Found a great Newton site the other day. Have added it to this blogs links list. If you get a chance please check it out….lots of great info.

The url is www.inventors-emporium.co.uk/pages/newton.html

Did not accomplish everything planned this last week. Did manage to find some time Saturday morning to paid my gate. Living in Phoenix, AZ is hard on any wood exposed to the elements. The only wood so exposed are the slats on a metal gate that provides access to back yard. We have been in this house for almost 4 years and the gate has never been painted. It was a very rewarding feeling to leave everything else and just paint the gate.

My attempts to install AbiWord on a Mac G4 and Linux met with mixed results. Never got in to install on a RedHat box and the Mac install only runs under X11. Under X11 the interface is poor at best. Seem to remember reading on slashdot that the AbiWord developers are unhappy with Apples support and as a consequence taken the position not to develop an aqua interface. To bad, this could have been a really nice cross platform product.

Made significant progress on a rework on the nQueue site. The site owner is to be complemented in providing overwhelming design input. One of the very few jobs where one really knew what the customer wanted.

Have been looking at the advertisement for the new Palm Tungsten C. Very tempting. Have spent some time playing with the Tungsten. Like its size, brilliant color screen, and functionality. One feature was missing, in my view, and that was a good 802.11b interface. It seems like this issue has now been addressed. Might pick one up and take it for a test drive.

Did manage to get a little more work complete on Your Development Team, LLC site. This is a complete rework including getting all the portfolio item to word in demo mode. Reworked the mySql database connection and table structure to get the poetman site working. Need to make a little progress every week.

Have not worked on my Newton Note project this week. Looks like it will be a little longer then I had hoped to get something out for testing.

Back in early February, I committed to the development of an application that could read and display the contents of the Notes Soup just like on the Newton. Well this is now a work in progress. As of this weekend the application, dubbed “Newton Notes” can now open and display notes from a Notes Soup downloaded using NewtSync. Hope to have something to post within the next couple of weeks that others can download and test.
Discovered a great FREE word processor for multiple platforms. Its AbiWord. I have installed it on my win2000 box at work. There is a RedHat rpm of this product. However, it crashed package installer on a RedHat box at work. Plan to install it on my G4 later this week.

Had a wonderful Easter weekend…lots of family gatherings. Hope yours was the same.

I hate tax time…..my typical modes operandi is to file for an extension and delay the inevitable as long as possible. This year was different. Spent the best part of Saturday just doing it. Used TaxCut on a G4 Mac. Found it a relatively simple process. Was really lazy and also purchased the state version. Once the federal portion was complete is was a simple matter to say me-to for the state part. The electronic filing was nice. Opted for direct deposit. What we really need is a flat tax with no individual tax reporting. Just think of the money our government could save not having to process tax returns. There would also be one less bump in my road.

Another week has slipped by. Where does the time go? Have been very busy at work coding tools for our accounting folks. Then at home coding for nQueue and reworking our business site Your Development Team.

Just using the Newton. Starting to think that perhaps I really don’t need my iBook. In the last month I have only powered it up three times. Before acquiring a Newton the iBook was used for daily journal entries. Now I do it on my trusty Newton. My only difficulty is that I have not found a way to move a notes soup into another application on my Mac. I can view it as an XML file. However, I want to be able to import into a word processing application and have it look similar to its appearance on the Newton.

Found a great site that clearly explains how to Upload Files Using CGI and Perl. It actually is not very difficult. Used the concepts from this site to develop a accounting tool at my place of work. Our accounting folks have been reconciling receipts manually. They receive an excel spreadsheet which detail transactions and compare it against transaction records stored in one of our databases. I simply provide web page where they can upload the excel file and code that performs the necessary checks. As a result I display to our accounting folks an exception report of any discrepancies. Next I need to give them a means to update our system as discrepancies are resolved.

Intend to use this experience to add to my-list.com the ability to upload dvd and cd jacket graphics.

Have made no progress on www.my-list.com or my Cocoa application to read Note Soups. This last week has just been too busy. In addition to my regular job, perl programmer for CWIE, have completed the first draft of a web site for a start-up company called nQueue. Its mission in life is to provide a low cost, cost recovery system for the legal market. Have additionally been fighting with a Sun Cobalt Qube 3 Server Appliance. Its a pretty box…..blue, with neat green lite. However, system documentation leaves much to be desired. Managed to break its web server, which is really bad since its the only way to get into the system. It has no video card…only web access. Did manage a telnet connection and figure out how to su into the system. Its operating system in red hat Linux. However, the file structure is not like any version of red hat I’ve used before. The system came pre-configured with perl, mySQL, and PHP. Installed phpMyAdmin-2.4.0 for mySQL administration. Encountered only one problem. That is the default configuration of a “tcp” connection to mySQL would not work. Had to use a “socket”. Fortionitaly the installation documentation provided help. Specifically it tells you to change the php config file setting $cfg[‘Servers’][$i][‘socket’] = ‘ ‘; to $cfg[‘Server’][$i][‘socket’] = ‘/tmp/mysql/sock’;. A great source of info is the Cobalt Forums.

nBlog now works. Discovered that if you check the option Always Publish in nBlog preferences the Post option becomes Post & Publish . When this option is tapped, The note will post and publish on a Movabletype blog. However, should you attempt to use the Publish option an error is returned. The error is:

” Error: Client
Failed to locate (publish) in class (blogger) at /usr/local/bin/perl5/site_perl 5.6.1/SOAP/Lite.pm line 2195.”

It seems that nBlog attempts to call apublish method that does not exist. Movabletype does have a publishPost method. Adding a new method of publish that was identical to publishPost failed. There was a problem getting the correct entity ID.

So…. to use nBlog with Movabletype, check the Always Publish preference to publish. Uncheck this preference to only post.

This is a test post from my trusty Newton.

Have solved the problem with the nBlog inactive action icons and nHTML error.

I purchased a second Newton. It was half the price of my first unit and had both covers. However, it has a very rough screen. Clearly this system has seen lots of use. Even though it is old and scruffy, it became my principle unit. As the principle unit it was the first to get an nBlog installation. This unit is different then my first. When it starts up its default screen is “Extras.” It also had the previous owners specialty software installed. Was never quite sure what all the pieces of this software were. It got me thinking that perhaps something was interfering with the functionality on nBlog. So I installed nBlog on my backup unit. Success…these two problems did not exist. Next, I did a hard reset on my scruffy Newton and reinstalled all packages. Since I have a 8Meg memory card, package reinstallation was simply a matter of a backup of unit 1 and restore on unit 2. Problem solved. nBlog action icons were now active and hHTML displayed.

A Hard Reset is:
“Caution: A hard reset erases all data, third-party applications, and information in the MessgePad internal memory.
To do a ” hard reset,” follow these steps:
1. Remove any PC cards or application cards inserted in the
2. MessgePad.
3. Press and hold the Power key while momentarily pressing the Reset button on the bottom of the MessgePad.
4. Continue holding down the Power key until a message appears asking if you want to erase your data completely.
5. Tap Yes.
6. When another message appears telling you that all data will be erased, tap OK. “

With this success, the next step was to publish. With great enthusiasm I composed a my greatest blog post and tapped the Publish icon. Data was sent, and a reply received ??

“Error: Client
Failed to locate method (publish) in class (blogger) at
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.1/SOAP/Lite.pm line 2195.”

I quickly ran mt-check.cgi to verify proper installation of SOAP::Lite. It reported back that everything was OK. I posted the problem on the nBlog Forum. Perhaps this problem has been seen before.