Journal:

After having had a code review of my python data to xml program for the VOS ship tracking, I've gone back and simplified my "elegant" program. It didn't feel right.. trival things were layers deep in objects and methods. The XML handling was painful. It would have been easier to just parse the XML configuration file by hand to generate the structures I wanted. As it turns out, most of the structures, classes, and methods were not necessary. What do you expect for only my third python program that I want, so much, to be appreciated by my peers (I flatter myself with whom I call "peers").

I've gone back to a more proceedural program.. less layers, less classes, less structures. I give credit to Brian L. and Roland A. for getting things back to a manageable level. But I give even more credit to Kurt S., and his persistance on my using lxml. It really feels good and simple.

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I've had my Nokia N800 Linux handheld computer for about a month now. The thrill of having a Linux handheld doesn't dominate my evaluation (as much as the first week). I had my ups and downs including believing that it had totally bricked. I flashed a newer version of the 2007 distribution, and it came back to life, in fact worked without flaws in performance.

Once the flashing was no longer as scary as I thought, in other words, once I used the Linux version of the flasher rather than the Windows dumbed down version, I decided to see what the 2008 version looked like. After all, I plan to port Xtide and I should do that for the newest OS.

Wow! The 2008 OS is much more usable than the 2007. First the GUI interface is more flexible, the default fonts and application screen layouts are more readable (some apps went overboard in making their interface finger based rather than stylus based). I haven't had a single OS hiccup. Some apps and libraries haven't yet been ported to OS2008, but that is minor.

My only complaint so far is in the lack of quality applications. The PID apps are weak when compared to the Palm Pilot. The OS2008 PID apps are now ports of GPE applications, a great improvement, but not enough to sell the N800 as a PID. There is only the most trivial of calculator apps. I use RPM on the Palm. I carry my Palm just for that.. and Xtide.. and a decent address book, phone dialer.

On the subject of Xtide: I have installed the scratchbox development environment on my laptop. I've the cross compilation toolchain. I've compiled and downloaded the example "hello, world" application. I've download Xtide sources and gave it a first try. Missing some libraries, it seems. So, I'll track those down and compile them. My first goal is to compile the non-GUI version of Xtide (just generates text tide and current tables). Since the Maemo (Nokia) GUI environment is different from the simple X11 environment, I'll need to design and build a GUI more appropriate to the Nokia. I hate GUI programming, so the text based version may be as far as I go.

A few weeks until I'm on Mother of Perl so I'll put this off until I'm swinging on my mooring in Tortola.

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