Continuing Palm troubles today. It seems as if the problems I was experiencing yesterday with the sync starting but refusing to continue were actually hardware issues with the cradle. I've replaced the cradle temporarily with my GoType! Pro keyboard (cheap, actually only $40 if you buy the “Author's Bundle”, and incredibly useful—a great combination).
Everything just worked. Wish I could say that for the proposal I'm working on. Back to reading…
Decided to put off the ICeCoffEE 1.2 release for another week. It's crashing in Terminal still, not reproducibly (sometimes I can launch 20-30 URLs before it crashes, there's no seeming pattern) but very definitely. I don't know what the problem is.
Syncing with both Mac OS 9 and X is operational. (No, it didn't take me an hour to do, I answered emails, copied files around, and did other stuff in the meantime). The key seemed to be removing some Palm Desktop 3.0 stuff from my System Folder; thank you, Conflict Catcher!
Getting the Palm Desktop beta and sync software set up on Mac OS X. The installer wants to erase the old version, so I did the volume mounting/unmounting dance in order to prevent it from doing so. Unmounting volumes, or more generally, disk arbitration, in Mac OS X is really fragile, it often unmounts more disks you want, Disk Utility is flaky remounting them, its interface is really horrendous. And I had to futz around with vsdbutil, mount and umount -f to get everything to work. Yeesh. Definitely the signs of an extremely immature OS.
First time I tried to enable my serial port (Griffin gPort, which just uses the internal modem interface and Apple's SCCSerial driver), my Mac froze (the mouse moved, but nothing else). Bizarrely, at the same exact moment, my SGI started forking processes madly, to the point I couldn't even run 'endsession' (the logout program) or start a shell. I wasn't doing anything more than checking my mail on it! So I had to reboot both machines on my desk. The second time, I was very careful and did 'tail -f /var/log/system.log' ssh'ed to my Mac from my SGI before I enabled the serial port, and everything worked. Weird.
So far, it seems that the reliability of HotSync is greatly improved in Mac OS X, compared with syncing in Classic (which I was doing) or in Mac OS 8/9. It's still slow, being serial, especially performing a full backup as it's doing while I'm writing this, but I can deal with that.
Next thing to try is syncing in both Mac OS X natively and Classic. I had that brainstorm yesterday afternoon—I can just sync the conduits I need in 9 (primarily AvantGo), and then I can move everything else to OS X. Palms are designed to sync to multiple computers, so this should not be a problem. I'll have to swap cables: Classic will use the Keyspan USB-serial adapter I have, and OS X will use the gPort. The only thing I am afraid of is that it looks like OS 9 Palm Desktop (2.6.1) is aware of OS X Palm Desktop's (4.0b77) existence.
And what happened to 3.0 anyway? Answer: 3.0 is the new Mac OS 9 version.
ICeCoffEE 1.1a2 released. Someone remind me not to take on another project like this any time soon. The time-to-benefit ratio when you're trying to work within someone else's program (in this case, Terminal) is not worth it.
1:49 AM