Jim Moy

A blast from the past, Koki from Beunited got in touch with me about a piece of software I haven’t worked on for years, ScannerBe.

I’d attempted to get other developers to adopt it but failed on a couple of attempts. Maybe this time, seeing as there seems to be a devoted community for BeOS (at least, more devoted than I was…)

Being young (ahem) and idealistic, I thoroughly enjoyed my experience writing software for BeOS. Fun community, crazy-devoted company, a BeBox to play with to my heart’s content. Which is fortunate because financially it turned out to bupkis.

I know Mandrake 9.2 is out, but 9.1 is the set of CDs I had lying around from CheapBytes waiting for my attention, so that’s what got installed.

After my relatively positive experience with this upgrade, I’m satisfied that if I want to go for for upgrade it’ll be straightforward. The rest of this article is some notes on things that prevented this from being a perfectly seamless upgrade.

And speaking of Mandrake, I gotta try this, portable OS and apps, data on my USB key, cool. (more…)

Up and running on Mandrake 9.1 now. Things seem to be operating smoothly except for a couple of custom server components where I’ll need to tweak the perl configuration. Nice to have MandrakeUpdate running again with updated packages.

Yay! Somebody’s given me a blast from my Mac programming past and provided a version of ProFont for Windows.

Are you tired of that ugly console window that comes up when you open a Java desktop application on Windows?

One way to deal with it as a developer is to use one of these to create a transparent launcher for you. But here’s a relatively easy way that an app user can do it, and not need to know anything about Java app development. (more…)

I’ve been doing a little experimenting with wxWindows as a way to achieve cross-platform compatibility with an Open Source framework.

Here are a few notes on additional work necessary to bring wxWindows 2.4.0 over to the Mac and compile under CodeWarrior 8. The last set of project files distributed with wxMac was in the 5.3-7 period. (more…)

The Theory of Diminished Urgency has always been in the back of my head, like so many fuzzy thoughts. But becoming a parent clarified it quite a bit. It’s very simple, and applies to many facets of life. (more…)

I’ve recently completed a project writing code for two devices based on the Symbian OS platform, specifically the Sony Ericsson P800 and the Nokia 60 Series phones. I gained from the experience of many others in the form of forum posts and sample code, so I thought I’d share a few notes for prospective Symbian coders coming from other platforms like I did. (more…)

I’m a big NetFlix fan, and this is great. I’ve been curious about the algorithms behind my rental queue, but never enough so take it as far as this guy has.

We had a record setting snow storm recently! This picture of my antenna doesn’t show the peak depth of snow we received, but I still had a fully functional connection even though the snow had reduced my signal level by about half.

The company I work for has finally released a product! We do some pretty slick stuff taking PC based documents down to a Palm or Pocket PC device. The last half-year has been pretty grueling, and I’m happy to be at the end of this project.