Archive for February, 2001

06 February 2001

February 6, 2001 at 05:00 · Filed under uncategorized

  • This is a picture taken in early December. We get about this much snow every week. It’s awesome.
  • The last 7 days have been basically non-stop work, with occasional 8 hour breaks. Mike and I were at the office until 06h00 on Saturday night. We’ve consumed two cases of iced tea, six beers, one pizza, two subs, four thai meals, a kilogram of Jelly Bellies, and a kilogram of Hot Tamales.

    In just under two weeks, we’re going to have something that’s really fucking cool.

  • Ian has done it again. RIM is going to send snipers for the three of us.
  • I’ve made some pretty significant progress myself lately, which leads me to Cassis:

    cassis > dbcount AutoText
    [Cassis/SerialLink.pm, line 236] Requesting record count of AutoText database
    AutoText has 95 records.
    [Cassis/SerialLink.pm, line 165] Sending RET packet (0×06)
    [Cassis/SerialLink.pm, line 217] Sending ACK packet
    cassis >

    It can backup and restore databases now, and I’ll start hacking the application loader soon. I’m tempted to write a Linux version of their simulator, since I think it’d be pretty easy. The BlackBerry is an i386 device, so it’d amount to trapping the handful of bios calls, mapping those to file IO/drawing in an X buffer/etc, and executing the rest as native code. A rough bootstrapping process, but by no means impossible.

    I need new pants.

Comments

08 February 2001

February 8, 2001 at 05:00 · Filed under uncategorized

  • I just had one of those “Well fuck, we might not make it” moments. I wrote some code, Mike and I debugged it, we found the missing dereference, all done. I turn to the other machine, send the data down the serial line, and…

    The machine running the simulator shuts off.

    Well, fuck, that bites, VC++ must have eaten itself. No worries, restart, rebuild the whole app just in case, and try again…

    Uh-uh. Power off. That’s going to really hinder development.

  • I fixed it by removing an extraneous line of code, but that line should really have been valid (to the point of being a no-op, which is why it was deemed extraneous)). I have no idea why it was sucking, but at least I only lost an hour on it, instead of spending the next 3 days trying to discover why my simulation environment eats the shit of dead goats.
  • Cassis is coming along. No time now. Must go hack. Just over a week left.
  • Case #3 of iced tea is dead. We’ve started bringing our own cases downstairs and storing the cans up against the window to keep cold; otherwise we empty the pop machine in the hall faster than they can refill it.

Comments

11 February 2001

February 11, 2001 at 05:00 · Filed under uncategorized

  • A day of rest; I took the morning off.
  • [phil@imperial cassis]$ bmptoppm loolix.bmp | ppmtogif | giftopnm | pnmtopng > loolix.png

    It is the year two thousand one, I should not have to do that much work for such a simple operation. Sigh.

Comments

14 February 2001

February 14, 2001 at 05:00 · Filed under uncategorized

  • It’s the one year anniversary of my legal immigration to Canada. Hooray.
  • It’s also the day that Mike and I did the impossible, two days ahead of schedule. Coincidence? I think not.
  • I’m sleepy. I was up until 06h30 yesterday, and a day of doing the impossible really wore me out.

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