http://nonvi.com/whimsy/nfblog Various thoughts on programming, GUI design, Python, Palm OS Thu, 24 Nov 2005 03:39:06 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en To really get the most out of music on your Palm, you need to have good music management software on your desktop machine. A good music manager will automatically find and catalog your existing music. As well, it will allow you to set properties and search (or create ... http://nonvi.com/whimsy/nfblog/?p=18 Why doesn’t most software have a warranty? You can find software that comes with warranties and guarantees–just not from a major software company. Many small companies will routinely put a warranty and guarantee on their software, saying that the software will work substantially as specified in the manual ... http://nonvi.com/whimsy/nfblog/?p=17 There are two useful pieces of computer science that are fairly easy to understand. These are the halting problem and P versus NP. Simply stated, the halting problem says that we can’t (in general) tell whether or not a given program halts. This is important because the two steps ... http://nonvi.com/whimsy/nfblog/?p=16 This script is pretty simple. It lets you find commands by entering a string. Any commands which contain that string will be displayed. For example, running python cmdfind.py find returns: ./cmdfind.py /sbin/findfs /usr/X11R6/bin/find /usr/X11R6/bin/find2perl /usr/X11R6/bin/findsmb /usr/X11R6/bin/gst-typefind-0.8 /usr/X11R6/bin/xfindproxy /usr/bin/find /usr/bin/find2perl /usr/bin/findsmb /usr/bin/gst-typefind-0.8 /usr/bin/xfindproxy /usr/kde/3.3/bin/dcopfind /usr/kde/3.3/bin/kappfinder /usr/kde/3.3/bin/kfind /usr/qt/3/bin/findtr Here is the script itself: #!/usr/bin/python2.3 “”" This script does a partial search for a command name in your path. Usage: ... http://nonvi.com/whimsy/nfblog/?p=15 I got my first copy of Palm and Treo Hacks in the mail on Friday. I like the way the book came out. Hopefully, I will get to do some talks or demos around town. The book should be in stores within 1-2 weeks. You can also preorder ... http://nonvi.com/whimsy/nfblog/?p=14 There are a couple of ways that you can make a robot with a Palm OS device. There is the Palm Pilot Robot Kit, which converts an older Palm device into a robot. You can buy commercial kits from Acroname. This gives you a small little robot ... http://nonvi.com/whimsy/nfblog/?p=12 So, a Palm device isn’t an iPod, but it can still play music. One nice iPod feature that is missing from Palm music players is the ability to rate the music. Music that is more highly rated is played slightly more often than music that isn’t. There is an ... http://nonvi.com/whimsy/nfblog/?p=11 If our twins were old enough for me to teach them how to program now, then I would be teaching them Python. 15 years ago (has it really been that long?) when I was in college, I taught some of my friends how to program in C (yes, that ... http://nonvi.com/whimsy/nfblog/?p=10 My name is Scott MacHaffie. I live in Tigard which is just outside Portland, Oregon, with my wife and our twin boys. I learned to program 25 years ago. I’ve been getting paid to program for the past 18 years. I have a B.S. in Computer Science from ... http://nonvi.com/whimsy/nfblog/?p=9