DeepWave

General Overview
One day, a friend of mine and I were talking about performance on PDAs. He owned several HP Jornadas, while I was a PalmOS kind of guy. Naturally, the conversation soon turned to CPU performance. While I had to admit that CPU speeds on WinCE devices are much higher than PalmOS devices, my WinCE friend was quick to admire the ability of PalmOS devices to overclock their CPUs through software. WinCE devices did not really publish their CPU specs, and to make matters worse, there are different CPUs for different WinCE devices, thus making the task of writing an overclocking software extremely difficult.

What then, is overclocking software? Well, each CPU in a PDA (or computer for that matter) runs at a certain speed measured in MHz. 1 MHz is one million clock ticks per second. Overclocking is the process of forcing the CPU to run at a higher speed than it was intended to do so. For example, if you had an Intel Pentium running at 300MHz, forcing it to run at 333MHz is called "overclocking the CPU." In the case of a PC, you have to change jumper and BIOS settings, an altogether difficult task. Like the rest of the PalmOS world, overclocking on a Palm PDA is a relatively simple matter.

However, it must be noted that the very notion of "forcing" a CPU to run at a higher speed than it was intended is inherently dangerous. While it will not explode like a car bomb, overclocking can have undesirable side effects such as CPU failure, electronics "burn-out" and lower battery life. The heat dissipated from an overclocked CPU is much higher and can lead to CPUs and sensitive on-board electronics literarily burning up. Also, running the CPU faster than normal will of course drain your battery power faster. You could lose all your data, and in fact effectively destroy your Palm PDA even. But even with the warning, people still do it. Please do proceed with caution and at your own comfort level. No need to keep up with the Jones and showing off your new 32MHz Palm V, if you catch my drift.

The default speed of Palm PDAs is 16MHz if I’m not mistaken. Older models of Palm PDAs, like the Palm III can usually be overclocked to 20MHz, while Palm IIIx and Vs can go all the way to the top speed of 29MHz. Newer Palm devices (like the Palm IIIc) running on newer Motorolla Dragonball processors might be able to achieve more, but it is still too early to tell. There are however, other important issues that users need to be aware of if they overclock their Palm PDAs. Communications with other devices are affected if the CPU is running at a different (higher/lower) speed. You can’t actually hotsync or beam when your CPU is overclocked to 29MHz. You need to drop down to normal speed before doing that. Games too, will run faster. That nasty shooting at you will be able to hit you faster than you can duck. Some alarms might sound wierd too, being played faster than normal, and applications like MTI Movie Player will play movie clips at "double-speed". Luckily, other software depending on clocks and time however, are not affected, so your alarms will ring at the correct time.

In this review, we’ll take a look at three different overclocking softwares for the PalmOS.

Product Discussion - Afterburner II 2.0

Afterburner is the first overclocking software released for the Palm OS. While Tornado V had much more features when it was released, Gavini did come out with Afterburner before Tornado V. Afterburner II is a powerful piece of software that allows you to speed up your Palm PDA all the way up to 29MHz (if you are running a Palm V/IIIx). It is a Hackmaster extension though, thus requiring you to have Hackmaster installed. It’s options screen simply give you a choice of different speeds on which to run. Doing a soft-reset however, will put you back to normal speed. Version 2.0 of Afterburner will automatically drop down to normal speed when you do a hotsync. This is not true when you beam however, so you will have to change speeds yourself. Version 2.2 of Afterburner II also automatically puts your PalmOS back to high speed after a hotsync, but 2.2 does not run on OS 3.3 and above. This review therefore focuses on version 2.0 instead. Bummer! Afterburner does however, offer the fastest CPU overclocking option on the planet to date - 29MHz on a Palm V/IIIx!
   

Product Discussion - CruiseControl 1.01

CruiseControl is different from the other two in that it does not actually overclock your CPU, rather, it sets the "wait state" of the memory your CPU accesses. A simple explanation is this: A long time ago, memory and CPUs could not get along due to different speeds, and so engineers came up with "Wait States" where one would "wait" for the other. Of course, things are better today, and CruiseControl works by setting the wait state on your Palm PDA CPU to 0, thus effectively disabling wait states. Because of this, CruiseControl has an idiot-proof easy interface - run the program, and choose "Fast" or "Slow". Fast disables wait states, while slow, puts it back. Idiot-proof. The upside is that since the CPU is not actually overclocked, other applications like hotsyncs and beaming are not affected. Furthermore, doing a soft-reset will let you keep the higher speed. The performance however, is not as good as actually overclocking the CPU.

Product Discussion - Tornado V 1.1

Tornado V was created when Afterburner II had just been developed. It took the idea a whole step further and managed to do away with the need for Hackmaster, but still manage to retain auto-speed-switching for hotsync and beaming applications. The great thing about Tornado V is the ability to customise speeds for each individual application. For example, you could set the overall PDA speed of 2x, but switch down to normal when playing Argon V. Afterburner II 2.2 has this feature as well. On top of that, Tornado V also sets the wait-states to zero to squeeze out some more performance for the machine. Afterburner II 2.0 does not, while Afterburner II 2.2 does provide the option to disable wait-states. The best thing about Tornado V is the auto-speed switching. I could set the PDA speed to 2x (maximum) and still hotsync and even print to my HP LaserJet through the Serial Port without the need to change speeds manually. Tornado V and Afterburner both warn that frequent speed switching and switching between speeds that are too far apart could be harmful to your palm. Do read also the third paragraph above about even more warnings about overclocking. You have been warned!

Performance
I used Neal Bridges’ Benchmark software that was written using Quartus Forth to benchmark the speeds. This is what I found for my own Palm V:

Normal	100%
Afterburner II v2.0 @ 29MHz	173%
CruiseControl	148%
Afterburner @ 29MHz and CruiseControl	256%
Tornado V	199%

I must say however, that running my Palm V at 29MHz and removing wait-states at the same time gave fantastic performance (256%), but I had to use a pin to reset my Palm a minute later! By using Afterburner to check the speeds, I found that while Tornado V overclocked my Palm V only to 22MHz, but by removing the wait-states as well, it is able to achieve better performance than just plain overclocking. The results, as they say, speak for themselves.

Conclusion
Overclocking can help you speed up many applications that have become a bit sluggish on a loaded Palm. Launch’Em and Action Names are both examples of programs needing a speed boost. Using one of these programs (carefully) can help you achieve better performance and less waiting time. Also, by lowering (instead of increasing) the CPU speed, you can also increase your battery life.

Give CruiseControl a try if you want a little better performance but are not a risk taker or are intimidated by the more complicated Afterburner or Tornado V. Go for Afterburner II 2.2 (if you run OS 3.1 and below) or 2.0 (if you run OS 3.3 or above) if you want better performance (for free) and are willing to sacrifice a bit of inconvenience hotsyncing and beaming. Tornado V is what you need for maximum performance and convenience, but you will have to pay a small price for it.

Summary:
Review: Comparison of three overclocking software
Review Date: March 1, 2000
Available from: Most leading Palm Software site (eg http://www.PalmGear.com)

Software 1: Afterburner II 2.0
Developer: Jean-Paul Gavini
Developer Home Page: http://www.gavini.com
Price: Free
Requirements: Any OS version, and at least 7K and Hackmaster

Software 2: CruiseControl 1.01
Developer: BackupBuddy Software
Developer Home Page: http://www.backupbuddy.com
Price: Free
Requirements: Palm OS 3.1 and above, and at least 5K

Software 3: Tornado V
Developer: IS/Complete
Developer Home Page: http://www.iscomplete.com
Price: US$ 10 (30 day demo available)
Requirements: Palm OS 3.x and above, and at least 21K

Note: Afterburner II 2.2 is not officially part of this review since it does not run on OS 3.3 (and probably 3.5 as well). EcoHack 2.2 is also not part of this review as it has been noted by its developer as "not working".

The Connected Organizer
Palm has long touted their Palm PDA devices as connected organizers. Other than add on devices for wireless data and infrared connectivity, the humble serial port is the key to connecting your Palm to the outside world. The Palm III series of PDAs have two different types of "free standing" cables available to it, the hotsync cable and the modem cable. What is a "free standing" cable you might ask? Well, it is just a cable without a cradle to support your Palm. However, when the Palm V came out, Palm decided to make only the hotsync cable and omit the modem cable. Furthermore, they no longer sold the hotsync cable seperately (like for the Palm III), you had to buy the Travel Kit to get a "free standing" hotsync cable. This made life a little inconvenient (and more expensive) for the many Palm V owners.

Crossdress? Crossover?
Your telephone is a "bi-directional" communication device (communication in both directions). Serial cables however, as the name suggests, allows communication in only one direction. The little wires inside a serial cable transfer data from one source (the Transmitter) to a destination (the Reciever). On any device (PC, Palm, Printer), a fixed set of pin-outs is defined and all devices follow this standard pin-out scheme for the serial cable to connect to.

Let us take an example. Imagine if yor PC had a serial port with two pins, pin 1 and pin 2, and your Palm has the same. They both follow the same pin-out scheme (since they are both serial ports) and have defined pin 1 as transmit and pin 2 as recieve. Serial cables connect pin 1 from PC to pin 1 on Palm and pin 2 from PC to pin 2 on Palm. A normal serial cable is therefore called a "straight" cable. Obviously, if you want to do bi-directional communication this is not going to work, therefore, you need to connect pin 1 on the PC to pin 2 on the Palm and vice-versa for the other wire. As you can see, this process is crossing one wire over the other one, hence the term "crossover". Such crossover serial cables are called Null Modem Cables. There are also Null Modem Adapters, that convert a normal (straight) serial cable into a crossover one. Of course this explanation is an overly simplified one, seeing as how a real serial cable has between nine and 25 pins!

In order for your PC to synchronise with your Palm, you need bi-directional communication. As such, your hotsync cable is (you guessed it) a crossover cable from the start. Here’s where the neat trick comes in. In order to access other devices that expect straight serial cables (instead of crossover ones), all you need to do is plug in a null modem adapter and wah-lah - you have a straight serial cable.

Getting such an adapter is actually quite easy. You can build one yourself if you know the proper pin-outs and have the equipment and supplies. Alternatively, you can ask a friend who can build one for you. Or you can get a shop to make it for you. I got mine from Fast Cable on the 5th Floor of Funan Centre. What you need to tell them is to make you a 9pin Male to 25pin Male Null Modem Adapter. You can also make a 9pin Male to 9pin Male Null Modem Adapter. Each adapter cost me S$5 and they made it for me on the spot in less than 15 minutes.

What do I want to do today?
The most common use for such an adapter is to connect your Palm to an external modem. Rather than buying the expensive Palm V Modem, you could get the 9pin Male to 25pin Male null modem adapter, plug it into your hotsync cable (or hotsync cradle) and your external modem and start surfing the web. Palm’s Modem Cable for Palm III is essentially the same thing but of course in a nicer looking package.

Another option is to print through a printer’s serial port. Some printers have a serial port (in addition to a parallel port) and as such may be configured to accept print requests through there. For example, I have a HP LaserJet 4000N (which has a serial port) and PalmPrint 2.2 on my Palm V. By hooking up a 9pin Male to 9pin Male null modem adapter to my hotsync cable, I was able to print using the software directly (in postscript even!) to the HP LaserJet. Okay, so IR would have been an easier option for printing, but not many printers support infrared printing as yet.

For those (like me) in the networking industry (or other such technology fields) you often come across equipment with Serial/Console Management Ports. These ports are essentially serial ports, but allow you to access the device’s management software. Some of them require crossover serial cables (ie. 3Com SuperStack switches), while others make do with straight serial cables (ie. Xylan’s OmniSwitch chasis switches). Having the 9pin Male to 9pin Male (and 25pin Male) null modem adapter together with your Palm and hotsync cable ensures that you can access any device’s management console anywhere. You might never need to carry that bulky laptop with you onsite anymore I’ve done so with both the 3Com SuperStack and Xylan Omniswitch using this technique and Palm Telnet 0.52.

And of course, it’s really cool to see your Linux server’s login screen in Palm Telnet when you hook it up to your server’s serial port. Actually, because you need bi-directional communication, you don’t need a null modem adapter for this trick, your hotsync cable (which is already a crossover cable) will do just fine. Just run a getty on /dev/cua0, open Palm Telnet, hit enter a couple of times and you’re in!

The caveat is of course that if you run overclocking software or such, you must make sure your software puts your Palm back to normal speed otherwise it will not communicate over the serial device properly. Also, since the Palm only has one serial port, it can’t be shared. While Landware’s GoType keyboard has a hotsync port on its back, you can’t type and connect to a modem at the same time becuase the GoType is already using the serial port to transfer your key presses. The new Stowaway doesn’t have a hotsync port on its back (why would you want one on a Stowaway anyway?). You should also set both the Palm and the other device to the same serial baud speed as well as the other usual 8-N-1/etc configurations for serial communications. 9600 baud and 8bit, No stop bit, 1 parity bit are very common serial communications settings. Palm OS 3.3 also allows you to move up to faster serial baud speeds, but from past experience, it’s not worth too much effort since the reliability of communications drops as you push the serial communications speeds up. Do also watch out for modem initialisation strings in your Palm. Refer to your modem manuals for more information on this.

Conclusion
In conclusion, the humble hotsync (and modem cable) is much more than just a cable to synchronise data between PC and Palm. Long before infrared, Bluetooth and wireless data, there was the serial cable. New applications based on this simple technology includes a demonstration of up to 4 frames per second of live video from a PC based web cam displayed on your Palm in Hong Kong. So, give the hotsync cable another look and it may turn your Palm PDA into a more connected organiser than you thought possible

General Overview
The Palm PDA is a truly connected organiser, having the ability to be "Internet Enabled". New mobile phones with Infrared and on-board modem capabilities allow you to ride the Internet wave from anywhere in the world. You can check email, access your web site and a whole lot more, all from one single, small, simple device. However, some of us do not have a mobile phone, or at least one with Data Services. Or we may want to have such access from our desktop itself, rather than while on the road. Well, connecting to the net through your PC from your Palm is not as difficult as you may think.

The process of connecting your Palm to the Internet actually involves two basic steps. The first is establishing a PPP connection over a link, be it Serial, IR or modem. Once that is done, a "server" at the other end of the link will be the "gateway" between your Palm with the rest of the world. Since we are focusing on hooking up your Palm to a PC and using your PC as a gateway, the two key components needed are PPP over a Serial line (in this case, the hotsync cable) and a suitable gateway software setup for communication. Once your Palm has the relevant IP addressing/DNS requisites (through PPP), and your gateway software is properly set up and ready to forward packets, you’re ready to go. In this article, we will go through the steps required for such a setup on a Windows and a Linux machine.

Configuring your Palm

The first thing you need to do on your Palm is to configure your connection. Go to your Preferences, and choose "Connection". Although you can modify your existing one, creating a new connection profile would probably be a good idea. You wouldn’t want to mess up your ability to hotsync right? After choosing new, you can name your profile, and choose "Serial to PC" as the connection method. Then, click on "Details" and set your connection speed. Usually, Flow Control is set to "Automatic". Do remember what the speed is because you will need to set that on the PC side as well. MochaPPP only supports up to 56Kbps.

For the next step, you need to go to your "Network" section in your Preferences. You can create a new service from the menu, and configure your Connection to use whatever connection you created above. You don’t really need a User Name or Password for this since the connections we are setting up is for Serial lines. In the "Details" section, you have to choose the PPP connection type, "Yes" to Query DNS and "Yes" to Automatic IP Address. If you click on "Script", there should be nothing else there except "End". Once you have verified these settings, you’re all set! Now on to your PC.
   

Connecting Through Windows

On the Windows 95/98 platform, the Mocha PPP software does everything required of you for the PC gateway side of things. All you need to do is install the software, and make sure you have selected the correct COM Port and Serial Speed (from the connection settings on your Palm) and you’re ready to go. Choose "Connect" from your Palm’s Network screen in Preferences while it is in the hotsync cradle/cable and you should be on the net. You should see the messages "Signing On" and "Established" as your Palm goes through this process. A small flashing cursor at the upper right corner of your Palm screen will indicate to you that you’re on the net. Surf away!

Connecting Through Linux
The simple reason why Linux still has not beaten Windows to the desktop is the higher levels of complexity to the user to do the same things. I assume that by your reading this, you know enough about Linux to dial-up via PPP to your ISP and have some experience installing Linux and using Pilot-xfer, and all the other Linux stuffs… You have been warned!

First, you need to ensure that your Linux machine has IP Forwarding turned on. Default Kernel 2.2.x installations have this setting off. Basically, in the

/proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

file, you should see a 0 (for off) or 1 (for on). If you can edit this file, just change the number and hopefully, it will be turned on/off as you require it. RedHat Linux however requires you to edit instead

/etc/sysconfig/network

and change the setting

FORWARD_IPV4

from

no

to

yes

and then reboot the machine.

Once you have done that, you will also need the IP Chains software as well as the PPP Daemon software. Refer to your system installation disks for that. Basically, what you’re doing is setting up a small subnetwork in the Private IP address space, using PPP to assign it to your Palm over the serial line, then using IP Chains to handle some IP Masquarading to do Network Address Translation to enable it to communicate from the subnetwork to the actuall Internet. If your Internet connection is a dialup, you will have to reconfigure all this to make your PC into a IP chaining firewall and router between your serial line and (another serial) modem.

Whew, what a mouthful! If you’re confused, try this setup. Create an executable script file and put in the following:

# PalmPPP - By Patrick Khoo - March 6, 2000 # See how we were started  case "$1" in   start) 	# Start PPP  Link to Palm 	echo -n "Starting PalmPPP: "  	pppd /dev/pilot [MY-SERIAL-SPEED] 192.168.1.1:192.168.1.10 ms-dns [MY-DNS-ADDRESS]  	ipchains -P forward DENY 	ipchains -A forward -s 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0 -j MASQ  	echo "Done." 	echo " " 	;;    stop) 	# Stop PPP  Link to Palm 	echo -n "Stopping PalmPPP: "  	killall pppd 	ipchains -P forward ACCEPT 	ipchains -D forward -s 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0 -j MASQ  	echo "Done." 	echo "" 	;;    *) 	echo "Usage: palmppp {start|stop}" 	echo " " 	exit 1  esac  exit 0 

Be sure to set up the correct Serial line speed as configured on your Palm and your network’s DNS address. Linux supports all the way up to 115Kbps for the serial speed and you will need to refer to your ISP/Network Administrator for the correct DNS Address. Then, to startup, just run

palmppp start

choose "Connect" from your Palm’s Network screen in Preferences while it is in the hotsync cradle/cable and you should be on the net. When you have disconnected, just run

palmppp stop

This setup assumes that you have /dev/pilot properly pointing to the relevant Com port, and that all those programs are in the relevant paths. If it doesn’t seem to work, double check that IP Forwarding is enabled (see above).

Conclusion: What’s on the Net?

The above screenshots show you some of the things you can do. From left to right are: MultiMail Pro 3.1, PaPi Mail 4e, PalmTelnet 0.52 and on the second row: ProxiWeb 3.5, PalmScape PR5.0a5 and PalmVNC 1.1. Not included are Avantgo, Isilo, PalmIRC, and various other news and telnet clients. The PalmVNC client incidentally, is showing a live view of my Windows desktop remotely. Other new applications include live webcam viewers and ICQ-like clients.

While one might debate the practicality of having your Palm connect to the Internet while you PC already is, the ability to have another machine (namely your Palm) access the net without tying up your PC is quite useful. Besides, the "Wow!" effect on your colleagues is likely to encourage you to try this at least once, more so if you own a PV. It truly is a "brave new world" out there!

Summary:
Review: Serial Connection to the Internet for your Palm
Review Date: March 6, 2000
Software Available from: Most leading Palm Software site (eg http://www.PalmGear.com)
MochaPPP Available from: http://www.mochasoft.dk/palm.html#palmppp
VNC Technology Available from: http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/

Note: Both VNC and Mocha PPP are free software. Others have various requirements. Please refer to developers/distributors for more information.

Note: This review was written entirely on the Palm V
using the Palm Portable Keyboard and SmartDoc 2.0

  
General
What can I say. I just got myself a Stowaway Keyboard. Sorry, I mean a Palm Portable Keyboard (PPK). Well, here’s a quick look at how it meets up with expectations.

The moment I got it, my (and my colleague’s) reaction was the straightforward "Wow! That’s amazing!" The sheer audacity and brilliance of the design of this keyboard is nothing short of fantastic. The ability to type away just like on a real keyboard turns your Palm into the smallest word processing package in the world. The first reaction I recieved when a non-techie saw me typing on it was "Is that a new laptop? It’s so small."

But let’s take a look at this remarkable keyboard beyond the glitz and glamour. I was trying to think of how I can test out this keyboard and so I decided to write this review on my palm using SmartDoc. Some of the issues I have here might be related specifically to SmartDoc - YMMV, your mileage may vary. Also, since there’s lots of photos of the PPK on the web, I thought I’d put up screen shots of the driver instead.

Product Discussion - Palm Portable Keyboard (PPK)

First off, the size of the keyboard is fantastic. I was stuck in a crammed space, with a PC keyboard on my left, mouse and mousepad in front of me and a big open file on my right. Any ordinary laptop would never have fitted in this spot, but the PPK and my PV had no difficulties. When it was fully opened and set up for typing, it took up less than half the space required by a laptop. The driver software too, is just as small, a single 23KB PRC file. And if you’re worried about your Palm falling off, the fit between my PV and the PPK is very secure. In fact, I need two hands to take my Palm out.
   
One interesting side effect is that you find yourself actually expecting a smaller keyboard. If you regularly use a laptop, you’ll definately have some adapting to do. But this is a small matter, and soon, you’ll be tapping happily away on it.
   
Someone commented that the screen size was so small. I too, was concerned in the beginning about the size of the Palm V screen on the PPK (having been used to a laptop) but it turned out to be just nice. The screen size is not a problem. You can see everything very cleary.
   
There are two small holes in the upper right and left of the keboard. I don’t know what they are for, but it is just nice to put your stylus in. I guess they thought of that for both the right-handers and lefties as well.
   
You have to re-learn some of the key functions and cursor movements because they are different from a standard keyboard. For example, one expects to press the Home key to go to the beginning of the line, but on the PPK, you press the CMD-Left instead. More on cursor controls later in this article.
   
However, the more I use the PPK, the more I realise a few small quirks that annoy me.
   
First off, I must say that the performance is generally quite good when typing continuously. However, sometimes there is a lag, especially for multiple key combination presses and cursor key movements. This lag has forced a few characters I typed to be "lost" in the transfer. Sometimes, Up and Down arrow presses takes more than a second to register on your Palm. Many times, I can type faster than it shows up on screen, and I type with two fingers too! The screen has a higher priority than the keyboard as well. If you pressed Down many, many times, and the screen was still scrolling, tapping the screen would interrupt the scrolling motion that wasn’t "finished" yet. I thought that maybe this had something to do with the fact that I am using Tornado V to overclock my Palm to 2x. Unfortunately, disabling Tornado V doesn’t help and the time lag actually feels worse. In addition, overall system performance seems to have suffered a 1% hit by using Neal Bridge’s Benchmark.
   
Another quirk is that if you press the HotSync button on the cradle when your PPK driver is active, it takes a few "presses" before your hotsync actually starts. Disable it, and there’s no problem. If you use the HotSync program on your Palm instead of the button on the cradle, it works fine. I think this needs further testing to find out more I guess.
   
Some other reviews have talked about the reliability and sturdiness of the plastic electronics connector that bends and connects the different parts of the keyboard together. I have already noticed a couple of scratches on it due to my opening and closing the PPK. The exterior is solid though, and this is another reason to get this keyboard instead of one of the others. when folded and put into its neoprene case, it’s nicely protected. Watch for third party cases for it because the neoprene one just begs for a leather replacement. Even better, a double-pack leather case, one for the Palm, and one for both the Palm and PPK. Make a nice one, and I’ll get it.
   
Cursor control on this keyboard is where it needs some serious work. FN-Up and FN-Down are supposed to scroll up and down respectively, but when editing a document, I realised it is not an equivalent to Pg-Up and Pg-Down. And there’s something about that CTRL-Left and CMD-Left arrow combinations that are supposed to move you left by one word and to the beginning of the line. Somehow, it goes to the space before the word (or line) itself. The CMD-Right also suffers from similar problems. It drops you to the beginning of the next line, rather than the end of the current line. CTRL-Right on the other hand seems to be the only one that got it correctly. And while they’ve got CTRL-C, CTRL-V, CTRL-X down pat, they missed out CTRL-Z. I suppose that not every application has an Undo capability. And when going for the menu, you can’t use the cursor keys to move around the menu options. This is a problem that forces me to go back to the stylus uneccessarily.
   
Speaking of the stylus, there’s no way that you can get rid of the stylus. While the PPK does a fairly good job of giving you access to most on screen buttons and the like, not everything works out the way you expect it to. For example, in Launch ‘Em, Left and Right arrows change tabs, FN-Up and FN-Down scrolls your current tab, but nothing allows you to select an app and launch it. True, PPK allows you to define "Hot-Key App Launchers" but full functionality is what I’m looking for at this point. As I said, luckily, there are these two holes that you can stick your stylus in (vertically) on the PPK. It’s quite good because if you accidentally hit your stylus, it just comes out without breaking your stylus or tipping over the whole PPK-Palm setup.
   
The other big issue that I am not too happy about is the fact that I can’t surf the web, read and write email and such things while using the PPK. I bought the PPK with the expressed intent of trying to do away with the laptop for most things. While word processing is now a reality, Internet access is still out. Guess I’ll be lugging my laptop around for a while.
   
And finally, 1 hour of continuous use brings down my battery level by just over 10%! I’m sure if you don’t overclock your Palm, you will do better than me. Still, it would have been fantastic if there was a port some where I could just plug in the palm charger to to keep my unit fully charged. If you don’t own a PV or IIIc, be prepared to change batteries often. I don’t think this is because of the PPK, but more so because of the extended you use your Palm!
   
Conclusion
I haven’t tried any other keyboard for the Palm, going straight for this one because of its easy portability. And I am happy because this keyboard has allowed me to go to a higher level of usability with my PDA. The downside is that I now end up demanding more. I demand for keyboard compatibility with apps and better cursor controls. I want to be online and use the PPK at the same time, I need a built-in port for charging PV and IIIc palms and better performance. Some of these things can be resolved with a newer version of the driver. Others, well hopefully the folks at Think Outside will consider them for the next version of this keyboard.
   
At the end of the day, if you use your Palm regularly and would like to take notes (or write novels), get this keyboard without a second thought. I think this is a great setup. I can already throw out my laptop in favour of my palm for many things. However, the fact that this keboard is so fantastic is also its greatest downfall. Notice I have ended up making comparisions between a PDA and a laptop. I think in the final analysis, I should remember that this is a keyboard for a Palm and not a "laptop maker" in itself. One day, the PDA and laptop will meet and truly we will have a "foldable" laptop that’s as convenient as a PDA. In the mean time, now that I have the remarkable PPK, just watch me when I attend my next meeting!   
   
Summary:
Review: Palm Portable Keyboard
Review Date: March 17, 2000
Available from: Most leading Palm reatilers (eg http://www.SiliconHorizon.com)

So, I finally sold my trusty Palm V and got a shiny new m505. After a month or so of playing with it, and trying new software, features and functions, I realise I had to "re-learn" quite a great deal. So here it is, for better or for worse, one person’s journal of his Journey Into Discovery.

Graphics Quality
The question everyone wants and answer to is if the graphics quality, colour, sidelight and so on is all that it’s cracked up to be. There are plenty of articles on the net about this, and no doubt, someone you know probably has an m505 that you can look at, so go try those out. What I can tell you is that once I started using the m505, I could not go back to looking at the Palm V screen. It was the same feeling as when I moved from the Palm III to the Palm V. And I use my m505 mostly indoors, not outdoors, so I am actually using my m505 at a disadvantage due to its reflective screen technology. In fact, since I use the m505 indoors almost all the time, a must have is Tip and Go’s 505LightOn. It keeps the sidelight on all the time.

Okay, so there are concerns about battery life and the like. Definitely, while I’ve never had the misfortune of running out of batteries, I can feel the battery drop faster than I’ve ever seen it drop on any Palm I’ve used before. But then, I’m also running my Palm at 54Mhz… Either way, I guess one should stock up on a good travel charger or get access to your cradle very regularly.

What you pay for in battery life, you gain in quality graphics. I need to activate my "Flame Protection Hack" here, but - Wow, I like the graphics! Take a look at McColors displaying Palm’s 16bit colours and ZBoxZ which can view GIF and PNG files. PNG files at 24bit colours are pretty large, but when you optimise them at 256 colours (like GIF) using good software like Paint Shop Pro 7, a non-interlaced 256 colour PNG can be anywhere from 2KB to 17KB smaller (in my own tests) than GIF, with absolutely no difference in image quality. Since each individual picture sits in seperate GIF/PNG files, such programs like ZBoxZ’s PiNGer are far better for SD card type image viewing than the traditional old school ImageViewer-every-image-in-a-single-PDB file. You can also install JPEG Viewer that which supports even higher colour qualities at even smaller file sizes by viewing JPEG files from the SD Card, but the user interface is not as good and I can’t zoom in and out. There is another beta JPEG viewer out there, but the user interface is even more terrible. JPEG viewing programs are so bad that I’ll stick to ZBoxZ and PNG format files. For now.

And of course, there is even movie playback. Okay, so the greyscale and silent MTI Movie Player was available quite a long time ago on the Palm V, but today’s TealMovie is pretty good. I haven’t tried FireViewer’s movie playback, but there doesn’t seem to be any good incentive for me to do so.

Anyhow, as you can see from above, I found 65,000 reasons to upgrade to an m505.
   
Speed Ups
Another thing that Palm has upgraded in the m505 is the CPU. It now runs a nice 33Mhz Motorolla Dragonball. I remember the old days when I used Afterburner to overclock the Palm V to 28MHz, and boy, was that a scream! Today, I comfortably run my m505 at 54MHz. And I can tell you that you will want to run your m505 at overclocking speed, if nothing else, to show off to your friends why you forked out extra dough to upgrade from your two-month-old Palm Vx. Shown here are Afterburner, FastCPU and GConsole, just three overclocking options available to you. One useful point about FastCPU is the ability in one stroke to activate or deactivate the overclocking mode. Me, I’ve been using Afterburner for ages, and I think I’ll stick to that even though there seems to be some problems with beaming - you need to go back to normal speed to do so. Another very useful piece of software is QuickBits. Unlike the others which overclock the CPU, QuickBits tries to optimise the graphics display subsystem. This certainly is a very useful thing, considering that the m505 has to display 16 bit colour compared to the Palm V’s 4 bit greyscale.

However, one very important thing to note is that even if you use such performance boosters, the real bottleneck on the m505 is not the CPU or the display, it is the speed in which the m505 accesses the SD card. If your application needs to access the SD Card, you’ll find it slowing you down like no other Palm application you have ever experienced. My advice is to spend more money to buy an SD Card, not MMC - SDs are faster. Also, try not to exceed 32MB on a single card. You will have much better performance physically swapping between 2 32MB SD Cards than using one 64MB one. Trust me on this one folks, I was already tearing my hair out on my 32MB card, I am so gratefull I didn’t get a 64MB one. Read further down this article to find out why. Then again, I wanted to put all my TealMovies on the card the other day, and realised that I had 38MB worth of TealMovies to load. Damn.
   
SD Card DB Management
Now that I’ve introduced the topic, lets look at how to manage the stuff that sits on your SD Card. You could arugue that 32MB is nothing compared to today’s Hard Disks, so why bother understanding how Palm chucks stuff into the SD Card? Well, a 20GB hard drive can store 20 copies of MacroHard UnOffice 10.0 that takes up 1GB of disk space each, while you can fit 640 50KB PalmOS applications on a single 32MB SD Card.

Okay, so what’s the first thing you should know about the SD Card? Well, think of your SD Card as an Iomega Zip Disk. You can have folders and folders within folders, store your files anywhere on the disk and all those wonderful things you normally do with your Zip Disk. Note that while file/folder/directory names on SD Cards support Long File Names ala Windows 9x, they do not allow special characters in those names (like DOS).

However, that’s where the difference ends. Certain folders are recognised especially by PalmOS and PalmOS applications. For example, the PalmOS default launcher stores its stuff in /PALM/Launcher while PowerRun puts it in /PALM/Programs/PowerRUN. In order for you to "manage" stuff that’s on your SD Card, you ought to know what folders are controlled by which application. Also, it is not so straightforward as before to delete applications that are on the SD Card or are half-and-half (applications that are in RAM but have databases in the SD Card like Noah Pro). In addition to deleting, one has to take extra care to recall what is on the SD Card when beaming as well. Not everything can beam stuff from the SD Card. In the end, you need a file manager to help you solve these problems. Thankfully, there are quite a few to choose from.

The first such program I looked at is Filez. Filez is an excellent program for managing DBs on your Palm. Everything you ever wanted in a DB Management program is here. And you can’t beat the freeware price. Perhaps its only lacking is that it doesn’t have an easy checkbox to select and unselect the Backup bit, as SuperUtility does. You have to go into the DB’s attributes, uncheck the Backup bit and then hit Save. But in this article, we’re looking at how to manage DBs on an SD Card, and sadly, Filez is good, but not that good. To copy or move a DB into the SD Card, you have to remember and write out the path you want to copy it to. No point and click Explorer style interface - more like DOS.

The next application I tried is excellent at manipulating stuff on the SD Card. It can even move DBs from one folder on an SD Card to any other folder on the SD Card, all through a nice Explorer style point-and-click interface. If you had text files on the SD Card, it can even view them! All the usual stuff is there, folder creation, rename, etc. Unfortunately, McFile doesn’t handle attributes for DBs in RAM. So you can’t do all those advanced things like changing Backup bits. It is however, very good though at "batch" processing - you can select many DBs and move all of them to the SD Card in one go.

After McFile, I went on to try SuperUtility. Now I have been using SuperUtility since before it was SuperUtility. Back then, it was known as FPS Utilities. Of all the things I like SuperUtility for, is the ability to checkbox enable and disable Backup bits for all DBs in the Palm RAM. You should know of course, that SuperUtility does more stuff than just DB Management. There are functions for RAM information, Battery life and reset options and so on. From this perspective, SuperUtility is quite a useful program to have on your Palm. Unfortunately, it too, doesn’t do so well in the DB Management department when it comes to SD Cards. Moving a DB to the SD Card requires you to first "select" the folder you wish to be the target, then go back to the RAM, find the DB you want and hit move. Not very intuitive if you ask me.

A new entry into the SD Card DB Management arena is TealMover from (who else) TealPoint Software. While it seems quite cool, it too forces you to "select" the target folder on the SD Card before you go back to RAM to move DBs, just like SuperUtility. And while it does allow you to move DBs from one folder on the SD Card to another, you can only move the DB one level up or down! Sheesh, what’s the point in that? To move a DB from /PALM/Launcher to /PALM/Programs/MSMount, I have to make three moves!

How can I talk about SD Card DB Management without including ZBoxZ? They’ve been around from before the m505 and Clie. ZCardZ is the SD Card DB Management portion of the family of programs that make up ZBoxZ. ZBoxZ does support batch DB processing, so you can delete all DBs in a folder in one go. However, like the previous two DB Management software, you need to select the target folder to move stuff from Palm to the SD Card to before selected the DB. The problem is, the user interface and buttons are really off base. For example, to select the target folder, you must click on "CarDir", and after you have selected the folder, you must click on "Exit" which is actually an "OK". Then you must select "File" and "Batch" processing to move a DB to the SD Card. This is true even if you only want to move just one DB. One very important capability that ZBoxZ has that the others do not, is the ability to copy non-Palm DB or PRC files to the SD Card. For example, PiNGer reads native PNG files from the SD Card, not PDBs. In order to do so, you can use ZBoxZ’s Windows (or Linux) based Boxer to "box" a PNG (or MS Word) file into a PDB. Hotsync it in to your Palm, then use ZBoxZ to "install" the DB from the boxed PDB. The newly installed DB (in RAM) is a real PNG file which you can now use ZBoxZ to copy to your SD Card. You can’t really use McFile or one of the others to copy a real PNG file (or other file types) for that matter to the SD Card because they try to assume it is a kind of Palm PDB or PRC, which it is not. So ZBoxZ does fulfill a specific case that cannot be handled by the others.

Finally, the last two programs in this space are not really about managing DBs at all, rather they are very useful programs to backup all your Palm DBs in RAM to your SD Card. Card Backup allows you to schedule backups for your Palm and even analyse the differences between a backup set to your current running environment. There is only one nagging thing though is that I wished it can be configured to only backup stuff according to the Backup bit. Currently it backs up all the DBs in RAM. With support for multiple backup sets, incremental backups, it is truly an advanced program, and a must-have for all m505 users with an SD Card. Now if you can’t foot the bill, try BackupBuddyVFS Free Edition. It does not have all the full features as CardBackup, but does a basic backup and restore of all the DBs. If you like BackupBuddy, you’ll probably like this. Check out also the full "pay-to-use" version.

Card Access
The first thing you should know is that most programs in the PalmOS world does not understand the SD Card. And so, to fix this problem you need to install more software. There are two basic pieces of software that will help make non-SD-capable programs to be able to recognise DBs on the SD Card. The first is called MSMount. MSMount was around since the Clie was available. Back then, even the PalmOS itself did not understand the Sony Memory Stick, and so, "Memory Stick Mount" or MSMount came about. What MSMount basically does is to make a folder on your SD Card to become a "virtual extension" to your Palm’s RAM. Whatever DBs are in that folder would also show up as if they were in the Palm RAM itself. MSMount allows you to "exclude" various programs from being able to see the MSMount-ed folder, and this is a very important feature that you should use.

A key point as I mentioned above is that accessing the SD Card is extremely slow. Now, certain programs (a very good example is TealInfo) will scan all DBs related to it in memory. Depending on how the programmers wrote the program, this could be quite an intensive search which becomes quite terrible if the program has to search the slow SD Card as well. TealInfo takes 40 seconds or more to scan the 32MB SD Card on my m505. Quite unacceptable if you ask me. Older versions of Filez also took a very long time to update the screen. And since this is related to accessing the SD Card, overclocking your palm does not help. So, you can imagine how much slower it would be if you had a 64MB SD Card instead of a 16MB or 32MB one.

Secondly, not all functions can be conducted on DBs on SD Cards. For example, normal beaming and deleting functions don’t work - you need special programs to do that (like McFile). Some programs look at DBs on SD Cards as DBs that are read-only in Flash, and they may crash because of that. You should also disable MSMount for applications that "manipulate" the DBs in RAM or can access the SD Card directly (like McFile, Filez, etc). And speaking of which, if applications already know how to access the SD Card, please for heaven’s sake don’t enable MSMount for them either. A good example of this is TealMovie. TealMovie can access the SD Card directly, so if you enable MSMount for it, you can end up seeing the same PDB twice in TealMovie. This can easily confuse you as to which is which and where is what, if you get my meaning.

All these caveats aside, MSMount is a must-have for all SD Card enabled Palm owners. Shown below is MSMount in action. As you can see, at first, WordSmith finds no DOCs. Enable MSMount and now WordSmith finds a DB that is in the SD Card. But note, WordSmith is not able to "edit" a DB that sits on the SD Card because it is considered "read-only".

MSMount can also be a great help for those who use non-SD-capable launchers. By putting programs into the MSMount-ed folder, your launcher can then find the program and you can launch the application directly from the SD Card. In fact, this was the original intent of MSMount. However, be forewarned, the launcher you use may take a long time to "scan" the SD Card for applications. For this kind of use though, I recommend PowerRUN instead.

PowerRUN is another must-have application from Japan that was made after the Clie came out (just like MSMount). It copies all the DBs related to an application from your RAM into your SD Card. In its place, it puts a "stub" or fake program with icon so that your launcher will see it. When you tap on the icon, PowerRUN copies all the DBs of that program back into RAM and runs it for you. When you exit, PowerRUN will delete it from RAM.

Some people have clamoured for Launchers that can run programs directly from the SD Card. While I agree to that concept in general, I think that everyone should use PowerRUN for one basic reason. It not only allows you to run programs from the SD Card, but it also helps you manage those programs as well. You can very easily delete a program from PowerRUN and copy or move it in or out of RAM. In addition, PowerRUN also updates the programs automatically everytime you run it.

For example, let’s say you used PowerRUN to move TealInfo and one folio into the SD Card. Later, you hotsynced and installed another new folio (so now you have two right?). The problem is that TealInfo and the first folio is on the SD Card and the new one is in RAM. Well, PowerRUN is very smart in that the next time you run TealInfo, it recognises that a new TealInfo DB has been added to the RAM and moves that to the SD Card for you automatically. And if you used TealInfo later and decided to delete the first folio, well, guess what? Yep, PowerRUN also deletes the first folio from the SD Card as well. Brilliant stuff!

As you can see from above, after moving Time to the SD Card through PowerRUN, you will find a "stub" of Time with a little square in the Launcher, thus allowing your launcher to launch Time. Another good thing about this is that since these "stubs" are there all the time, even if the SD Card has been taken out, the icons don’t lose their positions in your launcher. Definitely, if you launch a stub whoose program is on an SD Card that is not plugged in, PowerRUN will tell you so.

A good thing to note about the speed in which PowerRUN loads stuff from the SD Card is that while size of DBs to be copied back and forth between the SD Card and RAM is a major factor, the total number of DBs it needs to copy is also very important. It is quite likely that PowerRUN will take longer to launch a program with 50 DBs but totalling less than 50K than to launch a single 100K program. And sometimes PowerRUN’s estimated times are actually longer than in reality, especially if you overclock your Palm. Whatever the case, just try to move it to the SD Card and see. Because PowerRUN is so easy to use, you can always move it back later.

Launchers
Ah, the most important section (to some people anyway)! There are lots of launchers out there, but I couldn’t be bothered to try them all. I looked at the default Palm launcher. Yes, so it can access the SD Card and launch programs directly. But you need some other program to move stuff to /PALM/Launcher anyway. Besides, the PalmOS Launcher is so boring.

And then, there’s Silver. What can I say? See for yourself.

Fanta-bulous graphics and themematic displays (even for greyscale), icon libraries, "Auto-Raising" taskbar, recent apps hot button, tabbed launcher interface and yes, SD Card support! It allows you to move/copy programs to the SD Card’s /PALM/Launcher and will remember the icon locations even if the SD Card has been removed and re-inserted. If the SD Card is not there, the icon will not show up either. The speed is quite good, and Silver has a very nice "list" view of DBs. It groups and categorises the DBs very nicely, so you know right away which DB is related to which program. There is also the Silver TickerTape, that works like a TickerTape display (ala CNN and ChannelNewsAsia) and shows you your schedule and to-do list for the day. If I were to make one request of Silver is that I wished it can launch DBs directly like Launch’Em and Launcher III. Other than that, why look anywhere else?

Okay-lah, for the sake of being fair, I did look at some others as well. This was when I was using Silver 2.0, that did not support SD Cards and took a terribly long time to refresh the screen. Launcher III is an excellent launcher for those of you who want excellent features, but on a budget. It is also extremely small, less than 50K and yet can even create Tabs just for DOCs and Hacks. But that’s about it. I guess if I were to make a recommendation, everyone should run Launcher III at least. It doesn’t look as nice as Launch’Em, but it’s very decent and I take my hat off to Benc Software.

However, if you can afford it (money and RAM), move up to Launch’Em instead. Not only is the interface nicer looking than Launcher III, but allows you to create Tabs for any kind of DB, not just DOCs and Hacks. It also has a very complete list of gadgets, more so than Launcher III. As you can see below, I created a Tab for TealInfo folios.

Some Pointers

• After moving DBs into and out of the MSMount folder, you have to "Disable" and "Enable" MSMount again. This is to force MSMount to "rescan" the directory and reflect the updates. If you don’t to this, your Palm will crash and you will have to do a soft reset (reboot). And of course, disable MSMount before removing the SD Card. This is not required for PowerRun and the Palm Launcher.
• Some programs do not have progress meters on file operations like open, copy, close etc. Thus, if it is slow because it is accessing the card, you may think your Palm has "hung" when it has not. A good example of this is Noah Pro.
• Some programs are very slow at accessing the card and listing all files through MSMount. A very good example of this is TealInfo. It can easily take 40 seconds (yes, forty) to show you a list of available Folios that are on the SD Card. The solution is to use Launch ‘Em to list the files and launch TealInfo for you. Launch’Em lists the DBs much faster than TealInfo does.
• Create different folders on your SD Card for different purposes. For example, one folder should be used for MSMount, another to put TealMovies and yet another for ZBoxZ DBs. It is especially important to seperate the folders for DBs of different programs that can access the SD Card individually. If you put everything in one folder, you will quickly find that "scanning" for DBs is really very slow when it doesn’t have to be.
• WordSmith understands DBs launched by Launch’Em and Launcher III very well. When you launch a DOC from there, it opens in WordSmith. After you have done whatever you wanted to do, click on WordSmith’s "Done" button and WordSmith exits, taking you back to your launcher. It’s as if your Launcher had a "built-in" DOC reader/editor - cool!

Total Solution (or what is really on my own Palm)
So in the end, what do I really have on my Palm? I’ve used and tested all the above for almost three months now, and I’ve kind of settled down on a few which I feel are really good for me. I use ZBoxZ and TealMovie for all that image viewing stuff and Afterburner with QuickBits for overclocking. I end up having to use a combination of Filez and McFile for stuff in RAM and stuff on SD Card respectively. And I use both MSMount and PowerRUN. Which launcher do I use? Well, very honestly, I was quite tied between Launch’Em and Silver. I needed Launch’Em to solve my TealInfo problem, but I figured in the end that I didn’t use TealInfo all the time, and so I would rather have a "nice looking launcher all the time and wait 40s for TealInfo some of the time", than to have a "not-as-pretty launcher all the time and not need to wait for folios some of the time." Do I make sense? I hope so.

In the end, I guess as they say on the Internet - YMMV - Your Mileage May Vary. Good luck with your journey!

   
TOKYO –When Yukihiro Furuse first began prowling international computer networks in the mid-1980’s, he was perplexed to encounter emoticons, the strange combinations of punctuation and accent marks and letters that Westerners used in electronic mail to indicate happiness, sadness and other emotions.

But when Mr. Furuse and other network pioneers tried to incorporate symbols such as into their domestic E-mail, their Japanese correspondents found the Western smiley — dare we say it — inscrutable.

"We had to write many times, ‘If you tilt your head, you will see the face,’ " said Mr. Furuse, who is director of the publications department at the Center for Global Communications, a research institute affiliated with International University of Japan.

    :-)  Regular smile    (^_^)   Regular smile

    :-(  Sad              (^o^;>) Excuse me

    ;-)  Wink             (^^;)   Cold sweat

    :-)) Very happy       (^o^)   Happy

    :-o  Wow              (*^o^*) Exciting

    :-|  Grim             (_o_)   I’m Sorry

    :-|| Anger            (^.^)   Woman’s smile

    8-)  Smile/Glasses    (*^o^;) Sorry

    :^)  Happy            (;_;)   Weeping

    :^)  Unhappy          \(^_^)/ Bonzai smiley

So in the latest example of Japan seizing upon a Western idea, adapting it to their culture and improving upon it, Japanese computer users have evolved a unique set of emoticons. The Japanese smileys are intricate in their design, somewhat ambiguous in their expression and, in what many here would argue is a big advance, are right side up instead of sideways.

The basic smiley in Japan, (^_^), is much easier to recognize as a face than the Western version. But since the mouth doesn’t curve upward (no character on the keyboard can do that), the Japanese smiley is somewhat harder to understand without knowing the context.

However if you consider that people’s eyes crinkle when they smile or start to smile, this is just another case of one culture paying attention to a different aspect of reality than another.  Crinkling the eyes is no more or less related to smiling than a curved mouth — ask any zoologist who studies apes and chimps.

"It’s the same with Noh masks," said Miho Ueda, head of the Internet division at Isenet, a networking company, referring to the masks with blank expressions used in a traditional form of Japanese drama.  "They may appear expressionless to beginners, but they can be full of emotion if you understand."

Other emoticons are more clearly specific to Japanese culture. The girl’s smile, (^.^), with a dot for the mouth, because it is still considered impolite for women to bare their teeth in a grin, to the extent that some women still cover their mouths with their hand when they laugh. The "banzai" smiley, written \(^_^)/ or sometimes \(^o^)/, shows a character with arms raised in a traditional cheer.

Electronic mail and computer bulletin boards are used far less in Japan than in the United States. This is in part because the Japanese language, with its thousands of complex Chinese-based characters known as kanji, is not as keyboard-friendly as English.  Also, market barriers and heavy regulations have kept personal computers and telecommunications very expensive.

"They may appear expressionless to beginners, but they can be full of emotion if you understand."
- Miho Ueda

But those obstacles are being overcome, sales of PC’s are soaring and Japan is getting wired. And as the on-line culture evolves here, it is turning out to be slightly different from that in the West, at least as shown by what the Japanese call "kao maaku," or face marks.

Some experts familiar with on-line services in both Japan and the United States say the Japanese use the face marks more often than Westerners. This could be because the Japanese are used to looking at pictograms, since their written language is based on such characters.

It could also reflect the fact that even when they are off line, Japanese people do not express everything clearly in words. They tend to speak in a vague manner, relying on facial expressions and the other person’s understanding of the context to get the idea across.

"If it’s only words, it’s hard to express your feeling to the other party," said Tadahisa Hamada, an official at PC Van, a leading Japanese on-line information service.

One purpose of the vague manner of expression in conversations is to avoid confrontations. The same is generally true on line, although some arguments on electronic bulletin boards can get pretty nasty.

Perhaps to avoid offending others, Japanese people rarely use face marks showing anger or sadness. The most popular mark in Japan, besides the basic smile, is one depicting a cold sweat, (^^;).  Another one that some use is "Excuse me," (^o^;>). The triangular shape on the right apparently represents a protruding elbow and stems from the fact that an embarrassed or apologetic person will sometimes scratch the back of his or her head.

Typing the seemingly intricate Japanese face marks is not as bothersome as it might appear, thanks to Japanese personal computers, which are designed to handle the input of even more intricate Chinese characters. PC users enter words in a simpler phonetic alphabet or even using English letters, and the computer converts the text automatically to kanji. This same approach, with some user programming, can be applied to smileys. For instance, type "niko," part of a Japanese word for smiling, press a button and the proper face mark will appear.

In American computers, each letter or punctuation mark is represented by one byte, a string of eight zeroes and ones, allowing for 256 possible characters. But Japanese computers use two bytes for each character, to allow for enough combinations to represent all the kanji. For punctuation marks, Japanese users can choose between single-byte and double-byte characters, with the latter being wider or appearing double-spaced. A double-byte smiley (^__^) is used to convey a stronger feeling than a single-byte one and often merits a line of its own in the message.

Here’s some PalmOS Info and Reviews

• My Palm m505 Setup: A Journey Into Discovery
• Review of the Palm Portable Keyboard
• Serial Connection to the Internet for your Palm
• Palm PDA Cables
• Comparative Review of Overclocking Software
• Comparative Review of PrefDB Management Software
• Comparative Review of Text Completion Software
• Review of Time 1.2
• Word-Doc Converter II
• Review of Palm A.R.M. Screen Protector
• From the m505 to the T3
• Difficulty HotSyncing your Palm Databases
• Convert your Palm OS Contacts to vCard
• Convert your Palm OS Calendar to iCal

   
DeepWave SMS Alarms Collection

Here are is a collection of System MIDI Sounds (SMS) for your PalmOS device. Download it here (6.6K). Included in 3 individual collections are:

• 3Com’s Standard Alarms: Alarm, Alert, Bird, Concerto, Phone, Sci-Fi, Wake Up
• DW Favourites: Deep Space 9, Flintstones, Imperial Empire, Indiana Jones, Life of Brian, Star Wars
• Others: Cheers, Enigma, Friends, Ghostbusters, Palm Trek, X Files

Do also check out Some Light Reading for fiction work, or the Press and Events section for publications, press, seminars and events.

• Game Hints
• Back Orifice Check
• Novell CNE/CNA Information
• Animator’s Toolkit
• PalmOS Information and Reviews
• WordPress Hide Dashboard Plugin
• WordPress Serene Theme
• MyGallery to WordPress Converter Plugin

Old, Outdated or just Archived documents:

ASCII Art Pack!
___ ____ ___
____( \ .-’ `-. / )____
(____ \_____ / (O O) \ _____/ ____)
(____ `—–( ) )—–’ ____)
(____ _____________\ \____/ /_____________ ____)
(______/ `-.____.-’ \______)

BIG HUG

HTML References

Javascript References

Net Information - contains the following references:

• Internet Access Information (Internet Service Providers) - CICNet, FreeNets, Merit - MichNet, MSEN, Public Dial-up Internet Access List
• Mailing Lists - Anonymous Mail Server, ASPIRE, Berita-L (SEA News), Gateway 2000 Computers, Novell Netware, SLink (Singapore/ASPIRE), Windows For Workgroups, WinNews Newsletter
• Other Information - SANS’s Heuristic Analysis system for Defensive Online Warfare, Computer Abbreviations, Escape Codes, Graduate School Email Addresses, Computer Companies’ Phone Support