Newest Toy
Friday, 6 June 2003
Got the Palm Tungsten T the other day ($309 from buy.com, - $50 trade-in). Nifty, much better than the aging handspring I was toting around.
Cool apps include Kinoma for video viewing (anyone asking how Charlie is doing now gets treated to full-motion video :) Vindigo (as always; well worth the $24/year).
Tried sync’ing to a mac, and BOY is that nice; the integration of the addresses with mail.app and addressbook.app, as well as that of todo’s and calendar with ical is fantastic. I’m sold, and am seriously considering buying a second-hand tiBook for my main machine (work is OK with this; everything I need to run will work on it. :)
It also does networking, albeit a bit kludgily. I can go through infrared or Bluetooth; got the bluetooth dongle tonight, and have got SSH and Web working, as well as bluetooth sync.
The interesting part, of course, is the HTTP trace:
1054963307.347 1:1 578 63.97.179.30:55459 > 67.119.69.242:80
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> Host: www.mnot.net:8000
> Connection: keep-alive
> User-Agent: Mozilla/4.7 [en] (PalmOS; U; WebPro)
> Accept: text/html;q=1.0, text/css; q=1.0, application/x-javascript; q=1.0, text/plain;q=0.8, text/\*;q=0.6, \*/\*;q=0, image/gif; q=1.0, image/jpeg; q=1.0, image/png; q=1.0
> Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1; q=1.0, ASCII; q=1.0, \*; q=0
> Accept-Language: en-us; q=1.0, en; q=0.8, \*; q=0.5
> Accept-Encoding: identity;q=1.0, gzip;q=0.1, \*;q=0
> x-up-subno: 00T6PC2210KR
> x-novarra-device-type: 0
> X-Forwarded-For: 192.168.13.121
> Via: 1.1 wp210uhou (NetCache NetApp/5.2.1R3)
What does this tell us?
-
WebPro (or its gateway; see below) is fairly well-behaved regarding content negotiation; it accepts all of the popular types, and uses qvalues. However, it uses “*” instead of “*/*”, which I believe is illegal, and will get ignored; good thing, too, with those q=0; they mean “serve this too me or forget it”
-
No UTF-8 support. Hmm.
-
They’re using a Network Appliance NetCache for the gateway (gw210uhou.palm.net); I imagine that ICAP is being used to vector the responses and transcode them into something more mobile-friendly… Anybody know of a packet sniffer for Palm?
My only real complaint so far is the lack of a good case for it; I’ve tried two so far, and neither really works well.
Some dear readers might ask why I opted for a Palm device instead of a Pocket PC. I have two reasons;
-
The only PPC that’s small enough for my purposes is the HP 1910 (not linked to because, well, look at the HP site and you’ll see why), and it doesn’t do SDIO, so it can’t do networking.
-
PPC means being locked into MSFT for ALL of my application suite, and that isn’t acceptable. Most importantly, I want to be able to sync with a Mac; secondly, I want to support standards for e-mail and Web (although I’m not having much luck getting VersaMail to support SSL… grrrr…)