Cursed Wednesday continued (COR 8)
There are days when you should just give up. Go back to bed. Delegate where you can. Go to the pub. Any effort to make things better will only make them worse. Luckily, these days are few and far between, but they do tend to coincide with PMT, and its accompanying sense of stubborness.
The Wordsmith upgrade did not install properly on the Palm. I don’t know why; the version number seemed right (certainly no longer a pre-millenial version) but there was no VFS support which I needed for my SD cards. The nice people at Blue Nomad mailed me another file which to all intents and purposes was identical to the one on John’s harddrive, and that worked. I have no explanation for this. But while I’m slightly vexed, I don’t mind inexplicable things so long as they work.
What really gets me down are things that inexplicably fail to work.
At first, both the Proporta Probackup and the Palm Backup cards seemed to work fine; after completing their respective backups, both signed off with a wink and a reasuring pat on my shoulder, displaying something along the lines of all your data are now safe and sound. Please remove the card.. However, after a hard reset (don’t ask; it wasn’t a test), the Probackup card failed to restore the PDA. I expected that due to the problems with ‘large’ SD cards, although I was hoping that the thing could at least read (and hence restore from) them. So, Probackup on >64MB cards isn’t an option for the m125.
Enter the Palm card which was brand new and manufactured exactly with this task in mind.
It did not recognize the handheld or my username, but that was to be expected since all data on the thing had been erased, so I told it to restore anyway. After following the prompt to remove the card, it left me toggling between the clock and the ‘Preferences’ screens—nothing else would display.
So, time for another hard reset and a restore from the desktop, which will be 7000 miles away from where I’m taking the Palm.
It is possible that I can’t have two backup cards. I found that both left their footprints on my Palm in the shape of a little application and it could be that these were conflicting with each other. It could also be that I am unerringly optimistic—just like when I thought the flicker on my laptop was the result of a messy Windoze uninstall and did not represent a machine that is fucked up beyond all recognition.
By now I was very vexed; but of course, that was not all.
Next, I tested my restored version of Wordsmith with the storage SD card. On it, there was a copy of the old version which I had saved, along with a copy of the keyboard drive, as an extra failsafe.
I would find out just how much unlike a floppy the SD card is and how much unlike my LINUX box the Palm is: an application does not launch from the card by default. It doesn’t stay there either. Click on it (accidentally) and it is taken into the RAM; thus overwriting my all singing, all dancing, freshly registered upgrade of Wordsmith.
The Palm desktop software is not like a harddrive either. For instance do not go: Jeez, what have I done now? Thanks God it is all backed up on the hard drive, I’ll better Hotsync straight away. Phew
…!!…
By default, the handheld overwrites the desktop. Yep, thus replacing my all singing, all dancing etc. version of WS on the desktop with what I had currently on RAM.
Fortunately, the application itself is backed up on the harddrive, so it was possible to restore it onto the desktop and then adjust Hotsync to ‘desktop overwrites handheld’. With a bit of luck, I should still be registered. If not, I probably find out in Thailand after I have completed the last of the 50 free edits which the demo sversion grants me. I hope not; it would be the third time that I approach those nice people at Blue Nomad and thirty bucks can’t pay for much of their time. I’m definitely getting value for money, if nothing else.
Tags: computers and gadgets, Tag Index
Denni