One of my essential PalmOS ![[WikiPedia]](http://www.mikeyp.com/css/external.gif)
applications is SplashShopper. More than just the ultimate grocery list manager, it is actually a fast and versatile flat-file database that can manage lists of any kind. I use it to manage databases of wines, cheeses, and even video games. Best of all, the software includes both a PalmOS app and a very nicely-written Windows version for the desktop.
An included HotSync conduit keeps the desktop and Palm applications in sync, but recently, I started to get an error. The HotSync log file listed a SplashShopper error called "(Error compressing file)". I search the FAQ and the support message boards, but couldn't find any mention of this error. Finally, I decided to try fixing it the old school way: trust the synchronization software. I deleted the SplashShopper data files on my desktop (located in C:\Program Files\palmOne\MikeyP\SplashShopper), and re-ran HotSync. Success! Problem gone.
Update: It turned out to be a problem with WordSmith, not SplashShopper. The HotSync log file is not necessarily written in chronological order. I ended up deleting and re-syncing a Word document to fix this problem. Still not sure why the problem temporarily disappeared with the SplashShopper re-sync.
Thomas Warfield, the developer of the very successful shareware game Pretty Good Solitaire, writes an interesting blog about developing and selling successful shareware. Well, his blog is interesting with the exception of his gratuitous pictures of… cats.
The blog is called A Shareware Life.
Today he posted the answers to an email containing lots of naive questions about the life and business of a shareware developer. His answers are priceless. My favorite Q&A:
Q: Quite often people take on huge game projects and then they are unable to complete them. Do you think this is because of a lack of planning, lack of staff, or lack of commitment to the game?
A: It's because they are stupid.
Okay, it may only be exciting if you're a Microsoft Excel [excelpivottables, excel12blog] geek like me, but the Microserfs working on Excel 12 have been actively blogging about their progress at http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/default.aspx. Reading their posts makes me anxious to get my hands on the beta right now. Better pivot table formatting, unlimited conditional cell formatting, proper list support, better multi-user integration, and above all, good-looking graphs. Office 12 is looking to be the biggest productivity software upgrade to come along since Office 95. I can't wait!
A few weeks ago, the Inside Microsoft site posted a video of an Xbox 360 TV commercial that is pure genius. It truly captures a childhood sense of fake guns and combat "play", except that in the commercial, the kids are actually adult commuters. This instantly brought back memories of backyard "gunbattles" all the neighborhood kids and I used to play out when I was 11 years old. You can't help but smile when you watch this.
Supposedly, Microsoft's legal folks won't allow this commercial to air.
So far, my experiment with a Rock Paper Scissors game for writeback spam reduction [morerpscaptcha, rpscaptchasandwich, rpscaptcha] has been pretty successful. Until today, I've had zero successful writeback spams.
Today, I had seven attempted spam posts, all for different blog entries, and five spams were posted successfully. But oddly, all five successful posts had exactly the same winning answer to the Rock Paper Scissors game. All five had chosen the answer "scissors", and got it right on the first try. The odds of the same answer coming up 5 of 7 times seems weird, as the RPS game is random. Or at least, that's how the code is supposed to work.
I'm beginning to wonder if my Perl coding skills suck worse than I think…
Update 12/8: 29 more spam post attempts, 6 successful, all 6 answered "scissors". Definitely need to take a look at the code this weekend.
Update 2/20: I looked at my code, and couldn't find any glaring errors. After a couple of months with no successful spam posts, I'm getting a small flurry again, about 6-10 attempts per day, with 2-4 successes. And this time, all successful posts are answering "rock." Wild.
