I did some reading and got some wonderful reference material at a site called SlateDroid. Many people have hacked the Novel, so I took the gamble. All you have to do is download a zip file to an SD card, and boot the machine. Could it be that simple? Yes, indeed, it was. I now have a fully functional eReader, as well as a bona fide Android tablet. I have the Google Market available, and I downloaded my favorite apps tonight, just like I was able to do on my smartphone.

It has a few deficiencies, of course. Response to touching is not as sensitive–it has resistive  technology instead of capacitive, but once you get used to pressing a little harder, it’s not a big deal. You also can’t do the magnify thing with your fingers, but the screen is so large, there’s no real need. It only has wifi capability, but most tablets are that way anyway.

The display is gorgeous, and it’s really nice to see a web page spread over a relatively large area instead of the tiny screen on a smart phone.

All in all, I think it’s a heck of a good deal. I’m having lots of fun playing with it. And I’m glad I took the hacking gamble.

Addendum–as of 12/8, the prices has gone up to $89.95. I guess they realize they’ve got a winner.

But, there is a way to make Cobol do it. It’s not quite as easy to implement, because you have to use several steps, but once you set up the template, it’s very straighforward.

You may have used the Cobol debug option to execute displays and special logic in your program, and displaying a list of all paragraphs executed is an extension of that option. Here are the steps.

003100 CONFIGURATION SECTION.
003300 SOURCE-COMPUTER. IBM-370 WITH DEBUGGING MODE.
003500 INPUT-OUTPUT SECTION.                       

Line 3300 is necessary, the lines before and after are just to show where to place it in your program. Then, right after PROCEDURE DIVISION, place this code. Line 12400 is necessary, as it’s a stopper for the DEBUG section.

011700 PROCEDURE DIVISION.
011800 DECLARATIVES.
011900 DEBUG SECTION.
012000     USE FOR DEBUGGING ON ALL PROCEDURES.
012100 DEBUG-DECLARATIVES-PARAGRAPH.
012200     DISPLAY ‘—PARA: ‘ DEBUG-NAME.
012300 END DECLARATIVES.
012400 MAIN SECTION.                           

Use this parm in your execution JCL:

//PS001   EXEC PGM=UMCCALL,PARM=’/DEBUG’

If you need to pass parms to your program, temporarily hard code it as a literal in your program, as I don’t think there’s an easy way to add them to this required parm.

There are some special compiler options that your shop has to have implemented for the standard Cobol compile–if these code changes don’t work, make sure that you have TEST(NONE,SYM,SEPARATE) in your compiler options.

I’ve used this version of Ready Trace in several different programs at GEICO, so I’m confident it will work for you. You probably won’t use it every day, but for those situations where you’re pulling your hair out trying to solve a problem, this may shed some light on your program logic.

I use lists to segment my news feeds into names like family, business, almost family (subgroup of non-family friends), etc. That way, you can select that list, and filter out everything else. For instance, I always go to family first, because those are the people I’m most connected to. Once you have a lot of friends, it’s hard to scan for posts from certain people. It can take a lot of paging.

Anyway, back to news feeds–I saw several references on doing it, but no description of HOW to do it. Basically, they were saying you could access info as news feeds, similar to an RSS feed (like Google Reader). So, I started searching for a way to do it. I did find some, but they required installing an app, and the articles I was reading made it sound like it was built into FB.

Finally, it dawned on me–they were talking about using news as a list. Then, you add friends who are actually fan pages. Like Mashable, New York Times, etc. You’re not going to get exactly the same content you get from an RSS feed, but a lot of the same sources have fan pages, and they post that material there, too.

I tried it and it works. Adding fan pages is a little difficult, because I haven’t been able to see anywhere in FB where you can see a list of them. But, all you have to do is look at your default news feed, and you’ll see them pop up. Then you can just go to your account, where you can edit lists, and type in the name, and it will add them to the list.

So now, I have a Fan Page list, and I can look at that feed separately from family. You switch to a particular list by clicking on the down arrow next to Status Updates at the top of your home page.

It actually turns out that I probably didn’t need the extra memory–once I installed Xubuntu to the hard drive, it got significantly faster. But, extra memory never hurts. The version of FoxPro that comes with Xubuntu is fully functional with Hootsuite, FaceBook, etc., so I consider that installation a success.

The score is 2-0

Buoyed by this success, I moved on to my next PC. First problem–Xubuntu wouldn’t run, because it requires 2 gig on the hard drive. I have 4 on alpha, but only 2 on beta (but 256 meg of RAM). Even if it loaded, I would have no space for applications.

I found a newer version of DSL (Damn Small Linux) that loaded okay, and it had a newer version of FoxPro that would run FaceBook, but I couldn’t get it to successfully install on the hard drive. It boots fine off the USB, but I don’t want to depend on carrying the extra piece around. And when I tried to save my profile to USB, that killed the live drive capability, and it wouldn’t boot until I reinstalled DSL to the USB.

I did find a nice universal installer in the process, that lets you easily try lots of different versions of Linux. And there are many. I got it here. The executable is called Universal-USB-Installer-1.8.0.9.

I also tried Knoppix, but it required too much drive space. Tiny Core is truly tiny, but it’s bare bones, and only loads to a Linux prompt–no graphical interface.

Hello, Puppy

I’m currently working with Puppy Linux. It only requires about a gig of drive space, and the wifi and FoxPro work great. I struggled for a while trying to load it to the hard drive. Part of the hard drive install is supposed to create this thing called grub on the boot sector. But the install kept hanging and I could never get a successful boot.

I did finally get it to work, via a great install page. Success at last.

I also had to buy a new wifi card–the Belkin Wireless G didn’t cut it. It’s a PCMCIA dongle, D-Link WNA 2330. Fortunately these things are cheap, but plentiful. I got it off Amazon for about $20.

So, in summary, you can have success with Linux, and with PC’s with very small hard drives and minimal storage. Xubuntu works great if you’ve got more than 3 gig on a hard drive, and Puppy with 1.3 gig. 128 meg of memory will run, but 256 is much better.

A month ago, I saw an ad that had me frothing at the mouth. An Android for $25 a month, no contract, and unlimited internet. I bit. And haven’t looked back. It’s a Samsung Intercept. Small, and not the biggest screen, but it does everything I want in a smart phone. Thousands of apps and real time internet. A bonus is that I can also download Kindle compatible books and read them on my phone.

I did have to make some adjustments–I no longer use Outlook. I’ve replaced it with Gmail (I forward all my teebark.com mail to my gmail account). The Android app for gmail works great, and of course, I was able to import all my contacts with no problem. So, I have no more sync problems–it’s all done automatically, in the cloud.

I’ve also picked up some awesome apps that I would never have been able to use with my PDA (bless it’s little soul). Evernote is extremely useful–I now use my phone camera to capture handwritten notes, and labels of items I see in stores, and store them in Evernote. Then, at my PC, everything is automatically synced up and avalable for me to use there. And I can add tags to any notes or pictures, so I can find things very quickly.

So, as you can guess, I’ve retired my PDA. It was a sad day–it served me well. Progress.

Want to buy a used PC and update the OS on it to XP or Vista? Forget it, unless you want to buy a new license. Translation–an additional $100 or so. As you know, you can’t install your Windows OS on more than one machine. You have to have a unique license for each and every one. I have three older PC’s sitting around, minus hard drives (or non-working drives), that need an operating system. I actually “borrowed” an XP CD that didn’t require registration, as my first attempt to revive them. And that worked fine, except the first machine (let’s call it alpha), only had 4 gigs of hard space, and Windows took up 3.5 gig. After adding Office, I had almost no space left.

On to plan B–Linux. This is a free, open source OS, that I’d read about, but never paid much attention. Now it had my attention. It sounded perfect:

• Free
• Readily available
• Has a small footprint–meager disk and memory requirements
• Runs a free, open source version of Office (Word, Excel, Power Point, etc.)
• You can test it with a Live CD version (you don’t need to actually install it to use it)

It sounded perfect, but turned out to not quite be true. Here are my attempts.

Trial 1–It can’t be that easy

I bought a magazine with a version of Ubuntu on a Live CD. Ubuntu is a distribution of Linux that’s been more or less standardized and packaged so you have a core system that only needs to be updated from time to time with improved versions.

It ran fine on my primary PC with Vista. Except that the wifi connectivity didn’t work. I consulted with a friend of mine who is handy with Linux, and we ended up installing it on my machine with VMWare, a free PC virtual machine. That let me run Linux with all of my Windows hardware, including the wifi card. I was up and running, but not with the machine (alpha) that I wanted to run it on.

Trial 2–USB perfection

So, I figured I just needed to run the Live CD on alpha, and I should be good to go. Well, the first problem is that if you run from a Live CD, none of the changes you make to get something working, like wifi connectivity, will get saved to your next session. You need something called persistence, so any changes get picked up when you run it again. I solved that problem by finding a download of Ubuntu that will load and run from a USB drive, and has the persistence property. Basically, it just saves any modifications to another file on the drive, and the OS looks there for add-ons whenever it loads.

But uh oh, a new problem surfaced. Most older PC”s won’t boot from a USB drive. So, I did more googling and found a solution for that. There’s a neat little program called PLOP that will load from either a CD or a floppy, that will give your OS the option to boot from a USB device. I had CD capability on alpha, so I burned an ISO image to a CD, and joila, had the ability to boot from my Ubuntu-on-a-USB stick.

Except it ran and ran and ran, and would never finish loading. I did some more reading and discovered that Ubuntu needs at least 512 meg of RAM to run. I only had 128 in alpha. But, a smaller version of Ubuntu, called Xubuntu, seemed like it would solve my problem. I tried that, and Eureka, it loaded. But, it ran woefully slow. So slow, that it was impossible. to use.

Now, here’s the irony–XP was a resource hog, but it ran fine in 128 meg of memory. It was hardly slow at all. Yet, Linux, which has an incredibly smaller footprint, was like watching molasses flow. Argh.

Fortunately, memory is cheap ($40), even for older PC’s, so I ordered 256 meg of memory, and moved on to a still smaller version of Linux, called DSL (Damn Small Linux), while I waited for it to arrive.

Trial 3–Damn Small, and damn near working

DSL installed fine, but I still had the problem with wifi connectivity. That was, of course, a minimum requirement for alpha–it had to have browser capability. After fruitless hours trying to find a Linux driver for the Belkin card I had in alpha, I tried a technique built into Linux (and DSL), called NDIS wrapper, which lets you use the Windows driver that came with the card. And miraculously, it worked. I had a browser that worked. It was an older version of Firefox, but it worked fine. I thought.

I could browse pretty much any site I wanted to look at, including FaceBook, so I thought I had hit pay dirt. But, of course, it was too good to be true. Hootsuite, a FaceBook and Twitter add on, crashed the browser. And when I tried to use the chat capability of FaceBook, I found it wasn’t there. And I couldn’t get the chat icon to show up, no matter what I did. I think there probably is a Flash add on, or something similar, that this version of Firefox doesn’t even know about.

Well, no big deal, so I can’t chat. I can live with that. However, the next problem I found was that I couldn’t post updates on FaceBook. Nothing happened when I clicked on Share. So, that makes this experiment a failure.

I resigned myself to using Xubuntu (the wifi worked on booting), once I had upgraded the memory. Well, you’ll never believe this. When you order memory, the companies always make sure you give them the model number of the PC so they’re “sure” the memory will work. The new chips fit into the receiving slot just fine. Except the physical board was larger in one dimension than the original board in the machine. There wasn’t enough room in the memory compartment. I had to send them back.

Trial 4–Is it just me?

Once I get some memory that actually works, maybe I’ll be in business. Stay tuned.

When you install Dropbox, it adds a folder, My Dropbox, to your My Documents folder. Then, you just move your pst file to the Dropbox folder. When you restart Outlook, you will be prompted for the new location. After you’ve done that on one computer, add Dropbox to your 2nd computer. Wait a few minutes, and the pst file will appear. Then rename your pst file for the 2nd computer and start Outlook up. It will also ask for the location, and after you point it to My Dropbox, you’re in businees.

Dropbox takes care of syncing things automatically from that point on. I was dubious at first, but it works great.

Addendum

I kept getting extra PST files, named “conflicted.” After reading some more, I discovered that you have to let Dropbox download the latest PST file before you start up Outlook. Otherwise, Outlook may not pick up the latest version of the file, and when it’s in doubt, it writes an extra file, with the conflicted name embedded. Once I realized this, I now hover my cursor over the Dropbox icon until it tells me it’s through downloading. No more conflicted.