My Portfolio Diary

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man. - Heraclitus


Changelog

2003-02-01 - CSS-ification and the (obvious, by now) failure announcement.


Saturday, 2002-10-05

I've come a long ways from the first day. The Pofo is my day to day machine now, going where I go and doing what I need it to do. I'd say that it has been an able replacement for the Palm, even if it's 13 years old.

When I first started, I identified four functions that I used the Palm for - it would be good to review them and explain how the port matches up.

  1. Address Book: The built in address book works very well. This was something that I knew I could rely upon.
  2. To Do List: I started with sl-todo, because of the nice write-up by the author. I managed to crash the Port hard the first time that I ran it, knocking it out of commission for one night while I let the internal RAM discharge, since even a cold reboot didn't help. I picked up FolioDo then. Perfect. Small, fast and keeps with the Port's Look and Feel. Problem solved.
  3. Password Keeper: On the Palm, I used GNU Keyring, a Palm app with integrated strong crypto. It worked very well. On the Port, I've found that using the Address Book as a flat file database and encrypting things with TinyIDEA works just as well. (Along with a batch file and fake.com for extra convenience.)
  4. Daily Planner: The Port comes with the Diary, a spartan planner. The lack of some wanted features (variable length alarms, for one) have forced me into some work arounds, but all is 90% well.


I won't deny that I miss the games and that I could easily use much more space than my two 64k cards, but I've adjusted. I can't carry the novels around like I used to, but that's fine - it's not a killer feature for me.


Thursday, 2002-09-26

Oh, the places you'll go! The things you'll see!

I've sucessfully exported all my Palm stuff into the Pofo and brought over all my password information. The Pofo is a little slow loading the 11k address book (2-3 seconds or so) but it's not horrible. The passwords, however...

I had been using the DES 1.0 program from the atari-portfolio UK site. It was used for storing passwords, using DES, the old Gov't workhorse. (And insecure, to boot.) However, it had a few strikes against it: it was 8k, pretty big by Pofo standards; it was slow taking almost two minutes to [de/en]crypt a 6k password file; the old 'undelete' problem lurked; there was something strange going on to my file...

The big I could live with. It sucked, but what are you going to do? The slow was slo-o-o-o-ow. This had the side effect of causing me to leave the file open for longer periods of time, to avoid the time it would take to re-open it, if I needed it for something. Bad. Once again, I decided that I could live with it. I had other things to do rather than worry about it. And then I noticed something strange: duplicate entries. "Odd", I thought to myself, "I thought that I had cleaned it up." I did the manual decrypt and opened the file in the text editor. A mess! Partial entries, entries that didn't make any sense. What the hell? I must have transferred it wrong or exported it incorrectly. I blamed WINE, myself, the HPC-301 driver. I resigned myself to having to re-download it again and triple-checking the file for errors. Grrr... If time is money, I should have bought the Palm. Anyways, I chewed on this idea for a few hours until the answer hit me: the DES program was buggy. The README that came with it urged me to keep the password file small since it was slow. No doubt, I bet the author noticed that larger files became corrupted, too. Much cursing and consternation. Now what? I need these passwords. I was going to have to re-dl it anyways, might as well look for an answer.

I'm familiar with many forms of encryption, so I decided to write one of my own. If the old maxim is "Speed, size, features: pick any two" for software, it was an easy choice: speed and size. I didn't need any features and since the whole damn Pofo is rather obscure to begin with, the lack of features or obscure interface would blend right in.

As an interim solution, I considered tossing out a Vigenere Cipher with the pbasic interpreter. That would be quick and easy, but the punctuation wouldn't be handled, so I was forced to ditch it. I hit the net, looking for a small, safe method. I found TEA - the Tiny Encryption Algorythm. Perfect. Better than that, even. I also knew that Borland offered their Turbo C 2.1 for free now, so I'd have something to work on. Sure, it would be a delay while I install everything and work on the program, but I'd have a good replacement quickly. Just for kicks, I looked a little harder on the 'net just in case.

What this? (Mid-page) TinyIDEA, a DOS-based IDEA encyptor with ASM source. Sounds promising. Download, uncompress. Hey, 503 bytes. Wow. I mean it. Quick test. Seems to work. I'll put it on the Pofo to test it out. [moves it, along with new copy of pw file] Test from the command line. (tick-tock) Done? Naw, I must have done it wrong. Look at the file. The editor shows garbage. No, no way, couldn't be. Unenrypt. (tick-to-) Look again. Editor shows my passwords.

Jaw drops. Mind puddles on floor. Space distorts.

It works. Amazingly well. Done in under a second. No file corruption. In place encryption. I'm in love..

So that's where I am now. Almost everything in place - it has joined me on my day-to-day adventures. A little bulkier than I expected, but it's become my full-time PDA. Hooray!

More later. I'll talk about filesystems in general and trying to find a To-Do list.


Sunday, 2002-09-22

Oy. I lose, I lose, I win big.

I was *this* close to giving up. The wife wanted the machine banished back to the basement, land of no outlets. I knew that if it went down there it was a goner - I'd never get around to fixing it. I posted about a driver in many places - no responses. It looked hopeless.

I had one chance and one chance left - I had read that someone mentioned that he could also no read the disk. He could see the directory, but not the files. This is what I had. He said that he was going to set the BIOS back to 720k and see if that helped. I didn't think that it could do anything, but I didn't have any other options. I stole a keyboard from another machine and tried it.

It worked. Of course. I had tried 100 things that I thought would work and none of them had. So I tried the one thing that I didn't think would work. And, you know, just to spite me, it did.

So, I'm back in action. Loaded the DES encryptor, sl-todo list and the generic db.exe database. (And the casio.com clock. Dumb, but nice.) First thing I try is the TODO list, since it's high on my list of priorities. Hmmm.. Looks good, expand, contract. I wonder what happens if I.. no, wait, where's the undo? No, that's not it. Maybe if I clear everything. No. How do I quit? No. Nope. Fine, warm reboot then.

Divide by zero error.

Gah. This is the Portfolio's way of telling you that you're done for a while. Get this and even a cold reboot won't help. I pulled the batteries and let it sit overnight while the juice drains out and it forgets everything.

Batteries in. RAM Error. Ah, yes, cold reboot it is then. DIP Operating System. Good morning! Let's compute.

I'm happy. Screw that, I'm estatic. I've got everything but the To Do list accounted for. More searching, but I thing that I'm going to have to write it myself.


Friday, 2002-09-20

Well, crap. I've hit a snag - a major one. I can't communicate with the Pofo in any way, shape, or form. Quick rundown:

  1. Went to wife's Windows box to try the parallel file transfer stuff. This is what I had always used before. Hooked up the Portfolio, started ft.com. Nothing. Checked connections. Nothing. Just by chance I noticed that there was a printer icon in her system tray. Ah, the printer driver was trying to be helpful and intercept them for me. Try to kill the printer driver. Instability. Quit to DOS. Try again. Nothing. Perhaps the print driver has lived on. Reboot. Mash F7 and F8, since I don't remember which is which. Boot straight to DOS mode. Try again. Nothing. Hmmm...
  2. Retrieve a 486 from basement that used to run OpenBSD. It's been scavenged for parts, so I have to reconnect the PS to the HD and Floppy and MB. Make boot disk from 98 box. Attempt to boot from disk. Failure. Bad disk? Bad floppy? Unknown. Curse.
  3. Grab P200 picked up at last LUG meeting. Still duals between RH and W98. Boot from floppy - success. format c: /q/s - success. Copy files to c: and reboot. Now I have a DOS-ish box. Try parallel port again - no good. Dig out PC Card Reader (HPC-301). It's an ISA Card driver that's supposed to read the data cards used by the Pofo as a DOS floppy drive. Install card, hook up cable, replace cover. Try and load drivers from disk. Failure reading 14 year old LD floppy. (Real shocking, I know.) Much cursing.
  4. Hit the web. Google finds people talking about the drivers, but offers no place to download them. FTP searches come up empty. Pofo sites have tons of serial and parallel transfer progs, but no drivers. Argh.


So that's where I am now. I can't add any data or apps to the Pofo, no matter how hard I try. If you're reading this: If you have the DOS card reader drivers somewhere and can send them to me, please, please, please send them to me. Please.

In other news, I've identified replacement apps for all the things that I used to do on the Palm. They're not 1 to 1, but they're close. (A super helpful thing is a DES program for textfils for the Pofo. Very nice, I think.) Do I have to run it three times?

Hopefully, tomorrow is a better day.


Wednesday, 2002-09-17

I dug out the Portfolio last night and grabbed some rechargeables. Batteries in, power up... still works! Just a bare c: prompt, however. After refreshing myself as to how the FDISK works and restoring my files from one of the memory cards and rebooting, it looks good! Of course, it displays a very old address for myself and doesn't have any of my data that I had on the old Palm, but those are fixable.

Kind of. I exported my Palm addresses to a CSV file and am working on a Python script to convert it to an ADR. It's a super-simple format, but I want to get it right and I just don't have the time to do that today.

Also, I thought it would be wise to categorize my time spent on the Palm and see if I could find what specific apps I should work on replacing first. Here's how I see it:

The Pofo comes with an address book, planner, calc, spreadsheet and text editor built in, so some of the things are already covered. The address book is actually a slick general purpose flat-file database, so I can use it to store pw's, as long as I can find some encryption.

Off to look for apps. More later.


Tuesday, 2002-09-16

For the second time in 2002, I've dropped my Palm (Handspring Visor). Both times the screen cracked right down the middle making it unusable. They could turn on and you could see 'some' of the things, but the pen input quit responding completely, which isn't a surprise. The first time I replaced it with another one - this time... well, it's getting to be an expensive habit.

So, after squashing the idea of buying yet another one, I decided to consider other options. The first thing that came to mind was my Atari Portfolio. I've had it for years, but I don't think that I've used it since '98 and then only sparingly. I bought it more for my Atari collection than anything else and I wasn't much of a PDA user back then.

I'll turn it into a diary then, hopefully this will be useful to someone else. I'm going to dump a recent technology for something produced more than 13 years ago. Wish me luck.


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