Tech tidbits

I've been having some problems with my Fujitsu S2000 laptop, having to do with a loose AC jack. The laptop is now 2 1/2 years old (about the lifetime of laptops, in my experience), and the warranty has expired.

What really brightened my day was that Fujitsu has a free online chat tech support. I waited only a couple of minutes for someone to show up (and it's so much nicer to do this while on a computer, where you can multitask), provided my computer's serial number and some verification information, and was off getting technical support. The chap on the other side was very knowledgeable and helpful, and immediately understood my problem. Although he did recommend Fujitsu's expensive repair service, he very well answered my questions about alternative solutions.

I'm very unhappy with the quality and service of two online retailers I've used recently.

My first complaint is with Barnesandnoble.com. I recently received a gift certificate from Barnes & Noble, so I decided to spend it online. My first discovery was that their prices are significantly more expensive than their main competitor, Amazon.com. Second, I was misled by their website and ended up purchasing a book other than the one I intended to buy. Unlike Amazon.com, I am responsible for all shipping charges to return the item, even though the fault is theirs.

My second complaint is with Photoworks.com. I bought a photo book from them, which cost $40. After paying so much, I expected a product of high quality (my digital pictures are all very high resolution)! To my disappointment, the resolution of the printed pictures was very low quality, much below the quality of digital picture prints by Snapfish etc. Furthermore, one of the pages had a small blue splotch in the margin, and the text of my annotations appeared to be printed (in black) by a printer that was running out of ink! Finally, their arrangement software leaves much to be desired; for example, although I spent many hours entering time and date information for each of my pictures, there was no option to print this in the actual photo book.

I've lived in three different time zones over the last year, each time changing my computer's time to match the location. In the process I managed to completely screw up my Palm Pilot's date book (I have a Zire, m150). To fix the problems, I wrote Java program to go through the Palm Desktop's "datebook.dat" file (some people call this "datebook.dba", but I think they are identical), fixing the times on some of the records. Note that I did not attempt to edit the Palm's internal DateBook database file (which is in a different format). Once I fixed the computer's local copy, I did a hard reset on my Zire and re-synced.

I began with this excellent reference, last updated in 2002 (but completely accurate as far as I can tell, for Palm Desktop v4.1). The Java code linked from that page had a couple of bugs -- here is my revision.

The Palm Desktop stores dates as the number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970 GMT. Thus it is a relative time, and changing your computer's timezone will affect how the dates appear when you re-open Palm Desktop (but not when you re-sync, it seems). My biggest hurdle was dealing with repeating and untimed events. First of all, untimed events corresponds to having the record's start time land on the desired date. It seems to default to 3am EST (there is another flag which marks the record as untimed, so it doesn't actually show at 3am on the Palm Desktop) on the desired date. So, if you change your timezone sufficiently, you'll actually end up shifting your untimed events to an adjacent date!

Another problem was Y2K related, having to do with the difference between a yearly event having an end date very far into the future and "No End Date". There is no flag for "No End Date", and in fact the Palm appears to interpret a repeating event's end date of Dec 31, 2031 as "No End Date". When I shifted time zones, I inadvertently changed the end date of all my "No End Date" repeating events to Jan 1, 2032 (which, according to the Palm Desktop, is an actual date). However, the Zire and the Palm Desktop store the start and end times in different formats, and the Zire's time fields do not have enough precision to go beyond the year 2031. Thus, when I synced the Palm with my computer, the end dates on these repeating events (they were Birthdays) overflowed, probably to the year 1901... which, since it is earlier than the start date of the event, ultimately resulted in the repeating event never showing up on the Palm Zire (perhaps HotSync didn't even bother sending it over).

So, having figured this all out, I wrote this Java program to adjust the times in the correct direction.