This is sweet. The phone I ended up getting is a good old style LG VX8300. It looks and feels like a cell phone, not some kind of freaky ipod like machine, and you use it by pushing buttons, not tapping a piece of plastic in approximately the right place but always hitting the wrong thing (*cough* LG Chocolate *cough*).

The LG VX8300 does not come with mp3 support out of the box like the Chocolate does — it’s not sold as an mp3-capable phone — but it’s easy to enable it:

if you press ok (menu) then 0 it will bring you to a hidden menu screen, the pass code is all zeros. Scroll down to the bottom and you will see music settings, press ok and you can then enable MP3s to work on the phone instead of only WMA format songs.

Apparently you can also enable it just by going to a Verizon store and asking them to upgrade the firmware to the latest version (03 instead of 01).

As is usual for Verizon, the bluetooth is there but any advanced functions like file transfer are pretty crippled. But there is a neat technique to access a bunch of stuff you “shouldn’t” be able to over bluetooth.

There’s this glorious open source program called bitpim. With bitpim and a USB cable you can access a bunch of data on the phone that you otherwise couldn’t. On the LG VX8300 (and perhaps other phones; check out the docs) you can use bluetooth in lieu of the USB cable! Just enable it and pair the devices. The VX8300 list of “device services” in my mac’s bluetooth control panel is as follows:

Device Services: AV Remote Control Target, Voice Gateway, Voice Gateway, BT DIAG, Bluetooth Modem, OBEX Object Push, AV Audio Source

That BT DIAG is going to get us in. Download BitPim. (The Panther/PPC version provided works fine on my Tiger/intel machine.) Open up the Preferences. For the Phone Type you select LG8300. For Com Port, browse through the list and choose the one with BTDIAG in its cryptic name.

After that things should Just Work — at least they should Just Work the way described in the bitpim documentation. I appear to be able to send and retrieve pictures, synchronize calendar and phonebook entries with bitpim, all kinds of good stuff. MP3s at least at first appear not to be transferred; not sure if they’re supposed to be or not. But in any case, bitpim and a usb cable are a sine qua non if you’ve got a cellphone with a company like Verizon which limits what you can do with it, and your phone is supported.

Florida executions halted after botched injection – CNN.com

The execution of a convicted killer took 34 minutes — twice as long as normal — because officials botched the insertion of the needles that delivered the lethal chemicals, a medical examiner said Friday.Gov. Jeb Bush responded to the findings by halting the signing of more death warrants until a commission he created to examine the state’s lethal injection process completes its final report by March 1.

Think Dubya would have let that stop him?  Maybe Jeb is adopted.  Or maybe Dubya is…

I had a couple people tell me that they intended to play around with Squeak after hearing about it, and at least one of them pronounced himself baffled.

I should clarify. I’m not messing with Squeak in general. Squeak in general is about ten dozen different things at once, mostly brilliant but in constant flux and poorly documented. One of those things is Etoys, which is the environment I was getting to know. It is a tiny part of Squeak, but it is by far the most accessible part of Squeak, and it is the part that has been most successful in being a programming/media arena available to children. Really, Etoys is not Squeak itself but something new made out of Squeak; regular Squeak programming does not involve dragging and dropping tiles!

There is a community of Etoys enthusiasts, mostly educators, headquartered at Squeakland, devoted entirely to the use of the Etoys part of Squeak. To make things easy, Squeaklanders have their own version of Squeak, which installs itself as a browser plugin, like Flash. They happily build their Etoys and share them and teach kids how to build them and all that stuff, without worrying bout the other 99% of Squeak that the hardcore smalltalk hackers play with.

The plugin is not just a player, though. It’s the whole programming environment. You can take the Etoy you’re playing with and change it around and do things with it and save a copy with your own changes, or share that new copy, or start a new etoy entirely.

I saved a copy of Goober to share, and put it on my server here, and I wanted to test it out with the browser plugin, and found out that there’s no version of the plugin made specifically for Intel macs, and you have to do some silly voodoo to make the ppc version work. Ugh. I went to Windows XP under Parallels and downloaded a copy of the browser plugin for Firefox on XP. It installed quickly & easily, and I tried to check out the goober file… and it got all errory and crashy. Turns out that what I built in the latest version of Squeak from Squeak.org isn’t really compatible with the version at squeakland.org. If I wanted something for squeakland I should have built it there.

That’s frustrating, and the fact that I can’t get an Intel mac native version of the Squeakland Etoys environment is doubly frustrating. So I’m throwing up my hands for the moment, till things change.

For an interesting, recent perspective on what EToys is all about, from Elder God Alan Kay himself, check out this recent post on the Squeakland mailing list.

Peace out.

BBC NEWS | Business | Are penalty charges bank robbery?:

Yes, they are, in the UK. It’s illegal there to charge more for a penalty/service fee than it actually costs the organization to perform the service. Like, you can’t charge 32 pounds to cover the cost of a bounced check when the highest number you can possibly document in terms of actual cost incurred to the bank is 4.50 pounds.

If this law were enacted in the U.S. it would destroy a huge sector of the American economy! A huge, evil sector. That would rock. So I’m thinking it won’t happen.

Last night I couldn’t help going back to Squeak to play with it after the kids were to bed. I decided to make a critter to play with. I drew a fat red spider with googly eyes and named it Goober.

One of the first things I made Goober do was run away. I gave him a wiggly, back-and-forth run, and I made it so that when he got to the edge of his box he’d make an almost complete turn. I set the run to start when the mouse hovered over him, and to stop when he hit the edge of his box.

It was cool… until I thoughtlessly closed the little scripting box that constituted Goober’s brain. It would be easy to get it back of course and keep programming him…….. if I could right-click on him.

I couldn’t, though. He was too fast. I spent minutes amazed that my own programming creation had escaped my power, trying to click on him and watching him get away. Every programmer has had a program run out of control, infinite loop, too-deep recursion, too-fast memory leak, whatever. It happens. But there was a uniquely personal quality to having programmed a little critter to try to get away from you and being unable to catch it because it could move faster than you could click the mouse on it.

Goober dragged a pen behind him so he left a record of his attempts to escape my right-click (screenshot).

IT’S ALIVE!!!

I eventually got it to stop somehow. I don’t even remember how. And I kept on programming. It was a lot of fun. But I’ve never had a programming experience quite so visceral as chasing Goober across the squeak screen as he evaded my every move. Very cool.