Geek Update

My punch list:

* Ability to share data between HD's (Complete)
* Ability to synch my Palm T|E and install Palm software (Arrggh...)
* Configure WINE to run AceMoney (Scratched)
* Find a good HTML editor (Complete)
* Test USB drive (Complete)
* Test card reader (Complete)
* Import all of my data (bookmarks, e-mail addresses, e-mails, etc) (WIP)
* Configure Analog for Linux to analyze my web logs (Complete)

I am only going to comment on the things that have changed, to save space and time.

* I have yet to get my PDA to *fully* synch with Linux. I get about 80% and it times out. Not 100% sure why. I thought it was AvantGo so I removed it and tried. It went further but still hung. Then I thought it might be the photos I have stored on my Palm so I removed them, but still not luck. I will keep playing with it.

* AceMoney, while running on Linux via WINE works but will not sort and that is a big thing. I also have trouble with Windows and Linux sharing the same data file. That is important because if I cannot do the bills, I need my wife to be able to log in via Windows and do them. There are issues in the way that AceMoney/Linux/Windows maps drive letters, so I will just leave it on Windows, log in every day to do my updates in AceMoney and for my wife on the Windows box. A pain, but a livable one.

* I published my first updates to my website (www.mistergeek.com) completely in Linux. I used Bluefish as an HTML editor (a rather nice one I must say) and GFTP to publish the files. Nice process overall.

* I have imported some of my mail, all my bookmarks, but none of my e-mail addresses. I thought that import/export could get messy, so I started moving everything to my IMAP e-mail account on www.myrealbox.com, figuring that as long as I have less than 10 megs of mail (I have about 6), moving it would be easy. WRONG. I got all but two folders and those two are somehow choking my IMAP account. I may have to strip/forward all the html from them (I think that is causing the problem) and organize them a bit later. I tried to log on to the web and manually remove the corrupted folders, but it times out and gives an error message.

I started to use Evolution as a PIM, but it has a bug that causes the application to crash when you click on "Calendar". With no answer available (that I could find), I loaded up Thunderbird and it is doing OK so far. I just need to configure my Mistergeek mailbox, but until then, I can do it all via web.

* Analog was a bit more complex (due to the fact that the files are scattered all over the Linux partition) than Windows. All the Analog files in Windows are in one folder, in Linux they are not. Once I figured out how everything worked, I made a few changes in my analog.cfg file and I was able to run my reports from Analog in Linux.

So if I am not forgetting anything, the only two things I need Windows for is my finances and to Synch my PDA. Not too bad, eh? I am sure I will find an answer for the PDA issue, but until then, I can fire up the Windows partition every day for a few minutes to synch my PDA and do my finances. BtW, I know there are a few finance programs that run very well in Windows and Linux (Java based ones), but since I may not do the finances forever (and since AceMoney does not export to a format usable by those programs) AND I tend to run one data file rather than monthly ones, the best solution is for me to stay with AceMoney on Windows.

Most likely I will not have any new geek updates until I fix the PDA issue, but stay tuned for lots of other updates!