After a week of hacking, I finally convinced my Treo 650 to boot linux.

I’ve uploaded the pictures to a page for all to see.

I have a page registered on handhelds.org where I’ll be collecting information once I get a bit further. I’ll try to have something available so more people can have a go at it.

To answer some of the questions people have had:

1. Will the GSM radio work? Answer: Yep! The GSM radio is connected to a UART on the processor. You activate/dial it using GSM AT commands. There’s a couple of pins you need to activate to bring it up, but it won’t be hard to narrow them down.

2. Can I load it without destroying my phone? Answer: Yes. The current method for loading it uses the phone’s bootloader to place it in RAM. It doesn’t write any permanent data to the phone yet, and it’ll only be using the SD card for read/write operations anyways.

UPDATE

3. Will the CDMA radio work? Answer: Hopefully. Shadowmite pointed out that the CDMA radio uses AT commands as well. This means that a single phone program might be able to provide both GSM and CDMA service!

UPDATE

Welcome Slashdot, Digg, Engadget and other readers! The pictures are linked above, but I’ll link to them again if it’s not entirely obvious.

I’ve got to give credit to 1&1 hosting for holding up under a simultaneous Slashdot/Digg attack. :)

It’s been 40+ days since I switch off Sharpreader to the Sage extension for Firefox. My blog-reading habits have changed as a result of the switch as well.

One of the big changes is that I’ve found myself reading only the latest few articles per blog, rather than attempting to read all the new articles like I did with Sharpreader.

Sage lacks an auto-refresh feature, but because of this I’m feeling less pressured by my newsreader to catch up constantly. I refresh only once or twice a day now, down from the “every four hours” of Sharpreader.

Overall I’m impressed. The only features I’d like to add would be:

1. auto-marking of articles of read after I’ve switched to another feed,
2. ability to filter out “seen” articles so that I don’t have them showing up in the feed window, and
3. changing the click action to start loading the feed in the current tab right away, rather than waiting until the feed has loaded and opening in whatever tag is now current.

The great thing about Sage is the customizable style sheets. Check out the Sage stylesheet selector for some example feed styles. Note: I’m currently using the one named “hicks” off that page.

From Groklaw:

The Australian National Archive has selected OpenDocument XML for long-term storage of government documents. GovTech News also reports that Open Source Victoria has called for all remaining Australian government institutions to follow Massachusetts’ lead in adopting OpenDocument XML…

Wow.

I took a close look at Edgewall Software’s trac tool today. It’s an integrated bug-tracker, wiki, Subversion repository browser and general project goal management tool, all available in a single web interface. It’s open-source and free for anyone to download.

The tight coupling of all the services seems to be a major win for this tracking tool. All of the components are aware of changes in the other components and can react appropriately. This is apparent in the timeline view that picks out changes from all the modules and puts it into a single project overview.

trac also features an interesting concept for storing its current state – it keeps it in Subversion itself, serialized as XML. This gives you the ability to roll your project back to a previous revision if something goes wrong, as well as giving you direct access to the data itself to modify externally. On top of all this, it’s been designed with a pluggable architecture from the ground up, potentially allowing developers to add custom functionality as necessary.

From what I can tell, they look like they’ve done a lot of work on the new, unreleased version. It’s been a few months since the last release, but this upcoming release should be well worth it.

UPDATE: Fixed the URL.

I’ve decided that after nearly a year of very little activity, it’s time to start looking for a new maintainer for nprof.

nprof is pretty much the only open-source .NET profiler on the map. It has support for multi-threaded, multi-appdomained applications and even has basic support for profiling ASP.NET.

I am sad that I have to move on from the project before it hit 1.0, but it’s clear that my limited time isn’t going to change any time soon. With someone that has time to contribute to it at the helm, I’m certain the 1.0 release will be spectacular.

Contact me either via email or on the nprof-developer mailing list if you are interested.