It is a very interesting market out there. Consumers have the choice between the some huge heavyweights, such has the Apple Iphone, Blackberry Bold,Blackberry Storm, and for the enthusiasts of Palm the Palm Treo. For those people looking for something different, AT&T has the Fuse (HTC Touch Pro), T-Mobile has the G1 made by HTC. And I am sure there are plenty of others that could be categorized in this smartphone market.

I currently have an aging Palm Treo 680, yes I am a Palm advocate. I think they create a great product, or should I say, used to. The Palm hardware and software is becoming outdated quickly, missing the higher res screens, better interfaces and better connectivity found on all modern smartphones. To qualify a modern smartphone, at least for power users, it must have 3G or other high speed network, WiFi, lots of memory, a keyboard (either virtual or physical) and most of the modern ones are also including GPS. My Treo doesn't have 3g, it doesn't have wifi, it doesn't have GPS, but hey, it does have a physical keyboard, and enough memory to store the apps you need.

I am wanting a new phone badly, but can't find one that fits my needs / wants. I don't want the Windows Mobile OS, which really blocks out a lot of the smartphones being developed now days. I would prefer a physical keyboard, but I might be able to get by with an iPhone like keyboard. And I want to be able to control the apps on my phone, not be dictated to which apps I can use on my phone. As you can see this crosses the iPhone off, Blackberries aren't as bad on the app side, but I really dislike the idea of using the BIS for my personal e-mail, especially since it is really just a one-way sync. The Android looks cool, but I really questions how good it is going to be. Don't get me wrong, I really like Google, and they come out with some great ideas, but their products seem rushed and never polished. They just don't seem stable enough. And then you got Palm, using the same OS base for 1901 it seems. Their interface hasn't changed much, but it really hasn't had a need to. But the bad thing is, the underlying components to their OS hasn't changed either, which is killing it, a slow painful death. They have known for years that high speed internet was coming to phones, but yet their OS can't handle 3g or wifi ... WHY Not, this isn't new technology. It is sad, They've been producing the Treo's now for almost 5 years, but not a single change to the OS in that time, okay, maybe small changes, but nothing significant. Microsoft has released two new OSes in that time WM 5 and WM 6. Palm in that time has sold their software side, bought it back, rumors of working with Access to create a Linux based OS was out there, and now we sit here , the fourth quarter of 2008 with nothing.

And now I sit here, with my Treo 680, which needs to be rebooted about once a week, and I have to reboot the reboot each time because it doesn't boot up properly on the first boot up. It freezes on my in the middle of conversations. If I have a call come in while on the other line, and hang up with the original caller to answer the new call, I can't. It doesn't respond until the caller has been sent to voicemail. It is crazy how many bugs are in the OS.

So what am I do, I need a phone. I am on the AT&T network and really don't want to switch. The Bold looks cool, and it could work, but I don't want to pay for a BES connection to get my IMAP mail working. The iPhone could work, but I have Apple telling me what I can and shouldn't load on the phone that I bought. (Why people put up with this, I have no idea, if Microsoft only let you load programs they approved on your desktop .. would you like that). Palm's OS sucks, Windows Mobile sucks. Symbian's are okay, but their aren't any cool phones out there .. It looks like I am stuck with my Treo 680 for a while. Maybe the iPhone 3 will change things. Maybe by the time AT&T adopts the Android it will be proven as reliable and viable option. Maybe Palm can fix their OS and even better, have it be Linux based.

I'm not lying, I promise. Adobe has announced an x86_64 version of their adobe flash player. I unistalled that latest 10.0 32bit version along with nspluginwrapper, and downloaded the v10 alpha. The install was a simple copying it into ~/.mozilla/pugins, and it works.

Two initial findings I have, are dropdown menus are now popping up in front of the flash banner, instead of behind. Which is amazingly great. And the second is cpu usage. So far, listening to pandora is quite a bit lower, probalby b/c it was going through nspluginwrapper, but I notice about 4 - 5% difference in CPU. Can't wait to check out more flash streams that I've noticed cause some high cpu load.

For links to download and a chance to read up a bit about the release, check out the SWF Penguin's blog (one of the developers for linux flash)

I know, I missed these release by about 2 months, but better late then never, right? Anyways. Zabbix 1.6 was released. I've been watching this product since the 1.1 release, and they keep making it better. For those that don't know, Zabbix is a monitoring solution. It uses agents and SNMP to collect information and provide a nice interface to view it all. It is actually pretty robust as it is a distrbuted monitoring solution, which can make for some nice scalability through larger enterprise networks.

The last version I used was 1.4 and it was at my old job. I've been watching the development of 1.6, they have added a lot of improvements and features. I can't wait to get my hands on this release to see what it can do. If are looking for a monitoring solution, I highly recommend Zabbix.

The final day is almost upon us. Stacey and I are about to close on our First house. We are both so excited. Closing was originally set up for the 31 Oct, but because of some weird issues with our interest rate, we are having to close on the 30th. Not too big of a deal, just a bit of a hassle. But that means on Thursday evening, we are going to be new home owners.

I will have to work on getting pictures up, which means I need to start looking into photo galleries, but that will came later in time. Right now we have to finish packing for the movers coming out 7 Nov, I can't wait!

Yep, you read the title right, and no this blog isn't becoming an advertising site, just so happens this post and the last are right after one another.

Codeweavers has created a challenge and that challenge has been met. Gas in the Twin Cities as returned to where it was a year ago, at $2.79 per gallon, after being up to $3.79. I guess I will tell them that the avg gas here in Ft. Worth, TX is $2.25 right now, with some suburbs having gas wars between Exxon and QT and seeing the price below $1.95 per gallon. But that is another story I guess.

So for today only, you can go to http://lameduck.codeweavers.com/free/ and get your free serial number for their software. You have to register it before it is any good, and because of the increase of traffic today, their servers have died. Not literally, but they are done, and all their sites are now just plain text. You can get your serial number today only, but they are allow you to register it tomorrow also because of the down time.

For those that don't know CodeWeavers Crossover Office is a product based on the open source application Wine. You aren't paying for Wine itself, but yet the support and tweaks CodeWeaver's has done to the package to help it run your favorite Windows applications. It can run Quicken, Powerpoint, Excel, even some version of Access. With CrossOver Games, you can run your favorite games also. This product isn't just for Linux, but for the Mac also.

So go get, try it out, and hell, if you like it this publicity stunt might of paid of big time as you will likely want upgrades after your subscription is out.