Jason’s Random Thoughts

A few weeks ago I had tested a possible solution to display Japanese characters on my Worldwide English-version of Windows Mobile 6. Although it didn’t quite work the way I wanted, it provided a little hope for the future, as it’s rather important for me to display the three character sets (four, if you include Romaji — the standard alphabet) used in the Japanese language. So it came as a pleasant surprise when I learned about another option for displaying, and entering, Japanese on my HP iPaq 211.

The program is called CE-Star, and it’s put out by the people at Mobem. It’s certainly not free, but they do offer a limited trial of their language packages. What’s interesting is that CE-Star can be used to add support for the Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese languages on a variety of platforms. After using just the Japanese component for three weeks, I can sum up the experience with just one word: smooth.

Japanese Character Display

Being able to clearly see something as complex and intricate as the Kanji character system is incredibly important if I expect to use the small computer as a learning tool. Luckily, CE-Star has no trouble working nicely with ClearType. On top of this, it’s incredibly fast.

I’ve been using this application for just over a month now and, in that time, it’s been working like a charm (aside from the little issue I had a week back). Sites look great in their native fonts and, best of all, I can actually read Japanese emails that are sent from work or Reiko on the PDA.

Japanese Character Entry

This is one area I’m not too impressed with, however, it’s not something that most would complain about. When it comes to data input on mobile devices, I’m all for handwriting recognition or something akin to Graffiti (a.k.a. Block Recognizer on Windows Mobile devices). Little keyboards are ugly, imprecice, and scream inefficiency at every turn. Sure, some may be pretty quick with the tiny keys and pen, but who ever heard of using a pen on a keyboard?

That said, CE-Star uses a standard on-screen Querty keyboard to receive input and shows both the hirigana as well as the possible katakana/kanji spellings that can be used. What I’m not too impressed by, though, is the poor accuracy of kanji characters when spelling various words.

Kanji is not my strong point, but I am getting a bit better at reading the complex writing system. My cell phone is pretty good at determining what characters I need, so it’s a bit of a disappointment when I see 搗き交ぜる offered when trying to spell 着きます. That said, I shouldn’t be too reliant on a computer’s kanji suggestions if I can’t properly read them.

Advantages Over Competition

• buttons still work
• minimal effect on system performance

Disadvantages?

• some menu items to JP (Regional Settings)
• WiFi manager in JP (Regional Settings)
• 15 day trial version will make email, SMS, and (potentially) Excel unusable on the PDA after expiration

Overall?

CE-Star is a great addition to any PDA that needs to display or regularly enter non-Roman characters. For $42 USD, I’ve been able to add much more functionality to my Windows Mobile device which, in turn, makes the little computer a great tool in my quest for better Japanese speaking and reading ability. There is a cheaper option available for $28 USD, and this will certainly do more than enough for 90% of us who need Japanese, Chinese or Vietnamese language support on our mobile devices. Heck, thanks to this small application, it’s now possible to use and update Super Memo, as well as write notes and simple articles, in Japanese.

I’ll write more about SuperMemo and its uses in the near future.

Have you used CE-Star on any of your mobile devices?

This post was published using Embink 0.1 Alpha-1.

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One of the first rules of writing email that we learn is to never hit “send” when angry. This is important to keep friends and family from shouting obscenities at us, and it’s especially important in business where such powerful emotions as rage must be tempered in order to create a “positive work environment.” Considering how some of the previous angry posts on this site haven’t really gone over well, I’ve decided to follow the same rules when posting articles online. The nice thing about this is that I have time to compose something just a little bit better than just another angry rant like we can find anywhere on the internet. This is probably a good thing for both HP and the people at Microsoft, as my recent rages regarding the frequency of system hangs on my HP iPaq 211 has become something on the excessive side.

It all started the day I received the unit back in late April. Naturally, I can’t accept a new machine without doing a factory reset, or installing an OS of my choice from the original CDs or DVDs. It’s not that I don’t trust the equipment manufacturer to put the software I need on, it’s that I don’t like all the superfluous stuff that typically gets added to an installation. Either way, what happens is that when I am in the middle of using Word Mobile heavily, sending or receiving huge emails (more than 100 KB), doing anything with the file system (deleting lots of big files, or moving several smaller ones), or accessing media from the SD card for more than 40 minutes, the darn system freezes on me and I lose whatever data hadn’t been manually saved.

More often than not, this often happens when I’m in the middle of using Word Mobile to write reports or continue my novel while listening to mp3’s. What really pisses me off about this, aside from the fact that it happens, is that I cannot find anyone experiencing similar problems in any of the internet forums or websites dedicated to technical problems or reviews of this hardware. Am I the only one that experiences these problems? Am I using the machine far more than it was intended to be used?

The Daily Reset

For the last month or two, I’ve been resetting the device every day before heading off to work. It’s a funny routine, really. I have the system check the mail, get the latest RSS feeds, then *beep* … reset. This affords me the advantage of having updated feeds and whatnot as well as an empty memory buffer. When I do this, I can normally go about a day and a half to two days without trouble, which is why it’s done daily. However, since the summer heat has started here in Japan, the problem has been getting worse. It now seems that the system needs to be reset whenever it’s been used for more than four hours in a day. Four hours? How the heck am I supposed to keep track of when the four hour mark has been reached when I’m in the midst of updating complex Excel files, writing hundreds of words in Word, talking to somebody via MSN (which shouldn’t be used to begin with) or writing posts in Embink?

Before the suggestion that I remove Embink from the system comes up, I’ve been having this trouble for a month longer than I’ve been writing and testing my mobile blogging application. Heck, I’ve even done a factory reset a few times to clear the system of everything and start over from scratch. But even when I leave the portable device with just the default applications and settings, it cannot last more than two days without a reset. To the best of my knowledge, the only time it will give me more than three days of un-interrupted operational time is when the machine is left on the charger … off … while I’m not using it because it’s the weekend.

So what the deuce? My 5 year old HP iPaq 2210 could go a whole month without a reset, and that thing runs the very same software that’s installed on my 211!

I’m really at a loss as to what might be causing this problem. As I had mentioned earlier, I cannot find anything about this online aside from some HTC Touch users that complain about a problem with Windows Mobile 6 when they do certain phone-specific actions. Since my iPaq is clearly not a phone, and I’m not using the mobile phone version of Windows Mobile 6, I shouldn’t have these same issues … right?

I’ve asked HP tech support for a little information on this, but they tell me to just reboot the system whenever it hangs … as though I don’t do anything that even warrants saving once in a while. Perhaps if I just played Solitare, Jaw Breaker, Tetris or some other game, this wouldn’t be such an issue … rebooting would be no different than starting up a Nintendo DS or Sony PSP. But this is my enterprise-grade mobile computing device that was specifically chosen because it’s an enterprise-grade mobile computing device. If I can’t rely on the machine to do what I need it to do on a regular basis, then why does it carry such a heavy price tag? Heck, perhaps I would have been better off going with a cheaper model or, heaven forbid, buying a Palm III XE … the device that got me hooked on mobile computing.

I’m hoping that some kind of update is made available soon. Either for Windows Mobile itself or, at the very least, for Word and Excel Mobile. If the system is going to crash this often, then I want the Mobile Office applications to automatically save my data every 10 minutes.

This post was published using Embink 0.1 Alpha-1.

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This has certainly been a bit of a week when it has come to email. My server has been down for about 12 hours this week for reasons I can’t get answers for. I’ve made the leap from Microsoft Outlook to a web-based application called RoundCube. And, if this wasn’t enough, my HP iPaq decided to give me a blank screen whenever I would check my email with the device. Fun? Wow!

Seriously, though … having a semi-functional PDA is a real piss-off. The device is now my primary computer, as it’s always with me. Not being able to check my messages throughout the day is like walking around without underwear. Yeah, it can be done … but it’s not recommended.

A Problem With Language

In order to find a solution to this problem, I wound up wasting (what felt like) two and a half hours on the Microsoft support website. For a company that wants to take on Google, you’d think they could develop a half-decent search algorithm. That said, I managed to find a forum thread that talks about this issue happening mainly on HTC mobile phones running Windows Mobile 6. Turns out the problem isn’t really with the machine itself, but with a piece of software that was installed a few weeks back.

In order to display and work with Japanese characters on my iPaq, I’ve been using a program called “CE Star“. It’s a great little application that lets us work with Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese characters on non-Asian PDAs. The advantage to this is that we can both display and “type” the characters, and there is a minimal impact on system performance. That said, there seems to be a small problem when the application’s free trial period (which seems to be an unadvertised “two weeks”) comes up. It’s no longer possible to read email or SMS messages, and some people complain that Pocket Excel will not load. While I haven’t yet had a problem with Pocket Excel, having any application work less than perfectly on the mobile computer is just downright unacceptable.

Luckily, there are two solutions to this problem. We can either buy the CE Star software for $43 USD and enter the registration code, or we can uninstall the software and go through a soft-boot of the system. Either way, once this is done, our applications will begin to work just as we expect. Since I no longer have a credit card to buy CE Star with, I was forced to uninstall the application. Perhaps when they start taking PayPal (like every other web company on Earth), I’ll be able to pay these people for the wonderful ability of using asian characters on the PDA.

Have you had any issues with Windows Mobile suddenly displaying blank screens or otherwise changing it’s behaviour without warning?

Update: It appears that CE Star can be bought with PayPal on this page. This is great news, as it means I can still use my iPaq to study Japanese.

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Summer is just around the corner, and the staggering heat of the Japanese sun will soon bake us into exhaustion with its ceaseless presence. Last year the mercury reached 43.2 Celcius in some parts of Gifu prefecture, and this past April we were treated to termeratures in the low 30’s. Aside from a few weeks in February, both the weather and the temperature have been quite enjoyable. So, with the beautiful climate and temperate weather, why the heck is my PDA freezing so much?

Naturally, I’m not so daft as to think the regional temperature has anything to do with my iPaq’s tendency to hit some silent and fatal exception, forcing it to become unresponsive to every request, bargain or plea I might utter. Heck, I’ve only had it for three weeks! But considering how the unit it replaced would only freeze if I was running some memory-monster or processor hog, I’m left scratching my head over how this technologically superior device could be prone to such creativity-inhibiting behaviour. Is it a problem with Windows Mobile 6? Is it a fault with some application running in the background? Did I fsck something up while configuring the system? Do I have just too much data stored inside?

Your guess is as good as mine, since I’ve tried quite a few things in an unsuccessful effort to determine the culprit.

A Reset A Day Keeps The Freezing At Bay

One interesting thing I’ve discovered is that the system is usualy less prone to failure if it receives a soft-boot in the morning. This tends to clear out whatever gunk it might have clogging up the system and enables me to accomplish quite a bit of writing a day. Heck, so long as I don’t write more than 3,000 words with the Block Recognizer, I can often go the whole day without any signs of trouble.

That said, when the system does decide to fail, it usually occurs when I have 500+ unsaved words written to a Word document. I @$#%ing hate it when I lose a really good blog post or several pages of my upcoming novel due to some unknown system error. Considering how I write each article by hand on a PDA rather than using a keyboard, this is like writing two pages of text on an A4 sheet (8.5″x11″), and then torching them with a lighter. Sure, you can write the article again, but what a waste of time!

Looking At Alternatives

Because of the freezing, I’ve actually been looking at the possibility of getting my hands on a wireless keyboard. “But if your PDA is freezing at 3,000 words and you can type at 170 words per minute, doesn’t that mean that you’ll need to reset your iPaq every 20 minutes?”

I hope not.

The idea behind the keyboard is to get a device that would allow me to write much more in a day, and I’ll just keep my writing schedules. Sure, there is the potential to lose quite a bit of text if I’m not careful, but I have an idea for that, too.

Say Hello to Embink!

Within hours of aquiring a new portable computer, I had started (mentally) working on a new piece of software that would allow me to write a post on a Windows Mobile device, then upload it directly to my sites. I had discussed the possibility of creating this software before and, despite there being several applications out there that will allow me to accomplish most of my goals, none of them do it the way I’d like to see it done. So, with this in mind, it’s time to unveil Embink!

As of this writing, there isn’t any software ready for public consumption. However, there will be some code released in th the coming weeks as this project gets off the ground and I start working out the bugs while commuting to work. If I’m using this software daily, and it’s not living up to my exacting standards for software, I’ll be sure to get it corrected right away.

If you have any feature requests for this application, or would like to know what you’ll need in order to take part in the software testing, just let me know.

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For five years I had been using Windows Mobile 2002 on an incredibly failure-resistant HP iPaq 2210, and had become accustomed to the speed each program would operate. All in all, most of the software I had installed was snappy, with the only exception belonging to the last few versions of AvantGo. Now that I’m using a newer iPaq 211, I have the opportunity to use the latest and greatest version of Windows Mobile (in this case, Windows Mobile 6 Classic), which seems to have seen the same leap in features as we could find between WindowsXP and Vista. That said, the same amount of bloat between those two desktop systems seems to have found its way into the mobile version of the code as well. So, after a few weeks, I have come to the following conclusion: Windows Mobile 6 is fast, but every other Microsoft application for the platform is slow.

Office Mobile Not So Portable

I am a heavy user of Word and Excel. Word Mobile is active on my PDA for an average of 4 hours per day, and Excel is used at least half-a-dozen times each week to crunch some stats I download from various sites to test marketability of certain markets. On the older Windows Mobile 2002 platform, Word flew. It would load in half a second, and could open a 400KB document in less than 5 seconds. This newest version of Office, though, seems to require an excessive amount of processing power and time to accomplish even the simplest of tasks … like starting up a new document.

The problem is with the same technological demon that plagues almost everything Microsoft has released in the last four years, and that is MS-XML — Microsoft’s own version of the eXtensible Markup Language. Although XML was initially created to foster better cross-platform and cross-application data collaberation, it has been horribly bastardized and has become the biggest reason for resource hogging on most Windows-based PC’s. If you don’t believe me, simply compare your current MSN Messenger software with an older, non-XML-based version. Chances are that the non-XML version caused very few momentary hiccups (when your computer freezes for a second) when someone messaged you and loaded at least ten times faster than the current generation of the software.

So, that said, I’ll need to use something a little more resource-friendly until my WM6-compatible blogging software is ready for testing and tweaking. And luckily, there are options.

MADE

This is a small and incredibly powerful text editor for Windows Mobile 2003, 5 and 6. What I really like about this application is that it can save files in both UTF-8 and UCS-2 encodings. On top of this is an unlimited number of Undo/Redo calls and the ability to have several documents open simultaneously. This is a great feature for me as I often spend several hours writing articles for various blogs, and I’m still working on that big novel that likely nobody will read. If these features aren’t enough to grab your attention, did I mention that MADE is 100% free?

If you’re interested, you can download it here for free.

PocketNotepad

Notepad in Windows is a dead simple application, giving us the very basic requirements for text editing and, if you’re feeling particularily nostalgic for the good ol’ days of yore, HTML editing. The concept of PocketNotepad is “To provide the same feature as Desktop Notepad does” or “Nothing added to the original Notepad”. That is, no toolbars, rebar bands, etc…. On the other hand, it does not provide several functions as it is becoming to its name. Functions like printing, drag & drop and the search function.

That said, if you’re looking for something dead simple that uses next to no resources, this might just be the software you’re looking for. Just like MADE, PocketNotepad sells for the incredible price of nothing. You can download it from Tillanosoft here.

Word Mobile

If the prospect of installing free software doesn’t appeal to you, there is another option: save your Word Mobile documents as .doc rather than the default .docx.

Unless you’re allready using some of the rich features found in Word2007, or need to open specifically-formatted documents in OpenOffice, there is really no need to save Word Mobile documents in the XML-based file format. Not only is there very little short-term advantage to the file type, but it’s a waste of both processing power and storage space. If you write as much as I do, then the difference between a 500-word 6KB file and a 500-word 11KB file can be quite significant.

• This post saved as a .docx file: 17KB
• This post saved as a .doc file: 9KB
• Number of .doc files on PDA: 734
• Combined storage requirement for .doc files: 10,381KB

Although it’s not an accurate measure of the storage requirements, if every .doc file on my iPaq were saved as a .docx, I could require as much as 22 MegaBytes of storage to save the exact same information. Sure, we could just make use of storage cards or, heaven forbid, delete older files, but we shouldn’t be expected to buy more storage or faster processors just because a software company is over-using a severely hacked apart version of an open source document format.

That’s so Adobe.

I have a lot of respect for Microsoft and the things they’ve accomplished over the years, but I have some serious issues with their approach to XML and how they use it.

It’s Not The Size That Counts…

Whether you opt to use a light-weight text editor with the basic text formatting and language tools, or a fully featured package with all the bells and whistles, at the end of the day we’re really just choosing the tool that suits our needs better than the alternatives. Sure, we could use a sledgehammer to put a nail in the wall for a small picture frame, but a smaller ball-pin hammer will likely do the same job both faster and more easily.

Do you do a lot of writing with a PDA? What’s your text editor of choice?

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