h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm a stage manager and lighting designer for theatre and dance in Toronto, Canada. I also have the Visor Deluxe (sweet.....) and, seriously, it's become my saviour more than once. In terms of battery life, though - I've got it on more often than not. I tend to go through my two AAA in just over three weeks. Less than that if I'm in tech week and have it on more than usual.
Re: memory - yeah, with the Visor, you'd think 16 Megs should be enough. I'm just waiting for effective wireless service for Handspring to show up in Canada. The thought of being able to send and receive email while in rehearsal... faxing press releases.... whew.
- rook -

I'd like to do a PQA, but I wouldn't be able to test it until Palm rolls out their network over in Europe

Since the iMode service works using HTML, it's not a great step to a PQA (or even an AvantGo channel). The only thing that's holding me back is the fact that I'm already supporting three slightly different versions of the On the Move service - any changes have to be done in triplicate

This will change soon, as the On the Move service gets rolled into the main site engine. Then we can have several different PQAs!

Re: waiting for the Palm network in Europe:
Fair enough, I suppose. Keep me in mind if you need US testers once Palm DOES roll out the service over there.

Do you want to see "bug" reports about using h2g2 On the Move with various WAP browsers? I'm having 2 problems with the one I use. I have no idea if the issue in on the browser side, or the page side. I'm using the 4thpass Kbrowser ( http://www.4thpass.com/kbrowser/download.html ) for the Palm VII. I tried to use mobileID, but Palm completely separates the wireless side from "normal" modems for the III or V. So I can't use mobileID with the wireless modem. Kbrowser is available in both a "normal" modem package for III/V and a wireless package for VII.

Anyway, the 2 problems I have:

1)Frequently (almost always) I get stuck on a "Waiting" message with a blank screen after the page has downloaded. If I hit "Cancel" at that point, the complete page is displayed. It's like there is some final handshake that gets missed. Maybe there is some piece of the page missed, but I can't see it. It LOOKS complete.

2)I can't upload data. If I try to create a new Guide entry I get a page saying "This feature is not yet available from your device." I assume this is by design, yes? However, if I try create a new Journal entry, I get a browser error saying "The requested page is too large"

Like I said, both of these could very easily be browser bugs, but it's hard for me to tell from my end. I sent 4th Pass a note about my second error, and didn't hear back from them. I'll probably try to write up an email today to them saying much the same things. They have the feel of those sorts of problems that might need to be attacked from both ends.

Is this sort of information helpful to you?

This *is* useful information. Thank you

The reason you're getting a "waiting" screen is probably 'cos your browser is downloading the WMLscript attached to each and every WAP page. I'm not sure how many Palm WAP browsers support WMLscript, but without it you won't be able to log in to post Journal messages...

I'll take a look at that "The requested page is too large" bug - it's a common enough occurrence when you've only got 1397 bytes to play with and the compression depends on the WAP gateway.

Do you have an IP address for the gateway you use?

The whole idea behind h2g2 OnTheMove is to make it available on any and all mobile platforms for which there's a sensible level of demand. We've already got versions available for WML, HDML (phone.com browsers) and i-mode, plus an SMS service in trial and a basic low-bandwidth text version. Versions for 'Clipping'-based services such as the Palm VII and Avantgo are also very much on the cards - it's all a question of the deals we can do to make it happen.

No, I can't find the IP of the gateway anywhere in the menus. I sent 4thpass an email, so we'll see if they respond . . . do you happen to know of a WAP page I can goto that will tell me my gateway IP? If such a page is feasible, it might be something you might think about for h2g2. Something along the line of "Point your browser at mobile.h2g2.com/diagnostic and tell me what it says." Or I could be spinning pipe dreams, I don't really know anything about WAP.

Do you have a rig there that you were testing the mobileID browser on? If so, there is a separate version of kbrowser supporting the "modem connected to a cell phone plugged into a Palm" type package. I don't know if that will work with a Visor, but I'd guess so (aren't the Visor's pretty similar to the III/V Palm's, but with the Handspring slot?) I don't know how much code the two versions share, but I'd suspect they are probably fairly similar.

Anyway, I'll let you know if 4th Pass gives me any useful info.

Ooooh..... what's the URL of the low-bandwidth version? The full on version looks horrible on a standard palm browser.

Neil.

The text version was a prototype for development purposes only. It has since been retired, but will be reincarnated at some point soon now that we can change skins without changing the underlying code.

However, if you want to see a cut-down HTML version of the On the Move service you can point your browser at http://mobile.h2g2.com/html/

Note that this is designed for iMode phones (hence the "accesskey" attributes in some of the links) and so doesn't take advantage of some of the cool things you can do with AvantGo or PQAs. That will come later

psion launched yesterday the first beta of their wap-browser. www.psion.com

PAT

You could experiment with using avantgo to syncronize with the mobile.h2g2.com site. I have managed to set it up to download the new entries for offline viewing.

I just finished my entry on "How to mobilize your research ... using a PDA / PalmPilot":

http://www.h2g2.com/U151114

In my opinion PDAs are the one and only tool (until we will use UMTS-phones) for the mobile use of h2g2.

Let me know if this entry was helpful to you and apologize my english.

al-x mobile human unit, earth