The cure for unbeamable PalmOS files (Shallow Thoughts)

The cure for unbeamable PalmOS files

Okay, I know Dave and I are probably the last two people on the face of the earth who use PalmOS. But we still do, to read news and ebooks prepared with Plucker, only there was one big frustration: none of our Plucker files were beamable. So if I downloaded a really interesting article and wanted to share it with Dave, I couldn't (unless we went back to our desktop machines and transferred it that way.) The Palm just said Unhandled exception, error code = 5395.

I tried all sorts of things in the feedme code that calls Plucker -- adding --beamable, moving it earlier or later in the argument list, trying other arguments. --beamable is supposed to affect the "copy protect bit", but checking on the Palm devices confirmed the copy protect bit wasn't set, and still beaming didn't work.

And I just stumbled on the answer tonight, and since it's not documented anywhere, I must document it in case somewhere, there's someone else who still uses PalmOS and Plucker struggling with this problem.

It turns out that a document with a colon in the name can't be beamed. On any PalmOS device we've tried, regardless of generation or manufacturer. This of course isn't documented anywhere I can find.

So Fri: BBC World News isn't beamable. But simply give it a colonoscopy -- rename it to Fri BBC World News -- and beaming works great.

Sheesh! Ain't debugging grand?

Tags: palm, plucker
[ 20:43 Feb 12, 2010    More tech | permalink to this entry | ]