Hi Aaron,

  I hope you had a good holiday...

>If you find teh PocketPC total crap as a PDA, then I suggest you steer
>clear of any Zaurus model, at least for the time being.  PocketPC's PIM
>software is at least a few light-hours ahead of what you can get for the
>Linux Zaurus, even if you spring for commercial replacements like those
>from theKompany.com; the PIM stuff available for Psion or NewtonOS is a
>number of light-years ahead.  In general, the software available for the
>Zaurus line is pretty sad compared to what you can get even on PocketPC.

  So is wanting a list (i.e. text) of your appointments over the next
week all on the same screen such an exotic expectation?  The PocketPC
week view only gives you an idea of when you're busy, but not where you
need to be or what the topic of the meeting is.  Sigh...

  Maybe this is an opportunity to provide the WinCE world with a "good"
PIM application?  ...in Squeak, of course...

>As a Squeak platform, the C760 is very nice though. It gets pretty 
similar
>tinyBenchmarks values, although I wonder how different this iPAQ (or
>similar WinCE/PPC machines) *feels* compared to a Zaurus C750/760.  In my
>experience, Squeak on a Zaurus SL-5500 felt quite a bit faster than the
>Dell Axim X5, even though they had pretty similar tinyBenchmarks results.

  Well, by rough count, the 'New morph...' menu takes about 3 seconds or
so to appear compared to around 1 second on my PIII/700 laptop (which 
gives
something around 66M bytecodes/s and 1.9M sends/s), so this implies that
the sends are the dominant factor for costructing that menu and the iPAQ
performance is about what should be expected based on the tinyBenchmarks
results.

  The only other thing I can think of that would explain the difference
you see between the Zaurus and the Axim is memory bus speed.  The Zaurus
probably has a faster memory bus than the Axim, and I'm guessing that
tinyBenchmarks is small enough that it might benefit more from the 
tiny-ish
caches of the StrongARM/xScale that Morphic/UI operations.

  From what I've read, the iPAQ 2215 has a 100 MHz memory bus, although
they do fail to mention the bus width.  I would think 32 bits is a good
number, but I've heard that some of the earlier WinCE pocket devices were
only 16 bit memory busses for 32 (or even 64 - MIPS III) bit CPUs.


  We REALLY could use a VM that plays nicer with the latest version of
WinCE though.  The VM Andreas did for Squeak 2.7 on the Casio WinCE 2.11
devices was much better behaved as WinCE apps go.  I've started to look
a little at the sources in the Tarball that Yoshiki referenced to get a
feel for what's involved, but I haven't yet found (or looked for) the
list of rules for "playing nice" in Windows Mobile 2003.

  Anyway, I'm rambling, and I have to get some work done before it gets
too dark.  We're still running with reduced lighting and air conditioning,
and non-essential government workers will probably have the rest of the
week off until Ontario Hydro gets all of it's generating capacity back on
line.  It's amazing how dark some of our labs in the center of the 
building
can get even during the day.

  I was pleasantly surprised at how smoothly traffic flowed in
Ottawa on Thursday without traffic lights.  I was a little irked
though at how CNN et al. took such a US centered approach to the whole
thing.

                                                -Dean

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