The past month has been one of those too-busy-to-natter times. Crossover is metamorphising into Unplugged Games, a developer and publisher of games for wireless Internet devices, and I've been getting up to speed on WML/WAP. I've also been learning more about Linux. I've been told that I probably won't get much more use out of my Mac, that the development tools I'll be using will be Windows or Linux-based. This would upset me a lot more if my Mac hadn't been crashing a half-dozen times a day. I'm actually eager to migrate to Linux. (I'd just as soon keep The Horror From Out of Redmond at arm's length, of course.)

To this end, I've been learning Emacs, downloading and compiling all sorts of things, and trying (unsuccessfully) to get PHP4 working with , a task that I know is possible, but which just doesn't seem to be possible on my particular machine. I've gone to the lengths of stripping out the default Apache install that came with Red Hat 6.0, downloading the latest Apache source and recompiling, then building and intalling PHP4, according to the instructions given in the PHP docs for installing with Apache and those given in the Apache docs for working with PHP (for some reason these are not the same instructions), but to no avail -- apachectl configtest still tells me that libphp4.so has garbled APIs, and may not be a proper DSO object. Grr.

Today I got to put some of that research to use, mocking up a quick WML demo. Wireless devices all have tiny screens -- the 160 x 160 Palm screen is huge compared to what most of these cellphones have -- so I'm back in the realm of itty-bitty black-and-white graphics that I thought I'd left behind a decade ago.

That would be a good practical justification for playing around with TealPaint, the painting app for the Palm, but the truth of it is I'm starting to get a kick out of fiddling with it. It's still awkward. This picture here is the best I've done so far -- it's a glass of soda I sketched during dinner at Passover. The ability to draw directly on the screen makes this more like traditional drawing then using a graphics tablet is -- I still haven't gotten my eye and my hand sufficiently in-synch to make a tablet useful. I may just need to practice more.

The newest version of TealPaint supports color on the new color Palms, which I don't have one of. It also supports grayscale painting on Palms with OS 3.5, which Palm still hasn't released an upgrade for.