X30 with a lobotomy

[rogerfgay]

Originally Posted by dna

I can't believe it. It still works even after I gingerly replaced the back screws

And if feels sooooo good!

[dna]

Originally Posted by rogerfgay

Know anything about DHTML / AJAX in Microsoft Pocket Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile 2003?

Not a freakin clue.

I even went back and aligned the screen

[dna]

Well, I'm not completely finished - I've moved on to the having to squeeze the side of the PDA to get the screen to respond. Still, that's a known problem and solution.
Doing much better than before.

[Mahstah]

The squeeze problem's solution is posted by Drifter here.

[dna]

Heh, just searched for that. Kinda afraid to take it apart again

[rogerfgay]

Originally Posted by dna

Heh, just searched for that. Kinda afraid to take it apart again

Sorry to hear it's not totally fixed yet. You are being careful not to tighten the screws too tightly? My way of discovering where "too tightly" is was to tighten until the screen stopped working and then backing off until the screen worked again. The real explanation is just slightly more complicated than that because there are four screws, all of which should be tightened evenly. But you know what I mean.

[rogerfgay]

Originally Posted by dna

I don't see this in the picture?

RE: Wires. I didn't see them in the pictures either. It left me wondering if they were added when the unit was refurbished. Anyway ... after thinking about how I might give further explanation (unnecessary if you don't have the wires in your unit), I became 100% certain that the wires never had anything to do with my problem. When I repositioned the wires, I had no idea that tightening the screws too tightly could be a problem. I was getting false positive results when I tested without replacing the screws. It worked (YIPPEE!!) and I incorrectly attributed the fix to moving the wires. Then when I tightened the screws, it didn't work again.

[rogerfgay]

Originally Posted by Mahstah

The squeeze problem's solution is posted by Drifter here.

And I really appreciated Drifter's post there (it was also copied to this thread). It was one of the 2s in adding up 2+2 (so to speak) that made me realize that tightening the screws too tightly could be my problem. "If tightening the screws causes it not to work, then loosening the screws ...." ... simple logic, but my mind likes an explanation. The squeeze test tipped me off ... to think about deforming the case by tightening the screws too tightly, causing pressure where there shouldn't be any.

The case actually holds together pretty well without screws, which you should notice when you try to take it apart. The screws are only there to assure that it stays that way. It's much different that what I had just been doing over the weekend .. putting furniture together ... where tightening the screws very tight (without stripping) was part of the right way to assure that the furniture wouldn't wobble.

[rogerfgay]

Originally Posted by Pedah

Hey Roger, I think you have answered your own question, and maybe it's mechanical. Try the tape fix on the ribbon conector, and when you put it back together, screw together as softly, and as evenly as you can.

Mine's totally working now. No hardware problem. I'm in the process of learning the software system well enough to do something interesting. I had some moments getting a Bluetooth connection to my PC and making the Wifi connection to my wireless router, but I've gotten that all sorted out now. It was just because I have no previous experience on the X30 -- none on any Pocket PC / PDA for that matter. I hadn't even considered owning one. A friend of mine sent this one to me because he thought I'd like it. (I think he has an X50 now.) It still looks to me as though ActiveSync caused a problem by taking over a COM port without creating a new one. I fixed that by creating a new one. My next challenge is getting an AJAX application running on the X30.

I've discovered that the browser id is "Microsoft Pocket Internet Explorer" instead of "Microsoft Internet Explorer" as it is in PC IE and that sometimes people refer to the MS browser as PIE (Pocket Internet Explorer). There are some differences between AJAX and DHTML support for Windows Mobile 2003 and Windows Mobile 5 / 6. Windows Mobile 2003 is a little old ... just on the edge of providing initial AJAX support of some kind, but a post from a Microsoft Mobile guru assures that AJAX works in PIE in Windows Mobile 2003, just a little differently than more recent browsers. There is no upgrade to Windows Mobile 5 / 6 for the X30. There might be a commercial version of Linux that works on the X30. I'm not sure that I have any reason to be concerned at this point; but it doesn't look like Open Office has a Pocket PC version running yet and I haven't identified any other alternative to Microsoft Office products for the Pocket PC.

Getting AJAX running on the X30 is not a high priority for me. I have an application running in IE 6, Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, and Nokia's version of Opera running on Symbian 60 (Nokia smart phones). By the time the app actually reaches an end user, the X30 will probably be too old to care about. But an X30 is what I have. If I can get it working during a lunch hour sometime, it will give me an extra test platform and demo unit.

[rogerfgay]

Originally Posted by dna

Not a freakin clue.

I even went back and aligned the screen

RE: AJAX / DHTML
FYI (on the side):

It's the stuff that Google's most advanced applications are made of; like Google Maps. It allows content in the HTML page to be updated (Dynamic HTML) while you're looking at it without reloading the whole page (and the AJAX part ->) interacting directly with powerful back-end applications without waiting for them to return before performing another action. It's pretty sweet. The functions in the web page that control the page dynamics can easily exchange information with other programs anywhere on the www; and use that new information to change the details displayed on the page. I invented my own AJAX a couple of years ago using Microsoft's XML Http / DOM plug-ins and Servlets (Java Applets on a Tomcat server). Before that, Netscape had LiveConnect, which went unsupported as they fell. Microsoft has ASP. Part of its problem is that it only works on Microsoft's Internet Information Services server; a less popular internet server. AJAX is now a standard supported by all browsers. It's part of a definite wave in new-age internet programming. DHTML has been around for a long time; pretty much since the beginning of the web browser era. It combines inventions that came from the same place; the planet's original browser that was the foundation of Netscape. It's gotten better over the years, along with improvements in scripting languages like JavaScript. AJAX stands for Asynchronous (the not waiting for reply part) JavaScript (THE standard web page scripting language) And XML (a standard way of expressing data used in internet information sharing).