world gone mad

With palm's recent announcement that it will have a Linux-based Treo by year end and all the hoopla around the upcoming apple OS X palmtop, this seems like a really good time to be in the FOSS world.

I haven't seen the specs of either OS yet, of course. But I can guess at the hardware that they will both debut on, and I'm fairly confident that both devices will be more powerful than the first Linux box I ever worked on. I'm hoping that the end result will be a full enough set of posix libraries to move the LAMP stack with little trouble. "Little trouble" being a relative term, of course.

My own experience with palmtop programming started with a doomed foray into the Palm C API and concluded with a brief stint as a J2ME programmer back with Bangstate. The first effort was too clumsy for a snooty young OO programmer, and the second just didn't seem to have enough of a future on PalmOS (somebody, please, tell me I'm wrong). I had some great experiences as a Zaurus beta tester, too, but... well, it still hurts.

Not that I don't love my treo as an end user. But as a recreational programmer, in a word, I'm lazy. I want to re-use other people's better code. I want to bring along the scripting tools and yes, the SQL backend I've grown to know & love. Want me to go back to the hardware limitations and speed hits of 1999? No problem. Want me to relearn Windows 3.1-style GUI programming? Nope.

So bring on the new little desktops. Just don't let the gyroscopes and bluetooth goodies crowd out the POSIX goodness, and we'll all get along fine.