New PDA

Whee! I just won an HP Jornada 548. A bit old, but still.

There was a lottery here at work where they raffled off six PDAs of various types to interested employees (maybe "raffled" is the wrong word; no money was involved).

After the winners were assigned, the little tickets were re-counted and it was determined that two tickets were in the box that shouldn't have been and "two or three" weren't in the box that should have. So they figured out which tickets should be in the box and drew six new winners (two of whom were among the previous crowd, and they even won the same class machine they had previously). I was in the second draw.

So now I have a Windows CE handheld. Interesting. I had been planning on getting a PalmOS-based machine "sometime" (read: when I have money coming out of my ears), partly because of the longer battery life and partly because of the greater availability of software, but free is free.

Only thing is, there's no AC adapter in the box. There's a cable that plugs into the PDA and into an adapter but the adapter itself wasn't included. Such are the risks of getting something free sight unseen. I asked again but they said that everything they could find for a machine they had put in the box.

Maybe I'll try to get a new AC adapter off eBay; there's a promising-looking one there which expires on Sunday (they don't mention the 548 explicitly but the model number matches the one given in the "Accessories Guide").

Thank goodness for cscope

While looking through source code that's not my own, I've already grown to love ctags. Now I'm trying out cscope a little (which has been described as "ctags on steroids") and it is truely helpful.

I can find not only the definition of variables and functions (which ctags lets me do, too) but also such nice tidbits as "who calls this function" and "which functions does this one call". Especially the "who calls this function" and "assignments to this variable" are very useful when you're trying to find out how things come to be.

Edit 18:40: And thank goodness for ctags, too. And vim's ability to keep a tag stack. And the ability to double-click on an identifier to be taken to its definition. My word, these things are useful. (And I think using ctags is a bit faster than cscope so I tend to use tags when it's something that ctags can answer.)

I am so glad I don't have to sit in front of a stack of fan-fold program listings with paper clips in strategic locations.

Thank you, Bram Moolenaar! Thank you, Darren Hiebert! Thank you, all the others who work on such lovely tools!