psyslaunchDB

I have posted several times about the battle with the Treo650 crashes. I have been able to install TON's of apps that shouldn't be together by keeping some on the SD Card, Locking some in memory, and most importantly getting rid of and finding workable apps for the really troublesome ones.

A major tool I have mentioned I use is a Crash Logger. I specifically use the one build into Reset Doctor by Hobbyist Software (one of my favorite developers). This technique works GREAT unless you start getting "Application" as the primary culprit. This is what has started happening to me.

Well the good news is that it has told me one good piece of info. If Application is causing the crash, then a SPECIFIC app is NOT. However finding what part of the system itself was causing the problem took some time and some stumbling upon.

I ended up finding the problem by looking at my Resco Backup Logs. What I found was the "psyslaunchDB" was getting corrupt every couple days. My quick solution for this was to reach back to one of my previous 4 days worth of backups and find the newest one that was NOT corrupt and replace the corrupt one currently in memory. Viola all is good.

The moral I guess ... use all of the tools at your disposal. You never know which one will help you solve the problem.

Goodbye Dear Friend ... I Miss you already!

As many of you may know already SplashBlog (which was bought by Six Apart, creators of Vox Blog Site) is being shut down by it's new owners. This is forcing many old Splashblog users over to Vox as the closest "ALTERNATIVE". The nice part is Vox offers MORE. It offers video, Audio, Text, and Photos. However this also offers a more cluttered site and more from your visitors.

Vox does include a software app for Palms built off of the Splashblog app.

At first I found the Vox app annoying because it would automatically post each image as a separate blog entry. A small work around is to set your Vox app on your Treo to submit photos to the library and NOT a new Post. This allows you to then login to the site and quickly create a blog entry including all of the photos you have uploaded to the library.

While Vox is a workable alternative, Splashblog was a GREAT and Unique site/service that just hasn't been successfully replicated by anyone else yet.

Farewell my good friend. I WILL miss you!

4Gb are better than 8 ... This time.

So as you know I have been having issues with my 8 Gb card. A recap of the problems.

1. Files kept getting corrupt
2. The speed was SOOOOOO SSSSLLLLOOOOWWWWW
3. Other small things I can't remember

So as a test months ago I swapped out the 8 for one of my 1Gb cards to see how it acted.
The problem was definitely with the 8Gb card. Well now that my wife has an 8Gb I-Phone I am envious of the space I lost. So I have been tweaking again with the card to see what I can get out of it.

First observation.
When I removed the 8Gb card from my DV Camera (where I was using it temporarily) and transferred the files to my PC before reformatting it for my Treo, it was FAST. Real Fast. Like 1 Gb in less than a minute fast. However once I reformatted it and started copying files back to it for the Treo it took forever. 1 Gb was taking about 30 min. I tried several different formatting methods and chunk sizes .... none of them made a difference.

Then I realized that when the card was formatted for the camera that camera had formatted it to 4 Gb. So I thought maybe some of these cards act like CPU's that are essentially under clocked to work at a stable speed. So I put card BACK in my DV camera and formatted it on that, then copied the files for the Treo back on it. The copy speed was slightly better, but nothing compared to my first copy experience. However when I put in in my Treo it was only SLIGHTLY slower than the 1 Gb card I had in there.

So now I am running an 8Gb card, formatted down to 4 Gb and running relatively beautiful.
The single issue I had with it was when I was copying the files for the Treo back onto it. I kept getting corruption errors. However running and scan disk and correcting the errors while looking for bad sectors seems to do the trick.

Sure I am wasting 4 Gb of space I could be using, but it wasn't working very well at all as an 8Gb card and is working wonderfully as a 4 Gb, so I see it as a success. If anything changes I will let you know.

Friends keyboard problem.

Friends keyboard problem.

A friend of mine at work has been having a LOT of wierd problems with has verizon 650 since he bought it. The system would stop responding to key presses ... unless he ejected the card and reinserted it. After which it would work for a little while and then he would repeat.

All I could tell him was it seemed like a physical hardware problem because hard resets did nothing. So last week he replaced the actual keyboard and low and behold ... it all works again. Not sure why ejecting the card affected anything ... but hey .... it works.

Excellent.

When a backup isn't enough.

When a backup isn't enough.

I talk a lot about backups and I mean it. however I have found lately that my backups are not enough to fix my problems.

I will say that when you are looking for a backup program find one that let's you restore in different ways. specifically the ability to restore FULL, SPECIFIC FILES, AND SPECIFIC APPS.

Also a good crash log app helps a lot.

Lately I have been getting frequent crashes where my crash log simply states that "applications" is to blame. No specific program. This has led me to believe that I have a bad/corrupt or otherwise compromised system file. Simply restoring the system after a hard reset will just bring it back. So I have needed to do a restore only specific apps. I restore just the apps I want, no unneeded preferences, system files, or temp files.

This has been a real life saver for fixing these untrackable system crashes.

Well back to the tweaking.