gottahavacuppamocha

If you ever get a chance, pick up a book called The Mother Tongue: English and how it got that way, which I think is by Bill Bryson. It’s a book with all kinds of anecdotes about the English language. One of those anecdotes is more of a question: How come we can be overwhelmed or underwhelmed, but not just whelmed?

To put it in context, I’ve spent a large part of the day looking for anything to do with Unicode on Palm Pilots. I’m overwhelmed by the amount of information and underwhelmed by the performance (for lack of a better term). There is a lot of information regarding Unicode and Palms, or international character sets and Palms, but it boils down to A) Palm OS doesn’t support Unicode normally, and B) Buy our software. It seems like there is a lot of software for Palms that support international character sets, and a few that even support Unicode, but none of them (that I could find) were web browsers. There is one web browser that is in beta which is supposed to support Unicode kinda/sorta, but the website is down, so that idea is out the window.

There is a rumor that Palm may support Unicode in the future. They are on a panel at the Unicode Consortium, and I think I read they hired a VP who previously worked at the Consortium, so it bodes well for the future.

However, none of that helps me with my endeavor at the moment.

I did see that Moodle has a small Moodle for Mobiles project going. I first heard about Moodle when I was doing research for one of my papers this past semester. It’s an open-source courseware project, similar to the Sakai project (a/k/a Oncourse CL if you go to IU), though it seems to have a larger community. Plus it is PHP/MySQL. I’m thinking about starting to use that instead of continuing with my own project.

With the Moodle for Mobiles project (MOMO), they have a way to convert (or they are working on it) UTF-8 into other encodings. That won’t help me with my Palm since it can’t read the other encodings either, but I can use the Palm to work out the accessibility of the site and use my regular browser to work on the content. So, Moodle would just be a regular website and MOMO is a user-agent sniffer that serves up a special webpage for mobiles. I figure I’ll give it a shot at least.

Related posts:

1. Learning
2. Moodle is as Moodle does
3. Coming to a small screen near you
4. A Confederacy of …
5. Palm T|X