Of phones and time

[mortonfox]

There must be a sales drive going on at Sprint now because yesterday morning, I got a phone call from a rather insistent Sprint sales representative. Of course, I wasn't going to upgrade my calling plan since I hardly use any minutes in the first place, and I wasn't going to upgrade my phone either because I just got a replacement Razr V3m in good working condition. However, that sales call did get me to at least take a look at Sprint's current selection of phones.

The LG Rumor is one that I might get for the slide-out keyboard. The dealbreaker is it doesn't support EV-DO! If I have Power Vision, why get a phone that can't use it? The only other Sprint offering that I thought was interesting was the HTC Touch, a touchscreen Windows Mobile smartphone. However, the reviews are lukewarm. The rest of the phones are either less capable than the Razr V3m (so why buy those when I can always get a V3m on eBay?) or too high-end for me to be bringing out into the woods. Bottom line is I ought to wait and see. Maybe they'll have more choices next year when my contract is up for renewal.

Did more work on TwitVim. Yesterday, I added support for highlighting #hashtags and jumping to the Twitter Search for those hashtags. That should make hashtags easier to follow in TwitVim, not that many people on my friends timeline use those.

Then today, I rewrote TwitVim's date/time reformatting code in pure Vim script. It used to be written in Perl, so only those who ran Vim with the if_perl extension compiled in would see those. Everyone else saw raw Twitter API timestamps, which are in GMT instead of local time and aren't very pretty, besides. Now that this piece of code is in Vim script, everyone will get the new timestamps. Why was it in Perl earlier? Because Vim has barely anything by way of date/time handling functions so I was using Perl's library functions for that. Once I had the Julian date formula though, it was easy to write a Vim function to convert date strings to UNIX time values. (i.e. seconds since Jan 1, 1970) Of course, it was even easier to peek into the Perl library to see how they implemented timegm(). Wish I'd thought of that earlier.

So here's what timegm() looks like in Vim script:

" Convert date to Julian date.
function! s:julian(year, mon, mday)
    let month = (a:mon - 1 + 10) % 12
    let year = a:year - month / 10
    return a:mday + 365 * year + year / 4 - year / 100 + year / 400 + ((month * 306) + 5) / 10
endfunction

" Calculate number of days since UNIX Epoch.
function! s:daygm(year, mon, mday)
    return s:julian(a:year, a:mon, a:mday) - s:julian(1970, 1, 1)
endfunction

" Convert date/time to UNIX time. (seconds since Epoch)
function! s:timegm(year, mon, mday, hour, min, sec)
    return a:sec + a:min * 60 + a:hour * 60 * 60 + s:daygm(a:year, a:mon, a:mday) * 60 * 60 * 24
endfunction

Certainly not a long or difficult piece of code once the details have been hammered out.

Comments

[the-nighteyes.livejournal.com]

I also use sprint. I have the mogul from them and love it to death. In the next few months their new line of phones to replace both the touch and mogul (touch but with slide out keyboard essentially) called the HTC Diamond and Raphael respectfully. somewhere between sept and nov if i am correct. I would definately wait until then, the reviews for the diamond are looking excellent but havent heard about raphael yet cuz its not released yet. the raphael is essentially a diamond (same overall shape and look) but with slide out keyboard. DEFINATELY wait and see bout those.

^.^

[captpackrat.livejournal.com]

Have you seen the new ROM for the Mogul: http://www.htc.com/us/FAQ_Detail.aspx?p_id=75&act=sd

Windows Mobile 6.1 and Sprint TV, plus the EV-DO Rev A, GPS and task manager from the previous update.

[the-nighteyes.livejournal.com]

actually i use my own cooked rom by DCD off of ppcgeeks.com So i have all of that for a long time now lol. :P

[mortonfox.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'll wait. The sales rep hasn't called back anyway so I'm not going to look at their selection of phones until later when my contract actually ends. The Mogul looks like a wonderful phone, but the price would make me worry about dropping it or losing it in the woods or down a stream, whereas a replacement Razr V3m is only $60 on eBay.

[captpackrat.livejournal.com]

I love love love love my HTC Mogul (Titan). The GPS on it is totally unlocked, so you can load any Windows Mobile GPS software, such as Google Maps. There are also some freeware apps that let you use it like a traditional GPS (waypoints, coordinates, etc). It uses Assisted GPS but doesn't appear to support WAAS.

It also has EV-DO Rev A, and a slide-out keyboard.

It does have one annoying flaw, it tends to fail to answer calls, regardless of how quickly you press the answer button. This is supposed to be fixed in the latest firmware, which I just installed this evening.

The new firmware includes Windows Mobile 6.1, threaded SMS and Sprint TV.