This weekend was a bank holiday in the UK, which means nobody has to work on Monday unless you're employed shops that sell DIY goods, electrical items or sofas.

When I was last in the States I bough my girlfriend, Elaine, an iPaq. I'd bought her a Psion several years ago, and this was now nearing the end of its ability to withstand the punishment that relentless international travel places on it. The Psion (a 5 MX if I remember correctly) is a great little unit having the most usable keyboard of any PDA of recent times and also running on AA batteries which a) last a long time; and b) mean you don't have to constantly recharge the thing. The iPaq is much smaller, has a full colour screen and, unlike the Psion, uses software from Microsoft.

As an employee of Sun I obviously don't use Microsoft's products in my job. We have the Java Desktop System, StarOffice and Mozilla; I don't ever need to boot Windows in the office, in fact my laptop no longer has a Windows partition on it, being dual boot JDS and Solaris 10. For reading e-mail I use Mozilla. To be honest, I'm not a power e-mail user; the ability to file messages in folders and have a few simple filters is all I really need. At home I also use Mozilla for my personal e-mail account.

On the other hand Elaine needs to use Microsoft products for compatibility with a lot of people she does business with. The upshot of this is that I have to administer these things since Elaine is not a computer geek and views the computer as a tool rather than as a source of entertainment.

My day off therefore consisted of spending the better part of four hours moving data from one device to another and finding, as usual, something that should be relatively simple and straightforward is anything but. The Psion comes with software to move files between the PDA and a Windows machine. Since the files are not stored in Microsoft format there are also conversion filters for Word and Excel. These work well. Problem number one was trying to move all the files in one go. Select all the files and drag them to the new folder. Up pops a window giving options like "copy and convert". So far, so good. Choose the option and sit back and wait. No. For every file that is being copied a popup window appears asking you what conversion you'd like to use. This needs to be selected from a dropdown list with only one option! Tick the box that says make this the default and still, every file pops up the dialog box. Where, oh where is the "Yes to all" option? This is not too bad if you only have a few files to copy, but when there's nearly three hundred this gets downright irritating (and boring).

All files now on the main machine. Thankfully getting the files onto the iPaq is a breeze using the active sync software.

This still leaves the contact details, all six hundred of them (which means no way their getting re-entered by hand). Again, the Psion software provides an export facility into a comma delimited list. To get the contacts onto the iPaq you first have to get them into Outlook 2002's contacts. A quick look through the options reveals an import/export facility. Great. I export the contacts as an Excel spreadsheet so I can see the format. I then read the comma separated list into a different spreadsheet. The columns are all different, but at least with cut-and-paste it's relatively painless to get the information from one spreadsheet to another. Then I try importing the bigger contact list back in. Nope, just get some ambiguous error message about wrong format, blah, blah, blah. After much experimenting and swearing I finally figured out that if you put the new entries above the existing ones rather than below it will read in fine. Aaargh! Job done, you might think. Well, no. Copying the columns from one spreadsheet to another I didn't spot that the format for the columns hadn't been set to text. Any phone number that didn't have a non-numeric character in appeared in the form 4.2312333e+09, which funnily enough Outlook ignored. So after a lot of hand tweaking of the data all the contacts are finally saved in Outlook and synched to the iPaq. Success!!

Well, it would be if Outlook still worked. Now when you click on send/receive you get the oh-so-helpful error message "The Operation Failed". You really, really have to wonder about people that develop software like this. "The Operation Failed"? Yes, that's really succinct and tells you that what you tried to didn't work. However, if you want to try and fix the problem it's a totally useless error message. I mean, at least give us a hint. What failed? Why did it fail? Even some meaningless hex number as an error code is more use since at least you can look it up. A quick Google on "the operation failed" +outlook gave me 872 hits and a few ideas. I tried deleting all the contacts. I tried running the "detect and repair" option which obviously doesn't cover situations such as this. Looks like this evening's entertainment will be re-installing outlook.

Back in the office using Solaris and Mozilla everything seems somehow simpler.

Despite being at home for a couple of weeks I'm still amazed at how many things I want to do and yet don't seem to have the time for.

Most of this week has been occupied with looking at how to use Java to develop games. This is obviously a lot of fun, and since I've never been much of an active game player has really opened my eyes. (The only two games I've ever played for any length of time are Galaxians and Rogue. This should show my age nicely). I've been looking at JOGL, JOAL and JInput along with some other open source projects like the Lightweight Java Games Library and the slightly misleadingly named Java is Doomed project (that's Doom as in game, not Doom as in condemned). My presentation for this year's TechDays is coming on nicely (good job too since the first draft is due next week); next I'll be trying to sort out what are the most impressive demos. Then of course trying to work out what hardware will be required since 3D hardware acceleration is essential and I don't have the right drivers for my Toshiba Tecra 9100 to do this in Linux.

In doing the research for this I've also been looking (as usual) at what's right on the edge technology-wise. Given the success of the Sony EyeToy my first thought was to try and replicate this in a Java environment using the work I've done previously in JMF with webcams. However, after a bit more googling I came across the Track IR product that will track movement of your head rather than using a mouse. Sadly at the moment there is no Linux driver for the latest version of the product, but the forums say that there is work going on on a new driver. This could make for a very cool demo.

After being teased by one of my colleagues yesterday I finally unpacked the HomePod that I bought at JavaOne back in June. (This is what I mean, I have a cool new gadget and it takes me nearly two months to get around to playing with it). Setup was a breeze and it even integrated with the iTunes setup on my PC to provide me with all those hard thought out playlists. It even has an optical output that I can plug into the surround sound amp. The biggest challenge associated with this will be convincing my girlfriend that this in no way spoils the look of the living room (and look how useful it is, you don't even need to get up and change the CD anymore). Since I bought the developer version of the product I can actually telnet into the device and potentially write my own code for it (shoudl I ever have the time). I'm always happy with amy new gadget that I can telnet into.

Tomorrow my good friend and colleague Jon Haslam will be back in the office so we'll be putting in some more work on Project Dave. More of that tomorrow since we may actually have something to show by then.

Well, I've finally managed to start a blog. Despite being a Technology Evangelist (and therefore by definition at the leading edge) it's taken me quite a while to catch on to this. I will be most interested to see whether anyone reads this and comments on it, since I'm currently of the opinion that most blogs are write-only.

This week I've been working on new material for this years TechDays events, the Sun Technology roadshow that enables the Technology Evangelism group to travel the world and experience all the joy of many, many hours in airport lounges and economy class. The session I'm developing is Java and Games which means I get to go to work and play games (kind of, since I actually need to figure out how developers use the available technologies in this area). I'll post more on this next week as things start to fall into place.

I was in Brazil last week with some of my colleagues presenting the merits of Java to a number of financial institutions. This was a lot of fun as the developers we were presenting to were new to Java, coming from a mainframe background. It was nice to talk about the basics of Java for a change rather than the latest developments in EJBs or the specifics of generics :-). Brazil is also a great country to visit and the food there is just unbelievable. If you ever get there go for a Churascaria (hope I spelt that right). Truly carnavore heaven and vegetarian hell.

When I arrived in Brazil I realised that I've now been to six continents this year (only Antarctica is absent; there not being many developers there) and five continents in the last ten weeks. I've got to say I'm getting really tired of sleeping on planes and will be happy to spend a few weeks at home.