The Case of the Crashing Memory Stick
This evening, I was playing with my CLIE T615C. I used the default Palm OS launcher to switch to the memory stick, and the whole system crashed. Very odd, since I'd not added anything to the stick in a few days. I had to reset the device, so I tried this again. I consistently crashed when switching to the card view.
OK, I wondered if it was the card. I'd just gotten a 64MB memory stick, so I used MS Import to mount the CLIE as a drive, backed up my 32MB card, and put everything on the 64MB card. Same problem.
OK, this was getting annoying. However, I noticed something. On the card, I had about fourteen apps. When launcher froze, only the first twelve were showing, and the last one to show was my SXSW 2002 schedule program. Perhaps something in that app was wrong.
I used MSGate to remove the SXSW 2002 app from the card, and now everything worked. So, I'd solved the problem, but I still didn't know why things had stopped working suddenly.
I thought about what had changed on my system. My first suspect was JackFlash, which I'd installed to take advantage of the flash memory on the CLIE. I poked around with it for a while, but I decided this wasn't it. Then I remembered that I'd just switched the launcher to use the icon list view over the large icon view. This causes the launcher to use the 15x9 icon resource instead of the larger 22x22 resource.
I switch back to the big icon view, put the app back on the memory stick, and all was good. So, the new question is what happened to the small icon. I checked in Constructor, and the icon family and associated bitmaps looked just fine. I then dragged the PRC file into PRC Explorer and I noticed that the bitmap was all corrupt in the final output file.
I then had an aha experience. The PalmRez post linker included with the 4.0 SDK Update 1 had bitmap corruption problems! PalmSource had posted an update, but I'd not updated my home system where I was building the SXSW app. I got the new file, updated the post-linker, rebuilt the app, and now everything is fine a both icon sizes.
What's the moral of all this? Stay alert, especially when you're using new tools. Keep a close eye on updates, and make sure you actually install them. Verify your apps work with both icon views and at several color depths. Finally, don't panic. A seemingly random problem can often be overcome by thinking about what has changed in the system that could cause the failure.
Send feedback to combee@techwood.org
Copyright © 2004 Benjamin L. Combee
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The views expressed on this website/weblog are those of mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of PalmSource or Metrowerks.
qwertYAK / frobnovich
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