Jim Karpen Tips

September 2000

This morning I saved myself hours of frustration. I was trying to get my new Jornada Pocket PC to talk to my new Macintosh PowerBook. I tried for about 20 minutes to get it to work, but couldn't figure out what was wrong.

So then I went to Deja.Com. Whenever I have a question, I assume that someone else has also had that question. And I do a quick search of the Usenet discussion groups. In minutes I had my disappointing answer: a new Mac like mine can't communicate with a Pocket PC, even though I've installed a Windows emulator.

That's the bad news. The good news is, as I noted, that I saved myself hours of messing around with it. Let other people spend hours messing around with it and let me benefit from their experience. That's why I like the Internet.

There are tens of thousands of Usenet discussions on everything you can think of, from pets to your favorite movie star to Pocket PC computers. Despite its various incarnations, Deja is, in my opinion, still the best way to search the discussions. The search function is no longer on the main page but can be found at www.deja.com/usenet .

When you do a search, Deja returns a list of messages that contain the key words that you searched for. At the top it also lists the discussion forums in which these messages have been posted. When I searched on "Mac Pocket PC", it showed that six forums contained those terms, including one on politics. The politics messages were obviously irrelevant to my needs. So I quickly put a check mark by the three relevant forums, and then clicked the search button. It did the search again, but this time limiting it to the forums that would give me the best results.

Once I had refined my search in this way, I scanned the subject headings and read a couple messages that had a direct bearing on my situation. One person in particular seemed to have experience with this. Instead of posting a message to the forum, I simply clicked on his e-mail address and fired off an e-mail message. Within half an hour he replied telling me in detail why connecting the two devices wouldn't work.

If a particular posting seems relevant to your query, you can click on the Thread link, and Deja will show you an outline of all the messages that have been posted in response to the original message. You can use Deja to easily post a reply or query, but you must first go through a simple registration procedure.

We've covered Deja recently, but I depend on it so much that I thought it deserved our attention again. Give it a try if you aren't already using it.

© 2000 by Jim Karpen, Ph.D. (#231)