Bob Blair started us off with another installment of his PM Programming Tutorials. We got to see how multiple windows can be controlled with a single window procedure. We also got to see how not to count time with WM_TIMER messages.

The presentation concluded with some show and tell on how to use pmspy to watch the window message traffic.

Then came another of the every popular Saturday Live Help Desk sessions.

• We started off with Ray's problematic Seamonkey mail probelem. Scrolling from one mail message appears to take and excessive amount of time compared to either Mozilla mail or Thunderbird.

  A bit of side-by-side comparisions convinced everyone that this was more than just Ray's active imagination. It was not obvious if this was a file I/O problem or a display updating problem. Since we now knew how to use pmspy, we put it to use to see if it could help answer this question. What we found is that for some scroll action, Seamonkey redrew the message window approximately 40 times, while Mozilla did only 3 or 4 redraws. This was clearly some sort of regression in the Seamonkey code and Ray is going to submit a bug to Bugzilla.

• Next came Norm Metcalf, who flew from Colorado to Southern California just a experience a SCOUG help desk. The hard drive on his Thinkpad died and after reinstalling eCS 1.2R, he was having troubled getting the PCCard modem configured. A bit of troublshooting indicating that the card was not getting enabled because autoutl was not configured to enable the card. A bit more troubleshooting located an available IRQ and autoutl2 was configured and the modem came alive.
• Finally came Mark's Thinkpad z60t wireless setup. The z60t has a built-in Sierra Wireless MC 5720 PCI Express EVDO wireless broadband modem in miniPCI form factor. This card is functionally similar to the Sierra Wireless PC5220 PCCard that Mark has been using in his Thinkpad 770x. Steven and Mark developed a modified version of the USB comminications class driver to operate this card.

  To date, we have not been able to commuicate with the 5720 with the terminal programs we used for testing the 5220.

  We installed the debug kernel and debug versions of the USB drivers required to communicate with the 5720 and proceeded to take several steps backward. Functions that worked before no longer worked. Eventually, we started removing the debug drivers and the card remained invisible. Once this occurred, it was time to use usbresmg. The card remained invisible. At this time, we decided to call it an afternoon and Mark took the z60t home to do some hardware troubleshooting.

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