Trying to fix the OS on a handera

The Handera I got off of Ebay has major parts of the OS removed, in particular the CFBackup utility, which makes the device essentially worthless for travelling with. The Handera website has several OS upgrades available, but they require loading an .UPD file to a CF card. I've done that, and followed the proper reboot procedure to get it to detect the .UPD file, but it does not detect it. Nor does it detect it on the SD card.

Haven't found the solution yet, but here are some things that I found along the way.

A nice history of Palm OS upgrades:

http://www.fingertech.co.uk/palmos_version_history.html

Probably my issue is one of the Handera not being able to access the card slots due to the destroyed OS. Not sure if there is any way out, but this forum page has a link to something called SyncWizard which looks pretty neat:

http://www.spug.sg/forums/archive/index.php/t-19903.html

Get it here:

http://handheld.softpedia.com/get/System-Utilities/Communications/SyncWizard-2511.shtml

Installing Visual C++ the hard way

In order to install Visual Studio C++ 2008 on an offline PC, in order to avoid all the trouble with VSC++ 2010 (including that it can't convert old VS6.0 dsw files), I was again bitten by not having a DVD writer on my desktop PC. VS 2008 can be had as an iso file (for DVD only), as can the SDK. So, I found a couple of links on how to rip open the install configuration files and manually pull down the pieces that would be installed by the web install. Too bad this approach is so scattershot that it basically has no chance of working. I of course tried it anyhow. Here is the first article that gives the general idea:

http://vicker313.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/how-to-offline-install-visual-studio-express-without-download-the-whole-image-file/

This told me to download WinRAR to open up the setup files.

http://www.win-rar.com/download.html

From a comment in the first article, I got links to much more complete articles on how to download the pieces. It turns out that I needed a bunch more pieces. The VCPP installed easily and runs great, but I don't have any of the DLLs or .h files for compiling windows apps. It looks like I need to download the massive, DVD-iso-only SDK. I tried it piecemeal but the headers and dlls were not installed.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2008/03/14/8214926.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2008/03/24/8334544.aspx

That said, the above articles are pure genius.

Here is an article by somebody who has the same experience, but whose outraged post is much more poetic than I could ever be. The nice thing is that some M$ folks on the forum explain how to download the SDK. Or maybe they're robots, since it's the same answer over and over ten times in the comments.

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/vcgeneral/thread/2bfed529-fb6d-48a3-ad48-fc6301486646/

A different post on another forum which had the same answer pointed to the download page for the SDK, which warned of a problem that occurs when the SDK is installed after VC++2008:

The download page:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=E6E1C3DF-A74F-4207-8586-711EBE331CDC&displaylang=en

The problem:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974479

Lastly, here is some advice from the comments area of social forum thread above which describes how to download a 2003 SDK and reconcile it with VC++2005, which supposedly you don't have to do with 2008 but it seems like since I've been doing everything bass-ackwards so far I'm going to have to do some of these steps:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/applications/FreeVS2005Win32.aspx

Here's a link from another hacker who wants to take just the necessary parts of a multi-gig SDK package. He's talking about a really old version of VCPP, but these are still good hints:

http://bfilter.sourceforge.net/doc/vctk.php

No Special Characters Allowed With Google

The solution to this problem was to use AltaVista.

Trying to search for "wxALIGN_RIGHT | wxST_NO_AUTORESIZE" was fruitless in Google. No matter how I enclosed it in quotes, it would interpret the '|' as a command to search for either of these terms. Going to advanced search provided previews of how it interpreted my search string, and always showed that it refused to honor my attempts to format this as a complete phrase. Googling other peoples' complaints showed forum threads of people with the same problem, and regretful answers from Google's representatives saying that this kind of search can't be done and will never be possible (mostly people wanted to use '@').

Another thing wxWidgets doesn't come out and say

Later on, I was trying to set up wxStaticText widgets to be right justified, and they were always coming out centered even though I was using both wxALIGN_RIGHT and wxST_NO_AUTORESIZE. It turns out that because I used wxDefaultSize instead of a hard-coded size, it was doing the thing described below where it constantly redraws the widget to match the text (even though I was giving it a string with leading spaces). These trouble tickets turned out to be similar, but not related to my problem:

http://trac.wxwidgets.org/ticket/10716
http://trac.wxwidgets.org/ticket/5991

Here's some source code that verified that yes I was "using" wxALIGN_RIGHT and wxST_NO_AUTORESIZE correctly:

http://www.signalogic.com/index.pl?page=HWMgrDlg