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On Friday, November 15, 2002, at 07:09 PM, Kevin Brown wrote:

> Press the hotsync button on the cradle as J-Pilot suggests you do.

Just a quick refresher on the problem.  Michael has a Handspring Visor, 
which utilizes a USB cradle.

The way that the USB system is designed(1) is such that the USB devices 
don't exist until the device advertises itself.  With the USB cradle, 
this advertisement goes out when the HotSync button is pressed, 
followed by a synchronization request to the computer so that it 
functions identically to the serial counterpart (except faster).

However, we find that:

*)
The program cannot open the USB tty device before you press the button 
because it doesn't exist yet.

*)
The synchronization request is not received by anyone because nobody 
had the file open at the time.  There does not seem to be any buffering 
here.

Newer versions of pilot-link and coldsync handle this by responding as 
if they had received the synchronization request as soon as they begin. 
  Michael does not have an newer version.

(1) I believe that devfs can alleviate this problem if it is configured 
to execute a program when the appropriate device connects.  
Furthermore, it wouldn't surprise if someone had hacked a way to listen 
to non-existant devices (and bypassed the hot pluggable features in the 
process). :-)

- -- 
                                                            Voltage Spike
       ,,,
      (. .)
- --ooO-(_)-Ooo--

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