I have written my first PalmOS application. It's nothing spectacular, just a PalmOS version of my Lute Fret Calculator. Truly simple: plug in the string length, hit the "Calculate" button, and it tells you where your frets go.

Only it wasn't so simple. For starters, PalmOS doesn't have a built-in way to print floating-point numbers -- a ridiculous deficiency for a PDA which might well be used to keep track of finances or expenses. "Simple," I thought, "I'll just roll my own. Such a routine is trivial."

But my float-printing routine always spit out zero. I tried it in a regular DOS executable on my machine. It worked fine. I tried it on the Palm OS Emulator; it returned zero. I tried it on my Prism; it returned zero. For three whole days, I bashed my head against the wall trying to get it to work under PalmOS. I rewrote my routine countless times, to no avail. I downloaded others' versions of the same kind of routine. Theirs didn't work either.

And then, doing probably the thirtieth GoogleGroups search to help me figure out what was going wrong, I discovered it. A bug in the compiler. Just download a patched version, said the message, and all will be well. And thus it was. Three days driving myself crazy over a compiler bug. Grrr. Arrrgh.

Still, it actually works. And despite the fact that the intersection of the set of lutenists and the set of PalmOS PDA users can probably be counted on one hand, I went ahead and registered a Creator ID for my silly little app. Just because I could.