Hacker's Diary
A rough account of I did with Emacs recently.
- July 31
- Long, lazy day - lunch in town, then back to Dalkey to spend the
evening in the pub. Again. My computers are feeling neglected.
- July 30
- Woo, software release. Go me!
JC & Anita arrived, so drinks etc.
- July 29
- Hmm. So you have to compile in the framebuffer driver you want
to use before you can boot with it. That makes sense; you'd think
I'd have thought of it.
I have a one-way serial console for debugging the wireless box -
it displays output, but you can't send any keystrokes to it. It's
not intentionally one-way; I'm suspecting a bad connection on the
Tx line or something.
- July 28
- Sigh, PVR still not happy. It's recording the sound, but
clipping it weirdly. I'll have to go back to figuring out how to
make ALSA record from the line-in or CD socket, and backwire the
TV card's sound that way.
- July 27
- Well, that's annoying. aRTs + ALSA = skippy sound from XMMS. I
guess I need to look into buffering or something. A shame, because
up until now it Just Worked using the buffering settings in XMMS,
rather than requiring me to go grovelling around at the hardware
level.
D'oh. Left out a space in the command line for mencoder, so the
overnight test failed.
- July 26
- Rebuilt aRTs with ALSA support, which means that pretty much
everything can now run without the OSS interface since
artsdsp will pick up any attempts to open
/dev/dsp. I may well move the OSS compatibility layer out
of the way to verify this theory.
I think I've got the freevo sound sorted:
I've managed to tell it to explicitly record from the TV card,
which was harder than it should have been, and I've told mencoder
to downsample the result because for some reason the TV card's
lowest sampling rate is about 192Khz. We shall see.
- July 25
- Completely missed Hockenheim racing due to being a bit
hungover. Damn.
Schumacher won, mind you.
Hacked at the mapping toy to try getting the zoom stuff
sorted. There's some oddball stuff going on with the Tk::Photo
class that I don't quite understand. Also, you can't simply zoom a
Tk::Photo image. You have to copy it, and zoom while copying. And
zoom up and zoom down are implemented as separate and
differently-named methods. Every time I learn more about Tk::Perl
I hate it a little more, but until I figure out what the hell
images on Gtk::Canvas are doing I can't ditch the Tk
stuff.
- July 24
- Completely missed Hockenheim qualifying due to being in a car
between Dublin and Limerick. Damn.
Mapping toy working nicely, although I still need to tweak it to
allow it to patch in a lower resolution map if it doesn't have one
at the resolution that's being asked for.
- July 23
- Well, that's frickin' annoying. Everything on the Gnome Canvas
widget behaves as I expect, except the images: they move when I
change the scrolling area. Which I'm doing constantly. GAH. I
could use a DrawingArea, but that'll require a whole bunch of
manual redrawing that I was hoping to avoid.
I kinda got the Freevo stuff
sorted. There are still things I need to read up on, such as a
decent accelerated driver for the MiniITX box so that it doesn't
drop frames when showing TV or dump core when I try to use
Xv.
- July 22
- It seems like I've almost got Freevo working; it's
taken a bit of abuse, partly due to conflicting advice about
XMLTV, partly due to my impatience with the documentation and in
particular the configuration - why do I have to fill out the
channel list in two, no, three places? Why can't I just fill it
out in one and be done with it? Why can't I tweak this stuff from
the built-in webserver instead of having to edit a Python file?
Anyway, I'll give it a good kicking tomorrow evening and hopefully
get it sorted in time to leave it recording things off TV over the
weekend while I do other stuff.
- July 21
- OBEX continued: obexftp also doesn't work. Using the
get command in obex_test pretty much crashes the phone -
it loses all its connections and resets them. setpath
returns a Not Implemented message. I think I should probably try
the Windows
software for the phone to see what access it gives
me.
Veronica
Guerin is an excellent movie, and surprisingly understated
given that it's a Bruckheimer/Schumacher joint. Cate Blanchett
gives a fantastic performance throughout, in particular the scene
where she visits John Gilligan (Gerard McSorley) at
home. Definitely recommending this for your Must See list.
And yes, I do remember where I was when I heard about the shooting
on the Naas road.
- July 20
- Cleaned out my Mozilla
bookmarks somewhat. I have a script somewhere that's supposed to
do a lot of this automatically, but I've never finished it (heard
that before, have you?) so I figured I'd do a bit of manual
checking and cleaning instead.
Now that I've figured out that it's what I need, I spent rather a
lot of time trying to make OBEX PUSH work outside the demo code
from the OpenOBEX apps "suite". Eesh. Global
variables. Volatiles. This stuff is horrible. And without poring
over it closely I can't immediatly figure out which bits I
actually need. I also tried sl45c (wouldn't build without PCRE
installed, except I had PCRE installed and it still
wouldn't build until I slapped the CFLAGS upside the head, then
added -lm to the linkflags, and even then it crapped out in all
sorts of non-intuitive ways), fuse+siefs (won't work), obexfs
(wanted fuse before I'd resigned myself to installing it) and
scmxx, all of which aren't actually intended for my exact phone
but all of which speak OBEX. No luck, though. GAH.
Wrote a fairly blunt aumix perlscript that converts the
args to work with amixer - I'm trying to get rid of any OSS
dependencies on my system.
- July 19
- Much to my surprise, when I returned from my weekend in the west
I discovered a cheque from Eircom - apparently a credit on
my final bill that had previously gone unnoticed or something, I
dunno. Now, I've been free from Eircom since, um, April, so why it
took three months for this to show up is beyond me. Anyway, it
nicely balances out the cost of my new mobile phone, so that's okay.
Speaking of the mobile phone, it seems my 20-minute service call
on Friday was ultimately pointless, since you can't use the WAP
version of Banking 365 to transfer money between your accounts
like you can do with the voicemail service and the HTML version of
the same site. And this was precisly the thing I was keen to get
at. What sort of morons do they have in the online division,
exactly? Maybe I'll just hack up a proper WAP gateway to the
HTML site and use that. GRR.
Some tooling with OBEX led me to discover that I need to use OBEX
PUSH, not OBEX PUT, to copy vCards to my new phone. Whether this
also applies to older phones and/or my Pilot will be discovered
whenever I get the OBEX apps code into better shape.
- July 18
- Starsky
and Hutch was pretty slack, given previous form by
Stiller/Wilson. It had its moments, but there was a lot of stuff
that left me sitting there thinking, "enh".
Managed to drop power to the laptop twice on the drive home from
Ballina. I really need an audio alert for these driving trips to
tell me that it's suddenly using battery power because the last
stretch of bumpy road joggled the cigarette-lighter PSU
loose.
- July 17
- Love
Actually wasn't quite the movie I'd hoped it'd be - too many
things played straight when they could have gone for Comedy
Gold[tm], and a few loose ends just left hanging. Shame, because
the good parts were generally very, very good.
Tweaked the GPS mapping toy to use a properly POE-integrated chunk
of code to read the GPS data, so it doesn't block and it doesn't
generate XSync errors. Also looked at xosd for alerting
me in big letters to the fact that something's wrong.
- July 16
- Major overhaul on the MapServer but
only in a module I've not "published". I figure some of
the code I can backport into the master module so that it's
available to all the modules. It should be possible for me to set
up a sort of calibration mode where it figures out things like
magnification and size of map vs. reality and so forth. It also
briefly occurred to me that I could combine this with the DEM
altitude data I've got knocking around from earlier forays into
GIS, and generate low-res 3d maps. Gnee!
- July 15
- It took a twenty-minute customer service call, much of which was
spent listening to looping hold music, but I can now access my
online banking from my cellphone. If you've got a Sagem My V55 and
you're trying to access the Finance section of Vodafone Live, all
you need to do is go into the GPRS connection settings (Vodafone
Live -> Profiles -> GPRS Settings -> Port Type and change
it from "Non-Secure" to "Secure"). Now, I
wonder if I can find the same settings on my old phone?
The Italian
Job (2003) is a whole lotta fun. Very much cut for a 12
rating, but definitely worth watching.
- July 14
- After yesterday's IDE stupidity got sorted, I've finally managed
to build a 2.4 kernel for the
WLAN test box, so I can now properly abuse the drivers and
hopefully see about getting a patch or two back to the linux-wlan
guys. Wahey!
- July 13
- Durrr. It's a lot easier to boot a system with a 2.4 kernel if you include the IDE
drivers in the build.
- July 12
- Cute. $r->subprocess_env() does the exact hacking I
need.
Iron
Monkey was rather fun, even if the dubbing was comically bad
in places.
- July 11
- Schumacher starts 4th, finishes 1st. The guy is just
unstoppable.
Most of my LDAP hacking is done: I need to do a little more sanity
checking, but at this point I've managed to more-or-less invisibly
replace the flat-file back-end of a cheesy directory with an LDAP
server, with the obvious benefit that the cheese is now available
via the LDAP server to clients that are willing to speak to
it. I've noticed that the one small disadvantage to doing this in
Perl rather than in PHP is that PHP has access to the raw password
used in HTTP Basic Auth, which you simply can't get from Perl. I
may do a little redirection hacking to get around this, because
it'd be enormously useful to have access to that from within the
script. Or maybe I'll convert the cgi script to mod_perl
instead. Or, heck, I could even crypt the password in the chunk of
mod_perl that handles the authentication right now and stuff it
into the request environment.
Talked to The Brother on Skype; I'm very impressed with
the sound quality, but some wireless networking issues on his end
caused a little dropout, and it appears that while the application
never seemed to be using more than 20% of CPU, it got kinda upset
as soon as I tried doing anything that made the machine
busier.
- July 10
- Tooling with LDAP and PHP for most of the day. Despite what the
source, binaries and what documentation I can find suggest, I
can't seem to set up an LDAP record that feeds a Home Address to
Mozilla's
addressbook.
- July 9
- Set up LDAP for the office. Interesting. I need to read more
manuals and finish populating the database, though. And what's
with the complete lack of useful tools, such as addressbooks that
can write to LDAP server as well as read from
it?
- July 8
- Boss took us all to drink & food. Go Boss! Go
Hangover!
- July 7
- Shrek
2 is the absolute bomb. Totally. Why aren't you watching it
already?
- July 6
- Raising
Arizona was a lot of fun. Quirky Coen Brothers humour,
Nicholas Cage doing his Earnest But Bad routine (c.f. Wild At
Heart), and generally just plenty giggles and situation comedy
and what not. Worth watching.
Did some evil things with mod_perl. Woo!
- July 5
- I really need to finish off this XMMS-for-GTK2 hack not least so I
can clean out my RPM build area
and maybe pass patches back to the developers.
Hacked up XMMS-Crossfade
to work with my modified XMMS,
and wow, it's rather neat.
- July 2-4
- A long and tiring weekend.
- July 1
- The diary code still has bugs. I still haven't fixed them. Go
me.
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