Here is the cake Jen made me for my birthday, a very yummy white chocolate and raspberry cake made from lego bricks.
October 24, 2009
October 2, 2009
Linux Community
Interesting things I notice about Linux and its community and not all of them are good.
It seems Microsoft have one crazy guy called Steve Ballmer. As Linux users and developers though we have to suffer a whole army of guys just as crazy. We don’t even get the option of keeping them safely in Seattle.
One thing I noticed at Edlug talks last night is people are still venomously bashing Microsoft just because its Microsoft. For example, MS Office is a perfectly viable office suite. Open Office is not magically better because it is free or has a different menu layout. I can probably give you hundreds of cases where OO fails and MS Office gets it right (especially reqgards to speadsheets). Also downright lies about MS Office really don’t help, if your going to compare two products, please at least have used them both.
Linux advocates keep bashing on about “Freedom” well one of the freedoms I still enjoy is the ability to select an application that suits my needs. Sometimes these applications cost money, sometimes they even come from a company called Microsoft.
September 7, 2009
OMAP3 Card Formatter License
There is an updated and bugfixed version of this script now added to the OE git repository where all updates from now will be done.
Latest Version
At a request from TI developers I have decided to change the license of the script to GPLv2 as its more important to me that people can use the the script than spend their time arguing legal points.
Download
#! /bin/sh
# mkcard.sh v0.3
# (c) Copyright 2009 Graeme Gregory
# Licensed under terms of GPLv2
DRIVE=$1
dd if=/dev/zero of=$DRIVE bs=1024 count=1024
SIZE=`fdisk -l $DRIVE | grep Disk | awk '{print $5}'`
echo DISK SIZE - $SIZE bytes
CYLINDERS=`echo $SIZE/255/63/512 | bc`
echo CYLINDERS - $CYLINDERS
{
echo ,9,0x0C,*
echo ,,,-
} | sfdisk -D -H 255 -S 63 -C $CYLINDERS $DRIVE
if [ -b ${DRIVE}1 ]; then
mkfs.vfat -F 32 -n "boot" ${DRIVE}1
else
if [ -b ${DRIVE}p1 ]; then
mkfs.vfat -F 32 -n "boot" ${DRIVE}p1
else
echo "Cant find boot partition in /dev"
fi
fi
if [ -b ${DRIVE}2 ]; then
mke2fs -j -L "rootfs" ${DRIVE}2
else
if [ -b ${DRIVE}p2 ]; then
mke2fs -j -L "rootfs" ${DRIVE}p2
else
echo "Cant find rootfs partition in /dev"
fi
fi
September 6, 2009
Improved OMAP3 Card Formatter
There is an updated and bugfixed version of this script now added to the OE git repository where all updates from now will be done.
Latest Version
Got some feedback from people on IRC so added some checks so people with builtin card readers can run the script without having to edit it.
Download
#! /bin/sh
# mkcard.sh v0.2
# (c) Copyright 2009 Graeme Gregory
# Licensed under terms of GPLv3
DRIVE=$1
dd if=/dev/zero of=$DRIVE bs=1024 count=1024
SIZE=`fdisk -l $DRIVE | grep Disk | awk '{print $5}'`
echo DISK SIZE - $SIZE bytes
CYLINDERS=`echo $SIZE/255/63/512 | bc`
echo CYLINDERS - $CYLINDERS
{
echo ,9,0x0C,*
echo ,,,-
} | sfdisk -D -H 255 -S 63 -C $CYLINDERS $DRIVE
if [ -b ${DRIVE}1 ]; then
mkfs.vfat -F 32 -n "boot" ${DRIVE}1
else
if [ -b ${DRIVE}p1 ]; then
mkfs.vfat -F 32 -n "boot" ${DRIVE}p1
else
echo "Cant find boot partition in /dev"
fi
fi
if [ -b ${DRIVE}2 ]; then
mke2fs -j -L "rootfs" ${DRIVE}2
else
if [ -b ${DRIVE}p2 ]; then
mke2fs -j -L "rootfs" ${DRIVE}p2
else
echo "Cant find rootfs partition in /dev"
fi
fi
OpenVPN Hiding in HTTPS
Warning: file_get_contents(wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/openvpn.txt) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /var/www/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/file-inliner/fileinliner.php on line 81
So it took me a little while to gather the right set of docs to get this working but I find it useful when in places where you can get http/https connections but nothing else.
This is using tun network interface so make sure that is available on your server.
I also created a dummy0 with a random ip 192.168.123.1 so I could connect to services on my server without bypassing the VPN tunnel. The dns server running on 192.168.123.1 redirects server.external to that ip address.
Anyway here is my server config.
As you can see OpenVPN binds to the external port 443 and forwards non VPN traffic to localhost:443 where the webserver is listening.
August 14, 2009
OMAP3 SD Booting
There is an updated and bugfixed version of this script now added to the OE git repository where all updates from now will be done.
Latest Version
Since the instructions to format an SD card for booting with beagle/zoom2/other omap boards seems to be so complex I decided to write a script that was nice and simple to accomplish the same task.
Here is my tested and working script.
Download
#! /bin/sh
DRIVE=$1
dd if=/dev/zero of=$DRIVE bs=1024 count=1024
SIZE=`fdisk -l $DRIVE | grep Disk | awk '{print $5}'`
echo DISK SIZE - $SIZE bytes
CYLINDERS=`echo $SIZE/255/63/512 | bc`
echo CYLINDERS - $CYLINDERS
{
echo ,9,0x0C,*
echo ,,,-
} | sfdisk -D -H 255 -S 63 -C $CYLINDERS $DRIVE
mkfs.vfat -F 32 -n "boot" ${DRIVE}1
mke2fs -j -L "rootfs" ${DRIVE}2
To run this script you will require to run it as root. On Ubuntu or other linux with sudo setup run the script as
sudo sh mkcard.sh /dev/sdX
replacing sdX with the base device name of your SD card device.
If your running a distribution without sudo setup then become root then run the script as
su -
sh mkcard.sh /dev/sdX
August 3, 2009
Cave Hunting in Roslin
Has been a fun weekend with a bit of excercise thrown in for good measure. A trip out to the Roslin Annual Jamboree with Jen and Kirsten. The Jamboree itself was basically a village fete so we had tea and cakes. Kirsten found herself a mini steam train to ride on.
One of the guys/rangers at the even told us that there was an interesting cave called Wallace’s Cave down the river from where we were and that you could actually get along the path that was marked as closed so we decided to hunt that.
Much climbing of hills, walking along walls bridging deep crevasses and head height nettles we found a variety of cave like places but not the right cave. But we did find a cool little mini waterfall.
We kind of decided that we should do it again, but next time in suitable clothes for getting wet and actually walk the river bed. In prep I also have the Ordinace Survey maps for mobile devices borrowed from a countryside ranger. I guess I better find waterproof PDA housing.
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July 27, 2009
OMAP Zoom2 Day 4
Ok, as the kernel and rootfs are working to some degree and the autobuilders are making omapzoom2 packages and narcissus is generating zoom2 image I made it official today. Ångström supports the zoom2 officially now!
http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/omap-zoom2-support
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July 14, 2009
OMAP Zoom2 Day 3
Fixed/discovered why I was having touchscreen issues, now touchscreen is working.
Found out why gpe-login was dieing, Xorg uses neon via pixman but the default andoid config doesn’t enable neon in kernel so fixed that.
This means that the zoom2 can now boot x11-image fully. I guess this means Angstrom supports OMAP Zoom2 I shall have to update the Angstrom website later/tomorrow to reflect this status.
Only bit of work I would like to finish now before calling it totally complete is to work out why mainstream u-boot cannot boot kernels. It would be nice to use that as its defineately got some bugs fixed with FAT mmc cards.
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