wp.jochen.hayek.name/blog-en

Blog

  • First steps for Linux on iPhone with BusyBox

    After I had read this article last weekend,
    I forwarded it to one of the engineers at my current customer’s company.
    That company is in an automotive niche market,
    and he had already spent work time on an attempt establishing Linux within one of their projects.
    Actually Linux is being employed in one of the screen based user interfaces on a car,
    but as opposed to the Linux iPhone approach
    it’s not BusyBox based.

    I actually came across BusyBox only this year,
    but that’s only because embedded programming hasn’t been on my agenda for a while.

    That other context, where BusyBox is being employed,
    is my Internet router, an AVM 7270,
    actually also serving as cordless phone (DEC) base station,
    Fax recipient and PDF converter,
    WLAN access point, …

    So that box is also BusyBox based,
    and I can connect to it using telnet,
    and I can store and read data on it,
    and I like that.

    If you are interested in Building Embedded Linux Systems,
    have a look at this nice book published by O’Reilly!

  • annotating PDF files with free software

    flpsed is a WYSIWYG PostScript annotator.

    You can’t remove or modify existing elements of a document.

    flpsed lets you add arbitrary text lines to existing PostScript documents (PostScript is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated).
    Added lines can later be reedited with flpsed.
    Using pdftops, which is part of xpdf one can convert PDF documents to PostScript and also add text to them.
    flpsed is useful for filling in forms, adding notes etc.
    […]

    flpsed is released under the GPL.

    Actually it is more a PostScript annotating tool than a PDF one.
    When you first save an annotated PDF document,
    it gets converted to PostScript.
    If you want to resume editing such a document,
    you and the tool have to deal with the PostScript file.
    You lost the nice document structure diagrams,
    PDF viewers show you for certain documents.

    And: PDF resp. PostScript annotating is not filling out PDF form fields.
    This tool lets you write text at any location within such a document,
    and it does not help you finding PDF form fields, as PDF viewers do.

    I still find this utility very, very useful.

  • WeFind uses Grails, right?

    Yet another search engine,
    but what’s special about it,
    I mean from a developer point of view?
    It’s implemented using Grails.
    Well, yet another MVC approach in yet another esoteric language.
    Well, guys why just don’t you use an ordinary language like Perl,
    and why just don’t you use Catalyst?
    Somebody should have told you.

  • al desko — calendar sheet as of October, 31st

    al desko:
    eating something, usually lunch,
    at one’s desk.
    The expression is a play on the Italian word al fresco,
    which means outdoors or literally in the fresh (air).

    Admit it.
    While scrolling through this newsletter with one hand,
    you’re probably eating a Döner or a slice of pizza with the other.
    Glance down at your keyboard.
    Can you see morsels of bread,
    pieces of salad,
    bits of dried-out salami?
    Don’t worry.
    You’re just one of millions of workers
    who regularly eat al desko…

    (unknown author)

  • subversion and emacs

    After working with subversion within emacs for quite a couple of months, occasionally I found out, that my choice for emacs subversion bindings was quite a little to fast, but luckily enough apparantly quite the right one.

    You can find all the bindings at this SVN URL.

    My choice is psvn.el.

  • Apple’s PropertyList in Ruby

    Silly me just wanted to create my 1st project on rubyforge.org,
    and when I had just filled out all fields for doing so,
    rubyforge.org told me, that a project by that name already existed,
    and actually I found out, it is exactly, what I could have used instead of writing my own software.
    I remember, when I started that software,
    I was so focused and overly sure, that it was absolutely unlikely to already exist.
    I am happy to replace using my plist implementation by the public one soon.

    Actually my code looks like a litte more lightweight,
    but it only implements a reader so far
    (using ordinary lists and also hash lists but no dedicated classes),
    and mine requires ‘rexml/document’
    but theirs does it all itself — another case of NIH.
    Both implementations don’t support property values of type date and data.

    Maybe my code will survive this crisis.
    Will this then be another case of NIH itself?
    Or just offering an alternative?

  • shockwave for Linux — ist that a problem?

    title says it all.

    application/x-director is something, that my Linux firefox does not understand.

  • Microsoft Office Picture Manager

    On the Windows platform this is my favourite imaging utility.
    It helps me compressing the documents I scanned and on multiple other issues.

  • my eee-pc — I broke it a little

    It didn’t take too long,
    until I broke the tiny little thing a little.
    synaptics (the GUI package manager) complained about kdelibs4c2a and … cannot install … and whatever.

    I went to wiki.eeeuser.com and forum.eeeuser.com,
    but the search hits were a little unclear unsorted.
    I googled site:forum.eeeuser.com kdelibs4c2a and that was most helpful.
    Somebody had already described the same problem,
    and somebody else had already described a solution:

    You have to make sure
    that you get the Xandros ksmserver and kicker from Asus and not the Debian ones.
    It sounds like you’re doing this step
    after you put a Debian repository in your /etc/apt/sources.list.
    Use one of the various methods to force apt-get to get this from Asus instead
    (e.g. comment out the Debian server,

    and then 

    $ sudo apt-get update

    and then 

    $ sudo apt-get install ksmserver kicker

    and then after that, if you want, you can put the Debian server back in).

    I think I will re-de-comment the other repositories more selectively from now on,
    as I don’t want to experience this kind of trouble very often.

  • my brand-new EEE-PC

    A little late (but better later than never) I got myself an EEE-PC.
    First and important thing to do
    was to tell it to talk to me in english,
    because I hate it, when computers talk to me in denglish
    (as this awful modern mixture of german and english is called,
    and yes, of course, I use it myself in spoken language and I hate it,
    but at least for written language I insist on avoiding it),
    so how to modify the default locale?
    And pls don’t you just modifiy /etc/default/locale! 

    $ sudo update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8

    I found wiki.eeeuser.com and forum.eeeuser.com, most valuable!!!
    Really!!!
    Go to the wiki and make the best of it!!!

    I added a few Xandros package repositories, that got listed there.

    I found two package managers: synaptic (GUI!!!) and aptitude (ncurses based),
    obviously you will always have to call them through sudo.

    Sometimes you will nevertheless want to install a package on the command line,
    this is how it looks: 

    $ sudo apt-get install YOUR_PACKAGE

    These were a few of the packages I installed first this way:
    openssh-server, nxml-mode, rcs.

    Actually the init script, that got installed with the openssh-server package is somehow flawed: 

    $ sudo /etc/init.d/ssh # it crashes and core dumps (almost)

    So I have to run this instead for being able to access my EEE from my network: 

    $ sudo /usr/sbin/sshd

    I certainly also installed GNU emacs,
    but I did so using one of the package managers.

    I tried the descriptions for using bluetooth,
    and it looks like it works,
    but when I tried to connect to the Internet via bluetooth and one of my UMTS phones as modem,
    it didn’t work.
    But I successfully connected to the Internet, when I USB-wired that UMTS phone to the EEE.

    The EEE-PC seriously comes with an up-to-date and updatable Firefox,
    and I installed Adblock Plus (and its most important filter subscriptions, so all the obnoxious ads stay away from my screen),
    Sage (my RSS reader),
    and GMarks (so I can access Google bookmarks).

    Initially the Music Manager refused to play my MP3-s,
    but I installed a few MP3-related packages through synaptic and everything was fine.
    Now I can play my MP3-s (that reside on a fat USB disk attached to my Linux NEO box)
    through my home WLAN,
    and I overly enjoy it.

    Of course I switched to the Full Desktop aka Advanced Mode in the meantime.

    I followed the Multiuser mode HOWTO,
    and now I have to login before X starts up,
    and user is not the only user any longer.