Porting software from Linux to Windows is not as easy as it should be. Have now spend too much time setting up a GNU build environment under windows, using MSYS, MinGW and GnuWin32. They have some nice utils, that is fairly easy to setup. But most of the builds are way to old to be useful. So basicly ended op having to compile and "install" all required tools and libs. Of course the classic GNU "./configure && make && make install" worked for most, then there where really some libs that gave a lot of trouble. Why does it have to be so hard to make things work on cross platform?
But now I have a build environment, and can start on the really hard part; making the software run on both Linux and Windows. Feels like hitting one wall after the other. A "simple" thing like creating a DLL, have shown to be quite the bigger problem then first anticipated. The examples found online are to simple, and the application know to do it right are too complex. Someone should write a good tutorial or sample application for doing it the right way using auto tools. Know that I am not the right man for the job. But maybe I have to become that in the end...
Have completely forgotten to write about this years Libre Graphics Meeting. Was a fantastic trip. Event though the trip to Canada was quite long. It was nice to see a lot of familiar faces. The talks where as last year very interesting. This year we talked a bit more with the people there and got some really interesting discussions for instance about how to collect user statistics. Are absolutely going next year too.
At work our office is placed on top of a movie theater. Having felt the vibrations when an action movie is running an idea sparked, about testing how much seismic vibration this actually created. Not having access to a seismograph, we found the next best thing. A Wiimote. So wrote a small python script that simply dumps the acceleration data and a time stamp to a text file, and used gnuplot to visualise the data. Unfortunately the Wiimote is not precis enough, so can conclude the Wiimote is not the best seismic detector.But here is the script. seismograph.py - it uses the cwiid python library, so does not run on windows. Sorry about that.
Now that Ubuntu have release their version 9.04, and was so nice to release a netbook edition. I figured i would give it a try. Since i did not want to overwrite the standard operating system (Because i really like one special feature in it... booting in 5sec.) i have installed it on a 8GB SD card. This was actually not as difficult as i had feared. Followed the Ubuntu guide of how to create an USB install stick from the netbook image. Using the usb-imagewriter util, this is as simple as downloading the image, selecting the file in the Image writer program, and pressing "Write to device". The booting on the Eee also went very, compared to other USB systems i have tried to boot on the Eee, like Backtrack. The Ubuntu simply just worked. When installing i selected the SD card. When getting to the part where the boot loader should be installed, it faild. This did not really come as an surprise as GRUB is not meant to boot on SD cards. With a little help from the guide USB Boot using GRUB i managed, with a few qualified guesses, to make GRUB boot the Ubuntu system. So far it looks really nice. There are a few things missing, like the webcam, and can't seam to get the mic to work either. But some tweaking should hopefully fix that.
Ahh yes. What better way to spend an evening then figure out what things have changed in the interface from one update to another. Apparently the update from Django 0.95 to 1.0 had a lot of changes, both interface wise, and structure wise. Just to mention the few i have run across. When using the templates to insert raw HTML from for instance a database it is now required to disable auto escape. That auto escape is enabled by default, is indeed a good thing, because if there is no checking for malicious inserted code, it will not just get pasted to the page. Although this should of course be checked already when it is inserted into the database. But we all know, nobody is perfect. Another thing that has changed, is that now you have to explicitly register what classes in your data model that you want to edit in the admin interface. This is a bit annoying. Before the definition of how the admin page should edit the model was a sub class of the model class. Now this class, instead, has to extend the ModelAdmin class and then be registered with the model class to the admin.site. It is very much less automagic. Depending on your religion this can either be seen as a good or a bad thing. And finally, when configuring the urls for the admin page. They have changed it to not use include() and without any regard to consensus to admin.site.root. This has been fixed in the current SVN version, so if updating it has to be changed back into include(admin.site.urls). But all in all it appears that Django 1.0 is a good update.
Must be getting old. Because i have dropped building the server case my self. Now i have bought the Mini-box M300-LCD. Which is a rather nice little case. The best thing about it is that it is small, and worst thing about it is that it is small. Having a Mini-ITX SP13000 with a picoPSU the case was basically perfect. But with a 3,5" hard drive there is not much space left in the case.There is not room for a full PCI card, because the hard drive it filling up the space. Also the fan that came with the case is a bit noisy. So that have been replaced with a more silent fan. But besides this it is a very simple and nice case, with a fair build quality.
Now to the more interesting bit about the case. On the front, there is a LCD display with buttons. The installation of the display is very simple, it uses an internal USB connection. What really impressed me was the software that mini-box supplied for the display (Good to see some Linux software support for once). The software is basically only dependable on libusb. It contains a small util-app and library. That make it very easy to change what is displayed on the LCD, and to get events from the buttons. To my big surprise there is also an IR receiver build in, which is also very easy getting to work with the small util. Will definitely be playing a bit with the possibilities of this LCD.