Marcin Juszkiewicz

My desktop has few RS232 ports:

• one FTDI RS232-USB converter
• one connected to mainboard
• two on additional PCI card (which also gives me parallel port)

When I got BeagleBoard I had to remove the one connected to mainboard — connected that cable to BB itself. But today I got new package from Atmel: NGW100. And it means need for serial port too…

What for I use all those ports? Developer boards of course :)

• BUG
• BeagleBoard
• At91sam9263-ek from Atmel
• NGW100 from Atmel

To end that crazy situation I am planning to buy extended version of card which I use now but with 6 rs232 ports instead of just two. Will lose parallel port but I never used it and if will ever need it there will be a card with it somewhere in drawer/box.

I never thought that will need so many serial ports…

Some time ago I got BeagleBoard for one project. It is B7 revision so new version of CPU (with ES3.0 whatever it means) but without EHCI USB port.

Device is nice and powerful but default package comes without any accessories. So I had to check my drawers for some addons:

• SD card for rootfs (I use 2GB microSD one from my cellphone with adapter from other card)
• serial adapter (I took one from my desktop machine which had 3 serial ports anyway)
• power supply (got 3.5A one from friend)
• USB Host cable (hacked normal A->miniB cable to behave like host one with gender changer adapter)
• some kind of stand/legs to not keep board directly on table

Effect was good — board started, found USB hub and devices connected to it (currently only Ethernet adapter and Bluetooth dongle) and works fine. But using it with all wires floating is not good for longer time.

So I bought metal case for it:

It is not finished at all — I just mounted BB and made holes for audio connectors. Current todolist:

• cut some holes for connectors
• put USB hub inside
• make short USB host cable
• put USB Ethernet inside
• one power supply for BB and Hub

After all there will be still lot of space inside :D

Today I played a bit with Vortex86sx based device again. This time I wanted to get X11 working on it.

In short: it “works”. Default driver should be “sis” but it fails with messages which shows that libpciaccess has a problem on that device:

(EE) SIS(0): Unable to map IO aperture. Invalid argument (22)
(EE) SIS(0): **************************************************
(EE) SIS(0):                       ERROR:
(EE) SIS(0): Could not map MMIO area
(EE) SIS(0):                   END OF MESSAGE
(EE) SIS(0): **************************************************
(EE) SIS(0): **************************************************
(EE) SIS(0):                       ERROR:
(EE) SIS(0): SiSMapMem() failed
(EE) SIS(0):                   END OF MESSAGE
(EE) SIS(0): **************************************************

I switched to “vesa” driver — it works, gives 1280x1024 resolution. But it is so sluggish… Even my few years old Zaurus c760 is faster (I checked how Vortex86sx works with VGA resolution).

Tried also “fbdev” driver — same slowness. All was done with full X.org server not “kdrive” one.

Looks like I will have BeagleBoard soon which is great. But project will require also graphical output from it so here goes small problem — how to display it?

Currently I have 20” LCD which is capable of 1680x1050px resolution and have two video inputs:

• DVI where my desktop gfx card is connected
• D-Sub where I have Koala NanoPC connected

BeagleBoard require DVI or HDMI input so I can not connect it to current panel. So there are few choices:

• buy cheap 17-20” LCD with DVI input and connect BB to it
• buy FullHD (1920x1200 or 1920x1080) monitor with DVI/HDMI/D-Sub and use instead of current one.
• like second option but use current one with BeagleBoard
• do not buy any and use VNC to look what does BB display

OK, buying cheap LCD is not a problem — there are lot of them in local shops. The bigger problem is when I want to buy FullHD one. So far I created list of panels which are not an option and similar list of worth considering ones. So the choice for now looks like this:

Can someone suggest other options?

It is hard to believe but I started using OpenEmbedded 5 years ago…

• 2004-02-11 — bought Sharp Zaurus SL-5500
• 2004-03-20 — my first submission to OE (SubApplet 1.0.7)
• 2004-05-08 — my first push to OpenEmbedded repository
• 2005-04-05 — got first donation due to my OE/OZ work — Zaurus C760
• 2005-06-28 — joined OPIE developers team to push OE patches into upstream (left on 2007-06-01)
• 2006-03-06 — my first release of OE based distribution (OpenZaurus 3.5.4)
• 2006-05-20 — my first fixes which were paid by companies which use OpenEmbedded for own development
• 2006-09-09 — my company was created
• 2007-02-01 — started to work for OpenedHand as full-time Poky/OpenEmbedded developer
• 2007-04-26 — ended life of OpenZaurus distribution as Ångström took over it
• 2007-08-01 — Poky 3.0 ‘blinky’ was released
• 2008-02-01 — donated my SL-5500 to Thomas Kunze
• 2008-03-04 — Poky 3.1 ‘pinky’ was released and I am still supporting it
• 2008-10-15 — ended my work for OpenedHand
• 2008-10-30 — started to work for Bug Labs

When I was planning to buy Zaurus I did not know that this device will give me great new hobby and that hobby will change into well paid job. Today I have few OpenEmbedded powered devices on my desk (or under it) and none of them is used as PDA. New devices are on a way to me or on a “need to order soon” list. Many devices passed thought my hands due those 5 years (for example most of Zaurus models which were donated to OE landed on my desk before was given to our developers).

I learnt a lot about (cross) compiling, know how to play with many different tools used for building and I am good at creating patches.

Ok, there is one bad thing in it — my last application was written for AmigaOS over 8 years ago. Since then I touched code in many projects but never wrote application from scratch. But if we all would be programmers who would work on OE? :)

Recently few interesting devices appeared on a market. And they have high geek factor D:

SheevaPlug

SheevaPlug from Marvell contains MV88F6281 cpu running at 1.2GHz with 512MB of DDR2/800 memory. Other nice things are:

• 1GbE network controller
• 512MB of NAND for storage
• USB 2.0 controller (up to 480Mbps speed)
• RS232 serial port
• ARM JTAG
• SDIO slot
• U-boot as bootloader

Everything in small package and for only 99 USD. I think that this will be nice addon to my collection of ARM devices (it is also one of fastest available ones).

Touch Book

Few days ago Koen Kooi wrote on his blog about Touch Book. It is ARM (TI OMAP3) based combination of tablet and netbook. Composed from two detachable parts it can be tablet (one part) or netbook (two parts connected).

There are few things in it’s design which make it special:

• 8.9” 1024x600 touchscreen
• up to 15h on battery (in netbook mode)
• two internal USB connectors to hide dongles inside
• six USB connectors in total
• just 0.9kg
• no fans, no moving parts
• opensource design
• runs Ångström based distribution

Total price is 399 USD for netbook or 299 USB for tablet. Too bad that they offer selling to US only — but this can be handled by US friends D:

To get one or to not get one is tricky question. Current design lacks any video output so using it instead of laptop will be hard (no way to show presentation slides) but size, weight and battery time are interesting. I will definitely track their progress.

BeagleBoard C2

At the end of March new version (C2) of BeagleBoard has to be released. It has 256MB ram compared to 128MB of currently sold B7 version and also working EHCI USB port (B7 offers only one OTG port). I planned to buy this version but now I am not sure about it — Touch Book looks too interesting D:

Cliff Brake asked me which plugins I use on my blog for spam protection. I decided to write about all plugins which I use here.

Widgets

First part would be widgets which are used in sidebars:

• Configurable Tag Cloud — I had my own one but needed more functionality
• Feedburner Widget — tells how many readers my blog has via RSS readers. Not always sensible value ;)
• Popularity Contest Widget — lists popular posts
• Hrw Meta widget — no links to RSS, checks for WP/WPMU and give proper link

Spam related

I used Spam Karma 2 before but it is not maintained anymore. Now I use simpler ones:

• Yawasp - Yet Another WordPress Anti Spam Plugin — mangle names of comment fields and adds some automatically changed one to protect me from spambots
• ClearSpam — removes spam comments from database

Statistics

“Do not believe in statistics which you did not faked” or what to use to track visitors:

• Google Analytics for WordPress — real monster
• WordPress.com Stats — simple one but available in dashboard

Content related

• Markdown Extra — this should be part of WP core — no need to remember HTML as simpler markup is available
• Popularity Contest — gives informations which posts are still the most read one. Great when widget is used.
• SRG Clean Archives — powers Archives page. Very heavily modified by me with most of features removed.
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin — adds link to “probably related” posts at the end of each post
• Recommended Tags — recommends tags in post editor. Modified by me — will release my version one day.
• Tag Managing Thing — another rarely used plugin which helps to manage tags
• Scissors — simple editing of uploaded images
• Slimbox Plugin — nice popups of images

Other

• Contact Form — I use it on Contact page
• OpenID — adds possibility to use blog as OpenID server (also supports OpenID login to blog)
• WP Super Cache — just in case of Digg effect

Theme

OK, theme is not a plugin :D I use plaintxtblog by Scott with few modifications.

Since first week of 2009 I use Nokia E66 phone. It is nice device and is expandable with many applications due to fact that it runs Symbian (S60 3rd FP1). But as usual there is a problem with it — syncing or rather lack of it (at least under Linux).

Under MS Windows there is “Nokia PC Suite” set of applications. It is heavy and ugly — mostly because vendor had own idea how application UI should look. As usual it is unable to keep device data available in any sensible format — all it do is syncing Phone “installed PIM” (which mean MS Outlook or Lotus Notes). It does not even have VCard import/export which will work good (I had to kill application after attempt to import 32KB file with ~200 vcards in it). So basically all what I can do with it is making backups of phone contents (but for that there is also application on phone which use memory card for keeping backups).

Other option is OxyCube application. But it is too expensive so I do not even bother to check how good it is.

But how to sync under Linux? This is good question… First idea which came to my mind was OpenSync. But which version to use? Last stable (0.22) or current development one (0.38)? Their homepage says:

Releases 0.22 (and 0.2x svn branch) and before are considered stable and suitable for production. 0.3x releases introduce major architecture and API changes and are targeted for developers and testers only and may not even compile or are likely to contain severe bugs.

0.3x releases are not recommended for end users or distribution packaging.

So stable one is recommended but no one supports it as developers forgot how it worked. This is not strange thing because this release is over 2 years old now. So maybe development version should be used? No… I was told few times that it can crash, do dirty things etc. so it can not be trusted at all. And there is no plugin to get KDE4 PIM apps synced (plugin for KDE3 can be used after some tweaks).

Effect is that after firmware update my phone has all contacts restored from phone backup but lost all calendar entries…