Marcin Juszkiewicz

Yesterday I decided to give a new look to my website after I found Barthelme theme. It is minimalistic and it support Wordpress widgets so I’m able to change sidebar content without touching line of code.

Of course like always there had to be some changes done.. I added UTW support, wrote ‘Hrw Pages’ sidebar widget which allow to skip some ‘Pages’ and changed CSS a bit (I like to have preformatted blocks visible).

The result is visible now — what do you think about this look?

During last week I used Athlon64 X2 3800+ to make some OpenEmbedded bug fixing. Building on such machine is pleasure — you start build, talk a bit on IRC and build is finished. After using accounts on that kind of machines I do not even try to run builds on my AthlonXP machines (1700+ and 2200+). Probably it is a moment when I could consider switch to AMD64 platform but there is a usual problem.

Cheapest way is something low budget like Sempron64 2500+ on socket 754 (cheapest amd64 platform) with VIA based mainboard (don’t want to trace does nForce boards work OK under Linux). Or I can choose cheapest Athlon64 on socket 939 — this will allow me to switch to more powerfull CPU in future. Ofcourse there are Semprons64/s939 but only OEM with mATX boards by Gigabyte (I do not like mainboards from that company).

Local shop has also Athlons for AM2 socket so maybe switching to this family will be best… but this require new gfx card as I have only AGP ones (Matrox G400 and GeForce MX440) or buying mainboard with so called GeForce 6100 onboard gfx. Also new memory — DDR2 instead of DDR which I have already in box.

It can be be hard to decide which way to choose but currently I rather will only think about it — have other things to buy, need to think about our wedding in next year etc.

During this summer edition of Google Summer of Code I will work as mentor for “A new database model for unification of OPIE/GPE PIM data using SQLite with import/export features to text and iCal formats” project written by Marcos Hiroshi Umino.

This project will unite GPE and OPIE PIM applications format so it will be easier for users to try both before choosing one. This is my first project which I will (co-)maintain with guys from both enviroments.

During last month I was trying to push one patch into mainline — adding few CF cards into hostap_cs driver.

First attempts was not correct so I started from scratch and created few small patches. Then patch which my changeset required was marked as ‘ignore it’ so I had to recreate my patchset again (and again).

Finally it was accepted and yesterday commited into wireless-2.6 git tree.

Today I generated new OpenGPG key — lost older one. New key has expire date set to 2008-05-15.

Old key info:

pub   1024D/F0E65735 2002-05-31
      Key fingerprint = ED1F 99E1 45B0 ABE9 17E9  0ED1 B31F F326 F0E6 5735
uid                  Marcin Juszkiewicz (OpenEmbedded/OpenZaurus/OPIE work) <openembedded@blog.haerwu.biz>
uid                  Marcin Juszkiewicz <zaurus@blog.haerwu.biz>
uid                  Marcin Juszkiewicz <marcin@blog.haerwu.biz>

New key info:

pub   1024D/61FFDAAB 2006-05-15 [expires: 2008-05-14]
      Key fingerprint = CA5C D034 936B B08C 7690  E6C9 790E 8C94 61FF DAAB
uid                  Marcin Juszkiewicz <openembedded@blog.haerwu.biz>

Today I tried to install MediaWiki on one of servers and failed. This monster need memory_limit set to atleast 20M or will fail. Target system has it set to 8M and everything which is hosted there works fine. All I got from MediaWiki installer was memory allocation failed and it died.

There is no way to install this other then this web based something which does not work… Crap

Today I received Sharp CE-170TS serial cable. It was donated by one of OpenZaurus users which does not make any use of it. After some checking which RS232 port on my desktop machine is /dev/tts/0 and which /dev/tts/1 I got the second one working and installed minicom to get usable terminal (I used minicom years ago during studies when text terminals connected to multiport serial cards was something normal).

Few minutes later I got nice prompt in terminal:

OpenZaurus 3.5.4.1-rc1 c7x0 ttyS0

Now I can provide detailed kernel logs so maybe my 256M SD card will get more fixes from RMK :)

From time to time I grab something from TV to watch it later. Each time I had to re-discover proper MEncoder params and finally decided to write about it on site — maybe someone other will find it interesting.

Machine is simple PC desktop powered by AthlonXP 2200+ CPU (1.8GHz) and Pixelview TV tuner (card=70 in bttv) which sound output is connected via loop-cable to Line-In of onboard via82xx soundcard (ALSA driven) — all under control of Debian ‘sid’ running Linux 2.6 (2.6.16-ck1 now). For grabbing I use MEncoder (own CVS build).

First thing to do is to pick a channel — I run tvtime and quit after select proper one. Then mixer (I use KMix) is needed: turn on capturing of Line-In (can mute it too so it will not bother you during grabbing). After this you should be ready to grab videos.

Now MEncoder has to be started (all in one line):

mencoder tv:// -o tv2.avi -ovc lavc -oac mp3lame -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 \
-tv driver=v4l2:width=640:height=480:alsa=1:immediatemode=0:forceaudio:forcechan=1

This will tell that we want DivX with MP3 Audio — on my machine this encoding takes ~50% CPU. Before I used M-JPEG but was taking too much disc space.