Tuesday, 09 March 2010

Editline v1.13.0 Available!

First release with the new name. Available from the usual places:

Report bugs to the EMAIL found in the README file.

posted at: 23:11 | path: /hacks | permanent link to this entry

Wednesday, 10 February 2010

HowTo Change camelCase() to camel_case() with Emacs

Go to the top of your file, unless you want to do regexp replace in many files, then press Meta-Ctrl-% to enter regexp-replace mode. Then enter the following: 

   \([a-z]+\)\([A-Z]\)
Then press <CR> and enter the replacement text: 
   \1_\,(downcase \2)

The trick to use Emacs lisp was found here.

Update: For an even better ways of dealing with CamelCase, see the EmacsWiki topic. :-)

posted at: 08:50 | path: /emacs | permanent link to this entry

Sunday, 07 February 2010

The mobile phone was turned off, OFF!

I was just alerted to an article in Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN) that talked about an 18 year old man disappearing in the town of Varberg last night. The actual piece is a missing persons notice, which is always sad and worrying, but the real kicker was at the end:

"His mobile phone, that had been turned off, could be restarted remotely ..."

WTF?! When I turn my mobile phone off, it is supposed to stay OFF! Who came up with the bright idea to have the function to be reactivated by remote, and who in their right mind gave this certain someone permission to do so?

Unfortunately comments seem to be disabled for this article in DN.

OK, so the original story seems to have been somewhat retracted, and the Police claim to be confounded about the earlier statement made by the, so far unnamed, telecommunications company.

Even though it might be confusing to some people, I will still be removing the battery when I want to make sure my mobile is off!

posted at: 19:57 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

Saturday, 30 January 2010

On reviving pimd and mrouted

I'm unsure if I should take any pride in this, they are old and stale projects that probably should have been forgotten a long time ago. But the original pimd and mrouted multicast routing prodocols have been revived at github.org.

We need them at work and I were a bit tired of digging around the Internet for patches trying to keep them running on our ever evolving new platform. So I sat down a couple of week-ends and read up a bit on pimd and mrouted, collecting patches from the usual places as well as some unexpected places, before creating the projects.

Yes, I am aware of the effort to extend Quagga with a native pimd and I will definitely look into that in due course.

Starting these projects using GIT actually brings closure for me. If anything I can rest assured that my efforts can easily be picked up by someone else should I loose interest.

To those of you having trouble building and using pimd/mrouted, please include build logs and full debug logs in your emails requesting help. Thanks!

posted at: 13:23 | path: /hacks | permanent link to this entry

Sunday, 03 January 2010

Meccano™ Like Models and Design

Three interesting things happened today. First, the port of ltrace 0.5.3 for crosstool-NG finally built without problems. The build had completed successfully while I was sleeping. What remains now is to cleanup the patch and submit it to Yann. When that is out of the way I can pick up the GCC build problems on i686 again — funny how there is no problems at all building on x86_64 hosts ...

Second, after dropping off my sister-in-law at the train station I went by the office to pick up the Christmas gift I had forgotten before going on vacation. It turned out to be a rather over-designed candleholder. A small note leaflet was attached, it read:

Somebody said... Don't make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don't hesitate to make it beautiful. [c2.com]

Third, when arriving home I found that the kids had received (yet another) couple of late Christmas gifts. This time some kind of Meccano™-like models of an airplane and race car. My wife and I spent the better part of the midmorning trying to assemble them. The instructions on the back of the carton was rather sparse, but inspired by IKEA, so we actually managed in the end. However, by the time we had them assembled, our kids had long since lost all patience with us and left to do other and more interesting things. :-)

OMG! My wife just enlightened me about the crazy habit of decoupage. It suddenly came up when she compared Meccano™, scrapbooking and decoupage ... I can see now that she was not entirely off her mark. It takes a certain amount of crazy-manic to maintain the patience to actually complete such tasks. I did not tell her about my own crazy-manic side that actually spends a TON of time figuring out the intrisicaties of various FLOSS projects I work with on both my spare time and at work. Regardless, knowing her she was probably hinting at that anyway. ;-)

posted at: 15:09 | path: /personal | permanent link to this entry

Thursday, 17 December 2009

On the Lighter Side of Things

Since most of my blogging these days seem to happen when I'm not crazy busy at work it is not so surprising I get to blog today. I'm going on Christmas vacation tomorrow! Three weeks of non-work stuff ahead of me. Very necessary after apx. four months of 15/7 hours/day of crazy work!

This week I began winding down, a bit odd since we still have a lot of things to do, but I guess my mind has already prepared itself and put the brain in relax mode. That hopefully explains why I've overslept two times only this week, compared to one time only over the the last four months.

Since I'm off on vacation I dropped by the clinic today to get my complementary (new|swine) flu shot. Hopefully I won't get any of the dreaded side effects or even a fever.

While winding down today I found another great TED talk, this time by Dan Gilbert it's about how we humans ar bad at estimating things. He has some funny examples that really makes you think. :)

I also found some other neat stuff, completely unrelated, but still useful. In particular if you are an avid Emacs user, like me. The first is about managing several code projects, MK-Project. The second is about fixing the annoying scrolling. Enjoy!

posted at: 20:29 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

Sunday, 11 October 2009

Log rotation for sysklogd

I have been using the BusyBox syslogd for a while now. It's nice and small, but sometimes a bit too limited. Due to the resource limitations of my target system I've been dreading having to pull in something else. But recently the lack of standard syslog features, most notably support for more than one remote syslog server and the ability to, e.g., split debug and warning messages to separate log files, have forced me to shop around a bit.

I found sysklogd to be small enough but yet competent. It's the default in most Debian and Ubuntu installations and is a descendant of BSD. So I started playing with it, only to find out (again!) that the BusyBox guys really know what they are doing. The BusyBox syslogd support automatic log rotation, has a a neat circular buffer which a logread tool can hook into and supports double buffering. The one feature I cannot do without is the built-in support for rotating log files. My system is embedded and I don't want to drag in logrotate(8), or cron for that matter, only to rotate a few files. Also, there are several problems with having external scripts do the log rotation.

So, I set about porting the BusyBox log rotation code to sysklogd. Here is the first patch, which will be updated whenever I find bugs, make additions or changes.

When it is done and feels stable enough I'll submit it upstream. If not for general inclusion then perhaps it fits into the contributed patches category.

posted at: 12:48 | path: /hacks | permanent link to this entry

Sunday, 06 September 2009

The uClinux-dist watchdogd now licensed

This may be a bit of good and useful news to some, the watchdogd from the uClinux-dist tree has now been given a license. The highly permissive and MIT-like ISC License. The code is currently available as a Git repository:

A big thanks to the original author Michele d'Amico, and Mike Frysinger, for making this happen!

posted at: 13:32 | path: /embedded | permanent link to this entry

Sunday, 09 August 2009

Emacs Again

It's now over a year since my first post on and about Enterprise Emacs and, believe it or not, lots have happened in the world of Emacs!

Some of the development is detailed here in my blog. The biggest news is that Emacs-23 now has been released!

In terms of usability I must say a lot has happened in only one year. Let's have a look at the items of my most wanted list:

OK, not bad. Now, what's left and how can we work around it in the interim? I'll start off by presenting the quirks and then finish off with a minimal .emacs file that will become our first Enterprise Emacs setup!

I really recommend using the Options menu to set the bulk of these, see the bullets below for pointers, the rest still needs to be set manually in the ~/.emacs file. That link points to a version controlled file that I will update for each new blog post on Enterprise Emacs.

As you can see, the Options does contain a lot of useful settings. Try them out, they take effect immediately. Click Save Options so your settings are saved to your ~/.emacs file. I have included some of my own personal settings already in the above ~/.emacs file.

Emacs vs. de facto standard terminology
Emacs De Facto
buffer file
frame window
window frame

posted at: 12:20 | path: /emacs | permanent link to this entry

Sunday, 26 July 2009

Cool Images

Wow, this guy has really got some nice work to show! His work reminds me of Salvador Dali, who's work has been a real inspiration to me.

Since I am also a big fan of Tetris I linked one of Erik's works here. Tetris huh, I think my mind got seriously broken in my early teens when I was practically always playing it. I sometimes still see tetraminos everywhere I go.

posted at: 08:33 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry