superduper.net : Sam's blog

Before Christmas I was playing around with getting native apps to run underneath Google's android framework and having quite a bit of success.-

Apart from a slightly strange dynamic linker and libc everything pretty much behaves like standard linux. There are couple of missing libc and libpthread functions that are easy enough to stub/implement and then away you go. I even got SDL up and running with very little trouble.

Also, it looks like I'm not the only one who thinks Android bares more than a passing resemblance to the software stack we build at Transvirtual back in 2000. Jim Pick also mentioned it on his blog.

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 19:28 | tech | # | TB | 3 comment(s)

After almost a year I've made an update to 'pypod', the python library I wrote for handling the iPod filesystem.

The new version 0.6.0 is available in source form from here.

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 08:49 | tech | # | TB | 2 comment(s)

Looks like ironpython 1.0 plays nice with the latest version of mono in debian! I see its in the new queue as well... hope it gets in:

http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html

I was able to simple unzip the ironpython source, change CSC=csc to CSC=gmcs, type make, and run ipy.exe on my sid machine. Hurray. Soon we can say goodbye to the miriade of different interpreter engines we have and bow down the one true byte-code. For once MS have given something less that harmful.

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 11:03 | tech | # | TB | 3 comment(s)

Finally, after several years of periodic attempts my laptop is now able to suspend to disk. In the last couple of days its been powered up and down several times without ever shutting down my applications. Not quite sure why it took so long to get this working properly. It was the finally feature that made me consider switching OSs (not seriously of course!).

Now that its working I need to find a way to easily trigger it. Perhaps in the lid closed event in /etc/acpid? For some reason gnome power manager still doesn't think that suspend is an option so I'm having to do it from the command line.

Wed, 22 Feb 2006 09:07 | tech | tags: linux | # | TB | 3 comment(s)

I just wrote a little plugin for pyblosxom called permadate. Its based on a plugin I found called rememberdate that didn't work at all and was very broken. All this plugin does is maintain a single file which caches the timestamps of all blog entries. Once a blog entry is in the cache you can update the files timestamp without it being reflected in your blog. The method I use one accessed the file once at startup and occasionally (when it sees a new blog entry) once at shutdown.

Next I'm planning a serious plugin to display photo galleries, based on my existing gallery but in the style of pyblosxom. I'm going to make it very simple for users to add entire tree's of images to their gallery just by putting them in the gallery folder. The same way pyblosxom works for blog entries. Comments and hitcounts will be maintained in a separate but parallel tree do the users images need to be apache-writable.

Wed, 15 Feb 2006 01:42 | tech | # | TB | 4 comment(s)

Last week i finally got hear Richard Stallman speaking in person. I saw him give his "Dangers of Software Patents" talk at UCL and then was in bristol the next day to hear him speak about copyright. Both very educational and enoyable. What a character. We even get to watch him eat his lunch on stage before and during the talk :)

I took a few photos which will be online in a day or so...

Thu, 03 Jun 2004 12:19 | tech | # | TB | 0 comment(s)

I have had my IPod for several months now. Its a G3 30Gb model and I use it with Linux and gtkpod. I've been using the new HFS+ driver and the 2.6 test series of kernel and had no problems at all. This means I can mount both Windows (FAT32) and Mac (HFS+) formatted IPods. gtkpod already has lots of great features that are missing from iTunes such as duplicate track detection using MD5 sums. I am working on a feature that will allow a 2 ways sync between the ipod and linux. This will allow to detection of exectly which tracks on the ipod are not present on the PC and to copy those tracks back accross. This feature is very usefull if you carry your IPod with you and use it collect tracks from other peoples iTunes.

Secondly, I have noticed that it is perfectly possible to use a FAT32 IPod with OS X and iTunes. It seems like Apple could have saved themselves some hassle and formatted all the IPods for Windows. That said, I sure there are serveral technial benifits to HFS+ especially on large IPods. However, the key point here is that if you want to use your IPod on Windows and OS X (and Linux or course :) then format it FAT32.

Tue, 09 Dec 2003 10:48 | tech | # | TB | 0 comment(s)

As soon as I'm done with my MSc thesis next week I'm going to be adding some features to the photo gallery. Lots of people want to be able to download whole albums so I am added a "download zip file" option to each album so you get the original images untainted or resized.

I'm also going to add a simple way to to set orientation without touching the original images (I like to make my image readonly to even the webserver).

Mon, 08 Sep 2003 04:07 | tech | # | TB | 0 comment(s)

Wow, for the first time I am genuinely jealous of OS X users. I just discovered clutter, an application that lets you keep you CD covers on your desktop and organise them visually. You can click on the covers to play the audio files they represent. Fantastic. I always felt there was something missing from the whole MP3s experience.

Now who wants to help me write the Linux version! (litter?)

Mon, 07 Jul 2003 12:38 | tech | # | TB | 0 comment(s)

My first technical blog entry. I have had the good fortune of writing a lot of LaTeX in the last year or so. In the process I have created a couple of generic Makefiles that will take care of a lot of stuff for you. This includes things like automatic conversion of figures. I have produced one for normal latex projects and another for use with pdflatex which I use to generate slides for presentations. They both include basic instruction on how to use and are in my public cvs repository.

Sun, 18 May 2003 10:16 | tech | # | TB | 0 comment(s)