Happy Birthday to me!

I've been working on an external keyboard project for the Z. Last night I took apart an old PC keyboard and harvested the controller board, then traced the circuits and worked out how their signals get to the controller chip. Its all in a Gnumeric spreadsheet, waiting for me to solder up my first trail keyboard tonight. Exciting and fun.

I've been trolling EBay for embedded boards, which I'm planning to use for some of my Mad Scientist hardware projects. With a bit of luck, I managed to snag three suitable boards for about $35 each. I just wish I could find a nice ARM pc/104 board.

I continue to work on my Zaurus QPE packages. It is getting even more fun now that I am getting feedback and thousands of hits on my website.

My latest release is a giant (for the Zaurus) 17 meg cramfs filesystem which has everything developers need to compile with gcc & g++ on the Z, including all QT headers and such. With feedback from users, I've released an update and it seems to be serving people well.

This weekend, while debugging part of my macro enhancement package for embeddedkonsole, I made a new-to-me discovery. Readline is much more capable than I'd realized. In fact, with fifteen or so entries in an .inputrc file, I can have the majority of the functionality I was looking for with the macro package. It is still an interesting project from which I am learning quite a bit, but I'm going to install and test the inputrc method straightaway.

It's been a while since I updated the blog. Let's see if I can get back in the habit.

I am now a happy, one might say obsessed, Zaurus owner. I've been focusing my development efforts on porting and writing software for it. So far, I've ported 6 packages:

Most - A great pager

lua - an embedded scripting language

Links - a text web browser

MM - a QT mounting util.

Emacs - I'm just starting the testing on this one.

readline - It was already ported by the familiar team, but it was missing some utilities, and I needed the headers for other ports.

I've released one program of my own, "LightSwitchApplet", which puts a backlight toggle switch on the taskbar.

I'm now working on enhancements to the Konsole for the Z, allowing me to control the keyboard a little better.

As soon as the OpenZaurus rom supports IRDA again, I will resume writing the IRDA keyboard device driver for my MicroInnovations wireless keyboard.

All released code can be found at my website zaurus.zefamily.org or from Sourceforge (look under bkroeze on the files list).

The details of releasing an open source program are taking much more time than I'd expected. But I'm slowly pushing the rock up the hill.

Got a Sourceforge project accepted.

Checked in current codebase.

Refactored code to be more flexible, making it more likely to compile on different systems.

Autoconfiscated the project.

Wrote initial documentation.

All that is left is to test the configure script on a few machines, package and do my first release!

Ah the joys of a well organized office!

Instead of finishing up my game this weekend, I became obsessed with organizing my office more efficiently. Making space in the office required moving some stuff to the garage. Of course, no space in the garage, so I had to organize things better there as well. Two solid days of work and an aching back has bought me a wonderfully nice new configuration for the office, so I am well content.