Older blog entries for mallum (starting at number 17)

DSL is beginning to become a complete knightmare.

I phoned the ISP Id ordered DSL from to see how my order was progressing. They informed me the local exchange had run out of ports and it would be 2 weeks before they got any new ones. ( This was after waiting nearly an hour in a stupid phone queue ). So once these extra 'ports' are added the process of connectting me can start - which apparently takes 10-15 more days. So Im probably looking at another month of extremely slow, painful and expensive dial up - how depressing. After 3 years on a nice fast cable modem Id forgotten how slow dial up really is - Even doing a cvs commit seems to take forever.

I dunno what to do to improve the situation. I work from home and having just moved to the other side of London (SE) I have no friends near by with fast internet access I can 'borrow'.

I guess I can ditch this current provider and switch to BT, hopefully somehow finding out if they have free 'ports' at the exchange.

On a better note, getting into town is very quick from here ( half hour ) and the journey is pretty nice. I popped into TCR this morning and got a new battery for the tibook.

So we moved house and then the day after that I headed off to fosdem.

The house move went ok for us, but maybe not for the removal men. It took them nearly 12 full hours to do the move - they hadn't been told it was a 50M uphill trek to the new house and therefore didn't have trolleys etc. Mr Hallski was also a really really big help during the move though he didn't have to be ( He is the perfect guest ). Felt pretty bad about the mess up of move timings with Hallskis but Im pretty sure he still had a good time and made good friends with Sidske and the pugs.

So the morning after the move, Hallski and I headed via the eurostar to fosdem. Felt pretty bad about leaving Sid on her own in strange new house. The first night at fosdem we got maybe a bit too drunk on white beer. The next days hangover was amplified by lack of sleep and the sweaty overcrowded very smelly lecture theatures and hacking rooms at fosdem. It was a pretty bad day.

The next day was much better. I did my talk and though my laptop wouldn't speak to the projector ( dj adams was kind enough to lend me his laptop that did work - owe him beerage ) it seemed to go pretty well. Turnout was good and got asked questions etc.

The best thing about fosdem for me is meeting people in person, putting faces to irc nicks and getting to have fun with nice people in person you unfortunatly dont get to see very often. Also had a really fun time with Hallski and it was pretty sad when he departed back to sweden with the rest of the scandinavian conspiricy.

Now I back home on the dreaded dial up connection and a massive amount of unpacking todo. 10-15 working days till I get DSL again - urg !!

Hacked a very dirty 'mirrored' VNC Server out of LibVNCServer and the new X Damage extension. You can grab it here - its basically a quick reworking of the x11vnc.c included with LibVNCServer tarball ( in contrib/ ). The plan is to use it on the Ipaq as a demo tool for my fosdem talk. It works ok but not as good as Id hoped.

A Side effect of this was remembering vnc2swf - a tool for converting vnc streams into flash movies.So I made a quick little flash demo of matchbox running on my ipaq with composite ext, new minimo ( which is pretty amazing ) etc. You can view it here http://handhelds.org/~mallum/test.swf . Hmm, I wish I could run flash on my laptop ( powerpc ).

Hallski arrives in a few hours for some time here in the UK before we head off to brussles. Hope he can stand the mini zoo we have here at home.

Its good to see people are figuring out how to plugin/rework XInput for kdrive. I need to get in on the act and make sure tslib fits in somehow.

Seems the new matchbox release has gone down well. A few minor issues have cropped up but mostly now fixed in CVS. Will probably make new minor releases after fosdem and house move.

Arg, looks like after house move I'll be at best on dial up for a couple of weeks and there seems to be an unspected lead time on getting a new DSL line set up. This is going to hurt.

Packing for move is mostly done now. Just got to finish writing presentation...

Just finished uplaod of various new matchbox bits - packages, screenshots, website etc - glad its finally done!

Check http://matchbox.handhelds.org/ for the beef.

Now more packing,

Move house day before fosdem ! so Im spending the weekend packing :( I truly have a lot of crap.

I stumbled upon Jim Gettys very cool The Future is Coming: Where the X Window System Should Go paper today. Its been a while since I last read it - but now it seems with the emergence of freedesktop.org Xserver various points made on the paper are beginning to emerge.

Seems a while since I made an posting. Breaking matchbox up into seperate modules and rewriting autogubbins scripts has been rather boringly sucking up most of my time. Nearly there now.

Have libxine working really nice now on ipaq. More or less fullscreen 25fps video playback and oggs playing with fixed point tremor lib. Next to hack a really cpu gentle visulization plugin, included pluggins use too much floating point for arm.

Sash from cacko.biz informed me there adding matchbox to there X11 ROM. I've ordered a new cheap CF wifi card in the hope it'll work with the cacko rom and I can help out a bit more with its development - Id really like too.

Thought of a cool hack I could do with matchbox on the TV to get round the problem of dumbass overscan - simply make a dummy wm theme that clips the display to fit the overscaned area.

Exchanged contracts on house sale. Extremely likely now I'll be in 'Souf' of the river in 3 weeks time and out of the ghetto ;-) Have to sort out some new connectivity - I'll lose my cable modem ( new area not covered ) and will be in contention ratio ADSL hell?.

New Battery for Ipaq 3870 arrived. Actually managed to fit it without losing any screws or more importantly creating an expensive paperweight.

Also recieved recent EBAY purchase, a Voyager VGA CF card. I need now to massage fd.o Xserver into working with it. The eventual plan is todo FOSDEM presentation off it.

Uploaded a new matchbox CVS build into familiar unbstable. This one can turn compositing on/off on the fly.

I want to open a comic shop.

Lots of matchbox minor bug fixes today that were major pains to fix. good to get them done though.

Finally got round to install a 2.6 kernel on shuttle machine. All seems to be working very nicely. My card reader thingy now seems to be able mount cf cards and even my odd usb midi adaptor also seems to want to play at last :-))

Also discovered latest qemu can finally run at least some ( not bash yet ) Debian Arm Sid binarys on x86.

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