Monday, November 30, 2009

Minimal xorg.conf

This minimal xorg.conf file may come in handy if you need to configure something in X, but you don't have a minimal xorg.conf base file you can start with.

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Configured Monitor"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Monitor "Configured Monitor"
Device "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

Thursday, September 03, 2009

Qt confused about multimedia?

I've always had a very high opinion of Trolltech's Qt Software's Nokia's Qt framework.

But after a post today on Qt Labs Blogs, it seems that there are two upcoming Qt multimedia frameworks that seem to duplicate and ignore the existing Phonon module -- these are the Qt Multimedia module and the Multimedia framework for QtMobility.

Dear trolls, what is going on with all of this? Is Phonon going to be abandoned? Is Phonon the new arts?

Update: It seems that indeed Phonon is the new arts, as Nokia is putting it on life support. Fortunately, it seems that some KDE hackers (including Phonon's original author) will support and develop Phonon further, so it might not be so bad after all.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Contar tráfego 3G vodafone

Recentemente subscrevi o serviço 3G internet da vodafone, com uns extraordinários 75Mb, que têm que ser bem controlados.

Infelizmente, o único sitio onde se pode controlar o tráfego é no "my vodafone", e este vem discriminado, obrigando a arranjar alguma maneira de somar os valores em Kb para obter o total do tráfego.

Para facilitar o processo, escrevi um pequeno javascript que pode ser executado nessa página, que trata de somar os valores e dizer o total.

Para o utilizar, basta arrastar a link seguinte para as bookmarks do browser:
Script de soma de tráfego
aceder ao site onde está discriminado o tráfego,
Link directa
e carregar na bookmark para obter a soma de todos os valores na página actual. Para somar os totais do mês, colocar as datas de inicio e fim bem, e usar o ver todas para obter todos os valores do mês, e carregar na bookmark.

Esta foi a minha primeira experiência com javascript, mas espero que seja útil para alguém.

P.s.: Isto é apenas um pequeno script para facilitar a tarefa, obviamente que não me responsabilizo se alguma coisa correr mal e depois a vodafone vier com uma factura enorme atrás de alguém.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

zomgnotes is now on gitorious :)

Today I finally decided to publish my work so far on zomgnotes on gitorious.

But what is zomgnotes? zomgnotes aims to be a simple note-taking application for symbian smartphones, because nokia forgot to include such a thing on the base OS software :)

zomgnotes is qt-based, so it runs on symbian, linux, mac and others, so it is easy to develop and test.

I still have some work to do before I'm ready to do a release (and supply compiled binaries), but in the meantime, here is the link for the zomgnotes project: http://gitorious.org/zomgnotes .

Thanks and see you soon.

Edit: Here are some screenshots from the current development version


Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Spring cleaning

Today I finally decided to upgrade the blog to blogspot's latest layout version, and to clean up my old blog entries from 2005.

Soon I hope to have some new content like the Symbian S60 Qt stuff I'm working on.

Laters!

Silicom EtherModem PCMCIA card (SEM) and Linux

Recently one of these PCMCIA cards came in to my hands. I was very interested in getting it to work because I don't own any PCMCIA 16bit (non-cardbus) ethernet cards that are not Type III (the fat Xircom ones). It seems to use the Intel 82595 ethernet controller.

Unfortunately, it seems that although there was a linux driver for this card at some point, it was never integrated upstream, so it became unmaintained and very difficult to find.

This driver, silpcmcia-1.02b.tar.gz, originally hosted at www.silicom.co.il/linux.htm (Web Archive Link) seemed to have fallen off the intarwebs.

After some e-mails I finally got someone to send me this file (thanks!). Here it is, in hopes that it doesn't get lost again:
MD5SUM:
f4788eeef4db3aeb7565dc926f573517 silpcmcia-1.02b.tar.gz

SHA1SUM:
e8bfea6f338864302f3d007327b4b924b5132033 silpcmcia-1.02b.tar.gz

Download links:
http://knuckles.googlepages.com/silpcmcia-1.02b.tar.gz
http://web.ist.utl.pt/~ist155460/silicom/silpcmcia-1.02b.tar.gz
http://tuxmobil.org/software/silicom/silpcmcia-1.02b.tar.gz
(Courtesy of tuxmobil.org)


For completeness, other related, useful files:
pcmcia-cs-3.0.9.tar.gz mirrors: 2 3 4
pcmcia-cs-3.2.8.tar.gz mirrors: 2 3 4

Another driver sil_cs, which should work for 2.4 kernels (the silpcmcia one is for 2.2), and is based on the etherexpress pro/10 driver. It was originally hosted at http://lemon.malinov.com/sil_cs/ (Web Archive to the rescue).

This one is also hard to find, but thankfully web archive kept a copy of the files:

MD5SUM:
046aac61000ccf7b82c791790ce55ce1 sil_cs-1.0a.tar.bz2
ecc0e0b9d8d3c1f2340b0bf9a5e2ec52 sil_cs-1.0b.tar.bz2

SHA1SUM:
d9875899fbaa93e7da20413995da9a368acc5862 sil_cs-1.0a.tar.bz2
534c897fe784b1de933178eaee69e8662f1907cc sil_cs-1.0b.tar.bz2

Download links:
http://knuckles.googlepages.com/sil_cs-1.0a.tar.bz2
http://knuckles.googlepages.com/sil_cs-1.0b.tar.bz2
http://web.ist.utl.pt/~ist155460/silicom/sil_cs-1.0a.tar.bz2
http://web.ist.utl.pt/~ist155460/silicom/sil_cs-1.0a.tar.bz2
http://web.archive.org/web/20070411141642/http://lemon.malinov.com/sil_cs/sil_cs-1.0a.tar.bz2
(courtesy of archive.org)
http://web.archive.org/web/20070411141642/http://lemon.malinov.com/sil_cs/sil_cs-1.0b.tar.bz2 (courtesy of archive.org)

Conclusion: there seems to be no usable driver for 2.6 kernels, so if you found this site hoping for a quick download, I'm sorry. I'm trying to preserve this info in hopes that someday a bored kernel hacker might pick this up :) . If you do have some info/something that you think is useful about this card, please DO post in the comments section.

As an addendum, it's a pity that small files like these just fall off the internet, never to be found again. As a fan of older computers, it's disappointing when you can't find that old bios or configuration file because all sites linked to the same 20kb file, and when the original site hosting it went down, nobody had a backup link.

Some related links:
http://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2008/06/old-cards-and-information-gap.html
http://tuxmobil.org/pcmcia_ci10241.html
http://forum.ubuntu-it.org/index.php?topic=96994.10

Update: One of the mirrors stopped working, removed.