One too many mornings

Added del.icio.us and flickr links to the side bar. Swell!

And got tabs for Paddy Casey’s Saints and Sinners. I’ll be learning that this weekened.

Off work tomorrow so a nice long weekend, with my folks coming to visit.

Now I’ve started back on this perhaps I’ll get me brother’s website sorted out for him!

technorati tags:guitar, Hols, Paddy, Casey, blogging

In the great tradition of things being done properly by version 3.0, (windows, gcc, debian etc thanks for that Terry), it give me great pleasure to release version 3.0 of the tvgateway firmware. This brings in tons of fixes and usablity and performance improvments, support for decrypting channels and just general tidying up of the code base. I’m proper proud of this one, and I hope there is not some nasty bug lurking there once it gets in the field. To that end it is going to be tested at a few beta sites.

This is the first project I have taken from start to finish in quite a while as I tend to have to move onto new products and leave the final polishing to others. It is also finished just in time for my impeding departure on paternity leave, which should happen anytime soon.

Currently updating this work PC to edgy using apt-get the instructions using update-manager din’t work so perhaps I should hold off but the prospect of brand new packages I’ll never use is.. just.. too.. much.

The download will take an hour but the upgrade will probably take all morning with 1200 packages updated. The only problem I see is that I use a slightly patched kernel so I can use an unsupported serial port card. Here’s hoping.

technorati tags:edgy, ubuntu, linux

I got 2.0.5 of scapa out the door on Friday. It is currently under a long term testing, both here and in London. There is one bug left were I see loads of duplicated packets on CNN, and only on CNN. It is really wierd I posted on linuxtv.org mailing list and see if anyone else sees anything similar.

Since Christmas I’ve been clearing the remaining bugs out of the Gateway. This is now almost ready for release. Just to do a build and run through the regression tests.
This is also a unified release for the two hardware platforms and will make releases much easier in future. During the builds I’ve been playing crawl and now I’m hopelessly addicted to it’s silliness.

Since before we moved office I’ve wanted to put this feature into the decoders. It means we can host files on a ftp and http server and do playlist based serving of content as opposed to streaming. It also allows VoD support to be more of a focus. Now we have a customer or potential customer I’ve finally got round to doing it. The essential part of the coding only took two days. You can now get the decoder to play a playlist of MPEG2 videos. MPEG1 and mp3 will potentially follow. Another thing I want to do now is play from an nfs/smb mount.

Scapa was at long last released to world. The core has been working for a very long time but a complete overhaul of the user interface and the usual feature creep delayed release until the end of the quarter. Almost immediately we have found new bugs which require an urgent fix. One is in my bootloader code trivial but was stopping upgrades from some tftp servers, and not getting ip addresses fr om some dhcp servers. The bootloader now acts completely according to RFC for both protocols. Phew!

For the longest time, I’ve been backing up this weblog nightly. The fact I only write to it once a week not withstanding. Since moving to wordpress this has not been enough since the posts are held in a database which is outside of the web accessible area. Luckily Scott Merrill has written a plugin to backup the database and email it to me. Scott has also written a plugin to do this nightly so I can rest easy again.

Elsewhere, Dave Jones talks about rebasing his kernel each night. Inspired by this I’ve set up my PC to do nightly builds of all the exterity software branches I’m interested in. It then posts the built software to an internal website along with the buildlog. If there is a fail in the build it emails me the buildlog so I can fix the problem the following morning. It pays to be lazy.

boardmon monitors the temperature and fans of the scapa board. It logs the temperature and fan fails to a log file, reports high temps and fan fails to a manager, and shuts down the board on a high temperature. Other features may be added in due course. This little program was the first bit of new programming I’ve done in over a month. I’ve basically be testing and doing system analysis work during that time. It is nice to get to do the part of the job I enjoy most. And I am in such a better mood because of it. Maybe I need to pick up a debian package and start hacking on that in my spare time.