I know, I know... being busy is really no excuse for not writing my blog... although...

Many things have happened since my last blog entry :) Here's the list:

1. I spent the entire thursday evening on trying to install debian on my NSLU2... and I failed. I mainly had two problems:

The first one was that the debian installer didn't correctly get the DNS even though I had set up the network card to be dhcp. So, whenever I selected a mirror in the ftp list, it wouldn't accept it because the installer could not contact it. At least that's what I think. But what is strange is that when I selected the critical setup in the def menu, it would contact the ftp ?!?

The second one was that I had to fetch the SCSI package for the installer to be able to recognize my HD plugged into the USB port. But it recognized my HD only in 20% of time...

At midnight, after almost 10 hours trying, I decided to scrap it and to use uNSLUng instead. Half an hour later, I had finished. Everything ran as expected and fine.

On friday I installed TwonkyVision, a nice multi media server. It fit's without problems onto my NSLU2 and the PS3 recognized the server immediately. I still had to set PS3 explicitly in Twonky but hey... it works:) Now I have access to my music, my photos and my home made video clips on my PS3.

I still have to find the right video format because some seem to cause trouble to the PS3. VOB sometimes reports only 20 minutes of video but play the hour of video fine. On some avi encodings it doesn't recognize the video size correctly and on others it says it's unsupported.


2. On saturday we've met some friends and had a nice dinner. We didn't see the time pass and came back home quite late.

3. On sunday I continued putting my stuff into boxes (I'll redo my office) and we had a nice afternoon walk with the kids in the forest.

4. Yesterday I had a really stressful day. Coding from 8:00 am 'til 11:30 pm. For one of my contracts I'm working on a LaTex formula renderer which is able to render a formula or a formula group identified by an ID or name. It's also possible to pass a parameter container which will contain values that will replace variables within the formula...

Imagine you have the formula "A=B*C" (to make it simple). You deliver a parameter container which contains "B" is equal to "1.23". The rendered formula will then be "A=1.23*C".

So after working out the interfaces and starting their implementation last week, I wanted to finish it to show it to my customer. So I spent my time yesterday putting in some final things such as formula loading from an XML, access functions, container construction, etc. Some 90% of the code have been programmed yesterday. The result is a powerful interface which can handle nested formulas etc.

The customer was really happy because the initial plan had set the variable by value replacement to a point *after* an exposition he has to attend in a couple of weeks. Now he's able to show off more than he expected :)

Well... gonna go back to work, documenting and cleaning up some code, putting stuff into boxes...

Have fun,
Stefan

PS: Sorry... but I cannot show code of the interface due to NDA...