Archive for January, 2008

Playing with a modem

It’s a long time since I installed a modem – at least 8 years. But I had reason to need one attached to the Kurobox, the task being complicated by the Kuro:

  1. running linux
  2. being a PPC box
  3. having no serial ports, only USB

A quick bit of research found the Zoom 3095 which, the manufacturer claims, is linux-compatible. The drivers are from the nice people at linuxant, who collectively do a fine job of providing drivers for Conexant-based modems.

One of their support chaps, Jonathan, could give no assurances that the drivers would work on my PPC box, but still found a way to encourage me to take the plunge and buy the 3095. And I’m glad he did – it works fine, as long as CONFIG_USB_ACM is included in the kernel build.

I should also add that the DGC driver is the only freely available driver of the three that Linuxant support, but I’d have happily paid for it if necessary.

I have, of course, created an entry for the Zoom 3095 at the excellent ‘Linux USB device overview’ website.

For the technically-inclined: this is a Kurobox HG/WR, running Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy), kernel 2.6.23.14. ‘lsusb’ identifies the Zoom 3095 as “0803:3095 Zoom Telephonics, Inc.”. I’m using version 1.03 of the DGC driver from Linuxant.

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Filed under Kuro Box : Comments (0) : Jan 24th, 2008

Gutsy Kurobox

The Kurobox has been running Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) for a few months, and I’ve been itching to upgrade it to 7.10 (Gutsy). For no particular reason, other than “just because”. Installing any O/S on the Kurobox is quite a task, so I went for the ‘apt-get dist-upgrade’ route rather than doing a fresh install.

And it all went surprisingly well. Top props to the Ubuntu guys and gals who made it work.

There’s only one fly in the ointment. The source-o-matic service (formerly at ubuntu-nl.org) has gone, which is a great shame. Source-o-matic automated the creation of ‘/etc/apt/sources.list’, and is a useful convenience tool for both new installs and upgrades alike. I very much hope that source-o-matic has been just moved, not removed.

In the end, it was a no-brainer to edit ‘/etc/apt/sources.list’ and do ‘%s/feisty/gutsy/g’ – but that’s not the point. If an open source O/S is to thrive, it needs to be easy to maintain and upgrade, as well as being easy to use day-to-day. And tools like source-o-matic help.

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Filed under Kuro Box : Comments (0) : Jan 23rd, 2008

Starting to like spam

It’s perverse, I know, but I have two reasons to like spam:

  1. Spam emails with subjects like “She will always be hungry for your new big sausage!” make me chuckle
  2. With my email system being rather a Heath-Robinson affair, the constant trickle of spam messages is a nice reassurance that everything is working as it should…

Oh, and on the sausage front: ’she’ is veggie, so any “big new sausages” in our house had better be made from some kind of mushroom-derivative.

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Filed under tech : Comments (0) : Jan 17th, 2008

Revamped LiveDepartures plugin

 The LiveDepartures plugin for SqueezeCenter has received a long-awaited update, and will now show details for the London Underground as well as main-line stuff. This has been a fun hack and, while there are some bits of polishing still needed, it’s close enough to deserve a release.

So that’s version 2.2.193, released late on Sunday 13th Jan. I fully expect bugs to be reported within 12 hours – The Law Of Sod says so.

There’s nothing (yet) for the Squeezebox Controller (formerly known as “Jive”), but I hope to start that soon. And for that, learning Lua will be necessary.

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Filed under SqueezeCenter : Comments (2) : Jan 14th, 2008

Coding with one eye closed

I’m in the middle of rewriting a lump of code for the LiveDepartures plugin for SqueezeCenter which would be better suited to OO than the procedural rubbish I’ve been writing previously. (The rewrite is very timely, as it’ll enable me to add functionality that’ll work very well with SlimDevices’ newly released Squeezebox Controller.)

But it’s written in Perl. There are some things that don’t naturally go together, and “Perl” and “OO” would be a good example. What a mess! Passing around a blessed hash from one static method to the next aint’ my idea of fun… and now I feel entirely justified in delaying my use of Perl OO as long as I did.

When writing code, I’m usually only happy when I grok what’s going on, but in this case I’d rather not. I get the feeling that trying to properly understand Perl OO is rather like looking at a car crash: you know you shouldn’t look, cos it’s painful to watch and will make you feel sick. And it’ll cause sleepness nights for weeks.

So I’m writing Perl OO, but driving past the car crash with one eye closed.

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Filed under SqueezeCenter : Comments (0) : Jan 7th, 2008