Creating eye-candy from dead i-GO tracks

sample track

As, I’ve mentioned earlier, we had a pleasant trip through Italy the last summer. I have recorded the whole trip to my GPS unit using i-GO navigation program. Seems like 10 second recording intervals are fine and the track is quite precise and smooth.
Unfortunately, during upgrade from WM5 to WM6 I had to reinstall i-Go and all tracks just dissapeared from track list in i-GO. Stupid me, i HAD to save ‘igo.db’ file somewhere.
I found no way to put them back, so let the fun begin.
A short glimpse into one of the files and..

...
$GPGSA,A,3,04,20,13,23,31,11,,,,,,,2.0,1.2,1.6*33
$GPRMC,061120.287,A,5414.2734,N,02337.5314,E,54.08,261.55,290707,,,A*50
$GPGGA,061121.000,5414.2726,N,02337.5281,E,1,06,1.2,152.2,M,31.0,M,,0000*54
...

Hey, do You think the same way? Yes, it’s NMEA data in plain text.
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Screen change for Asus MyPal 639

little hand

The unit served as almost perfect GPS navigator for our summer trip though the Italy. One regular February evening i took my Asus PDA and…
Yep, a small problem. And a serious one.

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Troubles in remote server management

Had a severe issue with Samba server recently: it refused to serve after some undefined amount of time. It could work for a days perfectly or could be completely unreachable in several minutes after restart. Logs were useless, even in the highest possible debug level.

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PHProject in Unicode

The final migration stage from file-based Ganntproject to Web-based solution just began. I’ve set up PHProject in the office site. PHP5, Apache2, Mysql4 and Debian is enough.

The very first problem was Unicode support. Seems like PHProject was developed keeping MySQL3 in mind, althow ir works with a bunch of database backends, like Oracle, PostgreSQL, DB2, MSSQL.

So, to use UTF8 encoding in MySQL, add the following into lib/db/mysql.inc.php:

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Netgear WG511 Wi-Fi card in Debian

Long time ago i’ve bought Netgear WG511 PCMCIA WiFi card. It’s version 2, and is supported by prism54 module. the basic info is in jkx page, but at least 3 years have passed ;)

In order to run in Linux, you need:
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More complicated KDM and Xorg configuration on my laptop

the initial size of the desktop

The 1024×768 screen of my laptop from ESC is quite small. I got it when I had to change some preferences in Cinelerra. The confirmation buttons were far below the edge of the screen.

Well, manually editing files in ~/.bcast is a bit time-consuming, so i really needed these buttons ;)

There were two ways to press the button: either use bigger, so called ‘virtual’ desktop, or try to run two X serers with different layouts.
Using virtual desktops is more simple. Just add “Virtual x y” lines to /etc/X11/xorg.conf and you are done. The minor problem is that when the window gets maximized, it expand over the whole virtual desktop, not just the visible part of it.
The other way is more interesting. I should mention I prefer KDM as desktop manager.
So, good old Goooooogle showed me the way: [1] and [2]. The first one is quite interesting, but seems like kdm from KDE 3.5.5 is not reading Xservers file at all.
The temporary workaround is to use the ugly XDM as desktop manager. Read the rest of this entry »

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ESR meter

partly assembled ESR meter board

Sometimes i need to check the ESR values for second-hand or fresh electrolutis capacitors. Although ESR meters are available, it’s hard for me to spend a lot of bucks on one of it. So: the schematics is from ludens.cl, the case is from local supplier (a low-cost analog multimeter from China).
OpAmp, resistors and SMD capacitors are mounted. Black stripes at the bottom are milimeter marks on the metal ruler.

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Fun with a new Debian instalation

After Ubuntu was randomly refusing to load on my laptop, I returned to Debian.
Netinst disc, an hour on 2MBps link and we are here – mixed Debian testing/unstable with KDE, Cinelerra, Kino, gEDA an a lot of ‘standart’ stuff.
The problems were:

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Deploy windows software easilly

I’ve found a very interesting project recently. WPKG.
The idea is very simple: a script is executed by windows scripting host. It reads host description, defines needed package set using profiles and installs, updates or removes packages using package descriptions.
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Sudo in windows world

Sometimes it’s necesarry to allow a windows user perform a privileged task. *nix world has ‘sudo’. The cloneof sudo in windows is called … sudowin. Or sudown. Or winsudo.

Isn’t it strange to have three different clones of the same programm?