Archive for July, 2006

We can build it. Bigger. Faster. Stronger.

We have the technology.

Almost done with our semester project in robotics.  The team:

The team

The technology:

Hi tech?

Yeah I know.  1982 called and wants their robot back.  But at any rate, it is a pretty neat project, sorts objects by height and weight, then stacks them on a pallet and goes 2 levels high.  I am the sole coder, Nirav is the documentation manager, and John and Hussein do everything electrical and mechanical.

Novell’s Sled gets a thumbs down

Well I installed SLED today to give it a shot, and right off the bat my PRISM54 card won’t work complaining about missing firmware.  Being that my only internet connection is wireless, this presents a problem updating it.

How to install all the gstreamer packages in ubuntu

sudo apt-get install `apt-cache search gstreamer0.10 | awk ‘/^gstreamer*/ {printf “%s “, $1}’`

Microsoft Word is a bad idea

This guy hits the nail on the head for why it is a bad idea to use Microsoft Word for documents.  Read it here.

What I am working on

Package: gpac <– done
Package: ffmpeg2theora <– done
Package: gnusound <– waiting on upstream
Package: linphone <– done
Package: lynkeos.app
Package: moc
Package: motion <– done
Package: opencv
Package: smilutils
Package: vlc <– done.

Setting up a freevo box using Ubuntu Dapper 6.06

The process was fairly easy, but I ran into one or two little things to work around:

When using an old nvidia card for TV-out: use nvidia-glx-legacy, not nvidia-glx. This look me all day, dmesg kept saying there was a version mismatch, and there was. Legacy package was required.

When using an old nvidia card for TV-out: In the freevo local_conf.py file, at the end, I added:
OSD_SDL_EXEC_AFTER_STARTUP = 'nvtv -t -r 800,600 -s Normal -S NTSC'
Also I downloaded the binary from the website, and installed all the prereqs from the dapper repositories except mmedia, which didn’t exist. I downloaded it from it’s website, ran the setup and boom good to go.

I wish apple would support ogg

I currently have an IPOD shuffle, but I really wish Apple would support the Ogg Vorbis format.  I have a rather sizable CD collection, and I would rather not use MP3 to encode them (I do enjoy MP3 VBR –preset-standard) but I like the idea of an open format more because that way in the future I can use them 100% free of patented technology.  So hurry up apple so I can buy another ipod.

Finally a win at softball

Well after 10 losses on the season, our softball team picked up our first W.  There are 2 games left :)

Dusty is the big winner