Tcepsa's Thoughts

I'm enjoying watching the development of the games for the Humble Mojam Bundle--it's very cool to see the details of these talented folks at work!

http://humblebundle.com/

Check it out if you have some time (and note that there are three different streams as of the time of my writing this: one for Mojang, and one each for two of the Wolfire folks)

Well, 2011, you were a pretty good year for me. Some rough spots, but also some great spots. Still working on sorting some of that out. Already in over my head for projects for the new year, but I like the look of them. They're almost entirely things that I either want to do or desire the immediate consequences of having done them. Maybe this could be characterized as moving into the realm of "intermediate" with a number of my skills. Maybe it's a further mental shift away from my perfectionism. Not taking any more classes also will definitely help also. Okay, time to get started!

In my past, the week leading up to Thanksgiving has always been one of anticipation. For almost all of my life, this has been due in no small part to the fact that my birthday tends to fall on or shortly after that fourth Thursday of November. However, it had been heightened by the tradition of Black Friday. Ever since I discovered that, if one were staunch of heart and geeky of spirit, incredible loot could be gotten at a pittance by rising early enough* I have been seeking out these bargains and prowling the aisles of Staples and Office Max at entirely unreasonable hours of the morning.

This year, I'll be there again, but while in the past I have often been keeping my eyes open for anything that I could use (a USB memory stick that's less than $1 per GB? Heck yes! A stack of DVDs for $5? Never know when you might need one!) this year I have only one item on my list: massive hard drives so that I can set up a RAID array because our old drives are getting old and we have no backups. Previous years I'd have a list of 5-10 things I'd be actively trying to score, and I'd map out my route between stores in a delicate balancing act between which ones had the things I wanted most and which had the most things I wanted. A new monitor. A video card. I think I even got my Nintendo Wii on Black Friday five years ago.** But this year? There's pretty much nothing. Part of that is because I just got a new laptop, and it's harder to replace internal components on that, but mostly it's because there's just nothing out there that's all that much better than what I already have for what I want to do. I'm not going out for some shiny new awesome toy this year***; I'm going out in order to do an arguably critical piece of maintenance**** that I should have done years ago.

( Which brings me to my (slightly inaccurate) title... )

Okay, I've managed to work out all of the major show-stoppers that I wrote about here and am moving on. That serial port not connecting problem? I had to give myself adequate permissions (or run PuTTY as root, hrm...) Not being able to compile? Apparently the latest version of avr-gcc doesn't support the straight-up Atmega328 anymore (or maybe that was never a real chip, or maybe it's fully compatible with the Atmega328p object file that one must now compile against). Fixed by telling it the compiler, "Heh, well, I know I said that I was using a 328, but what I meant was a 328p." (Yeah, super embarrassing. That compiler must think I'm a complete baka by now, considering the wacky stuff I keep asking it to do...)

Not able to use the native Arduino programming environment? Don't care! I have Emacs!

N to go. Fixed the GTK PLAF problem by inadvertently opening the arduino script in Emacs (I hadn't realized it was just a shell script). Saw that it was explicitly specifying the GTK PLAF, and took that part out.

Now it's kvetching about not being able to find the preferred system font. I swear, these computers, they are never happy!

New ThinkPad e420. Ubuntu got me through GiveCamp last weekend, but then I tried to upgrade to the official drivers and the display stopped working, and also it was having issues compiling my favorite window manager (stumpwm). So I've switched over to ArchLinux, which is a lot more hard to set up than I thought it would be, but maybe that's because I never tried to use it with a dual-monitor system for Arduino programming before.

I have managed to get StumpWM (and X.org) up and running with the proper driver. Having a heck of a time getting the Arduino stuff to work, though/

• Can't run the super-simple programming environment because it can't find the Java GTK PLAF (translation: it can't find the collection of resources that tell it how stuff should look. Hopefully I can find it later or tell it to use a different one)


• Can't compile the code because it can't find one of the libraries, even though I've installed avr-gcc and avr-libc and avr-binutils and avrdude. Not sure what's up there.


• Can't actually talk to the chip because of something wonky with the FTDI cable. It says it's on /dev/ttyUSB0, but when I try to connect PuTTY tells me it can't open the serial port. (This has worked on previous systems; no clue why it's failing today).

Three strikes and I still refuse to yield. However, it looks like I'll be continuing to boot off of the external hard-drive that I set up to use with my wife's laptop for the purposes of doing my homework assignment for this Monday...

(Linux may only be free if your time is worthless, but it's still cheaper than all of the leisure activities that you have to pay for!)

My class this semester is Real Time System Development. Our first project is to install a real-time OS on a Lego Mindstorms brick (one of the new ones, the NXT) and then build a robot* and write a program to make the robot follow a line.

The operating system is nxtOSEK, which is apparently an operating system often used on the computers in peoples' cars and has been ported to run on the NXT. There were a few minutes of serious anxiety as I realized that I had no idea how the operating system actually worked and that it was apparently much more complicated than I expected it to be**. So I downloaded the specification and started going through it. Then, in a fit of boredom and desperation I start looking at the example code that came with the Lego version; rather than forcing myself to read through the entire specification and fully grasp how the OS works, I figured maybe I could scrape out enough information from the examples to cobble together something Good Enough. I started looking through the C code first and kind of sort of got an idea of how it works and it wasn't terribly scary except there are some weird things that don't work the way I expected when I started tweaking at the source code.

Now normally I am more comfortable with C than with C++, but I figured I'd have a look at the C++ examples as well just in case... and found something that Made Sense. At this point, I am far enough along in the assignment that I am reasonably confident that I can figure out the additional daunting stuff over the course of tomorrow. It'll be a little tricky to get all of the sensors to play nicely with the main goal of following the line, but I'm not nearly as freaked out about it as I was 5 hours ago!

*Surprisingly, this may be the first actual robot that I have ever built!

**Project is due Monday. Seems a bit tight to be trying to learn the nuances of a whole new operating system by then...

Due the week after this coming Monday (i.e. ~10 days from now) a line-following Lego robot and an Arduino that will blink an LED in the Morse-code equivalent of whatever strings are sent to it.

It's gonna be a busy weekend!

I'm working on getting my Linux computer talking to a Lego Mindstorms NXT brick for my Real-Time Systems Development class, but I'm having a little bit of trouble getting over the final hurdle of actually being able to upload compiled code to it. In one of the howtos that I've sought out, I came across the following gem:

You MAY or MAY NOT have to reboot at this time, I cannot tell

See the full howto here

Woo, C-i. Got it in one.

(Apparently there is also an Emacs package for editing LJ entries, but for now I'll settle for just being able to edit a text field).