Technology

LED displays, part II

Yes, I got to see the character problem several times more (on bus 178 and 670) after my previous LED display post, and I also got it confirmed by friends who saw it on other buses. It hadn’t been fixed, but clearly the displays in some buses show the correct letters.

pålsundsvägen on display, august 31 2007 17:22 on the 670 bus

I contacted some friends I know have some connections on the bus company, and according to “BL” all systems are supposed to be fixed and should display the letters correctly… He did say that he has forwarded my question onwards so hopefully we’ll get some further updates on this soon.

I got a nice quote forwarded from BL about this and it says that this is a failed installation by the techies that installed the sign on these buses. He (the person who wrote what BL forwarded) also said that if there appears “single buses” with this failure still present he wants to know the bus number to be able to fix…

So, if you read this and get to see the dreaded ü-letter on a bus, take a note on the bus number and time (and I believe the “vagnnummer” – the unique vehicle number printed on the outside of the bus) and report it. You can just post a comment to this entry if you can’t find a better place to post it.

(BTW, the photo is taken with my w580i phone and darn is it hard to take photos in the bus. When the bus finally stops at this particular stop, the sign switches text to the end station name so I could only take photos of the sign while driving…)

Rockbox

Rockbox on c200 and mi4code

Mark Arigo announced his successful port of Rockbox to the Sandisk Sansa c200 series, and following those footsteps MrH brought mi4code 1.0.1 with built-in keys for the most recent c200 firmwares.

While on the subject of mi4 based players: If you are the owner of a Sandisk Sansa e200R model, please help us out a bit by running e200tool on your target and get a dump of the i2c rom for us!

(Update: we got a dump, thanks. No need for more at this point.)

cURL and libcurl

curl on Fedora uses NSS

I noticed curl on Fedora suddenly started using NSS for TLS/SSL, as I believe the first distro out there.

I’ve been under the impression that Debian is the only distro shipping it built with GnuTLS.

I must admit I enjoy seeing more use of curl’s wide support of various underlying technologies, and it also makes it more certain that they will remain working and even get improved as we go. When we add support for things and they never really end up getting used those features just risk serious bitrotting and slowly dying away when the code changes but nobody uses them.

Technology

LED letters on buses

1 Comment

This week, me and my family have rented a house in the Stockholm archipelago and I’ve been commuting back and forth to work using buses I don’t normally go with (670 and 603 to be precise).

In many of the Stockholm buses there’s a rather big LED-display situated in the ceiling in the front and often somewhere in the middle of the bus, normally displaying the route number and end station and at each stop it displays the name of it while a recorded voice reads out the name of the stop in the speaker system.

While sitting there I noticed how it would display “Pülsundsvägen” instead of “PÃ¥lsundsvägen” (that is with a German letter ü instead of the Swedish letter Ã¥) but I didn’t think much more of it then.

LED display

Another day I happened to go with a complete different bus through a different area and yet again I noticed how the display used the ü instead of Ã¥ while the recorded voice used the letter Ã¥ and I was convinced someone in the bus company must’ve bought a German system or similar and very strangely got satisfied with this very strange-looking graphical choice of letters. The fact that ü was chosen is funny, since we’re kind of used to simply use a in Sweden when Ã¥ isn’t available. I also find it funny that so few people seem to mind.

This morning on the bus when I decided to mention my recent findings to a friend, I was shocked… now this bus actually showed Ã¥ just like it should.

This makes me so puzzled. Was I only dreaming? Do they use different displays/drivers in different buses? Did they do a software upgrade exactly this week that is removing this flaw?

IT Politics

SIS declares voting invalid

SIS logo
IDG reports that yesterday SIS announced that the voting on August 27 was invalid since they say that they have information that indicates one of the voting organizations participated with more than one vote.

With the big official ISO voting coming up already now on Sunday September 2nd, there isn’t enough time for SIS to make a revote so the Swedish official take on the OOXML will be… “no vote”.

With the proved very inefficient working methods of SIS, I figure this is the best outcome anyway since a revote now would just make a senseless race from both camps to register new members to be able to buy the outcome of the next vote!

Also on slashdot.

Microsoft announced that an employee of theirs offered monetary compensation for voting their way and one suspects it has something to do with this invalidating business…

It seems the French OOXML discussions was a lot of fun as well: “something resembling a bar-fight” !

cURL and libcurl

curl plans autumn 2007

curl
We enter feature-freeze on August 31 and we then fix remaining known issues for a week or two in September before we release 7.17.0.

The version number bump is this time mostly due to the new way of dealing with LDAP (being linked properly build-time instead of dlopening run-time like before) and the new LDAPS support. 7.17.0 also brings a brand new port to OS/400, it treats strings sent to curl_easy_setopt() differently and it builds and runs with recent libssh2 versions – that lib changed so much recently so that libcurl 7.16.4 can’t be built with libssh2 0.16 or later.

I am starting my paternity leave on October 1st to take care of Rex full-time, and I’m not sure at this point in time how much that’ll affect how much time and energy I’ll have for curl hacking, at least initially, so getting the curl release done before this seems like a good idea to me.

Edit: I should clarify that the “treats strings differently” means that libcurl will copy the strings passed to it, so that applications no longer need to keep them around until libcurl is done with them like they have been forced to up until < 7.17.0.

Open Source, Rockbox

mi4code 1.0.0

MrH mailed me the latest version of mi4code that now incorporates proper support for the recent Sansa 1.03.07 firmware (claimed to be beta, only available from some unofficial sansa fan sites, such as anythingbutipod.com), and I’ve uploaded it to the mi4code page.

Note that we still don’t advice anyone to actually use the unofficial 1.03 version as it has been reported to be bad in several aspects, such as the removal of MSC mode!

Licensing, Rockbox

GPLv3 pains start now

1 Comment

rockbox Yeah, Rockbox ships as a GPLv2 licensed package, without the “or later” option for users to switch license at will. This has been all fine and dandy for a long time and Rockbox includes source from a busload of different other projects, licensed as GPLv2 and BSD etc.

Now, some of the projects Rockbox uses or wants to use are slowly turning GPLv3. First out being espeak, and the corresponding Rockbox patch for using it.

GPLv2 and GPLv3 are not compatible. We cannot ship binaries built with a mix of these licenses.

So, we’re now starting to see the real-world effects of the GPLv3 license. Slowly some projects are going v3, and we (as in the Rockbox project) must remain with their older v2 sources until we take the jump (more or less forced) to v3 – only to then have the reversed situation as then we can’t use projects that are licensed strictly GPLv2 (without the “or later”)…

Sigh. The world is a complicated place.

IT Politics

Buy your own standard from SIS

1 Comment

As Marcus Rejås blogged and has been mentioned already by mainstream “media” such as IDG, Microsoft and its allies managed to buy themselves a favorable vote from Sweden in the OOXML debacle.

For our Swedish readers, I can’t but to show this funny picture I found on the SIS web site:
(gone)

The text in that circle on the right says “buy standards by clicking on your area”… and boy, did they!

(Updates: further Swedish details in DN and ekot.)

curl, open source and networking