blog.heeltoe.com

I love my tivo. I've added a big disk to it. But I want to see more of my "personal media" on the tv (pictures, movies, etc) so I decided to make a Mythtv box. I made a nice new pc in a "stereo cabinet like" box. I used a motherboard with built in HDMI output (very nice) and a 64 bit AMD cpu. I got all this from Mwave. Motherboard:

Just a quick note on bookmarks. I use several laptops, a common machine at home and a workstation at work. This can sometimes get confusing when I save web bookmarks in various different places. I recently discovered "foxmarks". I only used Firefox, and foxmarks is an extension which syncs up my bookmarks everyplace I install it. It's

It's often a good idea to make the root file system in a embedded system read-only. If you do this and only make changes to files in a ram disk (mounted under /tmp, for example) the device will always come back to a known state when powered up. This is a nice feature and often a requirement. But sometimes you need to make changes which

I ran into something in the announcement of the 2.6.19 kernel called "sleepable rcu". I found this wikipedia entry for rcu. It gives some nice background on rcu's. I don't normally place much credence in wikipedia pages but this one seems reasonably good. And it explains why RCU's are a better alternative to multiple-reader-single-writer

I had some problems with my colocated serve the other day so I thought I'd try out one of the "VPS" server companies. These are firms which sell "virtual linux", basically a virtual machine running on their hardware. It's a good idea if the hardware is located at a data center with backup power and multiple high speed

(aside: this is a pretty funny intro to lisp casting spels in lisp) Generating HTML from lisp is nothing new. Many people have done it and there are lots projects on the web using it. There's also a lot of interesting XML/HTML lisp code floating around. It turns out that XML and HTML lend themselves rather well to symbolic processing. I've

Usually when I find myself fighting to prove a point it's usually becuase it's a loosing battle and my ego just won't let go. But let's assume you actually might be interesting seeing why a simple lisp like scripting language might be intesting. I wanted to change the behavior of a display terminal. I wanted it to have a list of times (hours

I have been struggling with a way to make a simple user userface for an embedded system with a 640x480 LCD but no keyboard or mouse. The machine only has 64mb of ram and wants to run largely out of ram. This eliminates things like X windows, TK, etc... And, I wanted to be able to hack up experiments quickly. I originally tried Java, but it