Sunday, August 31, 2008

XO Open Firmware Prompt

To get to the open firmware prompt you press the X in the upper left hand corner of the keyboard immediately after booting the OLPC. Really? What does immediately mean?

1)Type "4c000014" and press
2)Type "rdmsr" and press
3)Type "u." and press (a hex number will be displayed)
4)Again, type "u." and press (a second hex number will be displayed, write it down)

According to

More XO

Saw something online that said - XO overclocked, so I dusted this crappy piece of equipment. Will make one last ditch effort before trashing it....

first, it runs around me trying to connect to the wireless network. I have to fish out my old post that says use HEX and Open Access for putting in the SSID. Then, I have to get into the router to see what's going on - and the DLink won't let me in - I wonder if I've forgotten the username - but online I find admin is correct - but, this is new - you can use "user" and leave password blank to enjoy in read-only mode. That works.

Back to the XO - you're tired of using that tiny screen - I remember my post that tells me how to get in using cygwin. That works - except, I'm root. I'd rather get in as olpc. Only, it doesn't take my password when I try SSH -X olpc@192.168.0.101 . So, I find something online that says how to be root and change the password - use "passwd username".

Now, as you might know, one of my goals to accomplish before I abandon computers completely is to reach a level of competence with linux and perl where I can quickly leverage the work done by others - use their packages and modules. That's where I'm going with trying to hack this XO thing.

There actually seems to be some worthwhile reading on the OLPC forum:

OLPC Hacks: XO Laptop Spy Camera or Motion DetectorOLPC Help: How to Install Ubuntu on the XO Laptop!
OLPC Help: Replacing the XO Laptop Keyboard
XO Accessories: XO Camera Two Mirror Periscope

The Motion Detection guy uses python to capture and filter images and uses motion detection setting posted by this guy. If it works, this is awesome - why - because, once it's done on the OLPC, it can be easily done on the ASUS thing - and that's something that you buy from a company - as in, it's guaranteed to work - so, now, you're giving people a configurable home security device. This could change the future of crime in a big way. I'm really excited about this.

Saturday, August 30, 2008

Resolved! Special Mention Saurabh Jang (MOT)

The problem was that dtwm was always looking at my ~/.dt/C/dtwmrc and I was always editing my ~/.dt/dtwmrc. I saw on some page on the net by the man whose is the word of honour on this page that dtwm looks at ~/.dt/C/dtwmrc before it looks at (if at all) the ~/.dt/dtwmrc and that was what clinched it.

Thanks Theresa, thanks Kannan, thanks Sun.... for nothing.

Saturday, August 23, 2008

Wuenschlist CDE WM

Okay, in Solaris-CDE - you can double-click on the titlebar of a window and it will be maximized. Question is, is it possible to tell the window manager that there are really two monitors and that you only want the window to occupy one screen when maximized? Or, can you control what the Maximize function will do? Can you tell it to only increase the window geometry to 1280x1024? That would help my productivity a lot.

Hier'st what goes on:

CDE through Citrix - crappy windows management ->
Exceed - Cadence hangs after the property form ->
Seamless windowing through Citrix -> crappy windows management ->
back to Citrix -> doesn't give me good pointer precision when I use the wireless mouse ->
back to a cheap wired optical mouse - which is so cheap that it sometimes sends double clicks ->
I'm still out of the psych ward. But for how long. I should probably sue M$ and Hummingbird and Sun and Novell for damages. What a set of *ds. Can't they get basic technology like this to be user friendly? Or are they serving a different set of masters than we think - all being paid by the Japs and Chinese to keep America's productivity down?

Configuring CDE

If you haven't figured it by now, yes, I've given up on the XO laptop completely. I don't even _look_ at it anymore unless I'm searching for something that might be under it. I've got two left. If you need them, please just ask.

Anyhow, now my predicament is that Solaris-CDE doesn't respond when I try to do stuff like:

AltTab root|icon|window f.next_workspace

It retains the old definition of the Alt-Tab combo which is f.next_key. Why is Solaris out to get me now? I have to give it to CDE - it's one of the crappiest window managers ever created. You now know why Sun's stock never recovered. Khosla probably wrote the code for this.

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Mathemagica

Stuff I didn't know you could do. This is what happens when you have so many smart people looking at something.

Mathematica puts out a symbolic expression that you can read. Now, you think about publishing that - using LaTex. Luckily for you, all you have to do is:

In[3]:= TeXForm[%]

Combine that with Tex's fault tolerance and you have a big time-saver here.

Another thing I didn't know you could do - but, being a shell guy I thought I'd try:

The % in the above refers to the output of the previous submission. But, can you refer to the nth output? Sure can, just use %n. That's a handy one too. Good job Steve.