2 Bit Hacker

This has been a fairly productive week. I’ve been working with the SV24, and so far I’m really happy with it. The one serial port may be a bit of a problem, but we can get around that with USB converters now. Also, I’ve switched from using FreeBSD for our embedded systems to NetBSD. The main reason for this is NetBSD’s USB drivers, supporting a wider range of devices (namely the serial converters.) I had a bit of trouble getting some of my serial interface code ported over, but I managed to get it working.

Also, I’ve been looking into voice modem technology for being about to do voice call notification and dial-in voice status checking. It should be really neat once I get it working. I’ve been mainly looking into using vgetty/mgetty to handle the modem, since that will allow it to do voice and PPP connections. We should be getting the modem in next week, it’s a Zoom USB 56K voice modem, which I’m really hoping will work with NetBSD’s umodem driver.

It should come together really nicely, and should end up being a very slick feature for the product. Whee! I’m all excited about it.

Ended up having a fun weekend, getting to spend a lot of time with Andrea. On Saturday, Derrick decided to go to King Richard’s Faire down in Mass., and once we learned he wouldn’t be back till 9pm, Game Night was cancelled, so I ended up spending the evening with Andrea instead. On Sunday, I dragged Andrea to Parker’s Maple Barn in Brookline for breakfast. We ended up waiting nearly 3 hours for a table, but it was a nice day, so I didn’t really mind. After that Andrea had to go to work, so I took her to her car then wandered home.

While I had been out and about, Derrick and one of his friends had hooked up the DirecTV dish, so I now have television at home. This means I once again get to watch all the wonders of television, such as… umm… Stargate SG-1…. Invader Zim…. I guess that’s about it really, but I’m still happy.

After that, Jason and I went to my parent’s house for dinner. My mom cooked one of my favorite meals, pork and dumpling (is it plural? there’s only one of them…) and I was sent home with plenty of leftovers, then we went and met Andrea at Denny’s after she got out of work. Apparently her boss, the store manager, had passed out that morning, so it was just her and one of the other comanagers doing a floor move, and they didn’t get it all done, so Andrea ended up having to work all of today, which rather sucks. I think I’ll go see her at the mall when I get out of work.

Speaking of work, I got a new toy today! It’s the Shuttle SV24 barebones system. We’re looking into using it for our SimLink-IC product, since it’s less expensive than the SBC and case combo we were using before. It’s a really slick looking aluminum case, and it’s really light as well. So far I’ve thrown in a PIII 933Mhz CPU and one of our spare Seagate drive, and it seems to be doing pretty well. It’s a little tight inside the case, but that’s to be expected. I was a little disappointed by the lack of a second serial port though. Ah well, can’t have everything, I suppose.

Well, none of the things I was looking forward to yesterday actually came to pass. My boss was apparently at something in the morning, so I got no donut, and ADP TotalSource once again forgot that I’m a salary worker and didn’t cut me a check. Andrea ended up going to a club last night, and Jason wasn’t around, and Derrick was sleeping, so I just sat in front of the computer and played Alpha Centauri all night. Whee.

Ah well…. I did spend a little bit of time last night specing out a new computer. I’m looking at an AthlonXP 1800+ on a Gigabyte GA-7DX motherboard. I’d like to get a GeForce3 Titanium video card, but I’m not too clear on the pricing for those yet. Coolerguys.com has a slick looking aluminum chassis that I’m thinking about getting. The ports in the front would be useful for LAN parties.

Right now I’m just sitting at home waiting for Andrea to give me a call back. I think we’re going to carve a pumpkin today, which should be fun. I havn’t done that in years.

I think I have plenty to be happy about this afternoon. Andrea and I are back together and she seems happy again, which makes me happy. Unfortunatly, she guesses 3 of her birthday presents already. I still want to get her one more thing, but I’m not sure what yet.

Today at work we were supposed to have a demo, but the guy didn’t show up because of some emergency. That kindof sucked, but we found a problem with one of my programs, and that gave me time to fix it. It turned out that my program that talks to the serial port was grabbing too many bytes from the port (I’d specify 8 bytes, it would read 8-12 bytes, then claim it only read 8.) I think I’ve fixed it now, and that makes me happy.

Also, tomorrow is Friday, which is both donut day and pay day. yay!

After spending a good chunk of today working on getting DirecTV up and running, I’m pretty much where I started, only with less money and more stuff in the kitchen (and it’s not edible.) Derrick and I were working on setting up the dish until about 5:30, when he decided he should get some sleep before his shift at 10pm. After that, I went and got Jason. He and I went and got an install kit from Wal-Mart, which has all the stuff you don’t know you need to install the dish. However, that didn’t help much either, since after borrowing a drill from John, I learned that the surface we were trying to mount on wasn’t all that stable. Oh well. I’m going to try and get someone to loan me a ladder so we can mount our dish over the downstairs neighbor’s dish at the corner of the house. And I was so looking forward to having TV again.

Well, I got home this morning to discover a half-full can of Coke that was on my dresser had been knocked over by one of Derrick’s cats. That was rather annoying, but I got it cleaned up. I think it was the older one, he was trying to look cute and innocent the whole time I was there.

Anyway, Andrea’s moving into an apartment with her friend Heather this Friday. She’s packing today. Hopefully she’ll be all moved in by Sunday, and we’ll be able to go into Boston or something fun.

Also, I should have my last paycheck from Net-Temps tomorrow. I’m thinking of spending it on an expensive toy. Perhaps an MP3 CD player of some sort, so I can leave my expensive game soundtracks at home. Not sure yet…