I bought myself a new toy – MSP-EXP430FR5739 experimenter board. It didn’t stay working long because I ran into the same trouble like the guy here. Mspdebug was complaining about blow fuses. Fix was quite easy thanks to my another toy MSP-EXP430G2 LaunchPad which I luckily bought together with the experimenter board. (more…)
Python setup.py to DEB package
From time to time I hit an interesting Python package which is not available in a DEB package. Setup.py/distutils/setuptools are de facto standard but the base binary distribution command set includes only RPM support. I don’t like python setup.py install. I prefer full installation/purging control via Ubuntu package system. Solution is easy.
Install package python-stdeb and then execute
python setup.py --command-packages=stdeb.command bdist_deb
And your DEB is ready!
Ubuntu encrypted home
I played with my new toy – HP Mini 5103 WT211ES. eCryptfs is not as enterprise as they say. It started to fail on Ubuntu 10.10. And also it is terribly slow especially for seeking. So I was looking for a better solution. I didn’t want the full disk encryption which the alternative CD offers during the installation because the disk is very fast and the CPU is not so fast 
I decided to make a separate partition to host my home directory and other private data. (more…)
Firefox cache and history cleanup
Firefox gets slower by the time. Lots of data is stored in sqlite databases. First step is cleaning cache – Menu>Tools>Clear Private Data – check Cache and Cookies. Other slowing stuff is the browsing history. Cleaning the whole history is not very effective way so why not remove only the oldest items? (more…)
MSPGCC4, debugging
I recently found a forked project MSPGCC4. It is built against newer GCC and GDB. It supports multiple versions. I tried GCC 4.4.3 and GDB 7.0.1. The compilation and installation is very easy. Just run the buildgcc.sh, choose wanted versions and watch the progress.
MSP430, GCC, mspdebug
This article describes brief steps to setup a Linux development tools for MSP430 MCU – compiler and programmer. MSP430 is not as well linux-supported as AVR or 8051 but fortunately there are ways to make it working.
Internet Explorer fixators – PNG, box model, …
The old and painful problem with Internet Explorer is the PNG transparency. IE6 is still so wide-spread, damn. Few clever people created a JavaScript fixes for that. The best I know is iepngfix. It has a little limitation and works for IMG, background-image, …
Besides the PNG transparency Internet Explorer has many other holes. Missing CSS selectors, wrong box model, … I found IE7 script which patches most of those holes. So great! Now I can use selectors like DIV > DIV or DIV + DIV everywhere. It also fixes the box model (total width = margin + border + padding + width) and min-height/min-width. It tries to fix the PNG transparency too but it is not as well tuned as the iepngfix. You should remove this path of the script.
Transition to FastCGI
Apache’s prefork MPM is a very heavy memory eater. Thirty instances together with PostgreSQL can consume more then 1.5GB of memory. I have already managed the PostgreSQL to become modest. Now the Apache is the target.
Filtering duplicities in XSLT
I had a problem: I needed to find some tags in a subtree without duplicities. The duplicity was determined by a tag’s attribute value. (more…)
MagicDraw – UML tool
Good (meaning many features and userfriendly) and cheap UML modeling tool is a hard candy to find. I need at least following stuff:
- use case, class, activity and sequence diagrams
- not just dummy diagrams but also some semantics
- ability to run under Linux