Dossy's Blog

Are you a student that meets Google’s eligibility criteria, who is interested in contributing to an Open Source project this summer? Google’s Summer of Code 2009 is on, and once again, the Tcl community has been accepted as a mentoring organization, which includes AOLserver.

Students can apply until the deadline of 19:00 UTC on April 3rd. If you have any questions about GSoC or AOLserver’s involvement in it, please ask me! I’ll try to help answer whatever questions you might have.

Good luck to all the students and mentoring organizations this summer!

Tags: Google Summer of Code 2009, Tcl, AOLserver, open source

I make extensive use of Google throughout the day and I’ve always got “g” set up as the keyword for a Quick Search in Firefox. However, I also spend a lot of time at shell prompts, and sometimes I don’t want to bounce to a browser just to Google for something.

So, tonight, I wrote a small Tcl script that lets me “google for” at the prompt. Just save the previous link and rename it to “google” and move it somewhere in your PATH like /usr/local/bin, then make it executable with chmod 755.

The script requires Tcl with tDOM installed, as well as Tidy–both of these things are installed out-of-the-box on MacOS X 10.5 Leopard.

Once you get the script installed, you can do something like this:

If you notice, for Google search queries that have a special result like the one above, the script displays it separately before the results. The script also emits the search query URL so you can just Control-click on it in Terminal and then select “Open URL” and have it pop up in your browser, which also works for any of the search result URLs.

I don’t know if anyone else would find this script useful, but it’s already saved me a ton of time–especially when I’m on a slow 64 kb/s GPRS connection like I am this evening. Either way, I’m releasing this script into the public domain.

Tags: Google, Tcl, open source

Apparently, South African Airways runs some kind of Linux for their in-flight entertainment system.

Of course, on the leg of the trip from New York to Senegal, the flight staff kept rebooting the system trying to get it to work, with very little luck. Most of the time we just stared at the Linux boot process hanging, trying to talk to the NFS server. Fortunately, they got it working for the Senegal to South Africa leg of the trip.

Tags: South African Airways, Linux, fail

So, I have a TiVo Series 2 stand-alone DVR with a Product Lifetime subscription. For years, I’ve had it connected to the home network using a Linksys WUSB11 wireless network adapter, but it finally died. I went and grabbed a Linksys WUSB54G as a replacement, but found out that the TiVo doesn’t support it. No problem, I know the TiVo runs Linux and there’s plenty of documentation on how to “hack” the TiVo so I can load my own kernel modules on it, etc.

It turns out that the Linksys WUSB54G v4 uses the Ralink 2570 chipset. Fortunately, there’s been effort on native Linux drivers for the Ralink family of wireless chipsets. The hurdle, of course, is that the TiVo’s MIPS R5432 is big-endian, so it presents a bit of a challenge porting the driver to the TiVo.

Working off the latest code for the legacy rt2570 driver from CVS, I’ve gotten it to compile using TiVo’s Linux 2.4.20 kernel. Loading the module, however, results in this:

rt2570: init
usb.c: registered new driver rt2570
rt2570: idVendor = 0x13b1, idProduct = 0xd
rt2570: idVendor = 0x13b1, idProduct = 0xd
rt2570: using permanent MAC addr
rt2570: Active MAC addr: 00:12:17:89:f5:02.
rt2570: driver version 1.0.0
Unaligned Access to 0x80230b2b in kernel mode at 0xc0217be4
Unaligned Access to 0x80230b2d in kernel mode at 0xc0217c04
Unaligned Access to 0x80357076 in kernel mode at 0xc021b3dc
Unaligned Access to 0x80357076 in kernel mode at 0xc021b408
Unaligned Access to 0x80357076 in kernel mode at 0xc021dc2c
Unaligned Access to 0x80357076 in kernel mode at 0xc021dc08
Unaligned Access to 0x80357076 in kernel mode at 0xc021cd8c
Unaligned Access to 0x80230f47 in kernel mode at 0xc0217be4
Unaligned Access to 0x80230f49 in kernel mode at 0xc0217c04
Unaligned Access to 0x80231155 in kernel mode at 0xc0217be4
Unaligned Access to 0x80231157 in kernel mode at 0xc0217c04

So, now I get to go fishing through /proc/ksyms and try to fix up all these unaligned access errors. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get through all of this and get the driver working.

Anyone out there have experience porting Linux device drivers like this? Got any tips or techniques that might help me? I’d really love any help I can get …

Update: I’m posting my debugging progress in a rt2×00 forum thread. Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow, right?

Update: I’ve gotten it working! I’ve addressed the majority of the unaligned access traps and I can now use my WUSB54G as a wireless NIC on my TiVo! Here’s a patch against rt2570-cvs-2008102616 of the driver and the corresponding kernel module binary:

• rt2570-tivo-mips.patch
• rt2570.o.gz (1.42 MB)
  MD5: 64605e019929db714d583d160a6b513c

If you have a SA2 TiVo and want to use a Linksys WUSB54G as your wireless NIC, this driver is what you want. It works for me, anyway!

Tags: Linux, TiVo, open source, hacking, Linksys WUSB54G, Ralink 2570

So, the AOLserver.com site, which has been hosted at SourceForge for years, is effectively “down” right now as requests to it are returning a “Error establishing a database connection” error. I’ve been a paying subscriber for SourceForge since 2004 because they claim to provide “priority support”–whatever that means.

Well, I went and opened “priority” support tickets to try and get the AOLserver.com site back online. To put it gently, the response I received was less than useful. I mean, three hours before I get a response–a canned response–which doesn’t even resolve my problem?

I recognize there’s not much I can do at this point, but what I can do is “vote with my wallet” … I’ve cancelled my SourceForge subscription today:

The clock is now ticking: they have just under a year to show that they can seriously run a valuable service correctly, or I won’t be renewing my subscription next year.

Update: Jacob Moorman, Director of Operations at SourceForge.net, emailed me to point out that the IP addresses for SourceForge’s VHOST had changed. Sadly, the DNS for aolserver.{com,net,org} had been set up as A records instead of as CNAME records. So, I’ve sent a request to have the DNS updated.

Tags: SourceForge, subscription, cancelled