blog/archive/2010/09/09.rss

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   4                 <title>Petter Reinholdtsen - Entries from September 2010</title>
   5                 <description>Entries from September 2010</description>
   6                 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>
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   9         <item>
  10                 <title>My first perl GUI application - controlling a Spykee robot</title>
  11                 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_first_perl_GUI_application___controlling_a_Spykee_robot.html</link>
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  13                 <pubDate>Wed, 1 Sep 2010 21:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
  14                 <description>
  15 &lt;p&gt;This evening I made my first Perl GUI application.  The last few
  16 days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently
  17 aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought
  18 that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least.
  19 It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to
  20 allow me to drive the robot around.  I picked PerlQt as I have had
  21 positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes
  22 browsing the web for examples.  Using Qt Designer seemed like a short
  23 cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and
  24 compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from
  25 libqt-perl.  Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and
  26 drive around.&lt;/p&gt;
  27
  28 &lt;p&gt;The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for
  29 controlling the robot.  Here is an small example on how to use it:&lt;/p&gt;
  30
  31 &lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
  32 use Spykee;
  33 Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[0]} = $_[1]});
  34 my $host = (keys %robot)[0];
  35 my $spykee = Spykee-&gt;new();
  36 $spykee-&gt;contact($host, &quot;admin&quot;, &quot;admin&quot;);
  37 $spykee-&gt;left();
  38 sleep 2;
  39 $spykee-&gt;right();
  40 sleep 2;
  41 $spykee-&gt;forward();
  42 sleep 2;
  43 $spykee-&gt;back();
  44 sleep 2;
  45 $spykee-&gt;stop();
  46 &lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
  47
  48 &lt;p&gt;Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could
  49 peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to
  50 implement the protocol used by the robot.  I&#39;ve implemented several of
  51 the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera
  52 support to make it possible to control the robot from remote.  First I
  53 want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring
  54 the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot
  55 without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux,
  56 so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing
  57 going. :).&lt;/p&gt;
  58
  59 &lt;p&gt;Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out
  60 where to make it available first.  I will add a link to
  61 &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/robot/&quot;&gt;the NUUG wiki&lt;/a&gt; for
  62 those that want to check back later to find it.&lt;/p&gt;
  63 </description>
  64         </item>
  65
  66         <item>
  67                 <title>Some notes on Flash in Debian and Debian Edu</title>
  68                 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_Flash_in_Debian_and_Debian_Edu.html</link>
  69                 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_Flash_in_Debian_and_Debian_Edu.html</guid>
  70                 <pubDate>Sat, 4 Sep 2010 10:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
  71                 <description>
  72 &lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote&quot;&gt;Debian
  73 popularity-contest numbers&lt;/a&gt;, the adobe-flashplugin package the
  74 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
  75 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
  76 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
  77 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
  78 installed.&lt;/p&gt;
  79
  80 &lt;p&gt;In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
  81 («&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&amp;do=view&amp;target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf&quot;&gt;Skolelinux
  82 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
  83 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs&lt;/a&gt;»), one of the most important problems
  84 schools experienced with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian
  85 Edu/Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
  86 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
  87 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
  88 good reason to stay with Windows.&lt;/p&gt;
  89
  90 &lt;p&gt;I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
  91 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
  92 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
  93 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
  94 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
  95 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
  96 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
  97 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
  98 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
  99 pages they want to visit.&lt;/p&gt;
 100
 101 &lt;p&gt;This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
 102 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
 103 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
 104 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
 105 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
 106 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
 107 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
 108 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
 109 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
 110 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
 111 accept the new package into Squeeze.&lt;/p&gt;
 112 </description>
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