BT747 on gentoo

Last week I bought a Pentagram PathFinder P3106 GPS logger device. To use it I decided to install BT747 – a swiss army knife for MTK chipset-based devices – as it is called. First I tried install from portage – it succeeded, but I couldn’t make it to connect to the device. I googled for help, but nothing seemed to work for me. I’ve even installed 2.2 version of rxtx from portage overlay but without aby difference.

Eventually, I found out that I did not have an USB_ACM module (USB Modem (CDC ACM) support) selected and compiled in my kernel. When I did that at least a /dev/ttyACM0 device began being visible in my system after connecting the logger. Then I downloaded and unzipped the newest version of bt747 (not in the portage) and this one worked!

Ricoh Women’s British Open 2009: 2. Florentyna Parker.

Three days of practice at the Royal Lytham and St Annes have passed and there’s time to pick a favourite to win the championship. From what I saw there are some obvious candidates. Paula Creamer was very elaborate with her short game. She’s practices different kinds of shots near the greens and she putted confidently. Many korean players did a great deal of analysis on the greens, making notes on the slopes and ondulations – they are always in the hunt for the title. However, today I saw a certain young player whom we all could be applauding on the coming Sunday.

Ricoh Women’s British Open 2009: 1. Accommodation.

Having done that last year I’m going to see Women’s British Open again in 2009. This year’s competition takes place at the Royal Lytham & St Annes Golf Club in Lytham St Annes. The first step was to find the best accommodation within the area, nearest to the course and with acceptable rates. Eventually I booked a room at The Anchorage B&B in Lytham centre, around 10-minute walk from the links. The place has very positive reviews on the net and the rate for 8 nights in a single ensuite room (breakfast inc.) was only 210 GBP. Couple of weeks ago they still had rooms available so be quick if you’d like to stay there with me.

Some other places to stay in Lytham are listed below. The acompanying information may assist you with your own search.

QT3 – BOUML – CMake: Hello World!

I am going to demonstrate how to combine the two tools, BOUML and CMake, to create the simplest possible QT3-based classic “Hello World” application.

First, in BOUML create a project under a name hello_world in a directory hello_world/model. Then select c++ as a working language. In the browser pane right-click to access the Edit  generation settings menu, where in the “Directory” tab we will enter hello_world/gensrc as a c++ root directory, where all the generated source code will be saved.

Ricoh Women’s British Open 2008: 3. Minea Blomqvist

Minea Blomqvist at the practice area

Before coming to the Women’s British Open in Sunningdale my personal favourites were Suzann Pettersen, Minea Blomqvist, and obviously Annika Sörenstam. It would be either of them I planned to follow, but it happened that I made the final choice on Wednesday during the last practice day – my first full day spent on the course. The decision was made after I approached all of them and asked for an autograph – with respect to my personal reception of their attitude Minea was a clear winner. She was certainly the most open, nicest, kindest, and all-smiles player I met that day, not only when it came to giving the autograph but also when I observed her reaction to the whole situation. At first she seemed a bit surprised that she’s received such fan attention, but then she elaborately signed the photograph for me. Moreover, a while later she spontaneously reacted to Linda Wessberg complaining on the photograph she was signing, leaving her own comments on the happening.

Ricoh Women’s British Open 2008: 2. Transportation.

A great helper if you’re going to use either public transport, be it train or bus, or drive yourself is this terrific journey planner, which will route you between probably any two destinations in the UK. For me the primary means of transportation were trains, specificaly those operated by South West Trains between Bracknell and London, with Sunningdale in between. As for the timetables and ticket information their website has it all, including customized timetables. When buying tickets you may use any of the direct customer service points located at the stations, however, during busy morning and afternoon periods they get crowdy, so standalone ticket machines, both with card and cash payments become a preferred choice.

For the Stanstedt Airport-London centre route I recommend the Terravision bus service. It is fast and with fares within everyones reach.

Ricoh Women’s British Open 2008: 1. Accommodation.

This was the first thing I took care of. My original plan was to look for something cheap and clean – a combination of simplicity and low rates – ideally hostels with single rooms in offer. However, I soon realized that it is rather unlikely to end up finding anything like that. Either my googling skill were poor, or simply there was nothing that would match my target. At that point (middle of May) it seemed that the only viable alternatives were hotels of which vast majority were already booked, and those still having free rooms were either too expensive, unattractive, or simply too distant from Sunningdale. Fortunately, one day I did a search directly through googlemaps and found a guest house in Bracknell. It looked as I found what I was looking for – their rates were low, their location is not that far away from Sunningdale having both bus and train transport, and yes they had free rooms! At first I thought about booking a single room for couple of nights at approx. 40 GBP per night, but then I found out that they offer even cheaper accommodation for at least on week stay (7 nights) for as low as 194 GBP. Eventualy I ended up booking a double room for 215 GBP.

Ricoh Women’s British Open 2008: 0. The Plan.

This year I planned something special for my vacations – a trip to Ricoh Women’s British Open. You may ask why? Well, it’s the only ladies’ major staged in Europe, this summer played on a golfcourse (Sunningdale Golf Club, Berkshire) close to London – a destination easily reachable by low-cost airlines, and the tournament’s entrance fee is much lower than for any men’s event of similar magnitude. In subsequent posts I will describe the basic steps I took to prepare my trip – maybe you might want to go there as well.

Ian Woosnam triumphant in Kraków

This weekend one of the golf courses around Kraków was hosting Parkridge Polish Seniors Championship. Among the star studded field was former Ryder Cup player and captain Ian Woosnam. On Saturday I was following his group and watched his game. Before the final round he was 5-under, two behind the top of the leaderboard and I was hoping to see him winning on Sunday. Unfortunately, yesterday on my way to the golfcourse I got nasty blisters on my feet, which made me today virtually grounded. Thus, the only thing I could do was to watch the live scores on the ET website. What I have missed was Woosnam emptying his bag of birdies – he made 10 of them and a solitary bogey on his way to a one shot victory over Domingo Hospital of Spain with a total score of 14-under. Congratulations!! I am looking forward to see him next year defending the title.

DVD quality scans on GNU/Linux

Yesterday I bought a decent DVD recorder – Lite-ON DH 20A4H. As for now (two DVDs burned) I can’t say a bad word about it. However, one of the reason why I bought a recorder from this particular vendor was support for quality scans of recorded media. For GNU/Linux based OS there is already the QPxTool, which allows for PIE/PIF analysis. Nonetheless, stability of this program leaves some place for improvements. My attention, thus, quickly turned to Wine and possibility to run such tests using win32 apps. I tried CDSpeed from Nero Utilities, but despite positive feedback on the cdfreaks forums I could not run it. Then I tried Kprobe2. It does PIE/PIF analysis, just as QPxTool, but not jitter. Same with DVDInfoPro, which should support jitter scans, but for some reason I cannot have them done.

Maybe one day NeroLinux will support jitter scans, or I will be able to trace bus data flow with CDSpeed run on Win32 to see what is being sent between the system and the hardware. With this in hand I might then write a utility myself, or contribute to the already existing GPL projects.

A tip for other users who’d like to run Kprobe2 or DVDInfoPro: in the Graphics tab of winecfg turn off the option which allows your WM to manage wine apps windows.