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 cheap 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 ther 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 possibilty 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.

BOUML 4.2.1 ebuild

The latest BOUML ebuild. Enjoy. If you’d like to make it yourself next time, then use the

ebuild [path_to_the_new_ebuild] digest

command to create auxilliary files within the portage overlay.

BOUML 4.2 ebuild

It’s been quite a while since the release of BOUML 4.2 but its ebuild is still missing in gentoo-protage. Having found few minutes of spare time I decided to create its homebrew version to share with all of you who sit there and wait looking forward to it being published on the gentoo-portage website. The uuencoded version is included below. Enjoy!

Beijing 2008 - boycott olympics with your wallets

In these modern times protesters in Tibet and anywhere else around the world will be regarded only as a symbolic gesture by those who decided to organise and support olympic games in Beijing. It will make a little difference (unfortunately) when it comes to reality of the ongoing events. But we can do something that will be recognized and will matter to those organisations and corporations - use our wallets against them. The black list of official Beijing 2008 sponsors and partners is a list of companies whose products and services shall be avoided, so they are punished for the steps they have taken to participate in this shameful event.

Don’t buy their products/services, but instead choose from their direct market competitors:

• Coca Cola (Coca-Cola, Fanta, Sprite, Diet Coke, Burn, Schweppes, Kropla Beskidu, Cappy, etc.)
• Mars (Mars, Snickers, Twix, Starburst, M&Ms, Skittles, Whiskas, Pedigree, Royal Canin, Uncle Ben’s, etc.)
• Kodak
• McDonalds
• Lenovo
• General Electric
• Samsung
• Panasonic
• Adidas
• Volkswagen
• UPS
• Budweiser
• Schenker Logistics
• VISA
• Omega

Use your mind - use your wallet.

The product names used in this blog entry are for identification purposes only. All trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

[SOLVED] tuner 0-0061: tuner type not set

I was bothered by this bug since the 2.6.14 kernel, and it has effectively stopped me from performing any upgrade till the very last week. Soon before I have found a tip from Michał Kochanowicz which prompted me to investigate the issue personally. By extensive use of printk within the i2c and v4l modules I managed to track down the root cause. It happened only for the PixelView PlayTV card (card_id=16) for which the parameters definition in the bttv-cards.c file was missing assignment of the tuner_addr and radio_addr fields. Consequently in the attach_inform function the TUNER_SET_TYPE_ADDR command was not sent to the tuner’s driver. The patch is as simple as that:

--- drivers/media/video/bt8xx/bttv-cards.c.orig	2007-07-08 23:32:17.000000000 +0000
+++ drivers/media/video/bt8xx/bttv-cards.c	2008-03-01 20:48:19.183306298 +0000
@@ -588,6 +588,8 @@ struct tvcard bttv_tvcards[] = {
.needs_tvaudio	= 1,
.pll		= PLL_28,
.tuner_type	= -1,
+		.tuner_addr	= ADDR_UNSET,
+		.radio_addr	= ADDR_UNSET,
},
[BTTV_BOARD_WINVIEW_601] = {
.name		= “Leadtek WinView 601″,

BOUML speaks python

well, well, well… kinda’ news that makes you jump in joy. According to the changelog the python support is far from being as mature as it is for c++ or java, nevertheless that is the thing which progress I’m gonna track within next weeks/months. If only someone would update the BOUML’s ebuild in the portage tree…

BOUML - you gotta like it

I just got back to playing with BOUML - a really nice UML modeler and code generation tool. Earlier this year I successfuly managed to create state machine model and from it generate working C++ code to include in a framework testing part of the large embedded system functionality. This time I’m trying to employ BOUML to bring to life a library I was planning to release long time already (more details soon?). Anyway, working with BOUML is getting more and more interesting, and with each step it reveals more and more of its hidden gems (along with few flaws, naturaly).