My place to share some bits and bytes

For my small home office I searched for a cheap duplex laser printer which can also make copies.

After some research I found the Brother DCP-8065DN. The price on the website is too high. I got mine for 490 Euro.

That is really cheap if you look at the features the beast offers me:

• Duplex laser printer with PostScript 3 and some other emulations.
• Parallel, USB 2.0 and network connection. (Even IPv6. cool)
• Duplex copies up to 50 sheets at once.
• Scan sheets, put them into a PDF or leave as JPEG and upload it to a FTP server or send per mail.
• Perhaps network scanning. Need to check linux support here, but this has no priority at the moment.

Besides the printer and copy features especially the duplex up to 50 sheets scan feature is just great.

Take a pile of paper you like to get rid of. Put it into the machine and you get a nice PDF uploaded to your FTP. Great. :)

Today we had the 'pleasure' to fiddle with some framebuffer registers on the Neo1973. (Working on this bug).

With OpenOCD and the Debug Board we are able to halt the CPU, write and read to the registers of the framebuffer and see the changes immediately, as the DMA for is still running.

Really nice to be able working on such a level, but a pain to read register values, calculate the what register fields it set, calculate the new one with the fields you like to get set and write it back.

After a short brainstorming with Daniel and Jan we were sure that we need a small script to handle most of this for us. Jan came up with a nice python script.

It connects to the OpenOCD telnet interface and you can just use the register field names to get or set a value. Much more comfortable and easier for rapid testing.

For the last two years my main working machine was a Thinkpad T40p. Nice machine for my day-by-day work, but it doesn't fit the needs of working with Openembedded for OpenEZX and OpenMoko the whole day. :)

Pentium M 1,6GHz, 512MB RAM and 80GB slow notebook hdd is nothing what I would call the right system for building packages and images the whole day.

So I'm now searching for nice components to build my own compile monster. My limit is 1500 Euro without display. It follows a brief list of components I like to have in it:

• Two Opteron CPUs with dual-core.
• 4GB RAM
• Matching motherboard with Gigabit onboard. Good linux support is a must here. I like to use it as production system without playing to much with kernel patches on it.
• At least one 400GB SATA HDD. I'm not sure about raid yet.

My biggest problem is to find matching components. All the different names, versions and marketing foo is a hell for building a system on its own.

If anybody has any hints for good components, just drop me a mail

The FOSDEM is already a week ago. Anyway here are some thoughts from me:

• Developer conferences rock. It gives us the possibility to have in deep technical talks for a full weekend.
• It's amazing to meet all the people in real life. It was the first time I meet many of the Openembedded developer, Sean Moss-Pultz and HTC hacker.

Even with the long road trip, 6 hours, I'll be there next year again.