Semesters are start in 10 days, so hardly had the time to hack on pygsmd. I had to implement multithreading for the first time in my life and that was real fun. But I had to cope up with a stupid race condition which fortunately has been fixed after gdb put things in perspective. Phonesim has been really useful this time, Now I can thoroughly check my code if it works on my desktop before creating premature borky packages. Anyways messages are getting handled now, after borrowing some code from libgsmd-tool. As a result functions like pygsmd.network.get_oper() return correctly. So now I can turn my attention to sms now. As always please please check the code out, and if you find some glitches report bugs that may be present aplenty.

Heres a screenshot of the latest revision 76 in action, Note that loads have changed internally since the last one.

A big thanks to sridhar and the gang maintaining the 8085, Its around 12 midnight now and am studying for my microprocessor semester practicals. But my hand writing is next to shit, So bad that even I cannot understand it. To make matters worse I had to study from a record which was written in a hurry. Anyway all my mnemonics, opcodes in my record are messed up, so needed a way to properly sync up the two and learn.

Ah, thats where gnusim8085 is currently saving my arse. My buddies: tuxmaniac, slytherin, srid, I owe you guys big time. You have no idea how gnusim8085 is helping me right now.

Viva la Linux et FOSS!

Oh, got to study now, dang internet is addictive..Leaving you with a couple of screenshots showing a program of 16 bit addition..

The opcode listing…

Get gnusim8085 here

The packages are there in the repositories of gentoo, debian and ubuntu..so its only a command/click away.

Currently enjoying every moment of it. Man, I am getting goosebumps…

UPDATE: For those of you who wish to know how I did the exams, this should help to explain scroll down that page..

Tada…

So the python-gsmd bindings for the gsm daemon in Openmoko works!! Checkout the screenshot. I had ssh’ed into the phone after setting up USB networking so that I might get a shell to work on.

Note the uname on the lower right terminal showing the ARM architecture of the neo.

The terminal on the lower left shows the logs from the libgsmd-tool shell.

And in the terminal on the top, we have a python session leading to a call to my good ol’ mom.

Now that the code sorta works, I have moved it to the projects.openmoko.org. Click here to browse the source. Note that theres another project by zecke which wraps up mickeyl’s libmokogsmd. Ours wraps up gsmd directly and creates a sort of raw interface to the daemon.

Too bad semester will be starting soon, so work will be a bit slow. So please please please ping us if you want to help.

P.S: The screenshot is from the gentoo livecd…=D

Went to SSNCE for Converita, symposium by the IT fellows. As usual registered for all the events to increase my probability of taking home some money. And yes we did, This time I partnered with my long time school buddy, Prem after a long time for Quiz named Conquizta. Prelims was ok and we had a feeling we would get through and yes, we did. From the finals, it was pretty clear the quizmaster had made good use of the trivia sections of Wikipedia..yay..

Thats were we sucked, we had a pretty unproductive quiz finals with everyone around us scoring points. My college friends even walked out and that was pretty demotivating =(. But we picked up pace in the last three rounds, one of which was the weirdest ever..In the end we won the third place taking home a post dated check of 2000/–..Well another month covered =D….

…Cheers to the Organizers

Forget the commercial crap talk aimed at Trolltech, but they have just announced support for FIC neo1973. For those of you who dont what neo is, it the first device that will run the OpenMoko stack. The announcement comes as a surprise since Trolltech is opening up Qtopia Phone Edition, which was non-free previously, under GPL. Just like QT, theres also a separate commercial license.

I even got to flash the preview build of qtopia and I must admit that its ahead of Openmoko, if the age of qtopia platform is to ignored. I could make calls on the neo with qtopia running on it. I had to struggle with the keyboard since switching between character set is done by scrolling an invisible line to the left of the screen. Otherwise its Ok, all said I somehow like the Orange + Black interface for Openmoko and much work has been done in the OM 2007.2 builds.

This is really interesting since buyers of neo would get a chance to flash whatever they want, qtopia or OM, so the freed phone is all set to rock. Expect another holy flame war? Openmoko vs. Qtopia..Naaa I don’t think so..=)

Anyway the links here: http://trolltech.com/company/newsroom/announcements/press.2007-09-17.9260755578

Get the images here: http://www.qtopia.net/modules/devices/openmoko.php

More info on running qtopia on neo: http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Qtopia_on_Neo_1973

So went to NRCFOSS today to play around with the kit which had arrived. The kit was safely locked up inside the Comm Lab and immediately got down to business. Really took the kit apart, got hold of the neo. It was’nt too heavy nor too light. Maybe my ngage weighing a ton caused the possible misconception. The “hacker’s lunchbox” was complete with,

• The neo

• Two batteries, two SD cards and two card adapters

• lanyard, carry strap, pouch

• Earphones, USB connecting cable

• Debug Board and stuff

• A card with some information regarding warranty and all.

• …and a sexy screw driver and a stylus thats a pen, laser pointer and a flash light as well!

• Sadly they missed the guitar pick, or its hiding somewhere =(

I immediately pried open the device to see what was inside, the back side was easily removable. Hmm..That could be dangerous since if the device falls down the back panel would come off easily (I wasn’t allowed to test the theory..). Put the battery in and booted the device. I was welcomed by a gentle vibration and a glorious splash screen that looked gorgeous on the high res screen. The bootup was ofcourse continued till a kernel panic with an error that init could not be found. Really looking forward to flash this baby and start coding…

Check my flickr for more pics and this video clip with the neo booting up

After weeks of waiting and sleepless nights guessing where our Openmoko advanced kit (Big thanks to NRCFOSS and Dr. Sreenivasan for sponsoring us the device) was, the kit has finally reached MIT and I got to touch the freed phone. The phone is quite handy and not as heavy as I expected it to be. Pics of the kit soon, when I go there on Monday.

The project roadmap is here. http://projects.openmoko.org/docman/view.php/14/5/python-openmoko-roadmap.pdf

We are aware of how OpenEmbedded already has support for python, but one of our major areas of interests is optimizing the core, stripping it down kinda like what Nokia did for their Symbian based smartphones…Hop in if you are interested..

Went to hyderabad after atul jha, (koolhead17) invited me to mukt.in from 24 to 26th of August. Without sponsors, lot of hurdles and with awesome help from the students of Govt Institute of Electronics, Secbad, the team comprising Atul, Krish and Pavi pulled off an event which was wonderful, enlightening and inspiring. Special thanks to Mr. Raju, Sun and Thyagu from ILUGC for lifting the crowd up and having them in splits. A special mention to neenaoffline (Ravi) and Shriphani, the young kids who came and helped them out, along with the students, Mustaffa (motta), Mustaffa (lambha) and Balram who volunteered for the event.

An interesting thing to note was the crowd even after the blasts in hyderabad occurred, though less than the previous two days, was significant.

Flickr snaps here http://www.flickr.com/photos/7611195@N06/

The semi-official?, snaps here http://neenaoffline.one09.net/mukt/main.php

The thought of college tomorrow, brrr..

Been long since I blogged. Not feeling lazy or something, but been kinda busy.

First stop, we had a 5 day trip to Kerala with my college buddies. Was nice to go back to a place which I once called home. I still dont know why my friends didnt like the banana bajjis and the big rice there. The tour was fun although I came home with a bad cold. Flickr snaps here.

Next thing, symposium preparations for my department are in full swing. Its been named Infovista much to my chagrin. The site is online at http://www.infovista.in. The site is drupal powered and hosting is sponsored my #l-i buddy, jace.

Oh, and NRCFOSS has sponsored us a neo. We have been billed, waiting for the baby to reach us..:D

pygsmd wrapping up libgsmd seems to work, Don’t get the “Couldn’t connect to gsmd warning” now. Instead, getting “Busy line” as is evident from the screenshot. Best of all, I could ssh into the neo (of course which runs on qemu). So hacking has been a bit easy since I can use my keyboard properly without using the slow onscreen keyboard on the neo. Waiting for the neo to arrive to see if it works on the device. Only the voicecall part of libgsmd has been written, that too its quite clunky. Check out the emacs window showing that an attempt has been made to connect to the gsm daemon and note the terminal in the foreground with the output of uname after ssh’ing

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