I dug out my Sharp Zaurus and flashed it with Poky Linux. It has a really clean interface. I prefer it to OpenMoko in terms of simplicity. I was close to getting my wireless card talking to my Airport Extreme BS but gave up in the end. I need to read up on WPA.
Archive for February, 2008
Poky Linux
Feb 23
Skyhook’s LBS
Feb 5
So I downloaded Skyhook’s SDK and ran the example program. I was pretty freaked out when it located me to right outside my house! So how did it do that? Well, some time back, possibly 2 years ago I did some war driving with my Sharp Zaurus hooked up to a GPS. I literally drove about a mile and clocked up a 100 or so AP’s. I uploaded the log to wigle. So I am guessing this information made it’s way from wigle’s database to Skyhook’s. Either that or somebody else war drove past my house and provided the information to Skyhook! Anyway, I think that with some commerical backing this approach could prove very useful for location-based applications.
thumbtribes-client_0.17
Feb 5
This update contains some design changes. The client is now threaded.
Download instructions here.
Dave
Feb 4
I have been working on a “bot” for thumbtribes called “Dave”. Dave has a couple of jobs. He can make sure the connection does not idle. He can also inform you of new posts to the thumbtribes site. He is pretty basic right now but will get some more duties. It would be nice at some point to give him AI!
Site updates
Feb 1
I have migrated thumbtribes to a new server using MySQL instead of PostgreSQL. There may be some teething issues. Drupal handles things differently between the two. For example, in MySQL, Drupal uses a ’sequences’ table to obtain the next id for various primary keys. In PostgresSQL it uses functions to obtain these values instead. The API between the server and database also changed. Due to these technical obstacles and time constraints I have not migrated old test accounts. Thanks to those who tested out the old thumbtibes site. I expect to do some more work on the server side of things and hold off client releases. I plan on working on “twitter” style updates to the client.