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Gettting rid of the interrupt table on the AVR

Sometimes, programm size is everthing. This is especially true, if you are coding for a very constraint system like the AVR or you are going to write a bootloader, which should be as small as possible.

Well, I actually hit both of the categories, as I program a bootloader for a customer's project for a 8k-flash Atmel. 

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Sparse Broadband

Its being quite on my blog.

Well it has a reason: My broadband connection is failing, and it does currently not look like if this is betting better soon. I knew, that I am on a bad line, but in this case I suppose some other error not in my influence.

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Acer Aspire 5633

Yes, the installation of my replacement laptop is now almost finished. Surely, it will still miss installed packages by this is only a matter of time.

My new laptop is a really nice pieace of hardware, and at the time of writing everthing I need for daily use is working smoothly -- under Linux. But details later this article.

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Windows Vista Licensing

Yesterday, my Laptop suddenly died. Something with the power supply on the mainboard. I spent half the evening disassembling and finding the bug, but it seems deep in the power supply part of the mainboard. Well, that's off topic.

As I currently *really* need a laptop, I hit the store today and left it with a brand new Acre Aspire 5633. This is a really nice machine, and I think you gonna read more about it later, especially about the debian installation i plan.

Debian. Yes, I  I do not plan to use - or even boot - the preinstalled "windows vista home premium", therfore I am planning to sell it. But it is an OEM, which should be not ap problem, as selling this is something Microsoft cannot forbid me, even if they'd love to do: The tried it already to forbid with XP, but the courts ruled that Microsoft is not allowed to forbid selling it. 

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Under the hood: New blog view

It took me some time, but the template for the template is ready.

So its time for the first preview:

Probably, the look will change, but the basic layout template is ready. It is based on YAML, and the focus while coding it was to make more consistent and more easily to change.

ALSA Sound suddendly stops to work on Intel Chipset

On my laptop, equiped with an Centrino chipset, my sound suddenly stopped to work. Well suddendly is the wrong word, as I do not use sound regulary on my laptop.

Also, the kmix applet did not show any problem, as it somehow declared my internal (never used) modem as sound card.  Interrestingly, some applications did manage it to properly playback sound (e.g pidgin), but obviously not using alsa as sound backend.

Today I found some time to look after the problem: Alsa loaded the snd_i810m Kernel module, which is the "Modem Module" for the i810 chipset. If this module is unloaded, sound will immediatly start working again. (Okay, after restarting alsa)

But fiddling around with rmmod and insmod every reboot is not my intention, so I needed a permanent fix:

Blacklisting the offender: uncomment the "snd_i810_m" entry in /etc/modutils/alsa-blacklist

This was my first solution to get it working fast. However, this will disable the modem function, but as I do not need this anyway, I do not care.  If you need it, you simply have to insert the module later in the boot process. 

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La Fonera's IPKG Bug

An Article in the category: Do Not Brick Your Fonera Router. If you break it, you'll have to keep the pieces.

The ipkg binary in the fonera is broken. It is not really the ipkg binary, which is broken. So it can happen, that  -- especially a ipkg remove -- can delete some essential directories. /lib/ for example, effectivly break the router.

But there is an script available, which replaces ipkg to get it safe. Just execute the following (on Fonera)

wget  http://blog.coldtobi.de/gallery/1/ipkg.txt -O /usr/bin/ipgk; chmod 0750 /usr/bin/ipkg   

[Update:] Safer is: