I took the plunge and, at the risk of bricking my Verdex, updated u-boot. I can only begin to describe the improvements! The process was not nearly as perilous as I anticipated (though I did hold my breath when I rebooted the first time). Noteworthy improvements are the ability to load the kernel directly into the U-Boot environment, and the inclusion of ymodem file transfers over the serial line. The former reduces my boot time to a breathtaking 23 seconds, while the latter reduces rootfs flash time via serial connection by more than half!
With a lot of grunting and groaning, a good amount of grepping through forum posts, and gallons of patience (coffee), I have finally got my verdex board to acknowledge my Belkin F5D7050 and bring the interface up. Due to a small bug in the zd1211rw drivers, the device needs to be brought up before an ESSID can be assigned to it. Without doing so, I would receive a permission denied error for a majority of the iwconfig options:
This weekend I spliced together a couple of USB cables to allow me to attach my USB-A devices to the USB-B port on the Console-VX. I have successfully connected my USB thumbdrive, 60Gb iPod, and Vimicro webcam to the tiny board. I still need to compile the video drivers for the camera, but it was quite exciting to see the Verdex mount and search my iPod's 60 gig hard drive.
While stomping around the cDc blog, I came across the Eve. Eve is a network traffic analyzer which gifts its users with a 3D visual representation of the network traffic as it is happening. To be honest the moment I read this a little part of me screamed for joy. I rushed through the site and downloaded the trial version.
I recently came across this job posting in the The Scripts Developer Network forums. It has an interesting brain teaser as a requirement for applying. The brain teaser was stated as: "What is the exponent of the largest power of two whose base seven representation doesn't contain three zeros in a row?" The only stipulation was that the applicant use Python to solve the problem.
I have made an official release of the graph traversal engine, codenamed Alice, today. Alice is an experimental graph traversal algorithm, based loosely on the Breadth-First Search, and having the properties listed in one of my previous posts. For you readers who are curious, you may pick up the path-finding library, its source code, and a small demonstration from the MotomaBASE Sourceforge Page. If anyone takes the time to try it out and play with it, please post your thought here so I can know what you think of it.
I would just like to once again express how unequivocally pleased I am that Microsoft has produced free versions of their Visual Studio IDE, aptly titled Visual Studio Express. A product such as this is a boon to both the software megalith and individual developers alike. It allows would-be developers the freedom to explore the options at hand, without the moral dilemma of pirating software.
