RCMS

General / Linux / New Toys! / RCMS — 1 Comment
14
Nov 08

New Toy!

Fujitsu Stylistic LT C-500

Fujitsu Stylistic LT C-500

Bought for the RCMS project, it’s a hand-held tablet PC (seen here in its docking station). Celeron processor and 256Mb of RAM and a whopping 60Gb hard disk space. Back when we got one for the CVRG robotics lab in 2002, it was the best thing available and cost thousands – today it cost me just over €160 by the time it landed on my door, with customs and vat and whatnot.

The plan is, get the touchscreen working (the fpit driver works but it’s not calibrating properly), and using python, the QT4 library, QT Designer and pyqt, to build a program that could replace the venerable RO Report form used in the rifle club:

RO Report Form

RO Report Form

General / Python / RCMS — 14 Comments
02
Nov 08

Python

One of the downsides of working on a pre-startup project is that you really can’t say much about it. Seriously. You think Cryptonomicon seemed paranoid about security? You’ve just never met the folks who safeguard possible IP for college spin-outs. Yowza. And it’s a shame because some of this stuff is really rather nifty, and it’s been good to not only do some high-level design of low-level stuff, but also to get back to implementing in C and for high-capacity stuff as well.

However, side projects are totally fair game 😀

At the moment, most of my side-project time has gone into a quick script for the rifle club in college. It has to read in a text file and do some basic statistics on the data therein. PHP would blaze through this in a web setting, but to my mind, PHP is out of its depth when not running on a webserver so I thought something else would be more appropriate. Perl is certainly up to the task, as is Ruby and I’ve been wanting to learn Ruby for a while, but some upcoming PhD stuff requires me to know Python, so I figured this would be a good starting point for it, so apt-get install python and away I went.  Continue reading →

General / PHP / RCMS — 19 Comments
26
Jun 08

Emacs FAIL

Okay, no. I gave it a try for a good week. And by the end of the week, I don’t have any way to change basic stuff like fonts or colours, completion is still a mystery, line numbers are buggy, and I’ve not yet seen one single function that made me say “y’know, it’s a pain, but it’s worth it”. I wound up getting not one extra page added to the RCMS project during the entire week because of emacs configuration hell. Frac that for a game of soldiers.

I’ll stick with vim 7. Completion? Got it. Reformatting code? Got it. Testing code syntax in the editor? Got it.

And now, on with the actual work. Y’know, the thing we’re meant to use the editor for in the first place?

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