Android on the Desktop

Currently I am speccing a call centre and one of our key requirements is to reduce our software administration and maintenance overheads. We are currently trialling Android STBs as terminals for the agents. Our hope is that their browser is sufficient to work with our bespoke web site and we will not have to do any major maintenance on the boxes as they are locked down to just the browsing app. Read More...

Legacy FreeBSD serial IO with Freetronics Leostick

Freetronics (www.freetronics.com) builds an Arduino Leonardo compatible device called the Leostick (www.freetronics.com/collections/arduino/products/leostick) that plugs in to a USB port and provides a builtin serial, keyboard and mouse emulation. Unfortunately, versions of FreeBSD before 9.0 don’t recognise the serial port. A hacked version of the FreeBSD modem driver can be created to allow communication with the Leostick. Read More...

Vale Charlie Bravo

Yesterday, Thursday 11 April 2013, we put down a member of our herd - Charlie Bravo - a warmblood we acquired approximately a decade ago but knew a few years earlier. Read More...

Broadband: Consumption vs Production

The Coalition has launched its broadband policy (from a technical perspective little more than an update of its previous fibre to the node copper to the home policy) and from a technical point of view it has only 2 advantages it is deliverable for a lower price sooner.

Why should Australia stick with our existing fibre to the home strategy rather than go with something less expensive we can have sooner? Read More...

Legacy FreeBSD Eleven and Etherten Serial Support

Freetronics (www.freetronics.com) builds a range of Arduino compatible devices in particular the Etherten and the Eleven. FreeBSD’s (www.freebsd.org) does not natively support the serial interface of these devices. Fortunately the uarduno (mrp3.com/uarduno-1.02.tar.gz) port does and I am happy to report that this works on FreeBSD 5.4 and works at least with Etherten and probably with the Eleven with a trivial addition to its configuration file. Read More...

Management by Inflight Magazine

The press rang with claims that Marissa Mayer had ban from working at home a month ago (Feb 2013) citing her review of VPN logs as the basis for her decision. My issue here is not whether this is the right or wrong thing for Yahoo! but should others follow her lead and whether using the found data (i.e. data collected for other purposes) to support their decisions will lead to a good outcome. Read More...