blog.V1ru8.net

Change happens

Thomas Post — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:55:12 +0000

Lets start in spring this year. The semester was my last semester of my undergraduate study. So I started to look for a job. That should be just a temporary job for at most one year. Because I would like to start a Postgraduate study in a year. So I searched for an internship in the US or the UK (a goal was to improve my english skills). This took a lot of time and it turned out to be a fight against the world economic crisis. Finally after a few months I gave up! The crisis won.

In June/August Roman and I worked together on our Bachelor Thesis. During this time I started to search for a new job. I got connected to a few people who searched a iPhone/Mac developer in the area of Zurich. But nothing got really concrete. So I took the time and wrote an application to equinux. A well known german Mac software company based in Munich. I went to the job interview and somehow I made a good impression. Which means I finally got the job and I’m totally glad to start there on October 1st.

After we finished our Thesis we all went to the canary islands and celebrated the completion of our study. We made up the role that we don’t share photos from this week so no photos here, sorry. After we returned, we had to present and defend our Thesis. That went very well and we’ve got a very good mark. As far as we know the best in our branch of study.

In the last few weeks I finally moved to Munich which is definitely harder then to get a job there . Currently I just have a temporary solution to stay there but a definite solution is close. I’m already starting to really like this city and germany. And of course I visited the Oktoberfest!

Last weekend I went back to the place where I studied for the last three years for the graduation ceremony. We all enjoyed it and celebrated it condignly with a good party afterwards. Now I’m “Bachelor of Science FHNW in Computer Sciences with a Specialization in Distributed Software Systems”.

Do to the fact that I signed an employment contract with equinux, I will stop developing my own applications and completely focus on my work at equinux. So I think that’s pretty much what happens in the last 1/2 year. I enjoyed the time of changes but I’m also glad to finally start at equinux this week.

Bye Bye iPhoneNotes

Thomas Post — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:43:01 +0000

As to the fact that iPhone OS 3.0 supports now notes synchronization itself. I removed iPhoneNotes from my homepage and from MacUpdate.
bye bye iPhoneNotes
If you still want iPhoneNotes you can download it here: iPhoneNotes 0.8

Video Filters in OpenCV

Thomas Post — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:58:14 +0000

For the “Audio and Video Processing” lecture tomorrow I had to write some simple video filters. The professor recommended to use the DirectShow SDK. But everyone who knows me knows that when there is a way to do something without Windows I will do it without! So I used the OpenCV library from Intel. Which I know from my last semester project. I wrote a little program who uses the iSight as video source. (based on the OpenCV XCode example project) You can select 8 diffrent video filters by pressing number 1-8 on your keyboard.

0: no filter
1: 3×3 Sobelfilter Horizontal
2: 3×3 Sobelfilter Vertical
3: 3×3 Laplace
4: 3×3 Box Filter
5: 3×3 Gauss Filter
6: 5×5 Gauss Filter
5: 5×5 Box Filter
6: 7×7 Box Filter (overflow)

With the key ‘t’ you can add an additional filter who generates four abstract colored pictures.

Downloads:

Sourcecode: Filters.c
XCode Project: Filters.zip
OpenCV.framework
Compiled Binary: FaceTracker.app.zip

LPC-P2148

Thomas Post — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 20:10:50 +0000

Last week I got my LPC-P2148 ARM7 micro-controller. It’s a pretty nice development board with two serial ports, usb device controller, sd/mmc card slot, AD and DA converters and some other useful stuff.

At the start it was very hard to get it work for me. I’m a total newbie on arm controllers. In school we always had intel processors and programmed them with windows. But now I wanted to program it with Mac OS X so I needed an extra USB/Serial/JTAG adapter. In the starer kit I got an OpenOCD-USB adapter which is totally free under the GPL terms and works perfectly with Mac OS X.

To get that setup to work under Mac OS X (10.5.6) you need the following software parts:

OpenOCD
ARM-ELF-GCC (Download the compiler and follow the instructions under “Installation”)
Of corse you need the apple developer tools installed for make and some other useful tools

Now how to get these things set up:

libusb and libftdi can you easy install with the following commands (execute them inside the corresponding directory):

./configure make sudo make install

For openocd you need to add some parameters for configure:

./configure --enable-ft2232_libftdi --enable-usbprog make sudo make install

Now we should be able to start openocd from the command with the following output:

oPostBookPro:~ tpost$ openocd Open On-Chip Debugger 0.1.0 (2009-03-25-18:33) Release BUGS? Read http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/openocd/trunk/BUGS $URL: https://kc8apf@svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/openocd/tags/openocd-0.1.0/src/openocd.c $ Can't find openocd.cfg

So we need to configure openocd to work with the lpc-p2148 board. I use these two configs (openocd-usb.cfg and lpc2148.cfg) for the following openocd.cfg

source [find cfg/openocd-usb.cfg] source [find cfg/lpc2148.cfg]

These two cfg’s are mostly copied from the configurations shipped with the oepnocd source. I only added a few lines.

#making gdb debugging work gdb_breakpoint_override hard gdb_memory_map enable

Now we are able to connect to the controller:

PostBookPro:openocd tpost$ openocd -f openocd.cfg Open On-Chip Debugger 0.1.0 (2009-03-25-18:33) Release BUGS? Read http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/openocd/trunk/BUGS $URL: https://kc8apf@svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/openocd/tags/openocd-0.1.0/src/openocd.c $ jtag_speed: 5 force hard breakpoints Info : JTAG tap: lpc2148.cpu tap/device found: 0x4f1f0f0f (Manufacturer: 0x787, Part: 0xf1f0, Version: 0x4) Error: JTAG tap: lpc2148.cpu got: 0x4f1f0f0f (mfg: 0x787, part: 0xf1f0, ver: 0x4) Error: JTAG tap: lpc2148.cpu expected 1 of 1: 0xffffffff (mfg: 0x7ff, part: 0xffff, ver: 0xf) Error: trying to validate configured JTAG chain anyway... Warn : no telnet port specified, using default port 4444 Warn : no gdb port specified, using default port 3333 Warn : no tcl port specified, using default port 6666

(Maybe someone can tell my why I get this error? I ignored it by now and I haven’t had any problems)

How we can see there is now running a telnet server on port 4444 (you can connect to it and take a look at the controller) and a gdb remote debugging daemon on 3333. I use the gdb with an init script. Which was very hard to make. The gdb init script:

#load the main.out for debugging symbols file main.out #connect to the remote debugging daemon target remote localhost:3333 #reset and halt the controller monitor reset monitor halt #set MEMMAP to User Flash Mode monitor mww 0xE01FC040 0x0001

#finally upload your program image (.bin or .hex) and restart monitor flash write_image erase /Path/To/Your/Compiled/Program/main.hex ihex monitor soft_reset_halt #break main #continue

Finally we can start the gdb and play around with a program. Be aware that openocd must be started to connect gdb to your controller!

You can get my first try out project here. Press on B1 and you can see the LED1 and hear a beep on the BUZZER. By pressing B2 the LED2 flashes.

More resources:

I’m very glad that I got through all and my controller is now working perfectly fine under Mac OS X. Once again no Windows needed! I hope I find the time to play a bit around with the controller and post some stuff here soon.

My Bachelor Thesis

Thomas Post — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 20:55:21 +0000

Today we (Roman and me) started our bachelor thesis. We had a first meeting with our advising professor, scheduled one with our external customer and already had some problems.

The thesis comprehends the development of a mobile payment application for the iPhone. With this application a customer should be able to pay parking lots from he’s iPhone as easy as possible. Our external customer called ePark24 has already a payment system. That system is a bit circumstantially. So our goal is to take the existing services and put them behind an iPhone application and expand it with some nice, useful and handy features.

Now that service is based on some 0900 numbers. You call them and then you enter your parking location and your license plate – or lot number. To do that automatically we need to dial so called DTMF codes. But that isn’t possible. Simple: Apple forbids to do that!.

The first version of that iPhone App should be available in the iPhone App Store by mid May 2009. I will try to keep you up to date about my thesis and that app on this blog. ePark24 announced our iPhone App already in their january newsletter. Have a look at the bottom of page two.

In this spirit, happy parking!

Google Chart API – An ObjC Framework

Thomas Post — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 10:48:32 +0000

I’m working on a new small iPhone application. An application who can generate some basic charts and export them as an image to your image library or mail them to someone. That application will be based on the google chart API. For that purpose I started writing a tiny Objective-C framework. I published it under a BSD license on that google code project: http://code.google.com/p/gchart-objc/.

It’s currently just a first version 0.1 and it supports just the basic charts and isn’t stable yet. But if someone is interested in supporting me with that project. Just send me a message. There is still a lot to do!

Updates For My iPhone Apps

Thomas Post — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 20:38:31 +0000

The semester is over and I have some time to spend on my iPhone projects. So spend bot of my iPhone apps a small update. Specially the MiGhtyDocs update was overdue.
Marks 1.2

It’s just a small update. It adds the ability to add some notes on every mark. This was a highly requested feature.

If you haven’t already, buy it now on the iPhone App Store for just $0.99

Need more info about Marks? Go to the product page

MiGhtyDocs 0.9

Finally it supports PDF’s!!

Some resizing problems in landscape mode are fixed too and you have now the ability to cache all documents at once.

Get MiGhtyDocs at the iPhone App Store for free! or go to the product page.

10,000+

Thomas Post — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 10:15:51 +0000

Do you find my Apps?

via: http://www.taptaptap.com/
full res. image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tap-tap-tap/3074199062/sizes/o/

Ad Blocking: as simple as possible

Thomas Post — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 21:14:31 +0000

This week I was searching for a simple way to add an ad blocker to Safari. What I’ve found is an excellent solution. It’s just a simple css file! You put it into your user home under ~/Library/Safari/ and afterwards in Safari you go to “Preferences… -> Advanced” and select the style sheet.

Here you go! Ad free surfing!

You can get that css file from http://www.floppymoose.com/ here: userContent.css

A new tiny GUI for the Cisco VPN Client

Thomas Post — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 23:19:56 +0000

Two weeks ago I was so angry about the Cisco VPN Client GUI that I’ve started to build a new tiny GUI for it. Now today I finished a first beta version. I used it for the last week and it worked very well! There is still a lot to do (as always), but the basic functions are implemented e.g. keychain support.
You can download TinyGUI4CV here. Its freeware and if I have time to cleanup everything I will release it as GPL. So enjoy and let me know what’s wrong and what you d’ like to see in a future version.

Download: Version 0.5 Beta