This time me and marabo have realized what so called an 'Automatic Tee Up', which is a device used in golf practice.

The device is controlled by an AtMega16 microcontroller and an open source software written by myself and (sooner or later) available on-line.

We are currently looking for sponsors who want to put in test this device on the field and give us feedbacks.

What need to be done

• A more detailed webpage with picture and more video
• A beautiful package for the device and the shaker

If You want more infos contact me.

A video on youtube:

As You can see I've added Google search for indexing this website. The pice of html code written into the sidebar page is simple.

<!-- Google Search -->
<form method="get" action="http://www.google.com/search" style="text-align: center;">
<center>
<img src="img/google.png" /><br />
<input type="text" name="q" size="20" maxlength="255" value="" />
<input type="hidden" name="sitesearch" value="enricorossi.org" />
<input type="submit" value="Search" />
</center>
</form>
<!-- End Google Search -->

The input field "sitesearch" filters the search only on my website, as It happens when you search google with the extension "site:searchonlythissite.zzz" in the search text.

Another piece of simple html code for searching with Yahoo:

<!-- Yahoo! Search -->
<form method=get action="http://search.yahoo.com/search">
<table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0>
<tr><td><div style="border: 1px solid #999; padding: 5px;"><center><a href="http://search.yahoo.com/">
<img src="http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/search/ysan/ysanlogo.gif" border=0></a><br>
<input type="text" name="p" size=19 style="margin: 10px 0 0 0"><br><font size="-2" face="arial, helvetica">
<input type="radio" name="vs" style="vertical-align: middle" value="">Search the web<br>
<input type="radio" name="vs" style="vertical-align: middle" value="enricorossi.org" checked>Search this site</font><br>
<input type="hidden" name="fr" value="yscpb">
<input type="submit" value="Search" style="margin: 5px 0 0 0"></center></div></td></tr>
</table>
</form>
<!-- End Yahoo! Search -->

It's obvious you have to change enricorossi.org into your domain.

My new bank send me signed emails, but theirs CA is not present in debian openssl installation. Looking around into their website I've found the CA certificate called TrustItaliaC1.cer. Downloaded it then

openssl x509 -in TrustItaliaC1.cer -text

It should dump the certificate contents. Unfortunately I didn't find a way to install the certificate as user into my home directory without playing as root which is almost always a bad thing to do, so, to keep the root's modification at minimum, I create a ~/.ssl/certs

mkdir ~/.ssl/certs

move and rename the CA into the new dir as

mv TrustItaliaC1.cer ~/.ssl/certs/mybank.pem

then as root

sudo -i
cd /etc/ssl/certs
ln -s /home/enrico/.ssl/certs/mybank.pem
c_rehash

Now in mutt I can see as verified the emails from the bank. Good.

I usually backup my nokia phone contacts to pc using multisync, now I have to switch from multisync to opensync.

Before you continue, I strongly suggest you make a backup of your phone contacts in some way (funny eh!) because these tools can erase it all, even they tend to ask for a confirmation before.

What I usually do is to sync the phone with a directory in vcard files, then cat these files together in a single large file used in lbdb for my mutt address book.

If you change something in the phone then it will be changed in the files too on the next sync, but if you want to make changes in a file to get to the phone the only way right now seems to remove the old record and add the new one.

Eventually you can always remove the old record and add as the last record number + 1 a new version, this will add your changes to the phone. Keep an eye on opensync web site for updates.

First you need to install these packages:

apt-get install osynctool opensync-plugin-syncml opensync-plugin-file

then create the sync directory:

mkdir /home/enrico/opensync/e71

then

osynctool --addgroup e71
osynctool --addmember e71 file-sync
osynctool --addmember e71 syncml-obex-client
osynctool --configure e71 1

I've modified only this part which off course should match your path:

<Path>/home/enrico/opensync/e71</Path>

Find out your phone mac address with hcitool scan and the channel to connect to with sdptool browse <your mac addr here>. Look at the channel with the same <SDPUUID>00000002-0000-1000-8000-0002ee000002</SDPUUID> used later in the config file. then configure the syncml plugin with:

osynctool --configure e71 2

in which I've modified:

<AdvancedOption>
  <DisplayName>Identifier</DisplayName>
  <MaxOccurs>4294967295</MaxOccurs>
  <Max>4294967295</Max>
  <Name>Identifier</Name>
  <Type>string</Type>
  <Value>PC Suite</Value>
</AdvancedOption>

and

<Bluetooth>
  <MAC>put your mac addr in here</MAC>
  <RFCommChannel>10</RFCommChannel>
  <SDPUUID>00000002-0000-1000-8000-0002ee000002</SDPUUID>
</Bluetooth>

open another terminal and use the bluetooth-agent to provide the pin code (note: you may not need this, depends on your bluetooth install and pairing with the phone):

bluetooth-agent <4 number PIN>

the shoot:

osynctool --discover e71
osynctool --sync e71

Have a nice day.

The problem start playing with rails is that most tutorial out there are based on rails 1.2.6 and doesn't work in rails 2 which is now the standard in debian lenny.

First install ruby and rubygem from debian packages.

Then install rails 1.2.6 in a local writable directory (ex. /home/mygemstuff)

gem install rails --version=1.2.6 --include-dependencies --install-dir /home/mygemstuff

Then we have to make some adjustment to the op-system. As root we link /var/lib/gems/1.8 to out /home/mygemstuff. Then we make rails and rake executable in out path.

cd /var/lib/gems/
rmdir 1.8
ln -s /home/mygemstuff 1.8

If in your path thare is /usr/local/bin than you can simply

cd /usr/local/bin
ln -s /home/mygemstuff/bin/rails
ln -s /home/mygemstuff/bin/rake

now you can do rails demo

and start to playing with it.

Since under Xen debian etch the is no rpm-strap for fedora > 4 I proceed in this way.

Note: This is only a brief explanation, not an Howto nor a step-by-step guide.

• I've installed fedora 8 somewhere with less stuff as possible, manually editing packages and remove any package you can during installation. This reduce fed8 into (only!) 800M filesystem. For simplicity I've used qemu with -no-acpi option as a target system.

• From 'init 1' rsync the whole filesystem excluding /proc and /sys into the xen filesystem created for fedora, either File, Lvm partition or something like that.

  rsync -av --delete --whole-file --numeric-ids --exclude /proc --exclude /sys / root@xenserverip:/mnt/fed8.img

• Copy the /lib/modules from xen Dom0 to the fed8 DomU. Since we'll use Xen Dom0's kernel (2.6.18-5) intead of 2.6.23 we need those modules.

• Start the fed8 DomU, reconfigure the network from concole, remove with yum the kernel which is not needed in DomU and, eventually, any other software which deal with hardware like acpid, ntp etc.

We are now working on an update to the Sint Wind project.

This new release will have a Davis's wind speed and direction sensor, simplified schematics and electronics, same Atmel's ATMega 8 microcontroller and a humidity/temperature sensor Sensirion sht-71.

Electronics by Marabo, I will write the C code for atmel, in avr-gcc using avr-libc all covered by GPL v3 license.

Hardware's costs, assembling the part, testing, installing will be carried by Diego and his paragliding club Volabass in Molveno, TN (IT).

Soon code-progress and schematics online.

This weekend I and Andrea 'Forrest' Marabini had installed the sint wind. Now we hope that the battery get charged and the station start working for testing.

I also hope to find out the time to put all the stuff regarding the sint (soft, manuals, schemes...) on the web.

After a long long time I did not get to fly, I have discovered a bug in mlrutil which prevent it to download more than 988 point.

Fixed... see MlrUtil