chuma.org

Well Sandy loved my infoboard idea, so I’m slowly moving ahead with it. I’ve been trying hard to get 802.11b drivers running on RedHat 6.2, but it’s just not flying. I’m going to have to try and upgrade the little laptop to RedHat 8.0 so I get a 2.4 kernel, and then things should be good to go. (Hope I can manage that on 16MB of RAM!)

In the meantime, I’ve been taking the scripts I used to use to send weather and news headlines to my cell phone and making them output a simple HTML page instead. The plan is for the laptop to display this page using Links 2, a lightweight browser that supports graphics, tables, and JavaScript, and also can display using SVGAlib. It also makes testing a snap as I can run Links in a window on my Linux box and set the resolution.

Here’s what the page looks like so far. It won’t refresh. Yeah, I know it’s really simple, but it should do the job. Plus I’ve still got some room on the 800×600 screen, not quite sure what else to put on there.

Instead of scraping web pages, I’m reading RSS feeds (from rssweather.com and cbc.ca) and writing out simple HTML. The CBC Top Stories link to the CBC website (which Links actually displays pretty well), which is nice. The clock is JavaScript. The GO Transit status is a lynx/sed one-liner that scrapes the page, since GO Transit’s website is still in the STONE AGE.