chuma.org

Well, one week later, the info board software is good to go. It boots up, connects to the wireless network no problem, and starts up into links in graphic mode, full-screen, and pulls up the info page, which displays:

• Weather Forecast (via the excellent RSSWeather)
• CBC News Headlines (via CBC RSS)
• IMDB News Headlines (love that RSS)
• GO Train Service Updates (via my page-scraping one-liner)
• Links to Maptuit routing, GO Train schedule tables, toronto.com, and a Canada411 search form
• The latest traffic camera image from 401 and Harwood (courtesy of the Ministry of Transportation COMPASS system)

Refreshing every hour. Mmmm, RSS….

Now to figure out how to mount it. It may end up just being affixed to a piece of plywood or a 1×3 wood frame and then using that to hang it.

New album “The Woods” out May 24.

They’re playing The Phoenix in Toronto on June 18th. Which is our one year anniversary.

I got the 802.11b networking finally, thanks to double-checking the SSID (note: SSIDs are case sensitive!) and upgrading the kernel for good measure. Ended up scrapping SVGAlib and installing an X server and using links on XWindows with no window manager, just one full-screen browser window. Looks good! Now that I’m running XWindows though I could theoretically run Netscape 4… shudder. It probably has better JavaScript support though. Links handles some sites fine (like toronto.com, us.imdb.com), some a bit less than fine (Maptuit HTMLClient works to a degree), and some break horribly (anything using Maptuit ActiveMap). It is a fast little browser though.

There are still some hitches though. I installed mad perl packages on the machine because I’d like it to handle all of the scraping and parsing on its own. Also, I powered it off and then brought it back up this morning and it wouldn’t connect to the wireless network anymore. Crap…

It’s getting time to figure out how I’m gonna affix the panel to the back of the laptop again, and then where the unit is going to go and how it’s going to be interfaced… if I could rip the integrated keyboard and trackpoint out of the thing and mount it externally… I’m going to need to experiment on this.

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.

Oh crap. It’s a sandbox. What a stupid thing to put in the middle of downtown Toronto… doesn’t everyone know that sandboxes are filled with pet crap and, well, just dirty in general?

For those who don’t know, right across the path from the garden is the patio of an expensive French restaurant. I’m sure they’ll be thrilled!