The EU are currently voting on whether to sign-up to the ACTA treaty being proposed globally and pushed by the US. The treaty has been negotiated in secret and aims to give even more power to “intellectual property” holders. From patented seeds and medicines, to internet connections policed by your ISP, ACTA is a major threat to developing countries and freedom of expression on-line.

For more information about ACTA, and what you can do to oppose it, see this page.

I recently discovered the joys of Arduino! But setting up the development environment on Debian Testing (Wheezy) took me a while. Here is what I did…

Set up the Arduino IDE

Many packages required for Arduino development were recently removed from Debian’s testing repositories. At the time of writing, they are being held in sid, waiting on a some issues before being migrated.

In the mean-time, you can download pre-built binaries from the arduino.cc download page is pretty simple. I downloaded version 0022 for 64-bit Linux. You just unpack this in to a directory and run the arduino script. You’ll need to have Java installed.

Next, you have to get the Arduino device to be detected. This works ok on Wheezy. Plug it in and look in your kern.log. It should show up as a serial device (my Ardino Uno shows up as /dev/ttyACM0).

So far so good.

Get the AVR C++ compiler working

You need to get the AVR C++ compiler and C-library. Unfortunately, the newer versions of the required packages in sid don’t work (which is why they’ve not been migrated). Fortunately, the ones in squeeze work fine. Download the following packages from squeeze

• gcc-avr (the compiler)
• avr-libc (the C-library)
• binutils-avr (tools to work with AVR binaries)

And install them

This way, when they are finally migrated to wheezy, they should just get upgraded normally.

Test the set-up

1. Open up the Arduino IDE.

2. Go to Tools -> Serial Port and select the serial port your Arduino is appearing as.

   If you can’t see it, there is a problem with the device being detected. If you opened the IDE before the device was plugged in, try closing it and re-opening it.

3. Go to File -> Examples -> Basics -> Blink. Then go to Sketch -> Verify / Compile.

   If there are compiler errors, you have a problem with the set-up of the AVR C++ compiler or the C-library.

4. Finally, go to File -> Upload to I/O Board. You should see the board’s serial TX/RX LEDs flicker, and then you should see the LED next to pin 13 blinking on and off. Congratulations.

My website has moved to ed.am.

All links to the previous site should redirect properly and, even though I now have a new email address, all my previous email addresses still work fine (and always will), so no one really needs to update anything.

Additionally, I now have a new site to provide services related to the software hosted here. You can find bug trackers, wikis/documentation and support forums at:

dev.ed.am

The Redmine installation at dev.ed.am, along with several other subdomains (for example, bzr.ed.am and files.ed.am) should allow me to host projects on the waxworlds.org servers from now on. I had previously been going to use Launchpad, but I don’t feel Canonical represents my interests so well any more.

Little baby Benjamin was born at 1:37am on the 9th May (his due date!) weighing 8lb 11oz. Becky, once again, delivered naturally and without any pain medication whatsoever! What a star!

Becky is recovering well. And Isobel has come home (she had been with her Grandma, Grandpa and Uncle Dan) and has met her baby brother. She seems completely enamoured with him. We’re still trying to find a new routine where we get to sleep a bit. But apart from being tired, we’re all well.

Here’s our little boy:

You can get bigger copies of these photos in Benjamin’s gallery.

Having recently installed Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Linx) on my partner’s Acer Aspire 3690, I was, as usual, impressed at how much of the hardware worked out of the box. Pretty much everything worked, from wi-fi to volume keys. There were only a couple of things that didn’t…

Suspend (to RAM)

This didn’t work. The screen turns off (I think the laptop is wired this way), but the fan doesn’t power off and the machine doesn’t power down.

Eventually, I found this in the syslog:

The USB device referred to is the built-in webcam. After quite a bit of googling I came across a kernel bug that explained it all (and turned out not to be a kernel bug). The built-in webcam (lsusb says it is: “ID 0402:5602 ALi Corp. Video Camera Controller”) resumes immediately after being suspended, causing the suspend procedure to fail.

To fix it, I added the following script to /etc/pm/sleep.d (don’t forget to chmod +x it):

Flash

Yes, flash again. :o(

The Acer Apire 3690 is not a powerful machine, but it is easily capable of playing video. Unfortunately, the latest version of Adobe’s proprietary flash plugin at this time, 10.0.45.2, which ships with Lucid, can run away with the CPU and bring the browser to a crawl. The BBC iPlayer is the worst culprit. Sometime between 30 seconds and 5 minutes in to a video, CPU usage jumps to 98% and firefox becomes unresponsive.

I haven’t fixed this entirely, but I have managed to alleviate the problem slightly. A pre-release version of flash player 10.1 handles flash movies that have gone awry much better. Update: flash player has been updated to 10.1 in Lucid now. It pops-up a message box to let you know that some actionscript is causing the flash player to run slowly.

Obligatory tweaks

There are also the little gripes.

Despite there being an overwhelming user preference to keep the window buttons (minimise, maximise and close) on the left of the window, as they always have been in Ubuntu, it was decided that they would be moved to the right. You can move them back again by following instructions in this post.

I also removed all traces of Canonical’s little cloud facilities which are unnecessarily installed by default. The following command did the trick: