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Hi my dear visitors, Some of you seem to like (or fall by mistake in) my unfunny, unspiritual and crappy english speaking blog. I’m very glad you have such bad taste. You are more than 2 500 to come each month. You mostly come about some stuffs around the TC65, SVN, C# .Net or Sharepoint. By the way, you consumed more than 200 GB of bandwidth this month, mostly on downloading the TC65 SDK. I’m really surprised, I guess a lot of people use this chip even if nearly nobody writes about it.

For those of you that take an interest in M2M and/or embedded things. You should look at the Waspmote. This is a generic hardware that can be customized to fit any need. Communication : GPRS / Wifi / ZigBee / USB Location : GPS Power usage : Low consuption, battery or solar as power input Storage : SD Card (2GB), no other storage memory Sensors : Everything you might need (really impressive set of sensors) I looked at the API and it’s in C (pretty low level, you have to free everything) but everything seems to be handled at a high level. It’s sometimes better to have a smart C API rather than a dumb Java API. Look at the examples, they are really easy to read, you don’t need to be a skilled C developer to understand everything. ...

What is it ? Most of the modern web applications display recently updated data, and to do that they need to get he latest data very frequently. Some of them even include some real-time chat (Gmail Chat, Facebook chat). How ? That’s the interesting part. Pull is pretty dumb. You do a request very frequently and you see if anything new appeared. This consumes some bandwidth, some resources (because server has to check if data has actually changed). Push is going back to the source : Once you’ve made the request on the server, it doesn’t reply instantly. It will wait for something before sending anything. So push over HTTP is in fact a pull with a sleeping response. Using push over HTTP is called Comet. So pushing data isn’t very complex, it just requires a special server to transmit some data (text, html, xml, or image) over an already opened HTTP connection. ...

I’m not a huge fan of SVN. It’s crappy for file transfers and it easily locks. But still, it works pretty well for my relatively small needs and it’s super easy to setup. I’d like to talk a little bit about the things you might not know about SVN… Hooks on the SVN Server You might not know this but you can add a lot of personalized actions on your repository. You just have to add script files to the “hooks” directory of your repository. For a complete list of hooks file name, look here. ...

I’m really displeased with my 1And1 virtual server. I took it because I didn’t want to spend time on some potential disk failures. And since the Oct, 19 2009 2:00 AM, i’ve seen my load average totally exploding. I guess the disk was totally busy with an other virtual server. I called them and they did a really awesome test : the PING test and even the web page test. I tried to explain them that this wasn’t the best way to test if the server was working, but well they told me that maybe I just messed up my configuration. ...

That’s something I wanted to do for quite a long time now: Creating some programs for PIC chips. I bought the ICD3 programmer/debugger with the PICDEM Z development kit (for ZigBee communication). I can’t say it was cheap (it cost me 500 €), but I’ve made good use of it. The thing is, it brings me back to my first C programs. It’s quite hard to come back to some unmanaged, memory limited, namespace less language. I thought the lack of objects would be the hardest part, but in fact it’s not (you can easily emulate it). The hardest part is the lack of namespace and the massive use of #define, I really would be happier with a some sort of limited version of C++. The MPLAB development environment is awful (compared to Visual Studio): no reindenting, no refactoring, no smart-anything. This is WILD for me. It’s like being a citizen in the jungle. ...

This is just a quick code to show how to do a simple http POST request from a TC65 chip.

I made this simple test website for those of you who would want to check if their HTTP request made from a simple equipment like the TC65 are sent correctly. The idea is simple : You choose an id like “ThisIsMe” You access the test website with this id : http://test.webingenia.com/ThisIsMe You check what was the content of the request at this address : http://test.webingenia.com/read/ThisIsMe You can contact me if you don’t understand something, if something doesn’t work or if you would like me to add a feature.

If you encounter a “Transaction Check Error” on yum on a x64 system during an install, an update or an upgrade, you will find out that most of the time, you can’t remove the problematic packages. But it’s very likely that the problem comes from a i386 version of a package. The easiest way to proceed is just to remove the i386 version of each software or library as it appears on the Transaction Check Error. ...

I’ve been working on a project where we had to use Flex on a .Net environment and it had to be realtime. I was a little worried at first that it could be tricky to set up. But with WebORB.Net it’s pretty easy. We used the integrated RTMP (Real Time Messaging Protocol) messaging server. It’s almost like using WCF. The most important differences are that, by default, objects are transmitted as Hashtable and calls can’t be synchronous. We can bind the object to right .Net object within the WebOrb management console but we decided to do it ourself using reflection (because we don’t like to depend too much on the management console). ...