A sad realization
It’s never nice to wake up in the morning and have the sad realization that you’ve mastered the task of being both incredibly boring and reasonably destitute. On the upside, it’s motivated me to fix myself one problem at a time, so I’m going to try to fix the easiest one first, by preparing a CV. Semester ends soon and I’ll be on holidays for about four months, which is a great time for those who need money to get a job. Two of my friends have recently bought the suprisingly cheap (for their sheer awesomeness) second hand HP TC1100 tablet laptops off eBay, and I’ve got a serious hankering to buy one. I need to either scrounge up a few hundred from somewhere or convince myself that I really don’t need something that cool, before I go crazy and explode in a puddle of murky goo.
I’ve tempoarily shelved last week’s project while I concentrate on getting MyUSB 1.5.3 out the door. So far I’ve only got some standards-compliance issues with the Mass Storage demo and some boot-protocol incompatibilities on some BIOSes in the HID demos to work on. For the curious, last week’s attempt was to make a Vista SideShow compatible device, so that I could display system, application and other notifications on an externally connected screen over USB. I must say that for once Microsoft has been caught out doing something innovative, although the published device specification SUCK HARDCORE. It’s about on-par with the Microsoft RNDIS specification — lots of missing details, typos, etc. which make life difficult when you’re trying to write a compatible device.
Despite all that, I managed to get it into a state where it will enumerate, and gadgets can be loaded onto it. The problem I had was in the XML parsing; writing a XML parser and some sort of user interface to navigate through the gadget would require more time than I’m willing to devote at present. For those with strong stomaches (the code isn’t complete, nor commented at this point) I’ve uploaded the current code to the MyUSB Support Google Group for download.
One of the real problems I’ve been having is that the SideShow API includes great capabilities properties which the device can report on, including whether on not the device can buffer content, whether it can display pictures and how large the screen is (amognst other properties). The problem is that neither the SideShow API itself nor any gadgets seem to query this information, resulting in me having to code around the host trying to send many content items at once, or trying to send images which the device cannot decode and display.
I think I’m comming down with the flu (or a bad cold) – so looks like I’ll be poor, boring and sick very soon – the ultimate trifecta of anti-popularity.
