Today at work I had a major breakthrough. The device driver that I’ve been working on for six weeks now finally compiles, installs and operates 100% correctly. It’s not much of a driver. It provides two operations for a network bus master, to enable an unused feature of a device.

The big win was a personal one. I’ve never written a device driver of any sort, let alone one cross-compiled for embedded linux. There were a lot of hiccups along the way, too. I implemented by hand in user-land all the features that the driver architecture provide for me, only to find out that system interrupts were fouling up my timing. So I moved to kernel land and started learning about device drivers. Module makefiles, installable modules, had to fix busbox’s rmmod so that it didn’t segfault when trying to remove modules, etc.

All-in-all, a big win for me today. It’s something I’ve always wanted to know how to do, and now I’m down the road towards saying that I know how! (:

If you have not yet played Team Fortress 2, but you enjoy team based first person shooters, then you’re missing out. It’s quite the good game. There are nine player classes, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. There isn’t a whole lot of overlap between the classes either, forcing strong teamwork in order to win.

I’d really like to see this game be our bread and butter for gamefest 2008. At a price of $30, I think it’s a fairly reasonable price for such a great game. If your budget can swing it, I’d suggest spending $50 and buying the entire orange box. The orange box includes the single player Half-Life 2, HL2: Episode 1 and HL2: Episode 2 games, as well as Portal. Every single game in this box is excellent. Half-life two is fairly well known. Portal on the other hand, you may not have heard of. It’s a first person puzzle game, with physics being the solution to most of the puzzles. You have to see it to believe it. Not only is the concept fresh and fun on its own, but the world you’re immersed into for Portal is very well realized and enjoyable.

Anyway, there are two ways to get TF2. Either download Steam and buy it online (steam will deliver the game to you over the internet) or else go buy the orange box nearly anywhere that software is sold. I highly recommend it.

I got a comment requesting a description of how I got IPcop working with a Novatel u720 (USB EVDO modem). This is that post. This also applies to the Pantech PX-500, a PCMCIA EVDO modem. They both work in almost exactly the same way, since the PCMCIA card just has a USB hub built into it internally, so that the modems both appear as USB devices.

I started with IPcop version 1.4.14. The most recent version is 1.4.18. I have not tried installing using the latest version. I’m going to assume that it works the same way. Install IPcop to your firewall machine with the modem plugged in. I use the green + red is modem profile for the network setup. At that point, it’s time to reboot the machine and connect to it via the web interface.

From the web interface, go the the network->dialup menu. Tell the machine that the modem is connected to ACM0. The phone number is #777. You need to put something in for the username and password, but it doesn’t matter what you put there, they don’t get used for the actual connection. I use “asdf” in each slot. You’ll probably also want to select either “dial on demand” or “persistent connection”. For persistent connections, you’ll probably want to select “dial on startup”.

Anyway, that’s all there is to it. Once you save that dialup info into a profile (I call that profile “Sprint”), you can hit the connect button on the main IPcop page and you should be golden.