Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

After a long time of ignoring (or at least not using) micro-blogging services such as Twitter, I recently tried the Free-Software based identi.ca service, and I'm beginning to like it.

The choice of service was pretty obvious — while Twitter uses proprietary software and has custom Terms of Service, identi.ca is based on software under the GNU Affero General Public License, and the contents are CC-BY 3.0 licensed.

The code behind identi.ca is called Laconica (recently renamed to StatusNet) and is hosted at gitorious:

 $ git clone git://gitorious.org/laconica/mainline.git

My account details are available under http://identi.ca/uwehermann, where I'm posting smaller announcements and notes about random technical stuff I'm working on (slightly more regularly than in this blog). Sometimes I use the web interface for posting, but using the Jabber integration available at identi.ca is even more convenient. You can both be notified of new posts ("dents") in real time via Jabber, as well as post your own dents from within your Jabber client, which is nice.

identi.ca seems to become more popular every day, which will hopefully make the proprietary Twitter pretty much irrelevant sooner or later.

I found out about TinEye a few minutes ago. It's a nice little search engine which allows you to find exact copies of a photo or even similar versions of it. You can either upload an image for comparison with their database, or point TinEye to a URL of the image you want to check.

For instance, checkout this this search for my unreasonably popular "Sugar" photo. Or have a look at this list of sample searches.

The site is also used in Wikipedia for detecting the original source of uploaded images.

I know there is some other website which also allows similarity search of images, but I just can't remember the URL. Please leave a comment if you know of other such sites, thanks!

I've been planning to write about building custom ARM toolchains for a while (I used stuff from gnuarm.com in the past, but I switched to the lastest and greatest upstream versions at some point). Among other things, recent upstream versions now have ARM Cortex support.

First you will need a few base utilities and libs:

  $ apt-get install flex bison libgmp3-dev libmpfr-dev autoconf texinfo build-essential

Then you can use my tiny build-arm-toolchain script, which will download, build, and install the whole toolchain:

  $ cat build-arm-toolchain
  #!/bin/sh
  # Written by Uwe Hermann <uwe@hermann-uwe.de>, released as public domain.

  TARGET=arm-elf                         # Or: TARGET=arm-none-eabi
  PREFIX=/tmp/arm-cortex-toolchain       # Install location of your final toolchain
  PARALLEL="-j 2"                        # Or: PARALLEL=""

  BINUTILS=binutils-2.19.1
  GCC=gcc-4.3.3
  NEWLIB=newlib-1.17.0
  GDB=gdb-6.8

  export PATH="$PATH:$PREFIX/bin"

  mkdir build

  wget -c http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/binutils/$BINUTILS.tar.bz2
  tar xfvj $BINUTILS.tar.bz2
  cd build
  ../$BINUTILS/configure --target=$TARGET --prefix=$PREFIX --enable-interwork --enable-multilib \
    --with-gnu-as --with-gnu-ld --disable-nls
  make $PARALLEL
  make install
  cd ..
  rm -rf build/* $BINUTILS $BINUTILS.tar.bz2

  wget -c ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gcc/$GCC/$GCC.tar.bz2
  tar xfvj $GCC.tar.bz2
  cd build
  ../$GCC/configure --target=$TARGET --prefix=$PREFIX --enable-interwork --enable-multilib \
    --enable-languages="c" --with-newlib --without-headers --disable-shared --with-gnu-as --with-gnu-ld
  make $PARALLEL all-gcc
  make install-gcc
  cd ..
  rm -rf build/* $GCC.tar.bz2

  wget -c ftp://sources.redhat.com/pub/newlib/$NEWLIB.tar.gz
  tar xfvz $NEWLIB.tar.gz
  cd build
  ../$NEWLIB/configure --target=$TARGET --prefix=$PREFIX --enable-interwork --enable-multilib \
    --with-gnu-as --with-gnu-ld --disable-nls
  make $PARALLEL
  make install
  cd ..
  rm -rf build/* $NEWLIB $NEWLIB.tar.gz

  # Yes, you need to build gcc again!
  cd build
  ../$GCC/configure --target=$TARGET --prefix=$PREFIX --enable-interwork --enable-multilib \
    --enable-languages="c,c++" --with-newlib --disable-shared --with-gnu-as --with-gnu-ld
  make $PARALLEL
  make install
  cd ..
  rm -rf build/* $GCC

  wget -c ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gdb/$GDB.tar.bz2
  tar xfvj $GDB.tar.bz2
  cd build
  ../$GDB/configure --target=$TARGET --prefix=$PREFIX --enable-interwork --enable-multilib
  make $PARALLEL
  make install
  cd ..
  rm -rf build $GDB $GDB.tar.bz2

The final toolchain is located in /tmp/arm-cortex-toolchain per default, and is ca. 170 MB in size. I explicitly created the build script in such a way that it minimizes the amount of disk space used during the build (ca. 1.2 GB or so, compared to more than 3 GB in the "naive" approach).

Using the "-j 2" option for make (see script) you can speed up the build quite a bit on multi-core machines (ca. 30 minutes vs. 60 minutes on an AMD X2 dual-core box). Also, you can change the script to build for other target variants if you want to (arm-elf or arm-none-eabi, for example).

Checkout the blog entry How to build arm gnu gcc toolchain for Mac OS X by Piotr Esden-Tempski for similar instructions for Mac OS X users.

Oh, and while I'm at it — does anybody have any idea why there are no pre-built toolchains for embedded (microcontroller) ARM targets in Debian? There are some toolchains for other microcontroller architectures (avr, m68hc1x, h8300, z80) but not too much other stuff. Is there some specific reason for the missing ARM toolchains (other than "nobody cared enough yet")?

I have heard about Emdebian, but from a quick look that seems to be more intended for toolchains with Linux/libc, not for microcontroller firmware (i.e. no MMU, no Linux, no libc etc.), but maybe I'm wrong?

As you may know I maintain a Creative Commons licensed photoblog at my website. I'm also cross-posting some of the better photos to my flickr page.

Even with my humble, and not really widely-known little photoblog, you can already see the Creative Commons license's effects on media sharing and remixing/reusing kick in. Quite a number of my photos have already been used by other people for various different purposes (blogs posts, articles, even album covers), including some of the "bigger" sites such as the Wall Street Journal Blog or Cult of Mac...

Here's the list of places I know of where my photos are used. Please leave a comment if you spot more of them in the wild. I intend to keep this list updated as more of my photos appear elsewhere.

(Oh, and I have no idea why people seem to be so obsessed with my "Sugar" photo...)

Sugar

• Wallstreet Journal Blog: A Clue for Tumor Survival Lies in How Sweet It Is (blog post)
• Discover Magazine: Blood Sugar Surges May Be Responsible for “Senior Moments” (article)
• Dear Mark: Sugar Cravings (blog post)
• VentnorBlog: Today is World Diabetes Day (blog post)
• EcoSalon: What Does That Bargain Really Cost? What It Takes to Make 10 Everyday Items (blog post)
• Paradox 365: The sugar cubes (riddle)
• Married to Fitness: Sweeteners Are Everywhere: Look Out for Hidden Sugars! (blog post)
• Charting the Course To Better Health Care (blog post) — dead link
• creativecommons.org: CC Q&A and the joy of being reused (blog post)
• Psychmama: Special Needs Sunday: Juvenile Diabetes Scare (blog post)
• About.com: Free Science Fair Pictures: Sugar Cubes (article)
• EGMN: Notes From the Road: Glycemic targets: How low to go? (blog post)
• TakePart: High Fructose Corn Syrup Losing Fight with Sugar: Hungry For Change (blog post)
• The Reluctant Eater: Raw Sugar vs Brown Sugar vs White Sugar (blog post)
• change.org: Cooking: Brainfood, Tasty Downfall (blog post)
• Just Beth: Sayin’ bye-bye to sugar… again… (blog post)
• UTNE Reader: The Future of Fuel: Sugar? (article / blog post)
• WiredPRNews.com: The Differences in Sugars (article / blog post)
• Wikipedia: Sugar (Wikipedia article)
• About.com: On This Day In Science - April 20 (article)
• Mahalo: How to Do the Sugar Busters Diet ("human-powered search engine" entry)
• GastroNomalies: The Sugar Shake Down (blog post)
• uusisuomi.fi: Sokerin hinta ponkaisi - tässä selitys (blog post)
• Suite 101: The Benefits of Body Sugaring (blog post)

Clock

• Angel Ortega: Dispersoul 1 (album cover)

Autumn Leaf

• The music of J.D. Warrick: GOING, A. THE LEAVING (album cover)
• myspace.com: ..Juliets Autumn (website logo)

Scissors

• 20somethingfinance: Is your 401k Match Being Cut? This May be your Hint to Find a New Job (article)

Soccer World Championship 2006

• Nicht nur in China versteht man kein Englisch... (blog post)
• ununun.de: Zu viel des Guten (blog post)

Organized

• Context is King: Organized (blog post)

Dandelion

• Herbal Healthcare: Dandelion (blog post)

Intel Celeron CPU

• Cult of Mac: Intel Unveils Lower-cost Mobile Core 2 Quad (article)

Smoke

• Carbon Trading: Australian Targets Loom (blog post)

Sun and trees

• Let's Read and Find Out!: The sky, the sun, the stars (blog post)

POSIX.1g

• Nyfiken Vital: Nya funktioner och tjänster i Nyfiken vital (blog post)

Easter eggs

• Blogging is my only vice: have a lovely Easter (blog post)

Use more bandwidth

• RISOFTE: Tips Menghemat Paket Bandwidth (blog post) [Translation]

Webcam

• Mahalo: How to Install a Webcam ("human-powered search engine" entry)

Two Flowers

• So She Tells You: The Flower (blog post)

Yes, it's that time of the year again... it's almost Christmas, which means that I once again updated my 10 + 100 Creative Commons Christmas Songs blog article I originally wrote in 2005. That's a collection of a lot of freely downloadable, Creative Commons licensed Christmas music.

Some of the older entries in the list are no longer available unfortunately, some only needed a URL update, and I also added more than 30 new songs this year.

This currently makes a total of 256 CC Christmas songs (more will probably be added over the next few days), so head over to the full song list and get those downloads started...

(Photo: Wikipedia. Author: Malene Thyssen. License: GFDL 1.2 / CC-BY-SA 2.5)