Wednesday 12 September 2012

Gadgets: tl-wr703n

I bought one of these : totocity Chinese Handy Wi-Fi Wireless Router 150M Wifi Wi-Fi for USB 3G LAN WAN Converter with the idea of creating a MIFI wireless network to use with my tablet.
To be honest I thought it had a 3G modem, but in fact it can only make use of one via USB - never mind I have a ZTE modem and it looks like a fun device.
£21 for a tiny UNIX server with LAN + WIFI. More information here. Hardware hacks here

 

 Step 1 

"I wouldn't call this a router for the average home user."
I replaced the Chinese interface with open-wrt see instructions at Installing OpenWrt on the TL-WR703N not too hard really.

http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr703n

Step 2

Getting the modem to work..

install packages :

  • kmod-usb2, 
  • kmod-usb-option, 
  • comgt, 
  • usb-modeswitch, 
  • usb-modeswitch-data  

to be continued...the boot log

Monday 3 September 2012

Drawing trees with XQuery and SVG

Looking for a simple way to draw tree structures, I came across this old xml.com article Automated Tree Drawing: XSLT and SVG  by Jirka Kosek. This uses some EXSLT extensions. I am sure it could have been rewritten in XSLT2 but I thought it would be  interesting to try it in XQuery ( and add a RESTXQ web interface). Demo and  source.