Older blog entries for chaos (starting at number 1)

I am back after sometime.

As always time is not by my side.
I have to finish a project to Tuesday and it will require a _lot_ of work.

I am writing a multiuse RS-232 device.
It uses a Zilogs Z8 microcontroller, a LCD display (240x128) and (ugh!) a numeric keypad.

I am facing some really unpleasants problems:
- The Z8 I am using do not have a UART. I have no choice about this, so I had to write a software UART to do the job.
The problem is that a _software UART_ eats all available resources and blocks during the transmition/reception.

- I can t use a more complex key[pad/board] without an extra microcontroler to continuous scan its lines. ( an standart IBM-PC uses a intels 8048 microcontroller for that!).

- The tool provided from Zilogs (ZDS) _really_ sucks. It does not work (debugging), without a hardware emulator attached to the serial port.
Well, at least it works from WINE. :)

If time and memory allows me, I will write a small set of terminal control/escape character, so that I might be able to use it as a console connected to a Linux Serial Port.

Today I started to work on a new server daemon for CMC.
It will keep track of the mail accounting.
It will process procmails logs for accounting instead of scanning every mail folder. This way CMC can go really lightweight.
This way I can have more "CMC" apps running. And they all query the server for the info.

The big quesion is: Should I have one daemon per user or a big one handling every users request?

Well, time will tell....