Know-How provided by priesch.co.at

This is an ever increasing list of know-how areas seperated by topic. Anything not covered here can easily be added by employment ;)

Foreword: As i am currently doing all aspects on creation of a device (system design, HW/SW design and development) and time is getting faster and faster - develompent time is getting shorter - my future plans are on focussing my energy on system design only. Over the years i found out that therein lies my real strength - to face a problem and find a good solution - happy hacking is the other hand - also funny, but i am getting a bit lazy on this ;)

Currently i am rather a systems designer and prototype developer than a product developer. I definitely want to share my experiences and know-how i gathered through the years for your specialised solution! If you feel the same and want to get in touch, drop me a line, it would be great!

 

User Interface Design

  • Since the first GUI apps hit the market (good old Amiga times back in th 80's) it was one of my main interests how man interacts with the machine.
  • As there are lots of good, bad and ugly examples out there, i put the focus on usability, simplicity and easy to follow / understand to provide usable solutions.
  • First contact with "how it should not look like" in 1994 (when developing an On-Screen-Display engine for a portable VideoCD player).
  • Development of user friendly "one-button" gyro-pointer based graphical User Interface in 1997 (written entirely in C from ground up) - not seen anything similiar in any consumer product until NOW ! - so anyone who is interested, feel free to contact me!
  • Current development focussed on using Web-Applications as the main GUI engine which provides network transparency and cross-platform availability - mostly by using the TurboGears framework and Python.

 

Web-Applications

  • First perl script in 1995 running under apache (to access rather unstructured files on a novell server via nice on-the-fly generated web pages - to overcome the unsupported VisualBasic Application)
  • Four years gaining first experience with Python on developing a framework for creation of static and dynamic web-pages (python 1.5.2) in 1998-2002.
  • Co-Development of a large Roundup based issue tracking system (experience with TAL templating).
  • Development of a large TG1.0 application for an embedded device.
  • Currently developing a WSDL/SOAP interface for the latter.
  • Currently planning development of a TG2.0 application as management portal for the latter.

 

System Design

  • Single-chip DVD-stream demultiplexer based on DSP in ~1996 (partly hw, sw - all layers).
  • Gyro-pointer based user-interface (partly hw, sw - all layers).
  • Currently all layers for embedded linux devices based on mini-itx x86 platform.
  • Currently all layers (hw, components, software) for linux server systems.

 

Open Source

  • First contact with Linux in ~1993 - several floppy disc installation on a 33MHz 486 PC.
  • Since then the focus was always to work with open source instead of proprietary software.
  • Try out of several distributions (debian, mandrake, suse, etc.).
  • Currently Gentoo Enthusiast ... but migrating slowly to Ubuntu for everyday use ;)

 

Embedded

  • Many years spent on developing on embedded hardware (8051 assembly, 68k assembly/C).
  • Several years on developing embedded linux kernel (experience in realtime kernel) drivers.
  • Heating controller with 1wire devices, owfs and a nice pygtk user-interface running on an ipaq running familiar linux.
  • Since "embedded" controllers get usable perfomance these days, switch to high-level languages for embedded appliances.
  • Current focus is on on fanless mini-itx architecture (HTPC, Freevo, Embedded Appliances)
  • Mainly using gentoo-embedded on all these devices.

 

Ubuntu

  • Good choice on Desktop systems (debian stability with recent hw-drivers and recent software packages)
  • Good amount of experience with ubuntu desktop.
  • Currently evaluating for server use (debian stability with recent software) including drbd, ocfs2, heartbeat to provide a failover solution for virtual machines.

 

Programming Languages / Libraries

  • most if not all: Python ;)
  • Gtk/pygtk
  • Gstreamer/python bindings
  • TurboGears 1.0/2.0
  • SQLAlchemy
  • PyGame
  • Javascript/jQuery

 

Virtualisation

  • VMWare user from the first time.
  • Currently using VirtualBox on the desktop and
  • kvm/qemu for virtual server appliances.

 

Networking

  • Linux as server (Postfix, Apache, djbdns, iptables, daemontools, trac, roundup, PostgreSQL,
  • OpenVPN Enthusiast (both for private and commercial use).

 

Applications

  • Gimp, Inkscape, Dia, Latex, Scribus
  • Evolution, Firefox, Thunderbird
  • Subversion, Emacs, vi
  • Gnome
  • KiCad
  • Mplayer, Mencoder
  • VirtualBox