jcm's blog

Got up, felt crap yet again. A bit better later on though. Finally got a couple of articles in and I’m now finishing off this month’s Kernel Hacking so rest of the folks at LU&D have it for tomorrow. Tonight, we went to John Nike Leisuresport Bracknell, and I tried skating for the first time. I don’t think I did too badly when all things are considered using some level of mystic consideration, but I’m not a natural skater. I can probably just about make it around a rink without holding on at this point – so it’ll be interesting to try the real deal in Ottawa during the coming days.

Daniel advertised our trip to klug in Kingston (I wasn’t subscribed to that list – fixed now – probably in part because their list shares the exact same name as the Kent LUG here in the UK, so now consequently that will necessitate some further level of organisation of my mail folders), I am debating about asking fellow oclug members if they want to join us on the road to Boston LinuxWorld – we’re working out what space we have right now. Certainly the trip has a prospect of being interesting and I’ve never done a proper “road trip” so this will be one of those things I can chalk up and cross off the list of stuf to do before whenever.

I’ll hopefully be updating this blog during my trip and should have some photos to add to the gallery and link from here if there’s good connectivity for uploading them. Probably going to take bits of the duck with me so I can work on that in the evenings – still haven’t got all the serial communications working properly and I’m a bit annoyed that I can’t easily discern activity with a simple LED wired up to RX1out on the MAX233 I’m using (I have several 232s and a 233 for cheating when I just want to be sure I got it right – still the 233 is annoying because you do have to hookup the internal charge pumps within it – the Dallas parts look a lot better from the point of view of plug ‘n’ play). Next I need to wait for Denk or someone to have a decent form factor board with host USB.

I was reading a little about Firefox plugins and using XUL as a consequence of discovering bugmenot (an excellent tool for those reading the New York Times or similar websites who don’t want to have to give them “free registration” information for pointless reasons) and discovered about:config as a mechanism for setting parameters. I wonder if the people behind the Mozilla Foundation (e.g. Gerv) could setup an firefox.mozilla.org alias.

Tomorrow I had better get emergency remote access to work related stuff sorted in case I need to hack on something while I am away.

Jon.

Visited Monta in Bracknell. Was over 20 minutes late but didn’t mean to be – I need to get a car so I can not have to do the waiting around for trains thing. Tried getting the Monta phone number from directory enquiries, but with no success. Tried calling Business Exchange only to find there was no listing for their Bracknell office in BT directories either. Laptop battery went flat. Bah. Annoying.

Felt really shitty later on, ended up having to lie down for a few hours to avoid being sick. Nice.

Currently trying to do everything I was going to do earlier on today. Ended up on #kernelnewbies until gone 03:00 discussing ioremap_nocache vs. ioremap with someone who wanted page protection bits (cacheability control) explained in some detail. Figured out that they wanted vmalloc_to_page to convert the ioremap address to a valid struct page in order to check it was mapped correctly (they wanted to verify).

I checked Air Canada prices for Ottawa during 2005. Prices begin to go up in a few months, rising to 580GBP for Linux Symposium, but I could perhaps afford to go three or four times this year, if necessary. Looked at various boots today too, but the Schuh shop I went in to didn’t have the temperature rating for Timberland boots (FWIW the guy in the store was helpful and did find a sheet with quite a large amount of information aside from that which I was actually seeking) and another shop had boots expensive enough to affirm the need to wait until I am actually in Canada.

Jon.

Photos (from left to right): Rootes pump, Carl von Linde’s Air Liquiefaction equipment (taken at the Deutsches Museum, in Munich).

Finally uploaded more photos from last weeks’ trip to Munich. I enjoyed that visit, but I learned that Adidas gloves aren’t necessarily all they’re supposed to be since the ones I bought in Munich have already broken at the seams. Bah.

Today I’m trying to get some stuff finished off at home in preparation for being in Canada from next Tuesday. I’m flying out on a Boeing 767 300ER (the same family I was on in the summer – last time it was plane equipment number 647 if anyone cares) at 16:35 on Tuesday afternoon and shall return on the 21st, arriving in Heathrow at around 11:15. I’m staying in a Victorian guesthouse in Ottawa for most of the first 11 nights, but am still planning a day trip to Toronto which has to fit in somewhere. I’ll be in Kingston for a few days, on the road to Boston, MA (via Maine, New England) and then in Boston during the show itself. I’ve arranged to meet up with Jeremy Allison (I think I can now mention he’s doing a column in the magazine) – I’m hoping he can put me in touch with the guys working on various embedded Linux media stuff at HP too – and hopefully one or two friends from other companies over there. I also have recently corresponded with some GNU/Linux companies in Ottawa (anyone else want coffee?) and today spoke with the folks over at Novell about meeting up for a few hours.

After recently moving some servers around, it became necessary to abort an installation of Ubuntu and recover the previous Mandrake installation from a bunch of soft RAID level 5 disks on a particular box. Luckily, only the partition tables had been nuked at the point that the install was cancelled. This meant that a few hours with xxd, less, fdisk, dd, disktype, and friends – coupled with the fact that RAID superblocks live not at the end of a blockdev, but at the last 64k aligned block (very important to realise, not well documented however) – allowed me to manually locate and read off the superblock contents, performing necessary endian conversions, and reconstruct the appropriate partition table entries which had existed previously. Unfortunately however, the geometry of the disks had been forced to be different previously (4866 cylinders rather than the real 4865, for various random reasons) which meant that I also had to figure this bit out. Anyway, at this point it’s almost ready to force mdadm to use it – anyone who likes non-Free Software: how would you do this with your favourite OS?

I added a bunch more entries to planet.jonmasters.org recently, am doing some reading, and keeping up the daily exercise within certain limits – I’ve also upped the number of situps to 40 each morning and evening whenever possible, and 20 pressups each time too. I have not yet gotten around to that serious python study I was going to do – but I hope to spend some time in the evenings while I’m away with my safari.

Tomorrow I’m in Bracknell to have some more coffee with the folks at Monta and talk about an article we had planned. I need to mail several other Embedded Linux guys I know about participating in a feature on the realtime work going in to support the various new uses we’re seeing for Linux through various devices.

Jon.

Someone found my first geocache, GCMJCN this morning. That’s cool, I only just listed it, having finally put it in place last week. I had been meaning to place it since last December but had to find a time when there weren’t geomuggles around to take it.

Sitting in SFCC at Odeon Square again (moved out to the back to get power, found a SuSE user guy sitting next to me just now when I saw the Chameleon out of the corner of one eye – my day pass from yesterday is still working even though I bought another. At 3.90 EUR it is really good value wifi here – take note Starbucks – this is how to get people to sit in a coffee house all afternoon). Trying to do some work now, having spent a substantial amount of time in the Deutsches Museum yesterday afternoon – wow is all I can say to summarise the place.

At the German Museum, I saw everything from Carl von Linde’s Air Liquiefaction equipment (demonstrations only available by booking two weeks in advance or for school parties and special group excursions) and the insides of a Rootes pump in the Physics section, to Astronautics (including actual spacecraft, rockets, and the like) and even a UNIVAC and Cray I in the Computer Science section. I’ve taken plenty of photos but since I’m using the PCMCIA socket on this Powerbook for wifi, I’ll upload them sometime later, probably when I’m back in the UK. Anyone reading this who does go to the German Museum should note that only the post-1960s sections tend to have substantial English translations of text – I couldn’t read most of the information in the Physics section because it was sparse and in German, and the nice chap I asked about it apologised for not speaking much English (that’s not his fault). The Technology sections and anything recent obviously had at least English available as an option (but I did not notice any audioguides or headsets on offer – though the lady in the ticket office was English!).

Just over a week until I’m in Ottawa. I should go skating one evening for practice.

Cheers,

Jon.

Photo: Odeon Square in Munich.

I’m in Munich for a long weekend visting DENX and investigating what this major European City has to offer in the way of tourism. It’s been pretty interesting so far – I enjoyed finally meeting wd in person and think their new offices are pretty cool and cosy. Thursday was spent flying out from London Heathrow, meeting Wolfgang & co., and then having a few drinks in the evening too.

Yesterday afternoon, I visited the Siemens Forum (site doesn’t render well in Firefox browsers – a shame for a technology company site). I’ve been geocaching already (last night) – Ludwigs-Apotheke / Ludwigs-Pharmacy and bought some more gloves (having left my main light pair at home). There’s skating here too, but today I must do some writing – right after a quick visit to the German Museum, where I hope to see Carl von Linde’s original refrigeration (Air Liquefaction) equipment (I hope to be able to see some kind of demonstration if I get there in time).

Wifi courtesy of the San Francisco Coffee Company, outside the Odeon Square here in Munich (3.90EUR for a whole day of wifi access on some kind of reasonable ADSL connection – they heavily advertise Apple Airport Extreme Wireless APs too but I don’t think that hardware actually supports a hotspot type pay-per-use arrangement, perhaps it does support RADIUS or something though? It’s probably done at the head end if this is actually running on one of those units).

Jon.

Bah. I’m ill. I’ve had a headache for the past day or so (no, I’ve not had much coffee – I’ve been keeping it to a couple of cups per day so far this year) and a slightly runny nose. So meh.

Let’s see, try to keep this up to date with small installments. Today I spent some time at home sleeping, made a few config changes at work from my armchair, and played with the beta of VMware to get a devel FC3 environment having given up on waiting for it to install under bochs (RedHat: please please please offer a “minimal install” option in a future release. I guess a bug report is necessary, I just want a couple of hundred megs of environment). I need to play with rawhide stuff and have a box that I can do kernel debugging on – a virtual machine seems to be the best option for FC until either this old devbox can be made to take SDRAM (enough to actually run an FC) or I get around to buying an Apple MiniMac (which hopefully will happen) so I can use this desktop for development stuff. I am willing to consider using VMware as an option – after all, I use closed source proprietary hardware so using their software is only an equivalent. The kernel sources are open.

Air Canada cancelled my booking, because I booked tickets on the 31st of December (New Year’s Eve) and elected to collect from a travel agent (as opposed to on the day at the airport or whatever the other entailed) but was given until the very next day to collect. It just so happens that New Year’s Day is a public holiday in both Canada and the UK (no, we don’t have the exact same public holidays btw – I’ve looked them up, they do have federal holidays for things like Thanksgiving, but earlier than the USians) so, Air Canada, this would be an obvious glaring bug in your website software. Please fix it. Alternatively, you could elect to respond to my customer service email rather than giving me a coronary when I called to confirm the weirdness with the booking status on the website (it was showing up, but nothing was showing for ticket status and the site generated an error code to accompany it) only to be told the booking had been “auto-cancelled”. Could you please not go cancelling my bookings without telling me you’ve done that? Thanks. I’ve now paid them again and been told I was never actually charged the first time – but I’ve checked with Barclays and will also have any double payments immediately cancelled from the account. Despite the obviously British sounding phone system at Air Canada UK, I’m not entirely convinced I wasn’t ultimately speaking to someone in a call centre in India – not that it bothered me too much since they did work with me on both occasions that I called them (the second time to reconfirm the confirmation and to get another copy of the second confirmation mailed out to me just to be certain). Note that, despite this, I am generally happy with the airline and their prices seem quite reasonable – just under 250GBP for a return flight is not bad at all.

I’m reading Designing Embedded Hardware. Specifically, brushing up on electronics – it’s the interactions of passive components and so on that I need to improve upon; For example being able to put precise values on rather fuzzy descriptions of “that probably wants a pullup resistor there or something”.

Jon.

Here’s the first “big” update of the new year. First the obligatory photos of various recent events:

Photos (from left to right, and top to bottom on most standard displays): Amstrad E3 Video Phone, a visit to Totnes, Trafalgar Square on Christmas Eve, OxLUG Food end of year gathering, the Canonical Ubuntu Conference in Mataro, Wolves LUG Christmas Bash, the final days of the office being based in Witney, visiting Hannah and Joe, dfb’s Christmas Party 2004, the Christmas fayres in Birmingham (listening to Hannah Sing and Sir James Galway playing).

On Friday the 10th of December in the year 2004, I celebrated my 23rd birthday in the company of good friends and family, up in Nottingham. For the third year running, I went to dfb’s EP (now Digital Document Engineering) Christmas Party and this time took Hannah and Joe along for the ride. We stayed up in Nottingham at the Gresham and enjoyed a late night party on Campus with Dave and gang, before retiring for the evening. I had been staying with Hannah and Joe in Birmingham on the previous few evenings, following Hannah’s enjoyable performance with the Birmingham University Choir at Symphony Hall on the Wednesday. In fact, I was so reminded that I enjoyed Symphony Hall as to attend a concert on the Thursday also – Sir James Galway and Friends. At that concert, I happened to be sitting near to a physicist who also has worked for one the companies I work with and we ended up talking about magnets while he graciously offered to give me a lift back home afterwards (thanks!).

On Saturday, 11th December, we met up with Carl and Susie for some shopping and general traversing around Nottingham centre. Carl, Susie, and I went looking for a geocache near to the National Ice Centre, but came away empty handed – Carl used his shiney mobile to lookup the website and ultimately found a photo which elluded as to where the cache might have actually been (but then, apparently some of those caches have been very awkward indeed). I suggested that a useful service would be to use mobile phone triangulation to approximate a location and then have various nearby caches automatically SMS’d to the cacher in response to a simple text. The idea must have been considered previously and probably has already been done – but it would nonetheless be reasonably easy to do and pretty cool for those spontaneous cachers.

We had lunch in V1 on that day, and went to Starbucks for some coffee (well, I suppose at least one of us had one in the end). Discussed Simon Cozens’ blog entry on ozymandns before Hannah poked me in to getting my arse in gear and going back to Birmingham with them. While up in Birmingham during the preceeding week, I had enjoyed visiting the German market and having a number of pretzels and fresh coffee. Saw Dan (must arrange to meet again soon when I’m next up in Birmingham or London or even perhaps in Kent), popped in to Open Advantage and talked with Jono Bacon for a while about random stuff – he’s keen on this ABI/API compatibility stuff for the Linux Kernel – I’m not so sure whether it’s not already covered or even will actually work out. But he’s keen for me to do something about it and that’s probably worth covering in LU&D.

I was in Witney, Oxford and Reading, helping to begin to sort out the office move from Witney out to Tubney Woods (think clinical private hospital looking place in the woods – hard to get to by public transport but luckily not quite impossible). Went up to Wolverhampton for the Wolves LUG Christmas Bash 2004 – great stuff. Got an early train from Wolverhampton to London so as to get a flight to an airstrip^W RyanAir serviced airport quite some way outside of Barcelona. Canonical hosted their second Ubuntu Conference out in Mataro, Spain, and I was there to see what they were up to – and generally to meet the likes of Mark Shuttleworth, Matt Zimmerman, Jeff Waugh, Lu (Louise McCance-Price), and the other guys and gals behind the team that everyone’s talking about (well it would seem pretty everyone in the Debian universe is involved at this point at any rate).

Back in the UK, I tried to get stuff flowing in to LU&D for the January issue of the magazine. January’s “Open Source Car” issue 45 looks pretty damn cool – go buy it now! We’ve got a DVD of Fedora Core 3 on the front cover and the a shiney new cover design to boot. Popped in for the OxLUG Food Christmas gathering (just four of us this time around in the Pizza Express in the centre of Oxford, off George Street). I popped in to London on Christmas Eve and finally got around to some shopping – bought a lot of stuff in Selfridges and prior to that got my dad a book token in Foyles bookstore. Selfridges changed me for tape to go with wrapping paper as their giftwrap service was overbooked (not surprising) and I couldn’t resist buying a Hershey’s bar while I was in there too. It’s truly disgusting by the way – nothing like Cadbury’s and “only” 30% fat too – so just a few squares and you’d be ready to swell up like a giant Texan.

I saw a couple of plays over the Christmas period. One with my friend Emma in the week before Christmas itself, at the Arts Theatre – How to Lose Friends and Alienate People – and another at the Playhouse theatre on Christmas Eve itself. This is how I came to be wondering along Shaftesbury Avenue and in Trafalgar Square on Christmas Eve, watching singers and noting numbers of people standing outside a church trying to catch a glimpse of the action. I also met a Canadian woman from Ottawa, which is always appreciated. I actually quite enjoy walking down Shaftesbury Avenue and towards the Thames, especially on a clear evening as I can walk across the Thames and on to the Southbank, pondering silently to myself. I’ve recently (as in now 2005) popped in to the Southbank Centre, in search of upcoming perfomances that I might attend over the next few months. I’ve not mentioned meeting Ben or Markus, but we did meet. In actual fact we met just after I got back from Spain and had crashed at the house of Sladen up in Seven Sisters. We installed panic.printk.net in Redbus in Harbour Exchange and then did the whole Docklands weekend coffee experience, followed by a trip in to central London. Discussion with the London Eye administration (for not coping with being able to store my suitcase in their luggage area) eventually lead to a private capsule on the London Eye, and curry somwhere just off the South Bank. I suppose I should write more about all this sometime.

Just before the new year, I popped down to Totnes for an afternoon to see Richard. Twas nice. Hannah and Joe were en route to Devon anyway so I stopped off with Joe’s parents for lunch – his mum makes the most wonderful tomato chutney and it was good to see Susie and Andy too. Totnes was as pleasant as the last time, and I especially enjoyed popping in and out of various little pubs as we tried to find the perfect place to grab a bite to eat. The photos show a bookstore Richard spotted, with a sale sign to rival all sale signs: Seriously Stupid [a la Bush] Sale.

New Year’s Eve was spent with the family at home once again, but we did go out in the evening for a change (this being my criteria for rejecting a friend’s party in Oxford in favour of being with my family at home – that we at least go somewhere different if we are all staying at home). We went to The Hinds’ Head out on the A4 towards Aldermaston – where Hannah and Joe are to put up some of their wedding guests later in the year. The “Masters Minds” team came second in the pub quizz and we won far too much chocolate to be even remotely healthy over New Year’s.

I did make a bunch of New Year’s resolutions, but I’ll choose to ellaborate upon them as I see fit. While on Christmas holiday, I did do some cleaning at home and bought myself an nice comfy leather chair to work in at the computer. This place is almost tidy right now and certainly much improved upon how I had let my stuff get. I did some reading over Christmas (I’m really enjoying having a Safari account so far – although I should use it more) and some reflection. I am trying to be more organised and to operate more regular hours, and to finish things I start. I also am now doing 10 press-ups, 20 sit-ups, and 10 press-ups both morning and evening, and it’s making a difference already. I can now eat 3 regular meals per day and still hopefully lose weight. I’ll mix that with regular outdoor exercise, as I’ve been trying to do, at least when feasible.

I am off to Munich this week and then I’ll be in Ontario (Canada) and Boston (Massachusetts) for much of February as I visit Canada for a week and a bit of skating and holidaying and Boston for the LinuxWorld. I spoke to Jeremy Allison recently about meeting up over there and happened to be at a Lonix meeting the other night, in which I heard Richard Cohen might be popping in.

Another update sometime soon. Should mention various stuff – also have a look over at planet.jonmasters.org for various news feeds.

* One of my favourite Christmas gifts was a shit spewing George W. Bush doll. Just press the button and he comes out with one of those trademark quotes. A great desktop item for anyone who dislikes George Dubya as the “leader of the free world”. Bah.

Jon.