jcm's blog

[ from the getting-photos-in-sync dept. ]

Photos (from left to right): Visiting Toby and Sara in Cambridge, Carl Ebrey’s Stag Party, visiting Hannah and Joe Wrigley in Birmingham, visiting a friend in Totnes.

I have taken a few photos which had not gotten uploaded yet, so I did that today while awaiting a sitdown family Sunday lunch. I’ll add something about these photos later on and also a link to the other new photos on my photo site – in the meantime look over there for stuff since 28/08/2004 when I visited Totnes for a day.

Jon.

[ from the have-you-updated-your... dept. ]

Photos (from left to right): Schin Op Geul (the view while crossing the tracks at the Railway Station), Leeds Canal, my iPod,
Visiting Cornwall.

It’s been too long since I last updated this blog, but then that’s life. When I last wrote, I had returned from visiting Ottawa, Canada for the 2004 Linux Symposium and had spent a few days in Cornwall (which I didn’t mention in the last entry). I have since been to the 2004 UKUUG Summer Linux Technical Conference in Leeds, the 2004 Linux Beer Hike, a few other events, joined yet more mailing lists, been writing on a variety of topics, and stuff in general. I’m trying more human things – not just computer stuff – so I bought some more sheet music for my violin, did some more non-computing reading and went to a nightclub for the first time in a number of years – that kind of stuff.

Canada Rules

I’m still thinking about the wonderful time I had during my visit to Ottawa in July and how much I would like to go again. Next July seems like an awfully long time to wait so I’m going over in the early new year. I want to go skating along the Rideau skateway – the Rideau Canal freezes over and becomes the longest skateway in the world – experience the temperatures (-20 degrees) and difference in winter climate, as well as simply to enjoy the people and places there once more. I know a guy who lives and is studying in the area and we are planning to hire a car and drive around Ontario for a week or so when not in Ottawa. I recently joined a few worldwide LUGs (in addition to the twenty or so that I’m on in this country), including oclug, and I am supposedly going to speak at their meeting when I’m over.

Would I move to Canada? I seriously like the place. Seriously. It’s crossed my mind on more than a few occasions. This is why I must go again more often to get a feel for living and working there – then maybe in the future I can seriously consider moving there – at least for a while. Not having visited the US, I also decided it was time I did that too. I want to see a country which has some of the most barbaric and inhuman conditions on earth, a place where 92% of people may never leave the country through not even having a passport, and most will never move within a few hours of their home town. A country where 80 million people are classed as illiterate, run by a monumental moron-in-chief, who couldn’t tell the difference between a good idea and a complete screwup if you branded him with it. I’m off to
New York with some friends within a couple of months – in time for the presidential elections. I want an enormous coffee from Central Perk (apparently a place with that name does actually exist).

Cornwall

My grandmother celebrated her 80th birthday in July. I returned from Ottawa on the day of her party and, after a brief stopoff for a shower at Paddington station, caught a train to Bodmin to join my family and certain parts of my extended family for a week in the Cornish countryside. We hired two barns which had been converted in to luxury holiday accommodation and are owned by a relative of mine. My grandmother was born 23 years before the Transistor was invented and has seen such change in her lifetime – wars, peace, changes in world order, the stuff of legend. Despite the rate at which modern technology adapts, it is unlikely that we will endure such a monumental change in human society as happened over the last 80 years.

Cornwall was really fun. I seldom go with my family when they visit our many relatives in the Cornish countryside and this was a good opportunity to play at guessing who people I met 10-20 years ago might actually be. Despite the extended family presence, it wasn’t overkill and it was both entertaining and relaxing also. I enjoyed running along clifftop paths with my cousins, two 80th birthday parties I attended (another relative was also celebrating at the same time as my gran), and cakes in small villages. While they might have ADSL in these parts today, it’s a far cry from the city life in Reading. I caught a train back to Reading midweek in order to check on some things in the office and see how Oliver (our cat) was managing with the care of a friend of the family. Upon rejoining my family, we enjoyed hillside readings of John Betcheman on a beech and had cornish pasties (well, I tasted one, since I don’t really eat beef – and haven’t ever since the beef scares of the mid 90s – these days I just don’t like the taste any more).

UKUUG Conference

I returned from Cornwall in time to fairly immediately travel up to Leeds for the UKUUG Conference. I was presenting a paper of the Business Case for Embedded Linux, and travelled to Leeds with my Belgian friend Philippe, and Paul, both of whom were also presenting papers. I had tried to organise an Embedded Track at the conference and I hope that is was a reasonably successful first attempt. Incidentally, I am fighting apathy to get another event organised soon.

The conference was really cool, mostly because of the people I meet at these things, and the kinds of extra-curricular activities that can happen. I enjoyed our evenings in the town, playing with Paul’s Brompton in the dark, drinking some Belgian beer with wja, rooftop partying, and seeing people that I have either worked with or otherwise been involved with. Leeds really is much more pleasant than one might first imagine – while it might have once been a rundown town suffering from the move to a more servies and technologically orientated modern society, the regeneration is quite apparent and the city really is most enjoyable indeed. The canal area has obviously undergone serious development over the past few years.

The Linux Beer Hike

The Linux Beer Wanderung (LBW) – or Linux beer hike – has been a regular event for the past four years. This was my first year in attendance and I could not be there for the whole week – but nonetheless it was fun. LBW took place in Schin Op Geul, in the southern Nertherlands, and featured a number of walks, trips and other events. I particularly enjoyed meeting Kimble, Sarah, and Dave, as well as seeing numerous people I have either met or encountered in one way or another, and regular Linux people. The beer was good and the accommodation was pretty cool too – with the caveat that some unsubtle geeks did have a bondage session with pink cat 5 cable in the female dormatory on the last evening.

I decided to go to LBW just over a week before it happened, so I had to rather quickly book a
Eurostar ticket to Schin Op Geul via Brussels and Maastricht (ticketed as to Amsterdam but it allows you to go to any station), and get things prepared. I had magazine deadlines and work commitments so I only went for the latter part of the week and arrived on the Thursday evening of an event that ran until Sunday. After some fun and games with finding the barn location, I plugged my laptop in to the network and geeked out for a while before deciding to do some regular human stuff too. During the course of the four days that I was at the LBW, I went for a few walks around the area, visited a few bars and restaurants with fellow LBWers (including an interesting gay bar) and even went toboganning.

On the Saturday I joined a group who were driving to Amsterdam for a day trip to visit the Van Gogh Museum, as well as the town itself. In addition to contrasting Manet and Monet (neither or which I find particularly gripping in their works – but then Van Gogh seldom painted faces and seemed to have a few interesting quirks) at the Van Gogh museum, I had a Bagal at Bagals and Beans (where a law student from Oxford served me – she’s been studying there for around 4 years and I pointed out the similarity with that establishment and G&Ds in Oxford itself), and a river and canal tour which was particularly interesting. Of all the day trips I have recently done I would rate this very highly indeed.

Meanwhile in the UK

Meanwhile in the UK, I have been reading various bits and pieces, I’ve signed up to a large number of additional Linux User Groups – partly out of interest and partly for a new column I’m working on – and I’ve been keeping myself busy by writing for several different publications. You’ll notice I am in the current issue of Linux Magazine in addition to my regular columns in Linux User & Developer, and if you look carefully enough you might notice more of my writing appearing elsewhere over the next few months. I decided to properly tracked the Linux Kernel Mailing List, Kernel Newbies, a bunch of websites on kernel development, and get in to making a public contribution in addition to the top secretish stuff I do at work. I have also started trying to regularly follow the happenings of Dave Jones and various other random Kernel hackers. I already have a subscription to LWN, which I find useful. This all fits in with getting a Gmail account for tracking high volumen mailing lists much more readily and easily in a way only Google
can do. Their threading support is pretty damn good as is the service generally – although it has been down a little (but it is beta), I have some invitations if someone wants an account.

I’ve been travelling around the UK a little too recently. A couple of weeks ago I visited Manchester, Liverpool, Manchester again, Birmingham and Nottingham in the space of a few days. During this time I was able to meet various people I had either not seen for a while or had arranged to see. I’ll need to make arrangements to see Sid because the last few times just haven’t happened and I feel bad about that – but it’s mostly just a result of trying to fit things around when we’re both available in the same place. It was good to see Nottingham as I had not been in months. I went to Carl’s stag party day event thingy thing – Quad Biking and Wagamama
with a pub stop in between and driving around with Hannah and Joe Wrigley. On the previous few days I had been to see Tom in Congleton and a guy from work who I’d agreed to help install ADSL in Liverpool. On the evening before the party, I had arrived in Birmingham a little later than planned (thanks to Virgin Trains et al and in part due to arrangements I had made), and so I missed meeting the guys from
Open Advantage and in any case had immediately had to find a shoe shop because the nice new slipon comfy shoes I had bought turned out to rub something awful at the back. Upon the conferance of positive encouragement from Hannah and Joe to my idea of boots, this is my first forary away from regular shoes. While they might make me look a bit like an arrogant American, they are pretty neat.

Toby went to the stag party too, which was really convienient as I hadn’t seen either him or Sara in ages and really wanted to. I’ve not seen
Robin or Beckie in a while either – but we’ll hopefully fix that fact soon. Toby and I caught a train to Cambridge after the party and I crashed over there with them before going on a walk in th park with some light provisions for our quasi-picnic lunch on a bench. Toby’s iTrip really is an improvement over the analog FM transmitter I was using for my iPod so I got a friend from work who just returned from the US to get me one while he was there – I’m quite sure it’s powerful enough to give people cancer but it works really well.

On the Sunday afternoon, after our picnic, I went in to Cambridge, walked across the green and in to town. I bought some stuff in Maplin (I had yet another conversation with the staff in a Maplin about how they are phasing out components and how much the staff also don’t like this particular move very much on the part of Maplin), visited a few bookshops and went punting along the river Cam. I discovered that Heffers are having a drive to turn themselves in to yet another crappy bookshop – the computing section is probably not the only section which was moved, shrunk, and now sells most popular mainstream stuff that I don’t go to Heffers to buy. Bah. I was also somewhat annoyed at an arrogant drunk who was on the tour punt I went on, and who not only ruined the experience but necessitated a call to the Cambridgeshire police force after he reacted to me asking him not to behave quite so disgracefully as he was (throwing water over people in the boat, others, causing a disturbance, while having a newborn baby with him and managing to be with an entire family of drunken people that should not be on a punt but were allowed anyway). Aside from these issues, Cambridge was quite entertaining. I discovered the summer fruit smoothies in Nero and met Dave Loew in Borders (the famous Celloist whom I met last year in Reading Smiths – this time his first words to me were “you’re Jon Masters” – which was somewhat amusing. He’s using an email I sent to him complimenting his music in publicity, which is why he recalled my name on that particular occasion). I bught his latest Safari In Classics 3 CD.

I went to a club recently. I’ve not done that in years but a friend suggested I might like to join her and some others and I decided to go. It wasn’t as bad an experience as I thought it might have been – I can’t dance and generally have been to the wrong kind of clubs in the past – and I think I’ll do this again when the opportunity arises. Mylo was DJing and I’ve since bought his CD in the Reading Fopp (it’s a very different CD from the live stuff and much more chillout, relaxing music in nature). The club was in East London (it’s called Plastic People and it’s near Shoreditch highstreet) and I saw Trevor and Frank on the way to it – haven’t seen Frank in years. I left the club before the others because I was feeling ill from a stomach bug that’s been going around which subsequently made me feel pain all weekend (and delayed this update by yet another week) but was not in time for the last train back to Reading. It took 40 minutes to find any staff at Paddington (managed by Network Rail – nobody in the shops had emergency contact details or would help (or both) – I later told the management that I must help prevent them getting a Safer Stations award as they clearly have appauling security and no ability to handle minor incidents of passangers feeling ill…doesn’t bode well for major incident handling. This is not the first time I’ve had to moan about this kind of thing at Paddington – I once had to complain about the security implications of large bins they kept around for catering while all the time removing general public wastebins.

I’ve been out in London a few times recently in fact. Mostly meeting a friend for dinner or for watching a film screening, or moonlit strolls along the Thames – I like doing that kind of stuff. This evening I went bowling with Hannah and Joe Wrigley, my younger sister, and mum. It was good to go bowling again as I have not been in several years, but unfortunate that the environment was encreadibly smokey and filled with the most disgracefully bad music at the loudest volume – next time we’ll have to avoid going there on a Friday night.

Random Travelling

I didn’t die flying to Canada. Or to several other places. So I’m going to do it more often. Over the next six months I hope to visit Slovenia, New York, Paris, Canada, Brussels, Tux, and a few more besides. Trains and flights are pretty cheap and while I am concerned about pointlessly burning jet fuel to go to these places – I’ve not done it heavily in the past and I’m sure at some point I’ll have family commitments and other reasons why it is less feasible to travel as much as I would like to right now. Perhaps it’s just pure escapism – I’ll ask Eliza for some comments.

Finishing comments

It has been too long since I updated this blog, there’s stuff I haven’t mentioned because it’s hard to get it all in one at this point, and I generally should write more stuff here. Once my laptop returns from being repaired by John Lewis (I’m having any issues resolved since the warrenty just expired) then I’ll upgrade the disk and fix a load of software updates on it – then hopefully I can sort out being more productive in writing and developing on to go. I’m reading “Understanding the Linux Virtual Memory Manager” and playing around with bits of code for the GBA after a friend sparked an interest. I’ve got a pet project which is beginning but I’ll mention more about that once I have something to show for it.

Jon.

[ from the turin-milan-rome-ottawa dept. ]

Photos (from left to right): The Ottawa Linux Symposium, A weekend in Rome, Teaching embedded engineering in sunny Turin, dfb’s summer BBQ.

This month has featured three trips overseas, an ipod acquisition, talk of ventures new and miscellany ranging from Geocacheing with Canadians to late night bar conversations with Americans in Rome. Regular readers have been waiting for this update for a while now but I’ve been busy – and let’s face it, this is mostly for my benefit and those of my resident stalkers anyway. Suffice it to say that three return flights later I am slightly more comfortable with the flying thing and I have decided Ottawa is one of the most civilised and enjoyable places one could visit on planet Earth.

I encountered a large amount of change at Linux User as well as elsewhere and realised that life is about living and doing new and interesting things. I must travel more often and experience the richness that is out there – I want to go to the States this year (visiting New York and Washington would be a good start but I would also like to see Boulder in Colorado and other more scenic American locales), Paris (having only ever been around it and to other parts of France), and other parts of Europe and Northern America. On the magazine front, I am now writing for several Linux magazines and am considering ways in which I can take writing further.

Meeting my foreign counterparts reminds me of just how much fun working with GNU and Linux really is and how much I want to continue to assist that cute little furry penguin in his attempt at global domination. Speaking of domination, I randomly met a dominatrix on a train recently – I bet none of you can claim that (whether you would admit to it or not is another matter). She has only one client and he pays her to kick him in his nads…but hey he did pay for her to visit the UK and that made for somewhat of an interesting conversation on the way home one night.

I have been listening to Katie Melua and The Corrs although I am starting to see the appeal in a variety of other music (my ipod has everything from System Of A Down and Slayer to Kylie Minogue and Handel on it). ipod Linux is now installed on the ipod but it will need re-installing when the replacement unit arrives. I quite like the ipod hardware however the casing on my unit is suffering from some alignment issues and this necessitates that it be swapped out soon. Whatever you do avoid any situation where iTunes is syncing music and you
either lose power or disconnect the ipod as it may well trash its internal metadata which the ipod cannot independently regenerate itself – so in plain English this means that you lose access to your music and have to either do another resync or reinstall the unit from scratch (I have done this tiwce as a result of incidents using iTunes). Apple should fix their software and add support to the next ipod firmware for scanning its internal disk so that one does not have to use their software to upload music (so that will never happen because they obviously want you to use iTunes).

I have not had much chance at violin practice and my Maths related reading has taken too much of a backseat in preference to the Embedded Systems material on esoteric Microcontroller architectures (Z80 and MC6800 mostly) and ARM. I have now got several different ARM systems and have been built various toolchains with varying levels of success. Finally had a second driving test and managed to fail – mostly on maneouvres once again. Perhaps I can get a short notice test in August and finally get a piece of paper which says I can drive so I can quit worrying about getting a parallel park right first time every time! I might then buy a car at some point later this year – I am quite fond of Hannah and Joe Wrigley’s Ford Ka, but also like the economical VW Polo and a number of others – I am not sure that one can really get a “green” friendly car but it is probably worth researching a little to find out which manufacturer is rated least evil.

Visiting Italia

A large GNU/Linux vendor asked if I might give an Embedded Engineering training course in sunny Turin. Who was I to refuse such a proposal – I figured it would be something worth doing. I travelled up to Birmingham to meet Hannah and Joe Wrigley on the 3rd July, went with them to dfb’s BBQ in Nottingham at lunchtime on the 4th July, and then flew out to Milano Linate on the last flight from Heathrow (for those reading in lands afare, this means 19:50 because certain Londoners dislike the noise of planes taking off and landing late at night). I flew with Alitalia on a small Airbus plane, having checked out the airline safety record and plane total cabin loss statistics prior to travel. The only serious problem involving this airline in recent times was an incident in which a wing was removed after landing by a truck striking a plane, although there were apparently no injuries. Statistics say I can fly for more than 36000 years without incident but that does not in general make me feel any better when I am on a plane.

When I arrived in Milan I took a coach service to a nearby railway station (I believe that it did go to the Central Station but it was late, I was quite tired, and do not speak much Italian), travelled in to the Central Station and waited for a train to Torino. After some time a service did depart for Turin and arrived in the early hours of the Monday morning. I spent several hours setting up equipment on the Monday morning before the training session actually began. For the rest of the week I showed a group of experienced Embedded Systems engineers how to produce their own ARM Linux toolchains and compile up kernels and userland environments. The whole experience was most interesting indeed.

I had some time to explore the Torino area on a few occasions towards the end of the week and discovered that Turin is a stunning corner of the north west of Italy. It is well situated near to the Alps and is to be the home of the 2006 Winter Olympic Games. While it is true that English speaking Italians are less common in the area, the regional government are providing free English lessons to those in the service industries (such as taxi drivers) prior to the 2006 Games. As can be seen from the photos taken, I enjoyed the nightlife around the city center and River Po on the Friday evening. I especially enjoyed the local Pizza and Ice Cream, for which Italy is famous.

A complication at the Hotel meant that I left late on the Saturday and missed the originally planned flight. Consequently it was necessary to book a short notice replacement however this did give some time to explore the Milano area briefly. I took a train to the Cathedral area and saw a number of designer shops as well as what might be the world’s most stylish McDonalds (see photo). Milan is certainly an area that I would like to visit again sometime for a long lunch and an afternoon coffee intermixed with shopping expeditions.

A weekend in Rome

I spent a week in the UK following my trip to Torino and got some work done before popping in to Rome for a long weekend with some work colleagues. Hetal, Mark, and I flew out on the 16th of July on an early morning Ryanair flight and were in Rome in time for lunch. We stayed at the excellent Camping Tiber campsite and spent four days exploring the local area and mixing with other residents on the evenings. I met a group of girls from Las Vegas and their friends on the first night and we stayed up late drinking at the bar.

Rome really is a fascinating place to visit. There is of course a wonderful amount of ancient culture to be discovered although parts of the city are clearly in need of some investment – such as the area around the River Tiber itself. We visited the Vatican, the Colosseum, and the Pantheon, as well as the Spanish Steps, a number of eateries, fountains, and many other places besides. The weekend was quite an experience and I enjoyed it very much.

Calling America

I have just come back to the UK from the 2004 Ottawa Linux Symposium. This was my first visit to North America and I found the Canadians most welcoming and friendly indeed. Ottawa is surely one of the most wonderful places on Earth – so amazingly clean for a major city and yet full of an inspired mix of anglo-franco-American culture which one could surely not hope to rivial anywhere else. The City itself is young in comparison with most other major international cities however it has a number of interesting sites to be taken in and the view of the Parliament and Canal by night is quite simply breathtaking. I especially enjoyed walking across the Alexandra Bridge in to Quebec and taking some photos of Ottawa from the bridge itself.

The Ottawa Linux Symposium was an absolutely enjoyable experience, with so many major faces to be seen and even the chance to meet Linus himself (which gave me chance to quiz him over the issue of kernel debuggers and other related stuff). I flew to Canada on Air Canada flight AC889 from London Heathrow which departed terminal 3 at 15:30 on Tuesday (I was in Rome until Monday evening and so planned to go home and pack quickly however missed the last train in the evening so had to spend several hours sleeping at Paddington railway station and travelled on an early morning train. I missed the first train because I was asleep but did get a shower and then got home in time to quickly pack and catch the RailAir coach service from Reading to Heathrow) and arrived in Ottawa in time for the first night pre-OLS party.

I stayed at the Les Suites hotel very near to the conference center itself, with agk and Ken. We had good pizza next door to the bar on that first evening. Perhaps the highlight of the early evening was talking to Alan and various others while he demonstrated a novel way of using his homemade drinking straw. Later on I went to another pub (an Irish themed pub) with the guys from Montavista as well as a bunch of other embedded types and had a few softdrinks and enough coffee to keep an army going for a while (I has pretty tired and I decided alcohol was really not a good idea at that point). These guys stayed out until the bar closed and we had to return to the Hotel. Since I was increadibly tired by around 03:00, I decided to go to bed after that.

Les Suites is an excellent Hotel and has wifi in parts so I was able to read my email in the mornings. On the first day, I went to the talks but took some time out around lunchtime to look around the city and became infatuated with its amazing asthetical quality. I encountered two cyclists with GPSes and inquired as to whether they were Geocacheing. Chris and Diane said that they were and invited me to join them in locating an ellusive cache which had been recently installed by a local Ottawa resident and Linux user (it’s a small world really huh?). I have a snail Travel Bug which needs to be registered and sent on his way around the world (I should do that).

On the first evening I missed out on an apparently dissappointing dinner event which had been sponsored by AMD after I returned to the Hotel for a few minutes and passed out from excessive tiredness. Still I am told I did not miss much and the upshot of this was that I was awake bright and early on the following morning in time to explore. In fact I got distracted (in a good way) during breakfast and left the Hotel later than I had originally planned. The talks were typicaly of high quality – I concentrated mostly on those happening in Room A because they tended to be kernel related. On the first day Jens Axboe gave a very interesting talk on Block IO, while Keith Packard spoke about the trials of making X less dependent upon specific hardware. The talk on dynamic kernel modules was pretty interesting and needs some followup.

The second day included a very interesting talk on scalability of Linux 2.6 (did you know there was a livelock problem in the scheduler due to the time taken in cache coherency overhead meaning that timer interrupts came around too fast to be handled?). There was some material on the Power5 which would be even more cool if IBM would send me one to review. Rusty Russell discussed the issues of adding (reasonably straightforward) and removing (a lot more involved) CPUs from a running Linux system and Dave Hansen followed this up by giving a similar coverage for memory devices aswell. The crashdump BOF sessions were enlightening, mostly because of the level of conversation which the group collectively created – I have already mentioned that I met Linus and talked to him about the issues of kernel debugging and I have made a few observations in this month’s column. I hope that we do get some traceing support added to the kernel soon at any rate. I had some good chinese at a private party on Thursday night.

Friday was pretty cool. There were interesting talks on IO scheduling performance (do not use AS with RAID5 on any sizeable system was one observation which was noted there) and Power-aware sensor systems (but this could have been much more interesting if it had delved in to the coding issues), and I enjoyed these as much as any other, but what made my day was having a banana split with someone I met during my stay in Ottawa. I was invited to a club called the Firestation and did turn up but could not find the people I was trying to meet so left early – but I did grab some food at the restaurant below called Mash – I do however certainly have a motivation to return to Ottawa when I am next in Canada I hope.

On Saturday I went to part of Alan Robertson’s High-Availability talks and one talk which was changed at the last minute, before attending the GPG keysigning session which was hosted by Matthew Wilcox. As can be seen from the GPG web of trust statistics I am well on my way to becomming part of the strong set. I had some food in a little cafe with the Montavista folks as well as Liberty, Russell King, and a host of others, before I had to leave to catch the 23:20 Air Canada return flight AC888 to London Heathrow. On the return flight I was pre-occupied with thoughts of when I could next visit Canada.

Heathrow terminal 3 was quite busy and we were delayed in leaving the aircraft, and in obtaining our baggage afterwards, so I was glad to get to Paddington on the Heathrow Express in time to have a 5 minute shower and catch a train to Cornwall in order to join my extended family and grandmother in celebrating her 80th birthday. I have been in Cornwall for the last week and hope to provide an update with some photos of the wonderful countryside which I was able to experience. I probably need to post a few more updates here to get things completely up to date but this will do for now.

Jon.

[ from the random-update dept. ]

Photos (from left to right): Critical Mass, The Oxford Thames Path, A Wolvercote Canal Walk, Evening cycling around London.

Time does anything but stand still. It would seem that another few weeks have passed and this blog has lagged again – not that it really matters in the grand scheme of things but I would like to keep it a bit more up to date since it provides a useful account of what is going on. I am attempting to motivate myself to get some much needed work done over the next few days of this week. I have various articles to finish and a trip to Turin planned starting on this coming Sunday (more on that later). Over the next few weeks I am planning to be away in various foreign locations and this means that I should get myself up to date with miscellaneous stuff.

On a recent trip to London I noticed the Paddington Band had been playing or were about to – probably worth listening to at some point. I seem to be listening to a weird variety of music at the moment – from Sixpence none the richer to Vanessa Mae (thanks in part to a sale which happened recently at Borders in Oxford) and even A-Ha (Stay on these roads and other albulms which I have around here – I should return the best of disk to a friend of mine sometime as I have borrowed it for far too long I suppose). I finally got that music from Foyles and will learn Bach’s Concerto for Two Harpsichords which has been arranged for Oboe, Violin and Piano (although the original arrangement was lost so the one we are to use – those of us playing – is only an approximation). My cousins showed me their flute and trumpet – I am quite fascinated by the flute as an instrument although it seems difficult for me to create the right resonance for the lower D – I could only play higher octaves.

I went punting with my family a few weeks ago. I drove to Oxford in my parent’s car (good practice for the next driving test on Wednesday) and Hannah and Joe Wrigley drove in their shiny new Ford KA. I quite like that particular model and would be seriously interested in getting one for myself at some point (aside from the evil American corporation thing that is going on a little there – I need to ascertain how bad they are) – I need to get that bit of paper before any of this can happen however. Punting was enjoyable and both Joe and I took it in turn to propell the others from the Cherwell Boathouse through the University Parks and back again.

I have recently been visiting G&D’s on regular occasions for Ice Cream and Bagel based nurishment. They have the most exquisite home made flavours which go very well with a Salmon and Cream Cheese Bagel – I suppose I am experiencing a Bagel fad, given my trips to the Brick Lane Bagel shop also. Brick Lane is a fascinating place that I need to visit more often – and on a somewhat unrelated note, I should read the book by the same name which is still sitting on my bookshelf beside Bill Bryson’s A Short History Of Nearly Everything (which I should also read at some point). After punting with my family on the occasion I have mentioned above, I frequented George and Davis’s for a light tea before actually being around for OxLUG.

I went punting with OxLUG too – although only Dom turned up. He told me that he was performing at the Sheldonian Theatre with the Oxford Bach Choir and I decided that it would be a most interesting way of spending a Saturday night. I enjoyed their concert very much and will look out for the next concert season which is due in December. After the concert finished, I met some friends in town and managed to miss the last train home – so stayed with a workmate and caught an afternoon train. I bought a new bike from Cycle King on the way in to London and went cycling with Trevor Parsons, Paul Sladen, and of course also Hussein Jodiyawalla. We cycled up to Primrose Hill and I once more saw the fantastic view to be had from there.

I have not been walking so much since the last bike was stolen and have become very conscious of that fact. I have recently been walking along the Thames Path in Oxford, along the Oxford Canal, cyling around Oxford City, and of course meeting people for nighttime cycle experiences in London. Wolvercote still appeals to me as a location and I have been there on several occasions quite recently – on one occasion I inquired about rooms for rent but am yet certain I want to commit to living in Oxford when I might hopefully be able to drive over the next few months.

I went along to my first Critical Mass on Friday and enjoyed meeting lots of other cyclists as we went around London. We had a police escort from policepeople on Smith and Wesson cycles (these things really rule) and they closed off bits of roads for us as we went around. Cycling amongst us were a number of fellow geeks who knew who I am. I am now keen to get a GPS unit because I can hook this up to an iPAQ or Zaurus to offer realtime tracking of the route we are cycling for Critical Mass. Essentially it is trivial to do this with a GPRS enabled mobile phone and a few scripts and this would simplify finding the group when en route.

I have been reading more about various Matrix Mathematics and also some of the various other books that I have mentioned. In addition, I have experimented with various FETs and done some general electronics. I hope that over time I can improve my capability there – and I am increasingly becomming interested in amateur radio as I learn about the true nature of the signals around us. Waves are fascinating things. Talking to my cousin about her flute on Saturday evening, I was able to explain various mathematically defined behaviours but this did not make a bit of difference to my inability to produce the sound that I wanted from it – still I potentially may buy a flute at some point for general interest.

On Sunday I shall be at a friend’s BBQ in Nottingham and then travel to London Heathrow for an evening flight to Milan. I have been asked to give an Embedded Engineering training course by a certain large vendor and am currently updating bits of the material for use on the course. When I travel back to the UK I shall not have long before a weekend trip to Rome with some work friends. The day after we arrive in London once more, I am travelling to Ottawa for the Ottawa Linux Symposium 2004. At the Linux Symposium I hope to meet many people I have encountered at events such as FOSDEM and have chance to discuss various topics, do GPG keysigning stuff, and absorb a large quantity of information from the many experts in various different fields who will be attending. After Ottawa I am travelling to Cornwall for a week with my extended family in celebration of my grandmother’s 80th birthday.

Photos (from left to right): Oxford, The Oxford Sheldonian Theatre, Punting along the Cherwell, Paddington Band.

[ from the wibble-wibble-blog-blog dept. ]

Photos (from left to right): Walking around Wolvercote fields, playing with Embedded Debian on an iPaQ and getting Debian running on the Gamecube, Dinner with Richard Stallman, tidying up various crud.

Once again it has been a few weeks since I posted an update to this blog (sorry Chris and others) and a few things are worthy of note. I have been to London a few times, cycled around various random bits of countryside (until that bike was eventually stolen) and I have taken a number of long walks too. On the books front I finished the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time within a couple of days and have recently bought Brick Lane written by Monica Ali. I want to do a lot more reading on all manner of topics. I have done a bit of hardware and software hacking too; When Tom visited I built an LIRC receiver board for him and I have now got an Embedded Debian box as well as a Gamecube which plays A-Ha – Take On Me (Superior Techno Remix) whilst running Debian. There are a few framebuffer issues left to resolve and I want to look at IDE hacks too.

Oxford has both the Thames flowing through it and a canal for good measure. I work out in Witney and have cycled to the office a couple of times so it was cool to discover that one can join the canal half way from Witney and cycle or walk in to Oxford on a very pleasant (Tom says I need a new word other than pleasant to descibe such experiences as these….hmmm) towpath. I enjoy walking along the Thames or the Oxford Canal and especially in and around the Wolvercote area of Oxford – famous for the Trout but I believe that I have taken some photos of fantastic countryside on my travels. It is not only Wolvercote that I have been to recently – we went on a family picnic to Sonning and had to reliquinsh our first picnic location to a bunch of swans who really felt they should be there instead.

A few weeks ago I went in to London to locate Richard Stallman (I missed his patents talk but have heard him talk about such issues elsewhere) with a vague plan of eating some Chinese. Paul Sladen and Trevor Parsons were there too as well as a guy from GLLUG called Nick and a games programmer whose name I do not have available. We had some Cantonese cuisine somewhere and I talked to RMS about a variety of topics – from open hardware and embedded systems to LinuxBIOS and even his penchant for reading about the history of the East and the books he had bought.

Afterwards Richard returned to his hotel and several of us talked outside opposite a giant Napster projected advertisement on a wall. Paul, Trevor, and I went for a moonlit cycle around London: from a view at the top of Primrose Hill to a Biegel (London spelling) on Brick Lane and even skipraiding – we did a few variable things on three different styles of bike in a procession (Paul on a Brompton, Trevor on his recumbant and myself on a mountain bike which has since been stolen). Having a Bagal on Brick Lane at 02:00 is certainly a cool experience – especially when you have been cycling around and it is a hot fresh Bagal with Smoked Salmon on it. We found some PS/2 promotional branded mice in the skip and an LCD panal as well as some miscellaneous stuff (such as a desk) which I do not know if Paul ever got back at a later point.

I stayed in Seven Sisters that evening, having cycled with Paul after we left Trevor in London. In the morning we went to Tottenham for a brief meet up with our friend Hussein. Afterwards we cycled in to London, visited Foyles (I ordered a copy of Bach’s Concerto for Oboe, Violin and Piano so that I can play the violin part with a friend from work who plays the Oboe and one of his friend’s who plays the piano in a trio), and got some bread, Humous, and Olives in a Sainsbury’s before cycling to Hyde Park for a picnic. We met a guy on one of those Segway-like wheelchairs which is self balancing on two wheels using 5 gyroscopes and 3 computers. Unfortunately it did take 7 years for FDA approval but that’s probably because this is a useful invention we are talking about and they likely have no real interest in being nice to people who invent cool accessibility devices for the disabled. Anyway I enjoyed this extended period of cycling around London, playing a friend’s violin and generally enjoying the outdoor experience as a whole.

Image: 14 Black Bags of rubbish resulting from a recent clean out.

I cleaned up stuff. Not just a little cleaning, but a big clean that is of course fully photo documented for no particular reason. Notice the excessive state I had let the room get in to as well as the temporarily nice shiny look I have achieved on it for the moment (I hope it lasts but I also know that these things tend to like to make themselves messy almost without any real help). I throw out some stuff (I decided to keep some of my old academic computing work for posterity, as well as a complete copy of Slackware 96. The 5.25″ Windows 95 floppy disks that I happened to have on a shelf were probably a little obsolete by now) sometimes dating back to 1996-2000 because it is probably not so useful by now and I also removed a couple of old machines to the loft so that I now have no 10base-2 networking left at home. What is the world coming to? Anyway the process of cleaning allowed me to locate several items of interest – including a radio clock which sets itself to the rugby time signal and a talking clock which annoys Joe enough to remove its batteries.

I bought myself an adequate Cambridge Audio A1 Amplifier and some Eltax speakers from Richer Sounds. The total came to around 150 pounds and I enjoy the reasonable frequency response in output. While I was recently in a Borders store in Oxford I noticed that they had a half of half price sale and bought some more music. I have now relegated the shitty pop music to the back of a cupboard and am trying to listen to more interesting material. Currently I am enjoying an albulm of Vanessa Mae’s various works and last night bought an old album by Sixpence None The Richer for background music. I have been playing my violin a bit more and reading a book on the mechanics of the instrument. Bowed string motion is actually more complex that your average physicist would wrongly infer and have you believe.

I called Vodaphone recently and said that I wanted them to give me another six months of half price line rental and a new phone in exchange for roping me in to a new contract. Requring a quick confirmation from their supervisor person, the chap at the call center agreed to this and a shiny new 6230 turned up a few days later. I can now listen to MP3 and AAC audio files from my mobile phone if I really want to and at a cost of 10 pounds for the handest. I bet they still made money on that. It has a ring tone too – it goes something like “ring ring, ring ring” – like all phones should. This is coming from someone who once thought having the Free Software song as a ringtone was cool (it isn’t and don’t even go there please).

Image: Homebrew Linux Infra-Red Receiver made for Tom Hawley.

Tom came to visit me in Reading over this past weekend. We went in to town and saw The Day After Tomorrow, having been to the Zizzi in Reading for a quick pizza that actually turned in to more than an hour and necessitated moving the tickets to another time once we arrived at the cinema itself. To the credit of Vue (formally Warner Village cinemas) the chap there did allow us to move our tickets by an hour once we had missed the screening. Actually Zizzi annoyed me recently when I was in Birmingham because they refused to allow three of us (myself and Hannah and Joe Wrigley) to have only tea and coffee without ordering food, despite having free tables. Not good for overall customer relations.

Tom and I built another LIRC receiver unit for him to take home for his jukebox and I got my LCD module up and running again for demonstration. I recently also wrote a simple 2.6. driver for the ITE8212 PCI IDE controller as part of an article and have been reading a lot about the block layer stuff in 2.4. and 2.6. kernels. I also signed up to LWN with a paid subscription because Jonathan Corbet and co. are pretty damn cool.

I mailed in a kernel hacking article on Monday morning and then went to Oxford with Tom for a day trip thing. We went punting along the Cherwell from the boathouse and through the University Parks. A very enjoyable experience which went well with the G&D’s white chocolate homemade icecream which we had beforehand. Afterwards we had dinner at the Trout.

I have some plans to go to Cambridge over the next few weeks and am due for a trip to visit Nottingham also. I am at the moment assessing the options with regards to attending the Ottawa Linux Symposium 2004.

Photos (from left to right): Punting along the Cherwell to the Victoria Arms, A family picnic trip to Sonning, Cycling around London with Paul Sladen, Cycling along the Oxford Canal from beyond Wolvercote in to Oxford.

[ from the have-you-updated-your... dept. ]

Photos (from left to right): James Brindley (Gas Street Basin on the canal in Birmingham), Nottingham Canal, Brindley Place (near to The Mailbox in Birmingham), Birmingham Canal.

It has again been a while since I last updated this online blog of mine. However I do have some things to note – chiefly involving a newfound interest in exercise and doing real world stuff outdoors on occasion. I have taken up cycling again and have been on a number of long walks. On the technology front, I went to the recent BCS Lovelace lecture from Adobe co-founder John Warnock (dfb and gang were there obviously, and I met John Oates from The Register and the guys from TopQuark (yes as in particles, we did actually spend a while discussing the different types…) – John Warnock discussed the original Postscript Hinting techniques for the first time officially and had great slides). I have also been doing quite a bit of reading of late – both on physics (waves, resonance, et al.) and mathematics (exponential forms of complex numbers and similar related stuff), and also recently some fiction too. I am half way through reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (very interesting so far).

I have been to visit Hannah and Joe Wrigley on a few occasions of late – once for a trip, once accompanying a younger relative visiting, and once to help out with some stuff. On two occasions I ended up visiting Coventry also – I have various rather bias reasons for enjoying visiting, but also find Warwick campus rather enthralling. Unfortunately the campus is rather outside of town, though pleasant. Journeying up to Coventry, I encountered a woman on the train who was rather distressed and probably suffering from a psychiatric disorder – some other passengers were typically offensive and distastefully untactful (they would feel quite differently if one of their drinking friends had an accident or was otherwise suffering from a similar condition. Essentially though, this is representative of the public as a whole and that is a sorry situation). Actually I was sitting opposite a woman called (I would approximate as) Liv. She had recently graduated from studying nursing and physcology at Warwick and shared a taxi with me to the campus.

When I have been in Birmingham I have had a number of walks along the Worcester and Birmingham Canal for exercise and for inspiration. On one occasion recently, I walked from Selly Oak in to Birmingham the equivalent of three times in one day, and went strolling around the town for a while too. I met my friend Dan when I was in the town [on the previous visit on the weekend before last - updated: 17/06/2004] and we had a very pleasant walk along the the Canal, some food and then saw the Jim Carey Eternal sunshine of a spotless mind film which has just recently come out. I had already seen Kill Bill vol. 2 for a second time on a previous visit, with Hannah and Joe and some of their friends who were around. I enjoy visiting Birmingham.

I seem to enjoy walking quite a lot now. Not only did I cycle 30 miles one day last week on my way to and from work one day, but then walked 12 miles on Saturday and cycled around London this evening with Paul Sladen. I hope that the narrowboat canal trip is happening – I spoke to some friends about it but have yet to mention it to some more, and in any case it should be fun.

I have been reading mostly mathematical and physics related stuff, but have also brushed up on some operating system theory and plan to resurrect the work that I was doing for my project on Genesis. At some point in the next few weeks I hope to get an Apple iPod so that I can get Linux up and running on it for the column, but I also need to get a writeup done on the EmDebian Stag Framework as well as Gamecube Linux – actually I need to do a few things for both of these projects. I have allowed my plan for fixing some PowerPC platform independence stuff to stagnate far too much and will do something about that.

This room needs cleaning up and I need to work at maintaining accurate mental records of what I want to do and when – I have a great tendency for persuing tangents, and this is a good thing, but I need to ensure that I also come back to what I was looking at before that. I have to examine electronics stuff that I have been meaning to look at, and I need to purchase a violin part for Bach’s Concerto for Violin, Oboe and Piano (a friend plays the Oboe and a friend of his plays the piano…as does obviously Hannah but I do not know any other Oboe players).

On Saturday morning, I went in to Birmingham and visited a number of bookshops in a quest for enlightening material to read (as well as a book on Embedded Systems which is on sale in the Warwick University Bookshop but which I have not seen in the flesh since, and I would rather buy from a real bookstore even if it is in my recommendations from that American online bookstore). I felt compelled to inform the management of Borders as to the decline of their Computing Section (it is now quite desperate in comparison to the state it was in when they first opened – and they have moved it downstairs from being in a sensible location next to the Engineering and Mathematical sciences, as a consequence of wishing to improve flow and their American mangement visiting) – it is not always about stocking books that sell, try stocking just one or two that are interesting so that people like myself will want to buy more.

Primark have a weird store layout in Birmingham and due to the nature of the fire shutters, I imagine certainly a number of issues in the event of an actual emergency – the shutters effectively isolate the escalators, but people will head for those in the first instance and become trapped. The engineer who designed that system needs to seriously consider when they last went shopping on a busy afternoon in the town. Zizzi also annoyed us on Saturday night because they refused to allow us to have “drinks only” because that is not their policy (I pointed out how often I go to that restaurant but to no avail, so I am less so inclined now). On a positive note, I bought The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time on Saturday and have read to around halfway now. A woman representing British Waterways asked me some survey questions at Gas Street Basin and I discussed maintainance, safety and accessibility issues.

On Saturday night I went to Symphony Hall in Birmingham and saw Carina Burana being performed by the Birmingham City Choir and Orchestra. Essentially a fantastic performance and I would certainly recommend a visit to anyone so inclined – especially as there was a good under 25 discount. Hannah and I spent some time commenting upon the performance afterwards and then we had some tea by the canal, before walking along it to Selly Oak and retiring for the evening.

This evening I went in to London for around 19:00 and met up with Paul Sladen. Meeting at Kings Cross, we went for a cycle around the City and along the Thames. Stopping off for Noodles, we eventually got back to Paddington and I caught a late train home. I enjoyed this evening very much indeed although my hayfever is starting to cause me some discomfort.

Jon.

Photos (from left to right): Cycling 30 miles to and from the office, Walking around London after the BCS Lovelace Lecture, John Warnock from Adobe, Symphony Hall, Jon Masters at Westminster.

[ from the doing-more-normal-stuff dept. ]

Photographs (from left to right): Philippe and Justin on the emDebian stand at Linux Expo Olympia 2004, Wookey cleaning up after the second day of the show, a walk along the River Cherwell in Oxford, a walk around London.

I have not updated this blog in a couple of weeks, and a few things have happened since the last update, so here we go. As I write this, I am in Birmingham with Hannah and Joe Wrigley, about to eat supper after a nice walk through a park in Selly Oak. I have been trying to get more regular exercise by taking longer walks whenever possible – either for the sake of a walk, or in place of a bus or taxi whenever.

I went to the Linux Expo Olympia 2004, and met what I would imagine was between 100-200 people that I know through some means or other. The show was interesting because of the sheer number of interesting conversations and people, and I enjoyed hanging out on the emDebian stand to talk to people about Embedded Linux. Various companies had offerings on show and the BBC especially were interesting because of their Open Source video and audio codec and interoperability software stack.

After the show ended on the Tuesday, we went to a dinner at Pizza Express (I am not as fond of them as I was, because I now prefer Zizzi), where I talked to Wookey, John Southern, and a few others. On the Wednesday evening there was a Debian pub meet, followed by a meeting of printk people (sladen managed to wonder off with a few people and was later to be heard on LUG Radio commenting about his plans, along with various revelations concerning the nature of products on sale on the Debian stand). I met Jono Bacon and some of the LUG Radio people again as well.

My column this month covers some general recent developments and touches upon GPL issues with embedded systems. I produced a piece on LIRC interfacing using a Sky Digital remote, and also finally got the CeBIT 2004 writeup in to a digital form which could actually be printed . Also did a bit of hacking on some block device code and spent a lot of time brushing up on my calculus, and getting up to speed with my understanding of NMR theory. I roughly understand how systems are built now, and how things like gradients work to add spacial information for determining the position of parts of an image or the movement of molecules within a sample for sizing.

Last weekend, we had a family outing along the River Cherwell in Oxford. We were going to hire a punt, but the queue was more than an hour long. I have recently made a number of trips along the Thames and wish to explore more of the Oxford area in general. On the Friday beforehand, I had located the Botanic Gardens and heard of a pub called “The Head Of The River” where I can apparently hire a punt for the Thames also. photos.jonmasters.org contains many more photos from these random events in the Random section.

This week, I had a driving test on Monday lunchtime. I managed to fail this first test because I performed a Parallel Park which resulted in the car being positioned too far from the curb, and subsequently decided that I had failed, so was not bothered when I picked up a couple of other faults on the way back to the test centre. The DSA waiting list in Oxford is currently absolutley ludicrous – September 2004. The surrounding areas are not much improved upon that and I have had to settle for a June test in Reading. This means I have to ask my instructor to drive from Oxford however.

I decided to follow the test with a little walk along the Thames, and then travelled from the Trout Inn back in to Oxford. I went in to London and walked around Regents Park, before meeting sladen and walking around bits of central London for a few hours. We saw some people setting up rigging in Trafalgar Square for Freedom Day and had some good Chinese food when we actually arrived in Leicester Square. I spent some time tracking down hardwareisms over the rest of the week and then went for a trip to Coventry.

Yesterday afternoon featured a visit to Warwick to see an old friend. Aftering eating some Pizza at Pizza Express we saw Kill Bill 2 at the Showcase Cinema. This morning, I walked in to Coventry and took a train to Birmingham in order to visit Hannah and Joe Wrigley. We went for a walk and I did a little reading on random Wave type physics.

I am hopefully speaking at the UKUUG Summer Conference 2004 and am spending much of my time learning stuff. Yesterday, I visited a bookshop next to the Rootes Social facility in Warwick, and saw a copy of the Embedded System Design book. This book definately requires a reservation on my bookshelf – there were a few others which I might need to add to my wishlist.

I recently saw a fantastic piece being performed on Classic FM TV, and I discovered the track on a compilation album in Borders on an evening of this week. Ludovico Einaudi performed Le Onde in a truly beautiful performace which had to be heard. I located a CD by the artist in preference to purchasing an entire compilation disc for a single track I wanted. Perhaps worth noting is that the Borders previewing system had incorrect details which resulted in the wrong previews being played for these tracks. Go buy his CD.

Jon.