jcm's blog

[ from the memoirs-of-the-week dept. ]

Photographs (from left to right): A peacock at the Trout Inn, a non-talk by an absent esr (John Pinner’s impromptu talk), Paul Sladen and Jonathan Riddell on a Brompton, Victoria Square in Birmingham, and a homebrew LIRC Receiver.

I have been working on fixing an interesting (debugging printk’s reduce execution to a rate that makes things work type of problem) bug in a Compact Flash driver and had another driving lesson in preparation for the inevitable. Reading a bit more of the maths book and looking at harmonic functions and resonance in more depth. Everything in life is probably a waveform in a cunning disguise. I also have just started looking at the Derome NMR book (“Modern NMR Techniques for Chemistry Research” by Andrew E Derome). I have begun the process of connecting dots between information, in the quest for a higher understanding of what I am doing at the moment.
I like to think that I am gaining something from my exploration of the block layer in Linux and that I can use this to do some fairly positive things fairly soon.

I went to the Trout Inn again, and decided to borrow a GPS from a friend at work in order to try out Geocaching soon. Also I am strongly considering whether to run in the London Marathon next year (if you think that I should the please tell me – certainly I need to decide what to raise funds for if I do run). I spoke to a lock keeper at Godstow lock about narrowboats and got a couple of details, and a brochure for one of the companies who hire boats for a weekend. Currently I am contemplating hiring a boat for a long weekend with whichever friends are interested in the idea. At least one of the companies (Anglo Welsh, according to the lock keeper) have multiple locations where you can pick up and set down boats, rather than return to the journey origin.

On Thursday afternoon I was in Oxford following another driving lesson, and after a trip to a certain coffee house (yes I know but I could stop drinking Starbucks coffee whenever I wanted, honestly), and a trip to the Trout Inn for a juice, I headed to the railway station to catch a train I expected esr to be on board, en route to his planned talk in Birmingham for SBLUG. I met a chap with an ACCU badge and asked him if he knew where esr was, and discovered that Eric basically decided at the last minute to cancel and not give a talk which he first agreed to give around two years ago. Eric Reymond left a large number of people in the lurch in Birmingham and should not be invited to future meetings, in my opinion. It is no longer necessary to meet him in order to understand the views that some hold about him and his actions.

The chap with the ACCU badge turned out to be John Pinner. He had personally paid for esr to travel first class to Birmingham but I ended up having the seat myself. I had brought a pizza, some olives, and ciabatta at Oxford Zizzi and ate these on the way, while John and I had a pleasant conversation. John stood in for esr by giving a different talk for the group and Tim managed the meeting well despite the rudeness of the absent speaker (who was instead having a teleconference with Sun). Fortunately most people were quite understanding of the situation and the talk with panel discussion was as enjoyable as the preceeding buffet.

I enjoyed meeting up with Paul Sladen, jok and Jonathan Riddell. I also met Jono Bacon of LUG Radio and Linux Format fame. Paul, jok, Jonathan and I were given a lift to the station afterwards by John Pinner. At Birmingham New Street, we bought some drinks (thanks to Robin I have discovered that Oasis Summerfruits drink is a little in need of occasional consumption) and a bottle of wine with no opener. I recalled a situation once in Oxford where many of us spent hours trying to open a wine bottle with a biro. We went to Nottingham, and on Friday I met up with Paul and Jonathan. Note the photos of the pointless number of logos at the railway station – perhaps we are going to end up with renationalisation by the backdoor.

On Friday I walked in to Nottingham and bought some grapes and a smoothie before having a coffee with a biscotti. I read a little and subsequently caught a bus to facilitate venturing on to the Jubilee campus in a quest for meeting Paul and Jonathan and various others who we were going to look for. I took some photos of the campus and the wildlife, and spoke to a few people too. I did find a certain Dave and heard that my tickets for the BCS Lovelace award ceremony should arrive at my home soon (in fact they have). I introduced Paul and then we went to get ready for a train to Birmingham. While I went to town and had another coffee in that certain American establishment, Paul and Jonathan returned to Beeston and got themselves ready – we both caught trains from the two stations and met on the train. It randomly decided to hail as I was waiting for the train to turn up.

Paul, Jonathan and I were discussing various randomness on the train, and I saw the Debian logo being prepared for the Debian stand this week. They changed trains and I continued to Birmingham, where I had food at Cafe Rouge before travelling to Reading on the penultimate departing train. Over the past few days I have been syncing my email and built an LIRC receiver. I upgraded perihelion to kernel 2.6.5 and applied the LIRC patches to add the required Serial Driver Character Devices support to the configuration. Trying to make some progress with the UKUUG Embedded Systems stuff and dealing with another related event.

Jon.

[ from the not-a-duplicate-story dept. ]

I went for a walk along the Thames Path in Oxford, Chai Steamer in hand, until I arrived at the Trout Inn in time to read some of my book before some soup refreshment, some juice, and of course tea. I have decided that this walk to Wolvercote is a good way to exercise and then have food.

I sat by the river for a while, after dropping a glass from the end of a bench table that had been left by another customer (which they cleared up straight away), and read about Partial Fractions while drinking a juice. When the air become slightly more fresh, I ventured inside and ordered a chicken cockaleeky soup with some more juice and later some tea.

A pleasant place to watch peacocks and read a book.

When I returned home, I wanted to read more than I did but I settled for a few paragraphs from a book on Fourier Transforms for students. I would prefer to understand Fourier Analysis and Synthesis more than I do, but a hope is that I can over time master these topics.

Jon.

[ from the random-walking-is-good dept. ]



Photo: Trout Inn at Wolvercote, which is in Oxford (famous from Inspector Morse).

Yesterday I went for a walk with Hannah and Joe and my younger sister, along the Thames Path in Oxford. We arrived in Oxford by train and joined the river at the station in order to give a good 3-4 mile walk to the Trout. We had lunch at the Trout and walked back, stopping at the Perch (where we played chess on a giant board) for soft drink refreshment. Certainly this was an excellent outing, because not only was the weather enjoyable, but also we saw cattle grazing along the route, dogs running randomly in the river, horses running around too, and many other relaxing things of that nature. A good day for a good trip along the Thames. I now need to hire a narrowboat with some friends and journey along the river.

Photo: Jon Masters, in University Parks Oxford.

I went for a walk around University Parks on Thursday evening, and then decided to go to oxgo for a quick game on the way home. I met a couple of guys from Codemasters and had an enjoyable learning experience with a 6 Kyu player, and met a player with a rating of 4 Dan.

I bought the latest issue of the venerable Elektor Electronics only to find that they have restyled the content and tried to do a typical makeover in the aid of helping more people to get in to the magazine (i.e. to push up revenue one would imagine). Fortunately this has not been too determental to content and I actually found a couple of good items in this edition touching upon ATAPI interfacing and other random stuff. AMT now do a new “Chai Steamer” beverage which is quite an enjoyable alternative to a latte.

Jon.

[ from the sardines-in-a-tin dept. ]



Photo: Jubilee Campus of The University Of Nottingham.

I visited Nottingham twice during the period of Friday and the weekend, and stayed with Hannah and Joe in Birmingham on both occasions also. I arrived in Nottingham on Friday afternoon and visited some friends in the Computer Science department, before having dinner in Birmingham with Hannah and Joe. On Saturday evening I returned to Nottingham to meet with some friends, and encountered pkh randomly while walking through the town on the way to dinner.

I bought a book called “Mathematical Techniques” on Saturday and had a very enjoyable time especially on Sunday lunchtime in a nice pub. Also went for a stroll through Oxford last night and went to OxLUG on the way home.

Another update later on.

Jon.

[ from the who-should-I-support dept. ]

I visited fumo and Hussein in London last weekend, for a random meet up essentially. We had food in Wagamama and ended up going to Putney for the Oxford/Cambridge boat race of 2004. As the news reported, Cambridge won and I care little about the outcome – it was an experience which was worth doing. Perhaps I should have gone to a BBQ with a friend at one of the markers along the route but there was not time to do everything.

On the way home from the boat race, Hussein and I met Paul (who was with his Brompton as per what now seems the usual situation for meeting him) outside Baker Street underground station and Hussein took a video of the assembly time for the Brompton. Perhaps I could have done something else in London but I felt like going home to read Horrowitz and Hill (hereafter often called H&H) again. I have re-acquainted myself with differential equations over the last week, and I followed through some of the fundamental proofs for RC circuits while on the train to work on occasion this week.

I spoke to BSM in Oxford about the theft of my debit card details and am still unhappy with their cavalier attitude and the time which was allowed before proprogating details to customers who might have been affected quite severely. Apparently my personal details were not compromised and the suggestion that computers were taken was incorrect (apparently the mid level management type I spoke to who is in charge of this farce was not aware that only keyboards had been taken and not whole machines. They also apparently are centralised with only effectively terminals installed in branches, but this was not made clear to me initially). I had already called the DVLA by that point and am going to consider what to do with the information that they chose to leave card receipts in the till machines overnight rather than in the safe which I observed during my protracted conversation with a reluctant manager who proved quite ellusive. I like my instructor but I think the BSM company (part of the RAC) need to really sort out their definition of customer service to some sufficient level.

I considered cycling earlier but the weather was not good and my neck was extremely painful and unable to turn to the right on Thursday. I am currently seeking a violin teacher in the Oxford area and this week am planning to look out for some more sheet music I can play.

Over the last six months, my mail server processed 182759 messages of which approximately 26,000 were manually marked as SPAM and an additional 2239 were filtered by my installation of a popular mail filter which needs upgrading to a version which is not the old one in Woody. I now estimate that I will receive over 400,000 mails this year and that more than 15% is SPAM. Since the bulk of this is from mailing lists which are already SPAM filtered then we are looking at actual signal to noise ratios which are considerably different and closer to 50%. Two mails were in my Impersonal maildir folder too long so please use my official mail addresses whenever possible.

Jon.

[ from the random-comments-random-stuff-this-time-in-the-UK-again dept. ]

Meanwhile in the UK

The rest of the past week contained a number of interesting miscallany. Monday evening featured a sponteneous visit from Paul Sladen, who knocked on my window at around 23:00. This would be odd if it weren’t Paul .
I like his Brompton and I might have to consider getting one at some point for town cycling but despite the size it does have some practical constraints like cost incurred when someone decides to borrow yours for an extended period of time. I mentioned to Paul about meeting up later in the week.

I did not go to Go because I felt pretty tired and had had to leave the week before in the middle of a game after I realised I was too tired. However much of this is down to the level of reading and learning I am wanting and trying to fit in at the moment. I have been feeling a little unwell over the last couple of days and there is something going around at the moment anyway. I visited Freuds on Monday evening and Shapla on Tuesday with a colleague.

On Wednesday I had another driving lesson and on Thursday also. I stopped in at the office in the middle of the driving on the latter occasion, and then went in to Oxford for a random walk around various bookshops – I bought A Short History Of Nearly Everything in Borders and visited Blackwells after a visit to Blackwells Music, where I bought “New Film Themes” which is a “Play along for violin”. I have tuned up the violin for the first time in a while and later played the theme from A Beautiful Mind, and also the theme from Gladiator. I would like to find a Violin teacher in the Oxford or Reading area, who is reasonably flexible with time and is willing to entertain my particular penchant for learning.

I went for a wonder through the University Park off Parks Road (opposite Comlab) and did some thinking. Took some photos too. I have decided to take up the violin again, and having finished reading Teach Yourself Electronics, have secretly ordered a copy of Horrowitz and Hill’s famous The Art Of Electronics, I have been reading this for the past week or so but am only reading small amounts each day because I have to ensure I understand everything I am reading if it all possible to do so (although they do make some assumptions which they may not explicitly state. This is a very cool book however and one of those that you can curl up with while drinking coffee, or take to a coffee house on a Saturday night). I am having to reconcile some missconceptions and brush up on my differential equations and some other mathematics to really get the full story.

On Friday, I went cycling around London with Paul. I got in to London at around 17:00 because I had to spend several hours dealing with my bank after BSM had a breakin in their Oxford branch and a thief managed to potentially steal my debit card details. I have complained to BSM that this breakin on St. Patrick’s night (17/03/2004 as per the letter they sent to those affected and not to their other customers) should not have resulted in my details being made available and that I require an explanation. I also feel that the Visa International might find they were somehow in breach of storage requirements. In any case I am considerably annoyed at the whole thing and the inconvienience. To top this off it is likely that the computers stolen also had my address details on although this was not mentioned in the letter (which apologies for any inconvienience this may cause (my emphasis added there)). They also failed to notify me for an entire week after the event.

When I eventually got in to London with my bike, I met up with Paul and we cycled around part of North London before stopping off in Leicester Square for some noodles at Wagamama. The photos show that we went to Kings Cross and saw the work on the Channel Tunnel Rail Link which soon results in St. Pancras station moving, and can be seen currently when approaching or leaving on a train from Nottingham. I tried riding the Brompton briefly and enjoyed it. I decided I would prefer to ride my own bike despite Paul suggesting I ride his for some experience of riding a Brompton – because I would prefer to do that on roads I know to start with.

I got up late on Saturday because my throat has been feeling a bit sore and I was up late after my return from visiting London. I went in to town and got some bits from Maplin along with the news that Maplin might be ditching the Components counter in its stores in favour of prepackaged shite according to the trend of not having recent parts in the view of someone I was talking to there about it. A worrying premise that.

Pret gave me some patisserie perishables with a coffee I had bought. I gave most of these to various people around the town. I bought some coffee and went to An American Coffee House for an hour to read my book after having food at Zizzi. I am listening to various music of the instrumental kind – e.g. from A Beautiful Mind tonight and feel like a visit to London Zoo to visit some penguins. I hope my friends reading this are well.

Jon.

[ from the random-comments-random-stuff dept. ]

CeBIT 2004

Last weekend I went to CeBIT 2004 in Hannover, Germay. I originally planned to go with jok but due to a complication with his travel arrangements, I had to go alone instead. We had some food in London on Friday afternoon at Wagamama and then proceeded to Victoria to catch a nonexistant Stanstead Express. It actually goes from Liverpool Street but for whatever reason we ended up in the wrong place and had to get a taxi to Liverpool Street. When I did finally get the Stanstead Express to London Stanstead (STN), it was about 17:00 and the Air Berlin flight was due to take off at 18:10.

The train was suffering from a number of issues, including overhead line damage, ongoing engineering works happening, and general overall congestion. I called the Air Berlin German office twice on my mobile while on route and heard that the flight was being progressively delayed due to the cumulative effect of earlier delays. I arrived in the airport at 18:15 and asked the check in staff if they would please let me on the flight (updated: 28/03/2004. I had only hand luggage with me on this occasion) – they issued me with a late arrival ticket and gave no guarantees. Security allowed me to proceed to the front of the queue and I was at the gate within not too long. As I arrived I saw a final bording call and rushed, but the flight was even further delayed and did not actually take off until a few minutes after I had arrived. For once this was a good thing and I was very greatful .

Yes I should plan for this and be early next time I fly somewhere. The good and positive side effect of this was that I had not enough time to consider my extreme fear of flying in planes at 33,000ft and just got onboard. I met my single serving friends for the evening: one person sitting next to me does research in abstract specification of Real Time systems and had just been to Test Con 2004 in Oxford! Another chap had been playing with cross gcc and we talked about cygwin and binary compatibility of compiled code which has been through the gcc code generator. Abstractly random.

I landed in Hannover and met the friends I was staying with a bit later than originally planned. They have the ability to speak English better than most English people do, and I enjoyed a conversation in the car with a psychotherapist who deals with gifted young people with various problems – she wrote a chapter for the book “Able Underachievers” (which I plan to read sometime – I read the chapter on Sunday but the book does look quite interesting). Anyway I arrived at the house I was staying in and had some soup before bed. In the morning, I awoke and enjoyed a relaxing shower before a very pleasant continental breakfast with meats, good coffee, and generally enjoyable conversation. My hosts provided me with a map of the area and directions for the show halls, before dropping me off to catch a tram.

Hannover seems to be one of the cleanest cities I have seen in recent times. The streets are clean and a modern yet not overdone look greats the eyes most favourably – as indeed does the sheer scale of the recycling schemes they have available. I was impressed with the Tram because it was clean and modern, had very amusing automatic retracting steps, and very useful information flat screens with news and other events in addition to the list of stops in a useful format.

Arriving at the show, I entered through the gates and went straight to Hall 2. I wondered around the Halls incrementally for the next few hours, especially with an interest in Hall 3 and the GNU/Linux stuff in Hall 6. Various companies were at the show this year (IBM had a Linux Cafe – a sure fire marketting gimmick but it probably worked dispite the cheese). I enjoyed seeing the number of companies with traditional Microsoft links who had brought out ports of their software. I also enjoyed seeing the number of companies using GNU/Linux in embedded systems or as part of a larger product – for example AXS security products which explicitly used GNU/Linux as a selling point for their technology. I enjoyed the sheer scale of the show and was quite taken aback at the number of people (yes ok so there were also a number of geek girls at this event but that is not just what I mean) who were passing through stalls. Security had a presense but there were plenty of bins and I am greatful that nobody tried anything at this event.

The LPI Germany guys were there (LPI Germany was announced at the CeBIT last year), and some people with embedded Linux stuff in the LinuxParc in Hall 6 but on the whole GNU/Linux was more of a secondary selling point as was generic Microsoft stuff. Far more focus was on the general ability to speak untold amounts of nothing on bluetooth adapters. I talked to the guys from Omnis about Omnis Studio 4.0 and my experiences from my recent review of Omnis Studio 3.3. I also enjoyed a long conversation with some of the guys from LPI and a very interesting hands on demonstration of the RSBAC security patches available for Linux kernels.

There were some talks organised too – I saw there was a KDE one as I walked passed but I thought most of it was in German and decided that I had been in one Hall for a few hours or so and still had to go through the others before finding Hall 1 for the final major Linux vendor experience (Hall 1 is somehow not as easy to find as perhaps it is presumed. I went straight to Hall 2 on the way in an then visited Hall 1 at the end). I have a large number of cards and bits of paper which I need to reconcile with the information on the press section of the CeBIT website for my official writeup but these are some starting words here. While I enjoyed the various Linux bits which were present at the CeBIT, I would have liked to have seen more focus on Linux tech and business.

The Future Parc was pretty interesting. There was a large robot doing a demonstration somewhat reminiscent of the scene from Short Circuit where the robot makes a glass of Gin and Tonic – although in this case without the crushing of ice, the mixing of drinks, and big pointless lazers. Actually not a lot like Short Circuit but I thought of that film nonetheless. Of the 3D displays that I did see, most had a focal point at 65cm if without glasses and required certain delicate positioning to work. The glasses based stuff was more interesting. BMW had a maintainance technology demonstration using Reality Augmentation and there was a demonstration of reality augmentation with cars which any reasonable computer science student could have done in a few months (therefore I felt not really a suitable exhibit for the future). The visual image processing cum tracking stuff was a little scary…probably tinfoil hat time pretty soon.

IBM, SuSE, and Novell were all playing good bedfellows at this show since their stalls were practically one giant big business Linux advert with a few other bits of technology and business. IBM probably brought a good few million pounds worth of i/p/z Series servers and I enjoyed a free juice at the Linux Cafe. No free beer on this occasion although it might have been on the menu. IBM had some kind of labyrinth upstairs for special customers and the press, and I had a look but there was little in the way of press stuff going on by the time I was there on Saturday afternoon and to be honest I was not too bothered to be given the standard Linux loving big blue stories or whatnot.

I did find CeBIT had too strong a focus on consumer level stuff and not enough focus on the business and technology aspects. Some Halls were a literal menagerie of companies pedelling the same technology in different forms – for example there were about a million people selling every possible combination of DVD writer and bluetooth dongle with some claim of theirs being somehow superior to all the others. In fact some exhibitors are considering leaving the show, and it seems that the debate over allowing pure consumerism to take over was well founded. It is.

I had some difficulty with the exit signage but eventually left later than planned and got off at the wrong Tram stop on the way to meet my hosts. So I was a little late getting to the Opera but they let me in – I probably looked like a tourist. I saw Mozart’s The Magic Flute, performed in German, and since I do not speak much German concentrated more on what was happening than on the vocals. Still I believe much Opera is like that anyway and my German friends said they had not caught every word.

I had some great food again afterwards (I must say that I really was well looked after by my hosts for the weekend) and then went to bed. In the morning we had some food with Robert and his mother before going for a walk around the local area and discussing various random miscellany. After this we had tea and I looked at Barbara’s chapter from “Able Underachievers” before being dropped off at the airport. My flight was on time and I had a single serving friend who had been demonstrating some equipment at CeBIT. On the return to London Stanstead I had a pleasant smoothie from a new juice bar called Love Juice.

Jon.