jcm's blog

[ from the g5-process-spawn-testing dept. ]

I popped in to London to visit Hussein and we went shopping on Oxford Street for various items among which included some new shoes for me and an espresso cup to keep my coffee machine company. We went to Bella Italia for supper and I popped down to the Thames on the way back to test how well my camera performs in the dark. I need to practice.

Hussein showed me the mods to his Xbox and I am fairly determined to get either or both of an Xbox and Gamecube over the next couple of months. Right now I am overcoming a weekend of incidental expenditure of the necessity kind and mulling over ordering my Xilinx dev. kit.

Jon.

[ from the dept. ]

I am taking pictures…

Cheers,

Jon.

[ from the yes-I-finally-bought-a-digital-camera-hussein dept. ]

I bought a camera. Jessops had a Nikon Coolpix 3100 for 140GBP and that seemed like a reasonable buy so I picked it up this afternoon. No it does not have every possible feature under the sun but it was not three times the price and does enough to be useful.

I also booked my hotel for FOSDEM 2004.

Jon.

[ from the er-um dept. ]

I downloaded the latest source for the ITE8212 Linux driver and started taking a look at the code. I need to learn a lot about how IDE devices fit in with the block layer in 2.6. Still with comments like “Fixed: Use kmalloc() and kfree() to allocate the buffer instead of automatic variables (use stack). The stack size is limited in kernel space.” and “First “dma thing doesn’t work” version.” I am reasonably confident that there is a lot of room for even me to improve what is already there. The driver as is seems to have been very hacked together and I am not so sure about the amount of testing which actually happened…I would not trust this driver.

However a bunch of people want me to see if I can do something to help and I do need to write a Compact Flash driver at work anyway so…

Catch you all later.

Jon.

[ from the forever-young dept. ]

Well it had to happen eventually I suppose. I bought a proper coffee machine. This was on offer in Woolworths for a mere 34.99 of our English pounds and was reduced from several times that for some reason. It is stainless steel and makes coffee: this point needs to be made (people who know me know I have a caffeine problem). I have started to buy proper coffee too (first for a new cafetiere but now I will probably need to buy a grinder and get the ultimate in flavour). I have enjoyed coffee a lot this week while trying to identify hardware bugs.

I did some more doing rather than just talking. I have been going to the Oxford Go club for the last few weeks and am trying to improve my game, have been doing really funky hardware debugging using gdb and various hardware debugging support features on a particular micro, etc. I have started reading Elektor Electronics and am about to start playing with a motor controller for a friend who is building a robot. I wrote a hacky parallel port driver for Linux 2.6 which allows me to deal directly with the port without having to resort to using userspace tools all the time and this weekend want to continue with the password OTP PIC Micro project I mentioned before.

I finished two articles for the magazine, will be starting some teaching for a large Linux vendor, and went to the Hants LUG meet last weekend. Southampton was enjoyable but the fancy bus information screens failed to tell me where each route went, so as a visitor, annoyed me a little. Although I was delayed on the way back, I did meet a guy who went to college with a former professor of mine (he does various stuff with gas measurement using PICs and formal proofs when necessary). David Lightfoot recently reminded me of his book on Z and I really should buy that.

Today I am planning to do some reading and pop in to either the City or Winchester or both momentarily, try to find out where people are staying during FOSDEM 2004 and book in at the same hotel myself next weekend, and also seriously look at digital cameras.

Jon.

[ from the I-have-a-workbench dept. ]

I did some more tidying and set myself a better working environment at home in which to get some stuff done properly. I have a workbench.

I went to Guildford today and did some reading. Tomorrow is the G2K4.

Jon.

[ from the cleaning-up-the-room dept. ]

Well I finally did tidy up this stuff which I have been putting off sorting properly since about 1998 (although some of the material dates back to 1995 and 1996 to 1997. Mostly that is old Brookes stuff and associated very old Train Timetables which I probably knew about but did not tidy up earlier). I figured it was about ready to be fixed.

8 black bags and a folded removal box later and a large chunk of this room has been reclaimed for some space. I now have room to setup an electronics corner for random experimentation. Later today I need to pick up some bits and pieces from Maplin but I finally started to sort this crud out.

I now have too many remixes of Alphaville – Forever Young – but if you know of extremely rare live recordings suitably techno remixed please pipe up!

Jon.