jcm's blog

[ from the trains-around-the-country dept. ]

We eventually replaced the CPU fan in dmesg.printk.net on Wednesday evening. Afterwards we were too late to go to Wagamama however did end up at a McDonalds where I managed to have a cup of tea and no fatty grease. Now I weight 12.75 stone and I am trying to work on these things. I got home at about 03:00 on Thursday.

I went to Nottingham on Thursday to visit some friends and talk about PhDs at the University. The plan is to get applications going through sometime in next few days and see what happens then although they do not generally do embedded research. I had a good time visiting and we want to Wagamama and I learned the board game called Risk. I did not win obviously against a seasoned player.

Friday was spent in Nottingham and Cambridge and in travelling between these two locations by train. In Cambridge I met up with some of the dasher people to talk about the ways in which the project can make Linux more accessible. I met someone who is in to random embedded boards running Linux and we went to a bit of the Friday Happy Hour where scary people played amazing chess.

I saw Kill Bill earlier on Saturday after staying with some friends who live somewhere outside Cambridge. We went in to the city and had some lunch in a Japanese restaurant called DoJo. This is likely the Cambridge version of a Noodle Bar near Old Street in East London.

I have read quite a lot of the DSP book. Started reading about 3D graphics.

Jon.

[ from the magical-pandas dept. ]

dmesg.printk.net is currently down since it had a problem between 02:00 and 03:00 last night. We went in to Telehouse in the afternoon and it came back up for an hour or more. Eventually it seems to have stopped responding again.
I may get chance to go in again today and diagnose potential hardware failures or other causes of this but there might be a need for parts. Anyway it was good to see James Mulcahy (who had to go early to get a train) and James Rice with Hussein and jok blah blah. The box possibly has a failed power supply.

We went in to Canary Wharf afterwards for some food in Wagamama in the just opened Jubilee Place. The food was good and the server recognised me instantly since he used to work in the Nottingham restaurant! I go there quite a lot.

We could not get tickets which were suitably priced or place in time for the London Philharmonic Orchestra on Friday night so went to the Tate Modern instead. After a visit to the cafe we spent time until closing on floor 5 looking at various works including the Sausage Film and those clowns. Paul McCarthy is an interesting artist and also the guy who did the inflatable sculptures outside the Tate Modern. He has produced scenes involving himself naked and covered in tomato ketchup with various meats, or plastering his head and arm in to a wall, and various others besides.

We went for a stroll along the Thames again also and had various tea and coffee in various places. I am really turning in to an Earl Grey drinker now and have found my slippers… I bought the O’reilly Programming C# book second edition yesterday to read up on .NET stuff. There is a third edition of the book now also but I just wanted something reasonably inexpensive to experiment and in particular ascertain portability with Mono. More interesting people yesterday including a bluetooth security guy.

Jon.

[ from the another-year-another-expo dept. ]

I have been at the Linux Expo UK 2003 on each of the last two days. Wednesday and Thursday were quite interesting although the Expo is again smaller this year. The .org village was quite reasonable and I met a number of people that I know through various connections. We had a meal out on Wednesday evening with Lonix and then ended up staring that the giant coke sign in Picadilly Circus while several of the guys got out the wifi equipment which they had available. We had fun in the Trocadero on the way to said coke sign and eventually got home late so Thursday started a bit later than planned although it ended with a few of us with Nottingham connections sitting in a Firkin pub behind Olympia for some very reasonable food and drink. Wednesday night was also complemented with good food although the sheer number of people ordering meant that the Indian Resturant called The Spice Of Life was overloaded and there was some significant latency on orders.

I spoke to various people and did the keysigning thing. Met some OpenBSD people who had some embedded boards which looked quite interesting on display. I joined the UKUUG and bought an FSF t-shirt while I also had some rather interesting conversations. I want to help organise an Embedded Systems workshop now.

This entry is really designed to get some information down about the Expo before I think about writing up a more ellaborate description.

Jon.

[ from the another-week-another-trip dept. ]

I visted Winchester on Thursday in order to have a late lunch with my gran and find a birthday present for my cousin. The Zaurus is helping me to get a litle more organised so that I nearly send birthday presents on time! We went to Pizza Hut and had a Chicken Supreme with little cheese. Remember to ask them to put less cheese on the Pizza as it is much better for you and tastes great too.

I went to Costa and put on some music on the way back to the railway station and of course left the Zaurus scanning for networks. None are using WEP. Arriving home I decided to fix my mail setup so the old 486 with an unsupported Redhat 6.2 configuration has been deprecated and replaced with pat.int.jonmasters.org – a Debian Woody PII 400 running Exim, Squirrelmail and courier-imap-ssl like dmesg.printk.net. Although mail seems functional please do let me know if you mail me and experience some problems. The next step is to get Spam Assassin working properly at home with per user configuration files.

Tonight I went to my first London 2600 meeting and met various people. I was reasonably impressed overall however I had expected to meet more hard core UNIX nerds than the mostly Microsoft Windows cum occasional GNU/Linux and PDA crowd impression I was given though as I say it was interesting. I got a T-shirt and confirmed why it is that I hate smoking in general since the Cyberia bar was very smokey indeed.

I am sorting out application forms for PhDs and various other bits and pieces and tidying up my stuff at home over the next few days. A few of us put in a Thinkgeek order and I have a caffeine stainless steel 16 ounce mug on order to enjoy my morning cup.

I spent a while reading through documentation for a certain ethernet chip this week and thought some more about this Using and Porting PowerPC Linux guide that I am planning at the moment. I figure this could actually be pretty useful and it is bound to encourage some feedback in any case.

The night bus in Reading is still 1 pound if you know about the street machines which sell them. If you do not know about them then you pay twice as much to the driver and it did seem a little unfair that the person arguing over fairs tonight was not told about this option. There was also a drunk guy at the bus stop tonight who could not wait to be old enough to legally get as drunk as he was. I told him the novelty would soon wear off.

I weigh 13 stone now and am planning on another stone or so being worked off over the next few weeks and months. I am going to be at Linux Expo UK 2003 next week and on Friday a few of us will hopefully arrange something. I like the idea of seeing another play and enjoying some more culture.

Jon.

[ from the howto-you-howto-everyone dept. ]

I decided the existing Linux PowerPC documentation for embedded systems could do with a hand and am going to write a guide based upon my work with the IBM 405 processor over the last year or so that I have been playing with them. This should begin by introducing the reader to an embedded system and tackle issues such as boot firmware and loaders as well as memory maps, platform support and drivers early on before getting in to the main text. Contributions and comments will be sought and I will post more soon.

Jon.

[ from the travelling-around-the-country dept. ]

xmms is now playing: Scooter – Weekend

I returned from Birmingham last night having spent Friday afternoon and Saturday morning in Nottignham and then visiting Hannah and Joe with the rest of my family who had arranged to be in Birmingham. Today I am writing up my review of pGina using a VMware installation. I notice that VMware blocks horribly on floppy IO if the floppy is in some way faulty or screwed. I am also completing my wonderful Tax Return.

I now mix a three day work week as an Embedded Linux Systems Engineer with some consulting and travelling which will soon include a PhD. I have some more news on the PhD idea I am wanting to go with and having spoken to a couple of people in Nottingham think I should persue that soon. Usually I work quite long hours on a Monday-Wednesday except this past week I was also in on Thursday so I delayed the Nottingham trip until Friday.

On Friday morning I travelled via Birmingham to Nottingham. Once again I met a few interesting people on the train, including an Oxford English graduate and a woman who had a Masters in variously interesting Chemistry concerned with viruses such as AIDs – though she now has several young children which I am sure is equally as challenging work in a different kind of way. I arrived in Nottingham during the middle of the afternoon and went to CSiT to grab a coffee with a few friends before I met up with jok for dinner at Wagamama. Beckie and Robin Allen joined us and looked every bit the lovely newly weds that they had at and after their wedding. (mental note to get a potted plant from Crocus for their new house). We bought some laser pointers in Maplin for £5 too. After dinner we spent a while in a J D Weatherspoon pub called the Roebuck Inn – which is where some NotLUG meetings happen – where I tried with great amusement to bring up the cinema film information on the Zaurus via my mobile. We saw Pirates Of The Carribean and I was actually quite impressed at how the cheese did not totally ruin the film.

Turns out CSiT upgraded all of the workstations to Microsoft Windows XP as per the expectation that they would do so and they now appear to be a little more responsive in some ways. There are still only three generally accessible Redhat machines in there however. Apparently numbers are down this year too – which is really great. Hopefully overall standards can be raised a little in response to the fall in number of students who are there due to the dotcom era and do not care.

I bought a Buffalo CompactFlash Wifi card and have kismet running on the Zaurus now. I like to leave it running when out and about – over the weekend discovered BTOpenzone available from a number of payphones in Reading and Nottingham as well as a Wifi network on a First Great Western Train called “1st2thefuture” which was interesting. In Nottingham we saw 27 wireless networks in the City with less than 50% advertising WEP.

In Birmingham my family were drinking tea and coffee in the Costa in Waterstones when I met them yesterday. Had yet another bunch of Marks and Spencer grapes before going back to Selly Oak and finding Hannah and Joe have a very cosy house now.

Over the next few weeks and months I will be at the Linux Expo, in Paris, in Brussells, Belfast, and Edinburgh as well as Oxford, Reading, Birmingham, Nottingham, Cambridge, and London. I have driving lessons to do, people to see and places to go. I need to find out whether the Nuclear Bunker Party is happening again.

Back to work now…

Jon.

[ from the another-trip-with-friends dept. ]

My Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 handheld running Open Zaurus

I had a very pleasant trip to Bournemouth today and visited bds while recalling the time when we lived in Bournemouth ourselves. I like the area. We went for a random walk around the City Centre and I saw the old bandstand where we went years ago – we walked along part of the beach and went up the cable lift before finding some lunch near Poole.

The 11:47 service from Reading was at one point going to be nonstop to Bournemouth though quickly introduced the scheduled stops. I saw my friend John who is working with Virgin Railways and ended up sitting with another pleasant woman who knew what a SPARCbook was once we got talking after discovering she works in IT at Orange. Had a talk about GSM and the various 3G stuff as wells as Sun and BOFH and even the nulcear bunker party hopefully soon. Another trip meeting thing. This is the second this week however though!

A very enjoyable afternoon with Hussein and Markus and Ben.

Jon.