jcm's blog

[ from the visiting-more-friends-today dept. ]

I am going to get a train to Bournemouth in a while to visit Ben with Hussein and possibly Markus. Need to fill out the Tax Return too.

I will be in Nottingham on Friday and probably Saturday too as well as Birmingham and potentially several other places. Nottingham is purely for having coffee with dfb and anyone else I can get hold of who I have not seen in at least a few days. .

Time for more tea and a shower now. I need a GPS and an Apple I clone too.

Jon.

[ from the would-sir-like-something-interesting-for-the-weekend? dept. ]

On late Thursday afternoon, after I finished unpacking the PDAs, I met up with Sid and Hussein in Leicester Square. We went over to Trafalgar Square and visted the National Gallery – which was pretty cool. I could get quite fond of visiting and especially enjoyed seeing several Monet’s in the flesh so to speak – before posing like tourists in front of statues. Hussein will remind me that I need a digital camera in the comments below.

Hussein caught a train after we had wondered down through Westminster – picking up a comical postcard with the Queen on it – and found a bike shop near Waterloo Station. Sid and I had food in Leceister Square at an interesting restaurant called Chiquito. We watched as Ewen McGregor turned up for a film premier and then found a train for Sid to go back to Nottingham.

The next day we met up again in the evening after I was delayed coming in to Paddington from Reading due to some signalling problem and also after I had gone to Computer Exchange on Tottenham Court Road to get a 128MB SD Card. We saw Blood Brothers at the Phoenix theatre – which was absolutely excellent.
I also spoke to this chap about “The Saturday Morning Orchestra” which I am thinking I might like to join soon – they meet in Calcot which is down the road and someone from work goes too so I at least know one other person there. I play Violin in case anyone was wondering I also have a Bishop’s Chorister Royal School Of Church Music award which is quite handy too.

Sid and I went back to Reading and then yesterday had a rather relaxed day in Reading. I bought the CompactFlash early in the morning and had my grapes before we went out to look around and eat at the Yellow River Cafe in the Oracle. Apparently Sid got home safely too.

On our travels we ended up in the Bargain Computer Books Store in Reading and I got talking to the chap there who used to run the Blackwells Computing section and recognises me each time I go in. I recommend that book store to anyone who wants good customer service.

I think I will try to regularly visit the theatre now and investigate Opera or Orchestral performances I can listen to on a weekend. There is what was called the Apollo Theatre in Oxford and is now known as New Theatre I believe. This is on the way home from work too.

Jon.

[ from the please-stop-going-on-about-them-now-jcm dept. ]

opieplayer2 is now playing: A-Ha – Headlines And Deadlines – The Sun Always Shines On TV (ogg vorbis)

I got offered a deal through a member of a linux mailing list and ended up with a Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 and a Compaq iPAQ 3660. The Compaq is still Microsoft infected although the antivirus magic will be weaved over that sometime in the next few days. The Zaurus now joins the many others running Open Zaurus. It really was disgusting how Microsoftish Sharp had made it out of the box.

There were a few problems installing Open Zaurus due to the fact that installation requires hitting a magic button combination with a preprogrammed CompactFlash in the slot with appropriate file names. It turns out that the 128MB CompactFlash – made by Integral memory who are really rebadging SanDISK technology and selling it through outlets like Photo Optix – has a faulty bits which results in it being effectively useless to most people. After more than 4 hours of experimentation with badblocks and mkfs.vfat I created a 32MB loopback mounted volume which I copied the kernel too and then filled with enough zeros to skip the faulty part – taking advantage of how vfat works using one giant linked list across the whole of the disk – then the next file. I got it right eventually and then repeatedly ran dd to try to get it on to the /dev/hde1 appropriately configured partition which to my amazement then proceeded to work. Today I shall have to try to return this memory and get some which actually works but there is a lesson to everyone – run badblocks on CompactFlash.

I have a 128MB SD Card and will get another 128MB CompactFlash card as well as a CompactFlash Wifi networking card for kismet and internet access. Probably should eventually get some ludicrously large SD or CF storage of more than 256MB though I think I will wait for reasonable pricing. Listening to music requires headphones although that is a good thing because I do not necessarily want to inflict my tastes upon others.

I had to modify several hotplug configuration files as well as the kernel maps for the USBified networking to come up and occasionally get host kernel hard lock annoyances when the interface does not go down cleanly. This I might try to fix since the last kernel hack I suggested had just recently been done by someone else! bah. I suggested writing an interface to call Magic SysRQ through software in /proc/sys and it turns out this can now be done via sending the key sequence to /proc/sysrq-trigger. I hope it is documented well for all the Sysadmins out there. .

The Zaurus is sweet. I can now login to it over usb and have proxy host NAT running to allow Internet access for ipkg to do package updates and to surf the web or simply ping google and yahoo. Did I mention it also plays A-Ha – Take On Me (Superior Techno Remix)? because it really does. .

I need to make a whole bunch of stuff and get a Man Area Network going between the two devices in my pockets for sheer amusement. Actually I bought a 7something quid camera bag from John Lewis as a cheap Zaurus bag.

Jon.

[ from the 21st-centuary-without-power dept. ]

Listening to Black Eyed Peas – Where Is The Love?

At 06:15 this morning approximately there was a High Voltage trip out in the Southern Electric provided area of Tilehurst. Since I know the emergency number off hand (+448457708090) through previous issues I immediately called for an explanation. Later today I shall attempt to ascertain whether this was safety related or purely Southern Electric incompetence. For some reason personally I always assume that in these situations it is more likely to be the latter issue although the former is of course a perfectly valid reason. Just as I powered off the battery backup the power returned which was of course bound to happen. I need to know why these happen.

I spent quite a while reading about the American power failures and have to know when these things are down to mistakes which could have been avoided.

I am not entirely concerned with complaining however. Yesterday I called Costa coffee to tell them that the guys in Reading Station are always extremely pleasant and have been so for at least a year or so that I have been going there for my morning caffeine fix.

My mood is recovering.

Jon.

[ from the the-jcm-sparc-museum dept. ]

Tadpole SPARCbook

The Tadpole SPARCbook arrived. In the evening last night I powered it up to confirm that SPARCbook Solaris 1.0.1 is installed and runs. Networking is coming up and the AUI adapter works however I need to remember how a few of the settings are configured on old SunOS over the next few days. This is pretty cool. I need to get hold of an installation CD either from Tadpole or from another SPARCbook owner who has one of the originals.

The plan is to investigate upgrading the hard disks to multigigabyte ones and to install both SunOS and SPARC Debian GNU/Linux on it. I can make a battery pack since at the moment it is running off a modified power supply which was sent to me with the unit. Screen size is small and supports only 16 on screen colours in the 256 colour colourmap at any given moment due to the limitations of the display technology. Who cares though really? It does display information and runs SPARC Solaris so what more could anyone really want in a laptop? .

So it will not be replacing my Apple 2002 Powerbook obsideon however it might come with me to Telehouse and to the Nuclear Bunker party at Christmas for the general extension it suggestively offers to manhood. Besides every other geek would do the same. Now all I need is to get a slightly newer Tadpole SPARCbook to complement this original S1 and I can have a pretty complete museum of old SPARC hardware going on in my bedroom.

Meanwhile in the real world I am debugging a serial driver and looking at networking and Compact Flash. One of the family pets is unwell and everyone at home seems to have a cold which they either caught from me or are going to give to me. I have not figured out which yet.
I am probably going to be in Poole this weekend and am writing a review of pGina for next issue – also writing about Tomcat and some other stuff too.

Jon.

[ from the Reading->Birmingham->Nottingham->Birmingham->Reading->Oxford dept. ]

Midlands Trip

Written on the train from Nottingham to Leicester at 14:20.

Today I am on route to Birmingham via Leicester (thanks to weekend engineering works which augment the journey time) to see Hannah and Joe for a very late lunch or early supper and to see their new house. This is the second visit in the last day since I met up with Hannah, Joe, Biggles and Susie last night to see her brother Mike performing Folk songs at the Arts Festival. Mike is very good and I was quite happy to buy an album for easy listening.

I caught a train yesterday to Birmingham and spent a few hours wondering around before meeting up. During this time I went to a Starbucks with a T-Mobile hotspot (Name: tmobile, SSID: tmobile, BSSID: 00:40:96:5A:F1:B5, Manufacturer: Cisco, Model: AP-350, Channel: 1) which I tried out. The service is pretty reasonable actually since it does not unfairly impose system requirements upon paying customers. It does some kind of rate limiting on uploads and has a few interesting monitors in place as well as some kind of MAC blocking prior to authentication which allows DNS queries and HTTP redirects all requests to the login service.

Last night I went to Nottingham to meet up with jok and have a late supper. I called our friend sid who dropped in too. Stayed up playing go and chatting. This morning I went in to Nottingham to grab a coffee and this train but also went in to W H Smiths and HMV. Bought another Pet Shop Boys album called DISCO 2 which turns out to be mostly remixes – I should have guessed from the title probably. We are planning on going to the Linux Expo in a few weeks although I will likely be in Nottingham at some point before. Freshers turning up soon.

Apple Rant

Apple want 279 pounds to extend my warrenty to the three year Apple Care cover plan. This runs from the original date of purchase so I would lose the first year thrown in anyway and since John Lewis already gave me another extra year of warrenty I would pay that for just one extra year. I have insurance and figure Apple are charging too much tax for extending the warrenty especially given that they will not repair the paint issue which is a known flaw in 2002 Powerbooks or the couple of annoying dead pixels. Somewhat minor things that I would want fixed in return for paying a ransom.

Birmingham visit part II

This afternoon I returned to Birmingham and caught a train to Selly Oak. Hannah and Joe and myself went to a Pizza restaurant which did not have Aubergene and Goats cheese toppings available however was still pretty good. I visited their new house for some tea before heading back on the train.

Currently I am on the return portion from Birmingham to Reading and am reading through some kernel documentation while cdparanoia processes the CD aquisitions from this weekend. I met another Powerbook user on the train which is always amusing. I believe that sysctl does now require the procfs interface in order to do any useful work in which case on a technicality my point to one of these bankers about sysctl is correct.

I am thinking about writing a modification for procfs /proc/sys to support sysrq sytle operations through the file interface for those situations in which there is no access to sysrq such as over an ssh session without a serial console as was the case in a recent post to Linux Managers. I am also perfecting the process by which I would overwrite kernel code at runtime via /dev/mem based upon disassembly of /proc/kcore.

Jon.

[ from the London-abstracted-from-reality dept. ]

London Stuff

On Friday I was in London all day. In the morning I had a meeting in the City and after that I went via DLR to Telehouse Docklands suite TFM4 to update the kernel on dmesg. Having rebooted twice following the realisation that lmsensors was not running in the new 2.4.21 which had replaced 2.4.20 – 2.4.22 does not have ACL patches currently available as yet – I went over to Cabbot Square for a late lunch or early dinner at
The Gourmet Pizza Company. Very nice vegitarian pizza there indeed.

Eventually I went back to Bank station and then began walking randomly in a direction I thought might take me to the Thames. I ended up at The Tower and then walked over Tower Bridge to find a certain David Blaine suspended in that famous glass box. I waved as he waved at the crowd.

Then started walking towards Westminster and crossed the now not so wobbly Millennium Bridge to end up at Tate Modern and spent a while looking at the art. Look out for the Sausage video of a female artist eating a sausage and a banana, and also for the violent clown videos. Of course there were a few typical examples such as a completely blue canvas which is supposed to express the meaning of voidness or somesuch – I see the point though this also encourages me that I too could be an artist in the sense that a printout of this blog might be considered art. . The Soviet Poster section was rather thought provoking. The cafe is quite nice and the coke and smoothie were well called for.

Did a whole bunch of random other stuff and added a high priority to getting a digital camera so that I can preserve more of these events for posterity.

Weekend Plans

This weekend I am likely to be in Birmingham at some point, obviously Reading a bit, possibly London for theatre, and I might go to Poole on Sunday if the weather is pleasant enough to randomly visit ben.

Misc

Strangely enough I will probably not visit Call Centre Expo 2003 as was suggested in a mailshot I was sent which just made me think that little bit more about human depravity. I did consider going in order to track down some Telemarkers in order to explain why it is that they do not help humanity but it would do not good. Of course not all Call Centres are used for Telemarketting BUT I would like to suggest that this Expo will feature a lot of that side of things.

The SPARCbook has now been paid for at should at some point be on its way to me perhaps. I am going to Linux Expo UK 2003 in London in October. Probably the Thursday and perhaps the Wednesday too.

Jon.