jcm's blog

[ from the another-update-another-title dept. ]

Random purchase of the day was a Tadpole SPARCbook S1.

Source: Tadpole SPARCbook S1 auction photo.

Today I had a rather lazy day looking over tax returns and contemplating stuff. Tom was going to be visiting however has changed his plans so I had a much more laid back day. sladen sent me a link to the Tadpole SPARCbook S1 auction and er, it absolutely positively had to be mine. I have wanted one of these for quite some time and now I will have one.

Muwhahahahaha! .

[ Mozilla Firebird crashed half way through writing this the first time. ] Thanks to Bill Joy for writing vi and the inspiration that gave to write other editors such as vim which is being used here for this rewrite!

The Linux kernel development that I have been doing has made a lot of progress and I will post a link to some patches once these become official. Suffice it to say I am happy with the amount I am learning and gaining from the work that I am doing with hardware and Linux kernel development.

I went to Telehouse last week to meet sladen and to fix the serial console problem with dmesg.printk.net. Unfortunately I was delayed but I did buy pizza for us afterwards! I am back in TFM4 tomorrow to perform a software upgrade which necessitates that I am onsite. I met Chris last week too and went to Wagamama for Noodles. I hope he graces me with another visit at Christmas or whenever he returns!

I was in Winchester last weekend to listen to my cousin and his band “The Taming Of The Shrew” performing as a support act to “The Trade” at the John Stripe Theatre. They were pretty damn good with Tom being great on vocals and the other band members too – especially Sam on guitar. I need to talk to them again about websites and other such random stuff to see if I can help out somewhere. Also met gran and my aunt Anne for lunch. Unsurprisingly we went to Pizza Hut and then headed down to the Water gardens for a walk which was very pleasant. Winchester changes every time I am there.

Last weekend I was at the OxLUG meeting which was in the Lamb and Flag since there was no talk planned. We discussed SCO and various obvious stuff, then got on to talking about Windows worms and the design of various Operating Systems. I discussed low latency networking with a guy who runs some of the stuff in what used to be and might still be Oxford Parallel including Myrinet.

Tonight I am planning for some stuff in central London tomorrow and visiting dmesg to perform patching. I also am considering going to Birmingham over the weekend and the possibility of also going to Nottingham or Manchester with a chance that there will be time to fit in a trip to Poole on Sunday.

Jon.

[ from the read-project-censored-reports dept. ]

I was particularly unsurprised when reading the news from Project Censored discussing those stories which have been notably absent from mainstream reporting over the last year or so. Still the reports are somewhat disturbing nonetheless.

Disturbing things the Bush Administration have kept from us

Rumsfeld’s Plan to Provoke Terrorists

This basically suggests that the US have been contemplating causing terrorist incidents in response to subversive actions on their part.

US Illegally Removes Pages from Iraq UN Report

Did you ever wonder where those missing pages from the Iraq weapons reports actually eventually turned up? According to this report, the US removed them and this in itself does not particularly surprise me. It does sadden me to think that this was again for capitalist reasons.

Jon.

[ from the retro-fitting-older-entries dept. ]

Random Stuff

Today I am on route in to London again in order to meet sladen and dmesg. Unfortunately I am now quite late having had to receive several calls this morning which resulted in leaving home quite late. I owe Paul a pint or two. Anyway…

Miscellaneous Stuff

Apparently I am also now officially “overqualified”. At least according to the SA’s at a certain large investment bank. I was asked what happens when you type sync at the ok prompt on a Sun box so I discussed zero page deferrencing and how Solaris traps down to the
do_panic function which verifies the disk driver sublayer and then stores a crash dump towards the end of the configured swap device – then why it does this and even parts of the magic numbers used in the dump. A little OTT perhaps.

Jon.

[ from the retro-fitting-older-entries dept. ]

Random Stuff

Today I am in London sitting in Cabot Square at Starbucks. While this is indeed an example of entirely articial asthetics it is quite pleasant nonetheless. Canary Wharf is in the distance with all the banking buildings dominating the skyline while I write random code and slurp tea. In a few weeks from now this area will be quiet and much more wintery. Back here again tomorrow with sladen probably if we can arrange a time to check in on dmesg over in Telehouse.

I seem to have lost more weight, which is probably down to not eating much over the last few days while spending most of my time at work. There can be problems when you enjoy your job to the level that I currently do and really the only way forward is going to be to live next to the office. Need to sort out my PhD applications also – I am applying to research distributed embedded systems and their reliability and failover capabilities.

Hacking on random code while contemplating life and the Universe and various other entirely random stuff. I should go to go see a play and experience some culture, I need to get out more. Of course this would be much preferable with a female geek so willing volunteers are sought. .

Hacking Stuff

The Linux PowerPC 405 ZPR Zone Protection Register handling code is amusing. Another classical example of a single endian issue with a byte swapped register differing between the way it actually works and the way the developers must have thought it works. That took enough time to track down. Everything starts working happily when you swap the zone numbers in it around, so if you are reading this having had the same problem and finding this page in a google search or something please do get in touch to share your frustration! .

Miscellaneous Stuff

So today I am in London and also tomorrow. Then I am in Winchester to visit my grandmother for some afternoon tea. Tonight I am meeting a friend and I still need to finalise the weekend – not quite packed enough in to this week so maybe another trip to Cambridge or Nottingham is in order. I am planning to visit Congleton as soon as there are trains going there once more and also Bournemouth once Ben figures out when would be good.

Jon.

[ from the retro-fitting-older-entries dept. ]

Random Stuff

Today I am on a train currently passing through Leicester on route to Nottingham. I had an interesting morning and got a delayed 12:05 train from Reading which was up to the usual excellent standard stereotypical of Virgin Trains – overcrowded so that I had to sit in the corridor next to the broken toilet and help rescue another female passenger who could not escape. Remember there are reasons people are not persuaded to use public transport.

This weekend I am off to a family wedding in London and am staying in what would appear to be a reasonable hotel on Friday and Saturday night. Next week I need to look in to this long European weekend I keep meaning to have somewhere like Brussels. Need to find out if any friends want to go too. Probably would be a good excuse to get a digital camera I suppose. Hmmm… Back to the present and this train should be in Nottingham soon so I can meet up with jok and tom for afternoon tea and supper.

I went swimming again last night and did the weekly weighing. I admit that I am still over what I should be – but I am just under 14st. now which is an improvement that I am aim to take further over the next few months. Eventually I want to weigh 12.5 or 13st and balance out my diet and exercise.

Hacking Stuff

The room setup has made little progress over the last week. I still have a bunch of machines which are clogging up the dining room and which need to be moved in to the new racking. Perihelion is pretty damned sweet running Debian testing now and I have to say Windows XP has nothing on this machine. The addition of an Ultra on my desktop would make the second monitor more useful though I now have more than I have room for (15″, 17″, 19″, 21″, etc.)

I have been debugging the Linux 4xx TLB handling over the last few days. The code is pretty simple and not SMP future proof, and of course differs in every release you come accross depending upon which tree you chose to use today. Would somebody please consolidate in to the next 2.4 release? . The PowerPC 405 is a funny thing really. The more you use it the more quirks and more interesting it becomes – I think I should have been a hardware engineer in another life or something. Anyway interest aside I am pretty comfortable with the work I am doing now (somewhat debug intensive now).

Reading the combinational logic design section in the Digital System design with VHDL book. Getting some more SCA disks for the Sun machines at home – probably time to pick up an Ultra soon given they are now available on ebay for under 50 quid.

Miscellaneous Stuff

Another day and more people calling me about recruitment. I seem to be averaging several mails a week now although I am as always driven by interest. Money is also a useful resource but not as important as doing something interesting this side of 25. Of course later I will have a zillion commitments, a flashy sports car and a geeky girlfriend…or just a lot of commitments to geeky technology. One or the other, you can guess which.

I find the work that the Embedded Systems Lab at Leceister are doing is both interesting and fits in with the kind of stuff I dig right now. There are various application forms sitting in an Inbox somewhere which I should fill out and get in to the pipeline.

This diary and website needs a complete overhaul.

Just arrived at Loughborough. Not far from Nottingham again now. TTFN.

Jon.

[ from the have-you-updated-your-blog-yet? dept. ]

Screenshots: Phoenix (Solaris 9) and Perihelion (Debian testing) Updated.

General Update

For the last few weeks I have been working on various Linux kernel hacking and continuing to read up on various items of interest, including hardware design and digital logic. I bought the book “Panic! UNIX System Crash Dump Analysis” for bedtime and train reading…and because I do actually dig that stuff.

I went to Liverpool on Saturday and enjoyed my visit to the point where I am encouraged to travel more over the next few weeks – I want to discover parts of England I have not been to, and other parts of the UK too. I switch to a three day working week soon so have some more free time.

Driving lessons will be arranged soon as I want to start within the next couple of weeks really. Swimming is going to also shift around so I go evenings Mon-Wed and mornings on Thu-Fri for the time being. Randomly got yet another recruitment call the other day – I like that .

Machines Update

The 4.5GB SCA SCSI disk I ordered from a guy on ebay (who it turns out I already knew through a mailing list anyway) works fine and is happily running Solaris 9 now. Phoenix was running Solaris 8 for a long time but had been offline for the last few months during moving. I am now using both Solaris and Debian on my desktop partly to compare the two in daily use and also to keep my Solaris skills up to date. I generally prefer a Linux desktop though it does have to be said – Solaris is very stable but library configuration and binary location should not have to bother a desktop user.

Hacking Update

I bought an PIC for updating the firmware on my older PICSTART programmer but since I only get one shot I will do it when I am less tired. Have been reading and planning to get a Xilinx Virtex II Pro evaluation board or a Spartan but still waiting to hear back about pricing.

Some ideas for my Genesis redesign (I have decided to do it properly now that I understand more of the PowerPC Architecture) have been forming and also for getting Minix to run also. The trouble before was that various non-existent interrupt handlers were getting called that I could not debug.

Jon.

[ from the surprisingly-nice-country-region dept. ]

I spent the weekend in Scuthorpe with Robin and Beckie Allen at their wonderful wedding. The whole affair was done very well indeed and the couple made a fantastic bride and groom.

I went on the 07:05 train from Reading on Saturday morning and got there at about midday. On Sunday it took a similar amount of time to get back home. The reception was at the Red Lion in Redbourne which was also the hotel I stayed at and can now recommend. The room was very reasonable, etc.

Also enjoyed some of the people I met. A couple of IT people, some others from London and the south and also the families. Especially a certain person who shall remain nameless – I regret not asking her to dance but I still think my dancing skill is, shall we say lacking.

Jon.