jcm's blog

[ from the something-for-the-weekend? dept. ]

The BSD Daemon copyright Marshall Kirk McKusick.

Listening to: Tears For Fears – Mad World (Ogg Vorbis)
(W H Smith have a special promotion covering a lot of music).

I have decided to purchase an FPGA development board with either a Xilinx Virtex II or a Spartan on it for playing with programmable logic at home. I plan to test the Microblaze uClinux port and have a board which is cheap enough to be justifiable but hopefully also be useful. The other side of things is that this should tie in with the book I bought on VHDL recently. I want to play with the OpenCores OPENRISC Specification and the OPENRISC 1200 hardware implementation.

Was reading up on Myrinet and VME as I consider some more interesting parallel libraries I might use on this SPARC cluster at home. The first job is going to be to build the thing over the next few weeks now that hopefully the racking is about to be complete. Also I want to experiment with MPI and a few of the other message passing primitives which Compsci Courses brush over without going in to detail.

Jon.

[ from the this-is-plain-funny dept. ]

This one is funny.

A kid in the States used various F-words in response to questioning by a member of staff concerning his potential smoking in the boys toilet.

A highly amusing legal document was filed in response.

Jon.

[ from the Microsoft-monopolistic-supporting-nuts dept. ]

Sod the Inland Revenue. These people offer a new online Tax Return service which unfairly requires the use of Microsoft software to do so. They could have used a standard Web Services based process using SSL or something similar but no. For some reason there must be some Microsoft Windows only software involved. These people make me very very angry indeed.

Jon.

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

Photo: Jon Masters, David Brailsford, Robin Allen.
Source: Robin and Beckie Allen Graduation Pictures

I have not been updating this diary much recently though there is a good reason for once here. At the moment I am planning to change various jonmasters.org functionality over to a new box and redesign the site using DHTML, XML and CSS2. This will take some time as it is not a high priority.

The Digital System Design with VHDL book arrived today and I have read a few pages. I think this book provides what I wanted – a filler for the material I felt Nottigham CSiT should have covered on their Compsci degree but did not for whatever reasons. I am too demanding perhaps though Southampton seem to have the right idea as this book shows.

I have been reading through the Myri documentation on the Myrinet. Also looking at MPI. The home cluster should be going in over the next few weeks when I am not working – I have decided that I like embedded systems development for the time being.

My room at home has been gutted and now has one of those wooden look floors with two doors and is being painted, kitted out with lighting and new racking for my SPARCstations. I should have an IRIX server installed sometime over the next few weeks if the O2 on offer is sorted. I was offered yet another Origin however I really do not have the room for it given I think there will be more than 30 computers in here soon.

This weekend I am preparing a review on the exim mail transfer agent and looking at an upcoming Tomcat article. I am attempting to cover a broader range of subjects ranging from Web Services through to Embedded Systems. NetBSD is on my radar now as I attempt to become more familiar with it.

Hussein is off abroad while I am working most of the summer but this is inspiring me to look for a holiday in September possibly in the States.

Next weekend I am off to see another friend married and am really looking forward to it Robin. I must go look at their wedding list this week.

My friend Chris might read this at some point in which case I would like to discuss when you are over in the UK during August and feel like a beer?

My provisional driving license has been applied for and I am going to end up paying 600-800 pounds for the pleasure of learning to drive in Reading.

Jon.

[ from the obsideon-switches-to-testing dept. ]

I switched obsideon to Debian testing rather than the previous unstable from months ago which was out of date and difficult to maintain. I had to fix GNOME 2 by installing gnome-control-center from unstable – and I would like someone to explain how apt pinning is meant to be done properly… .

Required screenshot

Jon.

[ from the yet-another-blog-entry dept. ]

I have been busy for the last few weeks but hopefully will have chance to write all about the fascinating things which might have happened. In short I graduated, then bought a bike and started going swimming. I am working most days at the moment and sorting jobs for September.

Graduation photos will be online soon though in the mean time check out Hussein’s Photos.

Jon.

[ from the push-and-shove-time dept. ]

Today is the day of graduation, or alternatively the day before they push us out of the door. “Thanks for feeding the system some cash and now on your bike mate go quick!” – or something to that effect. They will surely start calling and writing to me about donating for future students in time…

…but I may well be back very soon as I have now had several job offers which allow the flexibility to persue a part time PhD course shortly.
Mental note to give pkh and team a bottle of bubbly as a parting gesture and reminder that I am planning to return for some time to come.

Photos later.

Jon.