jcm's blog

[ from the hey-dude-how-is-it-going? dept. ]

Today I am working outside of Oxford, and will later be in Reading. I have been reading The Quintessential PIC Microcontroller on my travels and I am very impressed with it so far.

Today is the first day of Linux User & Developer Expo 2003 and I shall be in Nottingham from tomorrow night in preparation for our trip to the Expo in Birmingham on Thursday.

GLLUG borrowed my copy of Revolution OS over the weekend as theirs was still on order. OxLUG are having a screening at some point.

Jon.

[ from the I-am-blogging-this dept. ]

I decided to modify my view on SCO from being a mere annoyance to being another collective which should be put out of their misery. Their utter shite specifically designed to cause FUD around Linux annoys greatly.

Still a comforting thought is that Unisys can no longer extort money from webmasters for using GIF format images – thankfully their patent has now expired and they will have to divert those people agressively persuing collections of royalties in to actually doing some kind of useful work…perhaps. Maybe not. Then again there are patents on pizza delivery.

Today I will be in Reading, London, and Cambridge. I am looking out for a portable mp3 player and perhaps a PDA within a reasonable time frame. Solaris is now heavily on my agenda and in particular I want to get back in to what source documentation I do have. In other development news I got the serial driver I was writing working aside from a couple of issues.

I bumped in to a Microsoft drone the other day and managed to piss them off very quickly indeed. Primarily this was because I was dressed in one of my walking Linux advert outfits but I might have been mumbling a few words under my breath.

Everyone who saw the news on Thursday night will have heard about the Burnham chemical fire incident. I ended up travelling for 5 hours on a journey which normally takes not much more than 30 minutes once on a train. Even given the circumstances it took 10 times as long!

Jon.

[ from the I'm-spinning-around-etc... dept. ]

So it looks like the USA trip is on hold again, at least until the economic situation improves with regards to visiting certain companies. I am currently trying to persuade my contacts that I am happy to visit even given the present situation so we will have to see what happens.

I have another job interview tomorrow, which should be interesting. Various interesting stuff is happening on the job front but I am not going to document that for the general public at this stage – suffice it to say I am looking for an “interesting and stimulating role with an exciting company”, especially in embedded GNU/Linux development but also in a number of other Research areas too.

At the moment I am writing a quick test serial driver for something which looks a lot like a 16550 and at some point this week should be able to sort out the board info structure for this development board. Next week I will hopefully be at the Linux User & Developer Expo 2003 and also in Nottingham for a friend’s BBQ. There is a certain amount of stuff to do before then.

Jon.

[ from the a-somewhat-odd-film dept. ]

I went to see Anger Management last night. The film has a number of issues and ultimately provokes one towards hostility, while not being particularly humourous.

A predictable, slightly boring, composition of Hollywood Bullshit.

Jon.

[ from the fuck-off-and-die dept. ]

I was reading about the latest installment in the SCO-IBM issue. IBM (quite rightly) refuse to settle and SCO are blindly pressing on while being laughed at by everyone else. They got in a bit of hot water, brought in new management, and they decided that it made more sense to extort money than make or sell products (especially with Microsoft providing monies in “licensing fees” for technology they do not need). So what if someone in IBM might have used 80 lines of SCO “Intellectual Property” – that code can probably be re-written in minutes anyway. They should just accept they lost as a company and give up while they still have even half a reputation left.

Jon.

[ from the i-got-a-2:1 dept. ]

So the degree classifications were released late yesterday afternoon. I got a 2:1 which is what I expected – most of my friends also did quite well so we went out to have Wagamama.

While writing this story I was sitting in the Pope Building on a Sun Blade 100 – yes I actually found a Sun workstation available for general use within the University! w00t!

Jon.

[ from the a-warning-of-things-to-come-very-soon dept. ]

The latest twist on Warner Village is that they have been taken over by SBC Holdings and have formed Vue Entertainment Group. Warner Village cinemas will be redesigned to remove the Warner content apparently and I do not doubt that the whole process will cost considerable money which will have to come from some part of the customer funded experience.

The Vue Entertainment website is basically a giant flash animation – which I cannot view at all since there is no flash plugin for my system. I have mailed them to attempt a little enlightenment where the differences between a sprinkling of flash and giant flash animations are concerned, and how these fit in with customers who cannot view them normally. If Warner goes down this route then I would no longer be able to book tickets online – I would try local competition however Warner Village drove them all out of business.

I can see this takeover move is going to be a bad move for customers.

Jon.