jcm's blog

[ from the great-family-fun-event dept. ]

I am going to the Linux User Expo 2003 however I am not sure which dates I will be there yet so I am interested to hear from friends
who may be attending, and when they will be there.

Jon.

[ from the xilinx-are-pretty-cool dept. ]

I was bitching about the direction certain paths in education are taking and reminded myself that things could be a lot worse – or better.
I disagree with the government notion that 50% of the population should have degrees – people should have a degree if they want to study some area and have sufficient interest in the longer term or just for intellectual challenge…or whatever, not because they have nothing else.

I have been playing around with some Xilinx stuff again. I already had a bunch of CPLDs at home cluttering up space but now I am using the Virtex II Pro and the modified GNU tools. I plan to buy a load more kit as soon as it becomes affordable.

This weekend I told myself I would look at Minix for PowerPC again. It is of course likely that something else will grab my attention yet again rather than this port but if I do finally get around to it then I will begin the low level platform support.

Jon.

[ from the interesting-read-interesting-site dept. ]

My friends know that I find the idea of being licensed to receive or in some way attempting to control who can receive a transmission to be laughably unethical and immoral. I came accross this TV Licensing site of some interest.

Jon.

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

I went to York last Thursday evening to meet my parents and to have supper. There is a pleasant horse and carriage trip available around the old and new parts of the city and I used that to quickly take in some of the area. As for the food, we were most impressed with Oscars, which had come highly recommended – thanks Tom – despite it being so busy that there were no tables until someone left and having more than a half hour wait! The food was very good indeed. I had Cajun Chicken.

On Saturday (which er now seems to have been yesterday) I went to Cambridge to visit Toby and had good times. We went in to the city and had a BBQ afterwards. Speaking of the City – on the way back to Reading, I went through London and First Great Western managed to screw things up nicely. Due to a safety scare which was probably caused by them having admitted to their trains being in need of replacement , the 22:00 just sat at the platform for ages until someone eventually told us we had to get off. I called National Rail and wasted some time trying to find out what was going on – obviously it really is too much to expect customer service with certain rail operators – and eventually left London almost an hour later. So a 2.5 hour journey becomes 3.5 hours thanks to the fantastic state of railways in this country. The sad fact is we just cannot rely on such transport.

So bah anyway er, meh. I felt like ranting over that First Great Western thing because they just annoy me. Virgin Trains are getting better though – the staff at Reading actually used to know what I meant when I inquired for Virgin Trains services to hell – and the York trip went smoothly. I will mostly be in Reading for the next couple of weeks and back in Nottingham on the 12th for my degree classification!

Jon.

[ from the I-like-sun-boxes dept. ]

For no particular reason I just resumed one of my Solaris boxes – called Phoenix – after a good few months and notice it had 238 days of uptime between suspends so must have been last booted a good couple of years almost ago. I love that stability. I now need to buy a 5-10GB SCSI disk from somewhere and install Solaris 9 on it to move my files from CSiT in to a working Solaris 9 setup for no particular reason See trj you cannot even suggest I am wasting time now the exams are over!

Jon.

[ from the coming-to-you-every-hour-on-the-hour dept. ]

Last night was a post exams moment thing. I went to Wagamama with MaW and jok. I was a little late though MaW did forgive me. I had a 77, 99, Raw Salad, Fruit Juice, and a Coke. Then we went to Nandos for Bottomless Yoghurt…and had to ask for the machine to be refilled.

Came back early and decided to read about Open GL and a paper on Crypto.

Today is a day for some work, reading and very important tea breaks.

Jon.

[ from the exams-over-for-now dept. ]

Well it had to happen eventually. I just had the last exam.

The next few days will hopefully involve some relaxation before a busy few weeks working on a Linux port and sorting out where I might be in six months from now, the future, and so on and so forth. I still wish to persue a PhD if possible and this will be sorted out sometime soon – the cost is a negligable 500 pounds per term when studying on a part time basis though it takes considerable effort.

This week I will be in Nottingham, York, London, Reading, Oxford, and perhaps Winchester, Birmingham, Cambridge and a few other places.

Jon.