robbat2 | Recent Entries

Now that the semester is done, I have a little time to relax. I'm taking a vacation 27th Dec until 4th Jan, to be away from technology.

Although I haven't exactly made any new years resolutions in the past, I believe I do have one this year. To have read every book in the ALA's top 100 banned book list (http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/bbwlinks/100mostfrequently.htm)

I've read a few of the books already, I've crossed off the ones that I'm sure I've read. There are a few more I might have read, but I can't recall.

Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz
Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
Forever by Judy Blume
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Alice (Series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Giver by Lois Lowry
It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
Goosebumps (Series) by R.L. Stine
A Day No Pigs Would Dieby Robert Newton Peck
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Sex by Madonna
Earth’s Children (Series) by Jean M. Auel
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
Go Ask Alice by Anonymous
Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
The Stupids (Series) by Harry Allard
The Witches by Roald Dahl
The New Joy of Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein
Anastasia Krupnik (Series) by Lois Lowry
The Goats by Brock Cole
Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane
Blubber by Judy Blume
Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan
Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
We All Fall Down by Robert Cormier
Final Exit by Derek Humphry
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Girls: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Daughters by Lynda Madaras
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
The Pigman by Paul Zindel
Bumps in the Night by Harry Allard
Deenie by Judy Blume
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Annie on my Mind by Nancy Garden
The Boy Who Lost His Face by Louis Sachar
Cross Your Fingers, Spit in Your Hat by Alvin Schwartz
A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by A.N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice)
Asking About Sex and Growing Up by Joanna Cole
Cujo by Stephen King
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
Boys and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Boys: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Sons by Lynda Madaras
Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
Crazy Lady by Jane Conly
Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher
Fade by Robert Cormier
Guess What? by Mem Fox
The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline Cooney
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Native Son by Richard Wright
Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women’s Fantasies by Nancy Friday
Curses, Hexes and Spells by Daniel Cohen
Jack by A.M. Homes
Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo A. Anaya
Where Did I Come From? by Peter Mayle
Carrie by Stephen King
Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume
On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
Arizona Kid by Ron Koertge
Family Secrets by Norma Klein
Mommy Laid An Egg by Babette Cole
The Dead Zone by Stephen King
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Always Running by Luis Rodriguez
Private Parts by Howard Stern
Where’s Waldo? by Martin Hanford
Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene
Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman
Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
Running Loose by Chris Crutcher
Sex Education by Jenny Davis
The Drowning of Stephen Jones by Bette Greene
Girls and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
View from the Cherry Tree by Willo Davis Roberts
The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
The Terrorist by Caroline Cooney
Jump Ship to Freedom by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier

Current Mood: tired

~~Sun, Nov 28, 23h00 - MTEC403 Project Proposal~~
~~Sun, Nov 28, 23h00 - ITEC415 Conference #2 postings~~
~~Mon, Nov 29, 16h30 - ITEC421 Assignment 1~~
~~Tue, Nov 30, 16h00 - INTD403 Project Status Report #3~~
~~Thu, Dec 02, 23h59 - ITEC415 Muddiest Point #3~~
~~Fri, Dec 03, 13h00 - ITEC403 Demo project progress~~
~~Fri, Dec 03, 13h15 - ITEC403 Problem report 2~~
~~Sun, Dec 05, 23h00 - ITEC415 Conference #3 postings~~
~~Sun, Dec 05, 23h00 - MTEC403 Project Discussion~~
~~Tue, Dec 07, 16h00 - INTD403 Project Status Report #4~~
~~Thu, Dec 09, 23h59 - ITEC415 Muddiest Point #4~~
~~Fri, Dec 10, 13h15 - ITEC403 Problem report 3~~
~~Fri, Dec 10, 23h59 - ITEC421 Assignment 2~~
~~Sun, Dec 12, 23h00 - ITEC415 Conference #4 postings~~
Tue, Dec 14, 23h00 - MTEC403 Project Submission Deadline (was Sun, Dec 12) [5% complete]
Tue, Dec 14, 23h59 - ITEC415 Final report [70% complete, pending editing]
Wed, Dec 15, 16h00-19h00 - ITEC421 Exam
Thu, Dec 16, 12h00-14h30 - INTD403 Final Presentation [20% complete]
Fri, Dec 17, 12h00-14h30 - ITEC406 Exam
Fri, Dec 17, 14h30 - ITEC406 Project Presentation [20% complete]
Fri, Dec 17, 16h00 - ITEC403 Final project presentation and submission [50% complete]
Sat, Dec 18, 16h00 - ITEC403 Problem report 4 [20% complete]

Edit #1: Sorted by date now, and details filled in on one item.
Edit #2: Marked off completed items, put in some progress data on some things.
Edit #3: MTEC403 event non-existant.

Gone to ACM Contest as of November 12.
Bus to Seattle - Train to Portland.
Returning November 14.

Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 00:48:28 -0600
From: Joan Chen <ybyqshhtz@sina.com.tw>
Subject: necromancer 8381 cream puffs
To: Robbat2 <robbat2@orbis-terrarum.net>

bedtime I think.

Current Mood: amused

Sun, 23h00 - MTEC402 - Conference Summary Paper (DONE)
Mon, 14h30 - ITEC414 - Exam
Mon, 16h00 - ITEC420 - Assignment (95% DONE)
Wed, 09h30 - INTD402 - Presentation
Wed, 09h30 - INTD402 - Team Paper
Wed, 16h00 - ITEC420 - Exam
Thu, 23h00 - MTEC402 - Paper [moved from Tues 23h00]
Fri, 12h30 - ITEC405 - Exam
Fri, 23h00 - ITEC402 - Assignment

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Coldplay (Parachutes) - 03 Spies

Schwarzenegger: Bush Has Hurt My Sex Life.
Could you get any more ambiguous?

I've been wondering for a while what to spend money on...
The answer has dawned on me.
iPod mini
http://www.revogear.com/products.html - PPC embedded dev box ($160USD)
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS5894977110.html - MIPS dev box ($199USD)

Current Mood: happy

Bold the titles for the movies you've watched in their entirety.

Italicize the titles for the movies you've only partially watched.

Add three titles of your own choosing to the list.

( Movie list... )

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Elton John - Love Songs\13 - Can You Feel The Love Tonight

ITEC404.3 - Oct 2 - Project Outline (1 page)
MTEC401.4 - Oct 3, 23h00 - Conferencing questions
ITEC404.4 - Oct 4 - Assignment questions (6 pages)
MTEC401.5 - Oct 5, 17h00 - Project (10 pages)
INTD401.5 - Oct 5, 12h00 - My portions of the project brief due for editing
ITEC413.4 - Oct 6, 23h59 - Conferencing questions
ITEC419.5 - Oct 6, 16h00 - Exam
INTD401.5 - Oct 7, 17h20 - Team[3] Project Brief (10 page max)
INTD401.5 - Oct 7, 12h00 - Team[3] Project presentation
ITEC401.5 - Oct 8, 16h00 - Assignment questions (4 left to do, out of 10)
ITEC404.5 - Oct 8, 12h30 - Exam
ITEC413.5 - Oct 6, 23h59 Moved to Oct 8, 23h59 - Team[2] Project (10 pages, 0 down)
ITEC404.5 - Oct 9 - Project Plan (10 page max)

then the next module starts...
ITEC414.1 - Oct 10, 23h59 - Muddiest Point Report

So thats a approximately 30 pages of stuff I write entirely on my own, and a further 20 pages max in two team projects. All in the next 7 days...

Hmm, perhaps time to get some sleep.

For tommorow other things I must do:
- Buy casefans for my mother's overheating machine
- Go to Time & Gold to complain that my watch imploded right after they fixed it

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: A-Ha - The Sun Always Shines On TV

<Alanna> Saying that Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders

On that note, check out SableVM and free-java-sdk for running Java on every strange architecture and OS that can possibly think of...

Crazy spam... ( How one can become a terrorist? )

Current Mood: surprised
Current Music: Madonna - Greatest Hits Volume 2\08 - Beautiful Stranger

Bah, this is what I get for being on the bleeding edge...

root@hevesy-int /dev/shm # dd if=/dev/urandom of=/tmp/testfile bs=1k count=4
4+0 records in
4+0 records out
root@hevesy-int /dev/shm # file /tmp/testfile
/tmp/testfile: empty
root@hevesy-int /dev/shm # dd if=/dev/urandom of=/tmp/testfile bs=1k count=5
5+0 records in
5+0 records out
root@hevesy-int /dev/shm # file /tmp/testfile
/tmp/testfile: data

As at 2.6.9-rc1-mm1, ext3 fails with files that are exactly 4kb in size.

Current Music: Bt - Escm\[08] Remember

Just my personal list of everything still due that I need to do this module.

INTD401.2 - Sept 19 - Project Brainstorming
INTD401.4 - Oct 3 - Project Brief
ITEC401.1 - Sept 17 10am - Use and Requirements of Safety Systems
ITEC401.3 - Sept 24 10am - Implementation of Safety-Critical Systems
ITEC401.5 - Oct 8 - TechWeek Assignment
ITEC404.5 - Oct 8 - Project
ITEC413.2 - Sept 18 - Project plan and progress report
ITEC413.2 - Sept 19 - Muddiest Point
ITEC413.2 - Sept 21 - Conferencing Questions
ITEC413.3 - Sept 26 - Muddiest Point
ITEC413.3 - Sept 24 - Conferencing Questions
ITEC413.4 - Oct 3 - Muddiest Point
ITEC413.4 - Oct 6 - Conferencing Questions
ITEC413.5 - Oct 6 - Project
ITEC419.1 - Sept 16 - Assignment
ITEC419.2 - Sept 23 - Assignment
ITEC419.3 - Sept 30 - Assignment
MTEC401.2 - Sept 19 - Conferencing Questions
MTEC401.3 - Sept 26 - Conferencing Questions
MTEC401.4 - Oct 3 - Conferencing Questions

After waking at 1pm, and working on my large loads of classwork for a bit, I saw an email on the VANLUG list about some computer goodies being sold cheaply.

I wanted 5 of the items on the list, but two had already gone (a Creative DXR2 hardware MPEG decoder card and a BT848-based video capture card). But I did get a PCMCIA (type III) hard drive 340Mb in size - good for embedded systems, a Miro DC30Pro MotionJPEG card (with the breakout panel, all the manuals and an original of Premiere5.0 with licenses) and finally a APC SmartUPS 900 - good for 630W, needs some new batteries first. All of this cost me $75 :-).

Vanilla 2.6.8.1 appears to have PCMCIA glitches in it, and 2.6.9-rc1-* appears to have NFS problems amongst other things.

On the plus side, my XXS1500 is now mostly stable enough to be left building packages, but it still borks out occasionally :-(.

A new patch is up on my Gentoo dev space, against Linux-MIPS CVS + 2.6.9-rc1-bk12. It's a bit bloated, and should be consider dangerous to your PCMCIA [expect it to hard-hang the box in some cases]. See the latest console logs for examples of the problems.

An ALSA driver for the Au1x00 has floated around on the Linux-MIPS mailing list, so that should probably be added in here at some point.

I'm busy with school since the semester just started, and waiting for 2.6.9-rc2 before I continue work on the XXS1500.

Todo tracking:
PCMCIA - should work, just debugging it now
PCI - stubs in place
USB - needs to be revisited entirely, looks like non-PCI USB was dropped between 2.4 and 2.6
Audio - test outside code
NFSRoot Env - still a mismatch hybrid between Gentoo and Debian packages, need to build everything as -mips2 or -mips32 (I'm in favour of the former at the moment, as it can then be re-used on most mipsel boxes).

I've had some questions about what cross-platform toolchain I use, and I'm using Gentoo's crossdev which provides me with:
gcc-3.3.4-r1
binutils-2.14.90.0.8-r1

I've only got it in kernel mode, no glibc provided.

I had no idea that the scots wrote their webpages with accents...
http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/vli/language/scots/index.htm

Current Mood: amused

Seen when BigLumber wasn't behaving:

500 - Something Went Boom
Well, now you've gone and done it. You had to mess around and cause the mysterious 500 error to appear. You probably caused a core dump and whose going to have to cleanup that mess? Me, that's who! Dang kids. Why, when I was your age I was writing programs with punch cards and vacuum tubes. In the dark. Uphill! You and your fancy "mod_perl" and "postgres." Ha! If we wanted to store things in a database, we'd punch some cards and arrange them all neat-like in a box. At least I think it was a box. It might have been my pants. Where's my medicine anyway?....

So while trying to debug my kernel, I found a bug in another peice of software... it turns out ksymoops doesn't behavior correctly on cases where nm/objdump decide a file format is ambiguous. Ksymoops patch: http://dev.gentoo.org/~robbat2/xxs1500/ksymoops-2.4.9-target-fix.patch.gz

Latest kernel patch: http://dev.gentoo.org/~robbat2/xxs1500/linux-xxs1500-20040825.patch.gz

Had markedly more success with the XXS1500 today. After digging in the old config file, I found out that I'd totally missed HW_HAS_PCI, so the kernel was acting as if PCI didn't exist. Sorted it out in the Kconfigs, and a bunch more things fell into place. PCMCIA and PCI _nearly_ work. See my kernel patch above, and look for the two XXX markers. I need to see about the actual wiring schematic of the system to solve those two.

Cleaned up the include tree a bit, properly creating the asm/mach-xxs1500 instead of having the header directly in asm.

Cleaned up the au1000 handling of the boot cmdline, so that it actually uses CONFIG_CMDLINE, and makes life easier (editing your params straight into the file is nasty).

I suspect there is a bug somewhere in the NoOp I/O scheduler, as if I use it, I get a lot of panics. Switched back to the deadline scheduler, works much better :-).

Got my initial NFSRoot mostly up and working, a few slight glitches left, as the initial NFSRoot I got my hands on is for 2.4 only, I'll have to ask `Kumba if he has 2.6 mipsel stage available, or could build be a few packages I could use to convert the stage as needed. Packages needed: pcmcia-cs*, module-init-tools, nfs-utils, portmap

Once I've got the initial NFSRoot up (it uses glibc), I can build some uclibc stages, and nfsroot into them, ready to create some embedded disk images. I need to see about adding mtd-utils into the Gentoo tree first, as I'll need it for doing this.

Console logs in the usual place.

For the geeks and security-conscious amongst us, there will be a PGP keysigning event here in Vancouver. September 1st, 7pm. I will be attending, as will a notary on the Gossamer Spider Web of Trust (GSWoT) and an OpenCA Assurer.

Think Coffee Lounge & Bistro
4512 10th Avenue West,
Vancouver, BC V6R2J1
(604) 228-9510

Please see http://lunar.ca/keysigning.htm for further details and instructions of things that must be done before attending.

Please circulate this announcement amongst anybody you know that uses PGP.

Working on the PCMCIA driver today. Doing a fair bit of code refactoring to make life easier.

Have two snippets:
a) au_writel((au_readl(GPIO2_PINSTATE) & ~(1<<14))|(1<<30), GPIO2_OUTPUT);
b) au_writel((au_readl(GPIO2_PINSTATE) | (1<<14))|(1<<30), GPIO2_OUTPUT);

The 1<<14 indicates a specific location to set, and the 1<<30 says to enable output on that location.

In arch/mips/au1000/xxs1500/board_setup.c, snippet a is commented as 'turn off power'.

In drivers/pcmcia/au1000_xxs1500.c, snippet a is commented as 'turn on power', and snippet b is commented as 'turn off power'.

Which one do I trust? I don't have any wiring diagrams for the unit, so your guess is as good as mine. The CPU here uses a mix of negated and normal pins, so both options could work.

I guess it's just time for trial and error.

I'm still not sure which is right (If I can't solve it, I'll ask mycable), and I've got a few other PCMCIA glitches to deal with still, but it's mostly done. Patch up in the usual place, along with the latest console log.

Move along, nothing to read

A dis-illusioned software engineer

Merry Christmas

Scheduled Hell Again

ACM Contest

Funny spam subject

Assignment deadlines

Headline "Schwarzenegger: Bush Has Hurt My Sex Life"

How to spend your paycheck

Movie List Meme

We now return to our regularly scheduled insanity

(no subject)

Spam offerings: How one can become a terrorist?

ext3 bug...

Due Dates - Reminder To Self

Computer stuff good

XXS1500 Porting Status Report #5 - delays

Scottish Webpages

Rambling HTTP error messages

XXS1500 Porting Status Report #4 - bugs and success

PGP Key Signing, Vancouver - September 1, 7 pm

XXS1500 Porting Status Report #3 - or how to be confused by kernel code

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