jcm's blog

Decisions, decisions. Why is it that making seemingly easy decisions is always the hardest thing? Looks like my friends at work understand the choice I need to make now, but it’s still tricky.

Meh. That would be one of the reasons I’m still up, also because I ended up going to Pizza Hut for supper and kicking around Oxford for a few hours this evening. Twas interesting that the wheather wasn’t increadibly shite yesterday. That’s almost a guarantee that there’ll be a low pressure front heading in by Thursday, just in time for our potential impromptu OxLUG midmonth meetup.

Jon.

I gave a presentation to OxLUG entitled “An Introduction to Embedded Linux“. You can get the slides from my talk by clicking on the link. It will need some more work before it’s a good presentation and I need to produce an abridged version for LUG Radio Live next month.

British railways really piss me off sometimes. I’m all for advocating public transportation over using cars and other alternatives to meeting real people and experiencing the joys of getting from a to b, but sometimes even I will admit that it all just sucks. Like tonight. I turned up at Reading station just before 17:00 to get to Oxford to give a talk at 18:30. Now, Oxford is around 30 minutes away from Reading by a fast train service and so one could be reasonably forgiven for expecting a train to actually be running on that route. “It’s a Sunday”, came the reply from the ticket office person who served me a ticket and explained why train services were being so crappy. For those outside of the UK, weekends are by now simply a synonym for “engineering works will screw up your journey”. The rationale is that people who matter only travel during the working week and the rest of us have gotten used to the pain of weekend travel by train.

After waiting some time for a delayed train, it disappeared from the information screens spontaneously and I had to ask someone before finding out that it had been cancelled (in fairness, that was due to some “youths throwing a brick at the driver’s window” – I hope the driver was ok – but then, we don’t provide many alternatives to keep the little brats occupied and away from the railway|railroad tracks. Not that riding around on mopeds is much of an improvement – there’s no real social outlet for many of the people who will be doing this kind of thing). The next train was a slow stopping local service and ran a couple of minutes late from a different platform that was annouced at reasonably short notice – picture a scene with many already pissed off people rushing to switch to another platform over a bridge. Then the train took a weird routing (that I haven’t seen done in a while) where it went to Didcot (before Oxford) and then went into reverse on some interesting trek on a bypass route to eventually reach Oxford. I didn’t mention that the trains were stopping on the route to deal with engineering, did I? Oh well. It’s not like I had to be anywhere to give a talk to a large group of people or anything.

I’d like to thank the following train companies and operators for making this evening more interesting than it might otherwise have been with just a talk to give: Thames *cough* First Great Western, Virgin Trains and Network Rail. Thanks guys. Thanks for having zero co-ordination, for not announcing engineering works obviously enough and for having a complete lack of information exchange to the detriment of the travelling public. I really hope your management teams enjoy driving home in their cars tonight (you wouldn’t want to use your own services tonight). You really succeeded in disgusting and frustrating me. Sincere congratulations.

Jon.

Part of Prospect Park was sealed off this morning, after a teenage girl’s body was discovered. I was in the park just over a week ago doing some geocaching, I’d hate to have been the person who found something like that. My family drove past the park this morning and saw the area was indeed pretty much taped off. It’s a little disconcerting when such things happen where you live.

Jon.

Photo: Windsor Castle, Windsor. A nice day for a walk around Windsor and a boat trip and ice cream along the Thames.

There’s a Victoria in B.C.

Interestingly enough, there’s a place called Victoria in British Columbia (Vancouver Island – sounds like it’s just about feasible to visit, given a few hours), in addition to the one I knew of in Ontario. This I learned from some travelling Canadians I met on the train today. They’re over doing the Europe thing during a long summer vacation from college (which I took as a N.A. reference to University rather than an attempt to adjust vocab to my local context). Cool. They told me the places they were planning to go and I was able to point out a few useful bits of information – like the fact that “Barcelona Airport” with Ryanair is over an hour from Barcelona. It’s about as much in Barcelona as any other similar airport and the bus costs almost as much as the flight. Still, I was able to tell them about the bus service and recommend it over a taxi. I also recommended taking water if they go in search of historical landmarks like the Acropolis while they are in Greece (well, Athens) – it really can be quite hot indeed at this time of year and heat sickness is not something you want to have, if my firsthand witnessing of others (I presumed it was heat sickness) is anything to go by.

I spent the day oscillating between Reading and other places. Some of that time was in Bracknell (where an interesting concept was being discussed – yes, I’m being vague, if you’re a close friend then I’ll probably explain it to you) and some of the time was in Windsor/Eton for a lunch meeting with the folks at a post relational database company (magazine stuff). There’s only so much excitement to be had over the ability for millions of objects to persist peacefully (no matter what database, but it was a reasonably interesting conversation). Meh. Anyway, I took a few photos of Windsor Castle – since I’m not sure I’ve ever actually been to Windsor itself (or maybe I did when I was a kid, but I can’t recall). I didn’t pay to go and look around since that might be conceivable as an indirect endorsement of the Monarchy I didn’t take the GPS along, so there was no geocaching on this occasion. A pity, JP II still needs to find a home. Couldn’t find the microcache at the Oracle this evening, even though we had a reasonable look where I thought it might have been.

So, I’m still up, ostensibly doing some writing and planning this presentation for Sunday. I’ve got a lot of random bits of junk here that need to be ready. The fan started to screw itself over in apogee’s power supply and so I swapped out the PSU tonight. Only to find that the CPU fan was also fscked – and borrowed the fan from another machine as a stopgap to get online again. I need to rationalise a lot of this kit over the coming months as I prepare to move – all depends upon what I decide I want to do next. We’ll see.

Jon.

Recording: Playing with the ipod recording gadget I bought in Portland: A quick violin practice of Pachelbel Canon in D. It’s not to concert standard by any means (several obvious mistakes there), and my first real attempt at sitting down and preparing Jesu joy of man’s desiring for Hannah and Joe Wrigley.

Thanks to dsaxena, I’ve taken interest in the 10,000 Maniacs. They’re pretty cool. I think I’d heard of them ages ago but until now ignored them. I’m listening to “Eat for two” as I write this. It reminded me to mail one of the girls who recently left the office to check on how she’s getting on. A friend just went off on paternity leave, hope he’s getting on ok too (for USians: this is probably a very British/European legal thing, but men can take limited leave too here – which is obviously pretty cool for my friend whose wife gave birth last weekend).

dsaxena amused me with his latest blog entry about picking up a random hitchhiker, that’s cool. Unfortunately, we live in a world of such mass hysteria and paranoia that it’s also probably a pretty rare event by now. We mutually distrust everyone and think everyone is a witch (terrorist) who is out to get us. Did you know that less than 2,000 people died as a direct result of a terrorist incident around the whole world last year, according to U$ government figures I saw cited on American TV*? (around 700 were in Iraq – and they only choose to “account” for certain limited incidents). So, on the one hand we have millions dying from hunger or from AIDS (not helped by certain religious nuts’ views on contraception – would you rather people died from AIDS as some kind of curse then?) and on the other, a few random people – equivalent to statistical noise – are enough to get George and fellow morons ripping away at an otherwise mostly peaceful society we live in.

Photo: One of the ML300 development boards, hooked up to a hardware debugger.

I’m at home this morning, having gone to bed at a more sane hour of the day. Lo and behold, I’m up at a sane time without having to cut short on sleep and without having to smash too many alarm clocks for once. This place is a mess, so many receipts, invoices and other assorted bits of paper. My receipt for the Amsterdam flight turned up in the mail yesterday. I need to check everything’s good with atp as I’ve only received an email confirmation (which might be all they generally send).

Today, I need to get articles wrapped up, start planning for the next set, and go through some proposal documentation for Debra, in collaboration with Frank. I’ve got some ecos work that’s ongoing, must go out and vote at some point, a talk to write and assorted other stuff. I’ve switched from Nutella to Cadbury’s chocolate spread for my breakfast (due to someone else’s acquired nut allergy) and realised I don’t really care, just so long as the spread on my morning bagels/toast is very chocolatey. I also recently sent my old driving instructor an SMS (around the time that I finally bothered to check the DSA website – UPDATE: test now booked for June 21). Although certain “schools” of motoring won’t get you a test within a million years of your desired time, it is actually possible if you are prepared to use the DSA website at the last minute. I’ll get onto that, it’s silly that I’ve learned to drive but don’t yet have the paperwork.

Jon.

* But did they bother to point out how small that figure was? Nope. US TV really fascinates me. It’s generally so unbelievably crap that you wonder how any civilised nation could tollerate it. Finally, I realised that it’s so crap that the smart people don’t watch it any more or end up having to have PVR type equipment just to make it bareable. At least they get BBC World, sometimes.

Anyone interested in hiring an Embedded Linux engineer with practical experience in board bringup, kernel porting, device drivers, toolchains and related technologies? I’ve practical experience as outlined at about me and have recently worked extensively with Xilinx PowerPC platforms as well as some ecos development thereon. I am also the editor of Embedded and Kernel features at Linux User & Developer magazine, have served as an instructor for Redhat on their RHD248 (Embedded Linux Engineering) and have extensive community involvement. I have given presentations on various Embedded Linux technologies and am in negotiations with at least one publisher at present (I recently also contributed to the hardware hacking section of Linux Desktop Hacks).

I am presently employed in the UK but would consider moving to an appropriate environment and travel is certainly not a problem (in fact, relocation to North America would be especially of interest to me). Mail me, if you want to talk, or for further information (serious inquiries only please – no generic agency requests).

Jon.

I met some local political activists in Reading town center on my way to catch a train to work. There were three or four Tories and one Lib Dem handing out flyers. Since one of the former four decided to approach me with a piece of paper, I decided to take one from the Lib Dem instead – and then turned and told the Conversatives: “I hope you lose, I hope he wins, and I hope you have a bad day [of campaigning]“.

Who am I going to vote for? In an ideal world, I’d vote for something more radical – like the Green Party (but at this time, I don’t know enough about their policies and don’t want to deviate much more from the mainstream so as to add myself to the statistic of protest voters) – but this time around it’s likely to be the Liberals. I can’t in good conscience vote in Tony Blair, since he seems to support the George Bush school of politics – first a war in Iraq, then privacy invading legislation such as the current ID Cards bill before parliament (actually, they already introduced really evil privacy invading stuff long before that).

No, there’s virtually no risk of the Conservatives getting in to power in my local constituency and so I’ll send Tony my protest vote in disgust against a slew of bad policy decisions. Unfortunately, enough people buy the drivel fed to them by the other parties that my vote won’t count for anything, but maybe I’ll feel just a little bit better with myself for having had my say on Thursday.

That’s it. Now let’s think about issues that really matter. The election’s only a diversion from the current problems which need fixing. No matter who wins on Thursday, there are far too many legislatory idiots who feel a need to regulate every aspect of our lives – just you wait until the new session opens in the commons.

Jon.