jcm's blog

Ok, I’ll go with “psyched”, since it’s what several emailers seem to concur over. It’s not that I disagreed per se, but more that when I specifically looked for a definition of “psyched”, I couldn’t actually see something valid. I’m worrying too much about this, only because I find it bizzarely fascinating. It’s part of my compulsive personality to care about this too much – as one of the engineers I work with pointed out (he’s also very obsessive), it suits certain people.

Anyway, I’m still up finishing bits off. Had a few late night calls, considered calling someone over in the States, but I can do that another time. I’m annoyed I didn’t try harder to work out a cunning way to make it to Portland, but the reality is that I need to keep a few days of holiday this year in the case that I do manage to go to my friend’s wedding over in India. It’s for this reason that I probably won’t be in Nevada for DEFCON this time around (annoying also). Anyone want to offer me a job in Ontario/California today?

Eric, Matt: Thanks for the emails. I’m going to arrange to be in Anaheim next time I’m in LA (not for a few months but who knows what I’ll do after the summer). I’ve mentioned your LUG Radio interest to various people, since I find it really cool that that show is reaching a worldwide audience.

Jon.

P.S. Listening to Enigma currently, it’s pretty cool stuff. I also seem to be around 13.5 stone again – that’s 189 pounds (originally, I made a typo here, due to multiplying by the wrong factor. Bah.) for those who aren’t British. Although the UK is slowly becoming metric in many ways, we still have “pints” and often refer to body weight in stones (where one stone is 14 pounds, but in North America they don’t use stones AFAIK). We also use gallons or litres for petrol (gas) but a British gallon is more than a US one. Anyway, I’m potentially still losing some weight even despite my regular meals.

Ok. So today is the day to get copy finished up for Richard, finally. Yes. I will get that done today. Must. I can also increase my level of motivation through load music and coffee consumption (my music now being more organised on my ipod, which I finally hooked up to a shiny newish regular old PCI Firewire card that I have had kicking around the place for a while). Seems I’m using almost 30/40GB at the moment, but not all of that is music.

Is it “psyched”, “psyced” or “psyked”?

UPDATE: General preference is for “psyched”. Original quandary is below.

So, after the last blog entry, I got an email which asked whether I meant to write “psyched” instead of “psyced”. I’m not sure. I had hoped this wouldn’t come up Having looked online for a few minutes before writing the aforementioned word, I came to the conclusion that the only online slang reference I could find favoured the use of “psyced” or “psyked” rather than the other spelling. Which should it be? Someone with a degree in slang, please do tell me, and I’ll “correct” it in the previous posting (alternatively, a link to a dictionary definition will do).

Photo: Geocaching in search of GCME6C, but finding only this rather empty looking tree stump.

Hussein was here in Reading yesterday, after staying over on the previous night. We had been out to see the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy on Saturday evening. That’s a pretty cool film, though since I’ve not read the book, I can’t really pass more comment than “it seemed reasonably ok”. Hussein and I went Geocaching yesterday, looking for a cache near to my house. Looks like someone managed to get there first and trash it (or the co-ordinates we had were somehow completely wrong, and the obvious cache spot with bits of wood covering an empty hole wasn’t in fact the only remnants of a missing ammo box). Annoyingly, it would seem we have lots of flat bike tires here too.

Anyway, I just got a reply from sven about sailing on the bay. Since he’s up for it, I’m going to book yet another flight to San Francisco (this time from Vancouver), so that we can spend a day doing something I’ve wanted to do for some time. Yay! Yes, it’s a little excessive to go to the US for just a day – but then – if you don’t do these things when you get the chance, you never will.

The only flipside of my summer trip to OLS is that I won’t be able to make Hannah and Joe’s PnP on the 23rd of July (the last day of OLS) – had I known the date was going to change, then I would have said that I was over at the conference, but meh. They can now at least invite others who couldn’t come before, so it’s “swings and roundabouts” in the sense that more people might make it on the new date.

Would someone please find whichever Debian Developer (DD) decided to hide wherever gdm is forced to start an X server with “-nolisten tcp” and put me in touch with them? I’ve changed my gdm.conf and gdm-factory settings to allow tcp connections, but still it’s starting an X server with paranoid parameters. Yes, that’s real nice (thanks guys), but sometimes – in the real world – we have certain programmable logic vendors who don’t seem to know that, in the civilised world, we fallback to connecting to a local UNIX domain socket instead. Do they do this kind of thing intentionally? Perhaps I should add a copy of this book to my Christmas list for this year.

Jon.

Photo: VIA Rail’s “The Canadian” trans-Canada railway service currently operating between Vancouver, B.C. and Toronto, Ontario. Image is Crown Copyright (C) Government of Canada. This is fair non-commercial use under copyright law (image taken from Wikipedia).

I did something naughty this week. I booked a train. Across Canada. We (myself and dsaxena, and anyone else we rope in to joining us en route to OLS) are leaving Vancouver on July 15, and arriving in Ottawa on July 19, which is just in time for the end of the kernel summit and start of the main OLS conference. I’m totally psyched. I’ve booked my ticket for the conference too, and now need to follow up on arjan’s link to atp to get that cheaper air fare from Amsterdam->Vancouver and Ottawa->Amsterdam. This means I end up taking a pointless flight to Amsterdam in order to get a flight back again and connect to my transatlantic flight – but it’s 200 pounds cheaper this way. [ UPDATED: I've now booked the flights, departing LHR July 12th for Amsterdam, arriving Vancouver, B.C. July 13th. Cool. ]

I feel a little guilty about wasted jet fuel but I’m not a millionaire and “the flight was going there anyway”…the routing then becomes: London -> Amsterdam -> London -> Vancouver and Ottawa -> Montreal (or maybe even Toronto) -> Amsterdam -> London. I’ll need to book an el cheap easyryan (sounds like a gay porno star) flight to Amsterdam (probably not best to discuss gay porn in this sentence, but meh) for the night before I fly out. Next thing to do is figure out if there’s any way to: a). fly to Portland and/or San Francisco (I’ve got a date with a yacht on the bay at some point), b). take a train to New York and/or NJ if I’m not doing post-OLS stuff all week during the following week. Definately need to get in some cycling along the canal and am considering canoeing too (which I mention as a reminder that I should book for any course I want to do while I’m over there as places are limited).

Photo: Flying above the clouds in an Airbus A319. No, that’s not water below.

I’ve flown 8 times this month, which is my new record. Perhaps it’s also a sign that I’m slightly less bothered by the experience – although I still have many paranoias associated with flying. I guess it’s also related to the “fun factor”, in that going places to do interesting stuff is more enjoyable than just getting a bus from one city to another. Then there are the people you meet – “single serving friends” (Tyler Durden, Fight Club) – from the guy sitting next to me out to LAX, who’s moved from IT to wanting to study sustainable development, to the guy on the return flight, who is visiting from Australasia and has a mission to track down the family of a famous Australasian fighter pilot (I can’t recall if he is from NZ or AU so I’ll cop out and go with Australasian so as not be any more offensive than the idea of confusing the two in the first place).

Where was I? Hmmm, so, anyway, back on some kind of topic. I met a very nice girl on the Railair coach from Reading station at 05:00 on Thursday morning. She’s studying for a PhD in Physics at Reading University – but not wanting to be an annoying male type, I didn’t ask the obvious question. Meh. The question is, do I continue to follow my principle of not trying to ask out every female geek the first chance I get (because, frankly, it must be very frustrating to be thought of as a geek sex object rather than a scientist) or do I admit that on some level we’re all human and I should probably do more about being single. I wonder what stargirl and Val Henson would have us geek guys actually do in such situations. Well? What say you?

I was just in Brussels again, for two days, visiting some folks in Leuven. We (mostly myself and Carlos) did a bit of ecos development in to the wee hours in their funky offices and I crashed out on a matress in one of the offices when the lack of sleep finally caught up with me. Figured out a few things about the particular port we’ve been looking at, and am getting more familiar with the isms present in the latest Xilinx tools. Speaking of which, I’ve borrowed an ml300 to do some development work – and to use at OxLUG next weekend. I should probably start writing my slides over the weekend, but I’ve also got a proposal to put together (that should really have been done by now) and a number of articles to churn off to Richard. Meh. That’s life.

If I actually get chance (or even the motivation) to do some hardware development with this board, I’d be sorely tempted to buy an ML403 on the grounds that it’s cheap (compared to the ML300) and can run both Linux on PowerPC and Linux on Microblaze with custom SoC designs built in Platform Studio (EDK – dudes, just call it EDK, that’s what everyone else does). As it is now, I need to fix up differences in HAL revisions and try to come up with a generic set of procedures for handling this next time they bump “compatible” releases. I’m getting to grips with ecos, figured out some changes to the default templates for building applications and have been reading the Bruce Peren’s series ecos book (Embedded Software development with ecos – download it over here) – which I finally started reading properly once I got it in paperback form while in London with Richard H. a week or so ago.

It’s looking like I might use one of those free vmware licenses the folks at vmware gave me in order to run some of these Windows-only tools. I feel slightly evil about actually doing that, but it might let me catch up on some of the .NET stuff too, so it could be reasonably educational. I’ve been domainified at one of my day-jobs so am now having to use a nasty Windows domain from at least one PC – I’ve found a way around having to actually contemplate using Microsoft Exchange by having my mail forwarded to an account sitting on a more friendly mail system that’s actually usable.

Photo: Linux Desktop Hacks – look for yours truly in the credits.

Finally found out what that DHL package which kept not being delivered when we were in actually was. It was my copies of Linux Desktop Hacks which had been shipped over from the US. I quite enjoy the form Jono and Nicholas went with in the end, and so far have found only a single typo in an hour or so of reading (a simple replacement of Hz with MHz – I don’t think you’ll find any monitor with refresh rates in the millions, not even in research labs, but meh. ). I am, of course, bound to have a slight bias towards liking this book as Jono asked me to shove a couple of hacks his way – check out the Bluetooth Hack (number 92) in which I inform readers how to setup Bluetooth dialup connections using a single desktop icon.

Photo: University Parks, Oxford (Comlab in the distance).

I’ve been walking again (well, it’s springtime in the UK, and you know I’m a sucker for parks and canal walks) but need to get out and do some serious cycling and more outdoor exercise. I should actually go climbing properly sometime with my friend Ian from work – indeed, I could also go with twh or one of my other friends too.

That’s about it for the moment. There’s other stuff I should of course mention – like Hannah’s overall stress levels being a little high right now – but having read her blog I can at least see she’s feeling a bit better. Oh, I had supper with Philippe in Zaventem last night – Greek Kebab style. It was good to see him, if even only very briefly. Anyway, that’s all for the moment.

Jon.

P.S. Still not eating meat.

Photo: Prospect Park History 2 – Mansion House geocache.

Since I had had Merlin the Wanderer and geoPirat Night Shift III for a bit too long, guilt finally lead me to some evening geocaching. I picked up J P II Home and will try not to hold on to him for so long. The main impetus for retaining Merlin for so long (in particular) was that I hoped to be able to take him to Windsor Castle or somewhere similar, but that didn’t happen, so I figured he had best go on his way at last.

Jon.

Photo: Cycling the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco.

I just got back from a week in the States. Well, ok, technically I got back last Sunday – but I’ve been busy. This was my first visit to the West Coast of the continental United States…and I enjoyed it. I may not be the best fan of the US Administration (George Bush and his intellectual underclass, who rule the country using FUD techniques Microsoft would be proud of) but I did enjoy meeting the folks that I did. I especially also enjoyed taking a day out to have lunch with some Linux folks in San Francisco. I did some cycling across the Golden Gate Bridge and surrounding places alongside the beach, and even bought a silly t-shirt to remind me that I did that. I also rode some cable cars on the Powell and Hyde route, and saw a ballet at the Opera house (though, they did have to reseat me three times before I had a reasonably unobstructed view – standing would have been better by that point). The San Francisco Tourist Information Center probably need a written reminder that the world doesn’t have to revolve around cars (I should write that, I should).

Photo: Mann’s Chinese Theater, a whistlestop tour of Los Angeles, mostly by taxi cab (complete with suitcases and other stuff, since Virgin Atlantic telephone staff seemed to be confused over the potential for early check-in).

Our green and pleasant land

Landing back in the UK after a 10 hour 28 minute flight, you might have thought I would have been worse for sleep, but this time I did succeed in using the ear plugs and eye mask to get 6 hours of much necessary kip. As I slept, I became more in sync with UK time and was reasonably ok by the time I got back to Reading. Although I wasn’t in the office the next day (for various family reasons), I think I could have managed it reasonably successfully. As it was, I was in the office until Thursday and spent much of Friday finishing my catching up with missed sleep.

In other news, I recently met Michael Robertson of Linspire fame, Richard H., and even Roger Whittaker (formerly of SuSE, now of SCC Computers and Jack Richards of GNU Solutions). I grilled Michael about some of the missing features in Linspire’s product, and offered to give some suggestions – which they’re apparently willing to entertain. So I’ll be suggesting they get HAL and DBUS integration done right, in combination with Dell’s DKMS and other technology – when users insert a removable device on a Linux desktop, they should get the regular “I found a new device, Dave” ballooon in their taskbar. It’s possible, it should be happening. Had lunch with some of these folks, Paul was there also (although I gather he’s probably now in Australia still – need to followup on what he’s up to at the moment in terms of logistics). Meanwhile, I’m waiting for a friend to get back to me about taking a train from Vancouver->Ottawa for the 2005 OLS. I think that would be neat.

I’ve been roughly meat free for 4 weeks now. Although I’ve not overtly eaten meat, I’m not going crazy to avoid things that might have been contaminated. I learned earlier on Saturday that Scotch Eggs have pork in them (makes sense when you think about the taste some) – so I’ve stopped eating those too for at least the moment. I’m feeling better for not eating meat and feel as if I have a little more energy quanta to go around. I still need to address my vitamin intake and sort out exercise, book another driving test, do that kind of thing. But I’m trying to get myself somehow out of the apathy I had been in for a while there. I’m in Brussels again this coming week and am planning some other stuff which might get mentioned here sometime.

Photo: New prescription glasses for slight long-sightedness.

I picked up my glasses. I’m not totally convinced that the prescription is perfect, but they do seem to be helping me when using the computer (read: I’m not getting so instantly tired so far, but it’s early days as I literally only just got them on Saturday). The test will be when it comes to reading some of the material I’ve been putting off reading due to the eye strain I’ve had. Spent most of Saturday afternoon in hospital looking after a friend, but otherwise had a fun day with Hannah and Joe, his family, my family, et al. I hope they made it back to Birmingham eventually – to their house even. Scary. I’m still working on that front, but suffice it to say I’m not ignoring the whole grand life plan stuff entirely.

Jon.

Photos (from left to right): Deepak’s potluck, Portland, Oregon, Midnight Madness Cycle ride, walking along the Thames in Oxford.

Welcome to Dell, in association with the United States and Logitech.

I flew from London Heathrow (LHR) to Los Angeles (LAX) on Thursday lunchtime and arrived in time for the afternoon. Virgin Atlantic have a reasonable service and I was very impressed with the in-flight packs and entertainment options – I’d fly with them again on another trip. I sat next to a guy from Ireland who used to be in IT but is now planning to persue sustainable development after studying at either a US or UK college/University. Sounds interesting. Upon my arrival in LA, I was greeted by the Dell immigration officials – I’d say “US” but the first obvious markings at eye level are the Dell TFTs and (presumably) Logitech webcams from their silly anti-witch fingerprinting and automated privacy violation system. Rather familiar, from my previous trip to the US back in February, I fear Dell did a deal with the immigration folks to sell this pointless system’s much unneeded hardware, and are getting such advertising as a result. The food and agriculture folks also did an excellent job – with the aid of a sniffer dog (who also greeted us as we arrived straight from a ten hour flight across the Atlantic) – confiscating three apples from fellow travellers. We really wouldn’t want them consuming all that vitamin C.

So, having been immediately pissed off by a badly considered welcome lobby (staffed with very nice people though) which sends all the wrong messages (or perhaps the right ones if you’re not a citizen and are already not a fan of their government) about the US, I headed out to catch my second flight of the day – to Portland, OR.

Democracy is alive and well in Portland

Having just written the above, you’re probably expecting me to say similar things about Portland. However, Portland is magical and different – a blue town amongst many other Oregon towns which apparently are not – and it would seem to be an excellent place to live. Not only does Portland have a good number of hybrid cars (and realtively few SUVs), environmentally friendly programmes and cycle paths around the city, but it is also a very friendly town indeed. I arrived at the “International Airport” (it has very few international flights and you almost always end up getting connections) and took a TriMet metro/tram-like service to downtown. At PGE park, I disembarked and headed in to the “Alphabet District” (streets named in asscending alphabetical order) to find my friend Deepak’s appartment building. Incidentally, I don’t think I’d appreciated how useful the US number/street intersection addressing system is – although I’m very much not in favour of rigidly unpleasant blocky shapes, when it’s done right then it’s pretty cool.

Deepak and I exchanged greetings, I said hi to his two cats (hello India and Roosevelt), and then we immediately headed out for some late night drinking around the town. It was gone 22:00 when we started, and probably after 02:00 when we finally got back to his place – but, as per usual, the first night wasn’t the point where the jetlag caught up with me. The next morning, we went to a local pattiserie and boulangerie and had some breakfast (the proprietor had apparently studied in France before setting up the shop – and it’s pretty damn good too), then headed out on bikes for some cycling around the city with Matt Philips. We had lunch on the University campus in a (I think) student run coffee shop which sells only locally grown fresh produce. We had some excellent Veggie food and fantastic local juices from a farm at the nearby Columbia Gorge.

We found Powell’s bookstore and had coffee, before heading back to Deepak’s place. Portland is one town with a car hire concept called Flexcar – a hire-on-demand car hire system which aims to handle occasional demand for cars. They have car parking locations around the city, where one can simply pick up a car and drive it away. We decided to try it out and – after hiring a car for a couple of hours – Matt drove us to CompUSA in a Honda hybrid. I bought another iPod mic device, this time called “VoiceNote”, as it came with an external mic also and looks reasonable (the last mic was an iTalk). I hope that it will not get lost quite so quickly this time around. Matt wanted to buy a printer to work on a sustainable development DVD label for a forthcoming event event he’s involved with. Overall, I think CompUSA probably rates similarly to the UK PC World, although it’s a little bigger and just slightly more obnoxious initially – but then, I hardly ever to go PC World, so it might be just as bad by this point. Somwhere along the line, we probably swung by Deepak’s local coffee shop, just around the corner from his appartment since it’s a hive of local friendships.

We had some excellent dinner in the evening, especially the steamed bread, and I enjoyed a mild curry dish with some strong chilli. We returned to Deepak’s place for a few hours, before heading out for the Midnight Mystery Cycle Ride across town. Meeting at the pub starting point, and finishing less than a block away, we cycled around for a bit and then hung around for a few hours, chatting away. One of the folks at the ride works for WindRiver and had a birthday, so we enjoyed some of his “0×20th” cake, printed with a cycle on it. That icing was fantastic. I left with Matt and Joy (who was just a little incapacitated) in the early hours, but some stayed out even later. Apparently, the cops finally showed up just as the group was naturally dispersing and the evening ended without incident.

The next morning, Deepak and I went cycling around the downtown area, along the waterfront itself (nice view) and picked up some stuff for a potluck which was spontaneously organised for the evening. We had some more excellent local beer at a brew pub and some coffee in a “coffee people” coffeehouse (possibly slightly less evil than Starbucks). I don’t usually drink so much beer, but Portland is famous for its variety of good microbrews and brewpubs (the name can only be used if you brew onsite) – and I’ve got some excellent IPA here to take with me, or just drink before I get back home. After some lunch in another pub, we went to a local supermarket called “Trader Joes” to buy some organically grown groceries and other bits (this kind of chain store is impressive to see). These were used to make bits of our evening Potluck with some of Deepak’s friends each bringing random food along for us to enjoy eating. We enjoyed eating it in large quantities too.

Jon.

Expecting a topical RFC to be published today…I wonder what it’ll be this year.

Photos (from left to right): Afternoon tea with mum in Goring, three of my favourite people in the world, spring-like weather in London, an anti-Bush event poster in Oxford.

Well, I’ve not updated this blog in a couple of weeks, so here goes a random list:

* Started getting up at 07:00 each morning, thanks to multiple alarms.
* I’ve gone a week without meat now and feel better for it (read: less tired, lost a little weight).
* Started work on “ktop”, a kernel task browser in python (powered by pygtk, glade and simple_glade_app.py to pull in the bits from the glade XML project file). It’s covered in the forthcoming issue of the magazine – so far it’s a graphical front end to gdb magic on /proc/kcore, and as such is a little too slow for general use, but I’ll clean it up and release it properly as a kernel object browser for the curious. It should let people see what’s really going on inside.
* I wrote a couple of hacks for the forthcoming Linux Desktop Hacks. It should be out soon now and I should get some copies. You know you want to buy it.
* I officially need glasses for doing close-up work.

Screenshot: ktop – a kernel task browser

Those who know me (and you probably do somehow, since you’re reading this) know that I can be a wonderful procrastinator in certain situations – especially medical ones. I spent several months in hospital once, and haven’t liked doctors ever since. Ever wonder why I’m so paranoid and scared of blood tests? Try having one or two every day for a while (and eventually in your hand when they run out of places on your arm to jab you with sharp needles). That might be enough to convince you only to go to the doctor when it’s really really necessary…and to avoid talking to medical relatives about whatever medical problems one might have. For the curious, I had a rare blood disorder (very low platelet counts in my blood, triggered by some weird reaction to a virus or other somethingness) which meant that if you so much as hit my arm I’d bruise like crazy and perhaps even bleed – so any falling over on a hard hospital floor would have been not such a great thing.

So, now I’ve put you in a sympathetic mood, maybe it’ll come as no surprise that I’ve been putting off addressing a growing problem with my vision over the last couple of years. I’m finding it increasingly difficult to focus on nearby objects and my eyes are getting tired quite regularly. Finally, I went to Boots and had an eye test last week (picture me in paranoia mode, convinced they’re going to tell me I’ve got glaucoma and every conceivable issue under the sun is wrong with my eyes). Apparently my eyes are medically healthy, but the reason I have trouble working on the computer or sometimes reading music is that I’ve become slightly long-sighted. Hopefully, the glasses which will be arriving soon will facilitate me being much more productive again.

Oh, I’ve stopped eating meat for the time being and cut down on caffeine intake too. Wow! I figured the nasty stuff in the meat was bad for me, and having just watched one too many documentaries on smart pigs and animal treatment, decided I can’t in good conscience continue to regularly consume large quantities of meat. That’s not to say this will last forever – I like the taste of meat and I might not manage to keep this up. But I will try. There are some limits: I’m not going to go 100% crazy (my sister is much more strong willed in this department – Hannah won’t eat somewhere if there’s a risk of contaminated food, more power to her) and if meat is the only viable option then I’ll just have to lump it. I’m also still eating fish for the moment. Time will tell how fadish this is and whether I can keep it up.

I’m in the US next week, for various bits and pieces, and will be visiting friends in Portland and San Francisco. I’ve got a BDI2000 here at the moment and a funky board that’s not yet properly booting ecos, but hopefully will soon. Had to get some US->UK adapters for bits. Built various control stuff for the roboduck project (hopefully more news soon) and hope to have a couple of pretty interesting items of news in the due course of time. I’m speaking at OxLUG next month, and have been invited to give a lightening talk at this summer’s LUGRadio Live. Tonight, I’m meeting some friends in London – call me if you’re about and we didn’t talk.

Jon.