[ from the very-quick-photo-link dept. ]
Photo: The Eiffel Tower visited at night.
I am in Paris following a weekend of varied sightseeing and a little contemplation with some working. Visiting LynuxWorks today and hoping to do some work before returning to the UK tonight.
Jon.
[ from the finally-it-gets-written dept. ]
Photos (from left to right): After-dinner Geocaching with the family in Prospect Park, An autumn walk along the South Bank (Thames, London), visiting friends in Nottingham, Redhat’s Michael Tiemann speaking at LinuxWorld Expo 2004.
In this issue…Laptop update, walking, travelling, LinuxWorld Expo 2004 and Wolves LUG, Geocaching, and more!
Once again, it’s been rather a while since the last update to this blog. Never mind, anyone suffering from withdrawl symptoms in the interim is strongly advised to consult a qualified physician about this issue. Soldiering on, I’ll attempt to give a rough and ready take on life at the moment and what I’m generally up to – as is the custom of blogging. Since I don’t seem to update this blog very often, I have toyed with the idea of running an announce mailing list for this site – in fact I’ll try it (subscribe here) and if anyone bothers to signup then I’ll announce blog updates there. Indeed, I’ve been doing some CGI development for an embedded box using only busybox and l33t sed scripting so I might indulge a little dynamicness on this site once again – perhaps even in sed, since it’s about as easy to use as perl, or something “nasty” like that 
.
Since I last updated this blog, Carl and Susie have got married, we had the clocks change back, and it’s true to say that Autumn has well and truly come along now. It won’t be too long before my 23rd birthday – December 10th. I’ll be in Nottingham for dfb’s Christmas dinner – the first under the Digital Document Engineering renaming mantra. The group formerly known as Electronic Publishing. It’s funny, those years spent at Nottingham seem like such a long time ago already, and I am certainly trying to keep in touch with as many people as possible, but it is already evident that this is going to be difficult going forward.
Laptop Update
My laptop was repaired on behalf of John Lewis (since I had made a warrenty claim within the 2nd year of ownership, under the additional John Lewis extended warrenty, as mentioned in my last entry) and returned in about a week; I happened to be walking passed the store and it had just come back in at the time that I picked it up. In any case, the repair covered the issues I had had with the unit – everything from the right hinge to the DVD/CDROM drive and the asthetic damage to the paintwork on the metal palmrest. The system now has new casing and even a new battery – which actually gets 4 hours runtime, although it gets hot when charging.
The repair technician did follow the advice on one of the ten notices I had printed (directions for how to handle the unit – I stuck one to the laptop screen, one inside the laptop, and handed one over – the others were stuck in and around the laptop case, which they didn’t need) which stated I did NOT want System Restore run on the unit (of course it also displayed this in block capitals in yaboot if booted that way – just to be sure). As with friends of mine, they even returned it booting in to yaboot (I had previously switched it to Mac OS X). Of course, I cleaned out personal data files before it went off (including my GPG key) and restored those after it was returned. I didn’t want the hassle of restoring bits of the OS just for the sake of making it a bit easier for Apple authorised folk to swap my unit for another or something (the MAC matches the one it went off with and we know they didn’t swap it anyway).
Walking and travelling around
I’ve been walking a little, but nowhere near enough, and hope that the newly purchased GPS will assist me in getting more outdoor exercise during the winter months. I did recently walk along the Thames in Oxford and get stuck in a boggy marshland, after being a bit overadventurous as a result of my forary in to wearing boots (they really do rock – I’m wearing boots quite regularly now – whenever pratical and/or appropriate) and taking a town bike offroad. I also recently walked along the Southbank again, as well as the canal from Selly Oak to Birmingham when visiting Hannah and Joe Wrigley.
I’m going to Paris next weekend, with a friend from work. I’ve not been abroad in a couple of months but have some plans for early in the new year which I hope do actually happen. In February, there are plenty of geek events to go to, including: FOSDEM, GeekSki, and LinuxWorld Boston too. I would also like to pop in to Ontario to visit the fine folks at the Ottawa Linux User Group when next on that side of the Atlantic (and perhaps as a recourse to spending too long in the U$ – I’m sure it’s a nice place to visit but…). It’s interesting how many immigration requests Canada is rumoured to have had following the re-election of George W. Bookend. He managed to piss off the Chinese within a few weeks and bomb half the countries he didn’t like last time, I wonder what he’ll do next? There’s always China but he hasn’t deeply offended the Russians yet and we’re probably overdue for another Cold War (his dad would be very proud).
Working, writing et al.
Work is ok enough (takeover completion finally happened so I now work part time for a pretty large Plc.) at the moment and I’ve recently been doing some writing with Jono Bacon for an upcoming issue of the magazine. I’m also running a regular feature on Kernel Hacking and have just finished the second installment, for the next issue. I’ve also been doing some work on RoboDuck, having visited Gee Dee models in Nottingham last weekend to buy a rudder servo and some bits. I also found out about a popular online and offline model supplier – Robbe, where I can buy a Z drive prop and rudder assembly for power drive function.
I have reasonably recently been to Wolverhampton to meet up with Jono, and also visited Open Advantage West Midlands as a technical member of the press, to attend the PayThyme pre-release Open Source preview session. I popped in to Milton Keynes a couple of weeks ago, to visit Nexcom UK, where I reviewed one of their Blade servers (see upcoming magazine issue). I have also visited the Monta guys in Bracknell again. I had a conference call with various folks at
Monta a couple of weeks ago, and a longish chat with Victor Yodaiken of FSM Labs, at around that time. Both calls concerned the new Real-time work going in to the 2.6 Linux kernel and their different takes on it, as well as the release of RTLinux Pro 2.1. I did a feature on the RT stuff and plan a code walkthrough at some point – the latest patches by Ingo Molnar of RedHat are pretty interesting indeed.
Coffee
I won a coffee hamper in Whittard as part of their Big Coffee morning charity event (I don’t recall who my local store were running the event in aid of now unfortunately). After I received a message on my voicemail to say I had won, it was some time before I listed to it, and even longer before I went to collect the sweet coffee goodness. However I did eventually get a hamper and 25 pounds worth of goods to go inside. This included a selection pack of 6 coffees, some cantuccini biscotti and an oversized mug with a text printed on the side reading “I’LL HAVE A DOUBLE DE-CAF NON-FAT LATTE MEDIUM FOAM DUSTED WITH THE FAINTEST WHISPER OF CINNAMON” (as one of the Monta folks likes to describe such drinks, it’s also perhaps known as a “why bother”). In other coffee news, Starbucks now have Ginerbread Latte’s again and I’ve switched to Caffe Nero as my preferred coffeehouse (whenever possible – despite the smoking, they’re seemingly less evil than Starbucks). I did buy a four pack of syrups from that certain American coffeehouse (including Gingerbread) and spent the best part of 30 quid in a Birmingham outlet during last Friday on wifi/coffee when finishing up an article, and am considering signing up to Surf and Sip for wireless (Caffe Nero wifi affiliate).
There’s a Wagamama opening in Reading soon, at the Oracle riverside, next to what might be an interesting new Italian place. I’m looking forward to popping in on a semi-regular basis for Japanese. I went looking for the Oracle microcache but haven’t managed to find it yet since it really is very well hidden (well it would be, given the busy area).
LinuxWorld Expo 2004 and Wolves LUG
October featured the LinuxWorld 2004 conference and Expo, at Kensington Olympia in West London. I went along to the show, mostly to meet up with friends and catch up with Jono and the
WolvesLUG folk. The magazine listed them as LUG of the month last month, and I enjoyed having a curry with the Wolverhampton folk, as well as meeting several of Joe’s workmates who are LUG members. The Expo was quite small this year and followed the trend of ever smaller and more reconciled events, filled with a few large players and a few smaller guys. The .org village was tucked away in the corner but I met up with a number of the people I had gone to see. Evidently every show must have its showgirls, and Novell had hired some girls who were not shy to extoll their skanty outfits (and at least one was wearing an obvious g string underneath). JD managed to get some phone numbers, I of course was beyond such tactics, electing instead to arrange something more official, but apparently they’re only in the business of providing software and services solutions. The SuSE/Novell people were quite fun in the pub afterwards too, though I think a certain person from Wolves regretted drunken activities a little on the next day. Twas fun, I saw David, Paul, Philippe, Justin, Alasdair, the usual gang.
Geocaching
I bought a GPS from a friend at work. It’s a Garmin 12XL 12 channel receiver which works reasonably well. Although this unit is not as small as the popular Etrex, it does have a few features which are missing from the cheaper models and the battery life is pretty good too. As usual, it never ceases to amaze me how new technology can be so fascinating for that initial period after purchase – I have pointless statistics on distances from home to most places I went soon after getting the GPS, and many other wonderful facts (like that work is 29.7 miles from my home). I’ve restrained myself from posting my current co-ordinates in an effort to avoid the ICBMs this evening.
Other stuff
Obviously other stuff happened. We had family fireworks a couple of weekend’s ago – Joe did them again, and did a good job (see photos). There were a few trick or treat visitors this year, who at least had taken some effort with face masks and costumes. I caught the end of the Forest Fields event in Nottingham last Friday night (literally arriving at the end by the time Jo and I had eaten), when I went to visit Robin and Beckie and jok. I found the Caffe Nero in Nottingham and confirmed that I can use Surf and Sip there too . Also I decided to follow another friend’s recommendation on music, having had several good purchases recently – from an Ultimate collection of the Kinks to Euphoric techno music. I’m going to buy a Hoobastank album this weekend. I did also finally buy some bootcut jeans and warm jumpers as part of my winter collection 2004.
Jon.
[ from the getting-photos-in-sync dept. ]
Photos (from left to right): Visiting Toby and Sara in Cambridge, Carl Ebrey’s Stag Party, visiting Hannah and Joe Wrigley in Birmingham, visiting a friend in Totnes.
I have taken a few photos which had not gotten uploaded yet, so I did that today while awaiting a sitdown family Sunday lunch. I’ll add something about these photos later on and also a link to the other new photos on my photo site – in the meantime look over there for stuff since 28/08/2004 when I visited Totnes for a day.
Jon.
[ from the have-you-updated-your... dept. ]
Photos (from left to right): Schin Op Geul (the view while crossing the tracks at the Railway Station), Leeds Canal, my iPod,
Visiting Cornwall.
It’s been too long since I last updated this blog, but then that’s life. When I last wrote, I had returned from visiting Ottawa, Canada for the 2004 Linux Symposium and had spent a few days in Cornwall (which I didn’t mention in the last entry). I have since been to the 2004 UKUUG Summer Linux Technical Conference in Leeds, the 2004 Linux Beer Hike, a few other events, joined yet more mailing lists, been writing on a variety of topics, and stuff in general. I’m trying more human things – not just computer stuff – so I bought some more sheet music for my violin, did some more non-computing reading and went to a nightclub for the first time in a number of years – that kind of stuff.
Canada Rules
I’m still thinking about the wonderful time I had during my visit to Ottawa in July and how much I would like to go again. Next July seems like an awfully long time to wait so I’m going over in the early new year. I want to go skating along the Rideau skateway – the Rideau Canal freezes over and becomes the longest skateway in the world – experience the temperatures (-20 degrees) and difference in winter climate, as well as simply to enjoy the people and places there once more. I know a guy who lives and is studying in the area and we are planning to hire a car and drive around Ontario for a week or so when not in Ottawa. I recently joined a few worldwide LUGs (in addition to the twenty or so that I’m on in this country), including oclug, and I am supposedly going to speak at their meeting when I’m over.
Would I move to Canada? I seriously like the place. Seriously. It’s crossed my mind on more than a few occasions. This is why I must go again more often to get a feel for living and working there – then maybe in the future I can seriously consider moving there – at least for a while. Not having visited the US, I also decided it was time I did that too. I want to see a country which has some of the most barbaric and inhuman conditions on earth, a place where 92% of people may never leave the country through not even having a passport, and most will never move within a few hours of their home town. A country where 80 million people are classed as illiterate, run by a monumental moron-in-chief, who couldn’t tell the difference between a good idea and a complete screwup if you branded him with it. I’m off to
New York with some friends within a couple of months – in time for the presidential elections. I want an enormous coffee from Central Perk (apparently a place with that name does actually exist).
Cornwall
My grandmother celebrated her 80th birthday in July. I returned from Ottawa on the day of her party and, after a brief stopoff for a shower at Paddington station, caught a train to Bodmin to join my family and certain parts of my extended family for a week in the Cornish countryside. We hired two barns which had been converted in to luxury holiday accommodation and are owned by a relative of mine. My grandmother was born 23 years before the Transistor was invented and has seen such change in her lifetime – wars, peace, changes in world order, the stuff of legend. Despite the rate at which modern technology adapts, it is unlikely that we will endure such a monumental change in human society as happened over the last 80 years.
Cornwall was really fun. I seldom go with my family when they visit our many relatives in the Cornish countryside and this was a good opportunity to play at guessing who people I met 10-20 years ago might actually be. Despite the extended family presence, it wasn’t overkill and it was both entertaining and relaxing also. I enjoyed running along clifftop paths with my cousins, two 80th birthday parties I attended (another relative was also celebrating at the same time as my gran), and cakes in small villages. While they might have ADSL in these parts today, it’s a far cry from the city life in Reading. I caught a train back to Reading midweek in order to check on some things in the office and see how Oliver (our cat) was managing with the care of a friend of the family. Upon rejoining my family, we enjoyed hillside readings of John Betcheman on a beech and had cornish pasties (well, I tasted one, since I don’t really eat beef – and haven’t ever since the beef scares of the mid 90s – these days I just don’t like the taste any more).
UKUUG Conference
I returned from Cornwall in time to fairly immediately travel up to Leeds for the UKUUG Conference. I was presenting a paper of the Business Case for Embedded Linux, and travelled to Leeds with my Belgian friend Philippe, and Paul, both of whom were also presenting papers. I had tried to organise an Embedded Track at the conference and I hope that is was a reasonably successful first attempt. Incidentally, I am fighting apathy to get another event organised soon.
The conference was really cool, mostly because of the people I meet at these things, and the kinds of extra-curricular activities that can happen. I enjoyed our evenings in the town, playing with Paul’s Brompton in the dark, drinking some Belgian beer with wja, rooftop partying, and seeing people that I have either worked with or otherwise been involved with. Leeds really is much more pleasant than one might first imagine – while it might have once been a rundown town suffering from the move to a more servies and technologically orientated modern society, the regeneration is quite apparent and the city really is most enjoyable indeed. The canal area has obviously undergone serious development over the past few years.
The Linux Beer Hike
The Linux Beer Wanderung (LBW) – or Linux beer hike – has been a regular event for the past four years. This was my first year in attendance and I could not be there for the whole week – but nonetheless it was fun. LBW took place in Schin Op Geul, in the southern Nertherlands, and featured a number of walks, trips and other events. I particularly enjoyed meeting Kimble, Sarah, and Dave, as well as seeing numerous people I have either met or encountered in one way or another, and regular Linux people. The beer was good and the accommodation was pretty cool too – with the caveat that some unsubtle geeks did have a bondage session with pink cat 5 cable in the female dormatory on the last evening.
I decided to go to LBW just over a week before it happened, so I had to rather quickly book a
Eurostar ticket to Schin Op Geul via Brussels and Maastricht (ticketed as to Amsterdam but it allows you to go to any station), and get things prepared. I had magazine deadlines and work commitments so I only went for the latter part of the week and arrived on the Thursday evening of an event that ran until Sunday. After some fun and games with finding the barn location, I plugged my laptop in to the network and geeked out for a while before deciding to do some regular human stuff too. During the course of the four days that I was at the LBW, I went for a few walks around the area, visited a few bars and restaurants with fellow LBWers (including an interesting gay bar) and even went toboganning.
On the Saturday I joined a group who were driving to Amsterdam for a day trip to visit the Van Gogh Museum, as well as the town itself. In addition to contrasting Manet and Monet (neither or which I find particularly gripping in their works – but then Van Gogh seldom painted faces and seemed to have a few interesting quirks) at the Van Gogh museum, I had a Bagal at Bagals and Beans (where a law student from Oxford served me – she’s been studying there for around 4 years and I pointed out the similarity with that establishment and G&Ds in Oxford itself), and a river and canal tour which was particularly interesting. Of all the day trips I have recently done I would rate this very highly indeed.
Meanwhile in the UK
Meanwhile in the UK, I have been reading various bits and pieces, I’ve signed up to a large number of additional Linux User Groups – partly out of interest and partly for a new column I’m working on – and I’ve been keeping myself busy by writing for several different publications. You’ll notice I am in the current issue of Linux Magazine in addition to my regular columns in Linux User & Developer, and if you look carefully enough you might notice more of my writing appearing elsewhere over the next few months. I decided to properly tracked the Linux Kernel Mailing List, Kernel Newbies, a bunch of websites on kernel development, and get in to making a public contribution in addition to the top secretish stuff I do at work. I have also started trying to regularly follow the happenings of Dave Jones and various other random Kernel hackers. I already have a subscription to LWN, which I find useful. This all fits in with getting a Gmail account for tracking high volumen mailing lists much more readily and easily in a way only Google
can do. Their threading support is pretty damn good as is the service generally – although it has been down a little (but it is beta), I have some invitations if someone wants an account.
I’ve been travelling around the UK a little too recently. A couple of weeks ago I visited Manchester, Liverpool, Manchester again, Birmingham and Nottingham in the space of a few days. During this time I was able to meet various people I had either not seen for a while or had arranged to see. I’ll need to make arrangements to see Sid because the last few times just haven’t happened and I feel bad about that – but it’s mostly just a result of trying to fit things around when we’re both available in the same place. It was good to see Nottingham as I had not been in months. I went to Carl’s stag party day event thingy thing – Quad Biking and Wagamama
with a pub stop in between and driving around with Hannah and Joe Wrigley. On the previous few days I had been to see Tom in Congleton and a guy from work who I’d agreed to help install ADSL in Liverpool. On the evening before the party, I had arrived in Birmingham a little later than planned (thanks to Virgin Trains et al and in part due to arrangements I had made), and so I missed meeting the guys from
Open Advantage and in any case had immediately had to find a shoe shop because the nice new slipon comfy shoes I had bought turned out to rub something awful at the back. Upon the conferance of positive encouragement from Hannah and Joe to my idea of boots, this is my first forary away from regular shoes. While they might make me look a bit like an arrogant American, they are pretty neat.
Toby went to the stag party too, which was really convienient as I hadn’t seen either him or Sara in ages and really wanted to. I’ve not seen
Robin or Beckie in a while either – but we’ll hopefully fix that fact soon. Toby and I caught a train to Cambridge after the party and I crashed over there with them before going on a walk in th park with some light provisions for our quasi-picnic lunch on a bench. Toby’s iTrip really is an improvement over the analog FM transmitter I was using for my iPod so I got a friend from work who just returned from the US to get me one while he was there – I’m quite sure it’s powerful enough to give people cancer but it works really well.
On the Sunday afternoon, after our picnic, I went in to Cambridge, walked across the green and in to town. I bought some stuff in Maplin (I had yet another conversation with the staff in a Maplin about how they are phasing out components and how much the staff also don’t like this particular move very much on the part of Maplin), visited a few bookshops and went punting along the river Cam. I discovered that Heffers are having a drive to turn themselves in to yet another crappy bookshop – the computing section is probably not the only section which was moved, shrunk, and now sells most popular mainstream stuff that I don’t go to Heffers to buy. Bah. I was also somewhat annoyed at an arrogant drunk who was on the tour punt I went on, and who not only ruined the experience but necessitated a call to the Cambridgeshire police force after he reacted to me asking him not to behave quite so disgracefully as he was (throwing water over people in the boat, others, causing a disturbance, while having a newborn baby with him and managing to be with an entire family of drunken people that should not be on a punt but were allowed anyway). Aside from these issues, Cambridge was quite entertaining. I discovered the summer fruit smoothies in Nero and met Dave Loew in Borders (the famous Celloist whom I met last year in Reading Smiths – this time his first words to me were “you’re Jon Masters” – which was somewhat amusing. He’s using an email I sent to him complimenting his music in publicity, which is why he recalled my name on that particular occasion). I bught his latest Safari In Classics 3 CD.
I went to a club recently. I’ve not done that in years but a friend suggested I might like to join her and some others and I decided to go. It wasn’t as bad an experience as I thought it might have been – I can’t dance and generally have been to the wrong kind of clubs in the past – and I think I’ll do this again when the opportunity arises. Mylo was DJing and I’ve since bought his CD in the Reading Fopp (it’s a very different CD from the live stuff and much more chillout, relaxing music in nature). The club was in East London (it’s called Plastic People and it’s near Shoreditch highstreet) and I saw Trevor and Frank on the way to it – haven’t seen Frank in years. I left the club before the others because I was feeling ill from a stomach bug that’s been going around which subsequently made me feel pain all weekend (and delayed this update by yet another week) but was not in time for the last train back to Reading. It took 40 minutes to find any staff at Paddington (managed by Network Rail – nobody in the shops had emergency contact details or would help (or both) – I later told the management that I must help prevent them getting a Safer Stations award as they clearly have appauling security and no ability to handle minor incidents of passangers feeling ill…doesn’t bode well for major incident handling. This is not the first time I’ve had to moan about this kind of thing at Paddington – I once had to complain about the security implications of large bins they kept around for catering while all the time removing general public wastebins.
I’ve been out in London a few times recently in fact. Mostly meeting a friend for dinner or for watching a film screening, or moonlit strolls along the Thames – I like doing that kind of stuff. This evening I went bowling with Hannah and Joe Wrigley, my younger sister, and mum. It was good to go bowling again as I have not been in several years, but unfortunate that the environment was encreadibly smokey and filled with the most disgracefully bad music at the loudest volume – next time we’ll have to avoid going there on a Friday night.
Random Travelling
I didn’t die flying to Canada. Or to several other places. So I’m going to do it more often. Over the next six months I hope to visit Slovenia, New York, Paris, Canada, Brussels, Tux, and a few more besides. Trains and flights are pretty cheap and while I am concerned about pointlessly burning jet fuel to go to these places – I’ve not done it heavily in the past and I’m sure at some point I’ll have family commitments and other reasons why it is less feasible to travel as much as I would like to right now. Perhaps it’s just pure escapism – I’ll ask Eliza for some comments.
Finishing comments
It has been too long since I updated this blog, there’s stuff I haven’t mentioned because it’s hard to get it all in one at this point, and I generally should write more stuff here. Once my laptop returns from being repaired by John Lewis (I’m having any issues resolved since the warrenty just expired) then I’ll upgrade the disk and fix a load of software updates on it – then hopefully I can sort out being more productive in writing and developing on to go. I’m reading “Understanding the Linux Virtual Memory Manager” and playing around with bits of code for the GBA after a friend sparked an interest. I’ve got a pet project which is beginning but I’ll mention more about that once I have something to show for it.
Jon.
[ from the turin-milan-rome-ottawa dept. ]
Photos (from left to right): The Ottawa Linux Symposium, A weekend in Rome, Teaching embedded engineering in sunny Turin, dfb’s summer BBQ.
This month has featured three trips overseas, an ipod acquisition, talk of ventures new and miscellany ranging from Geocacheing with Canadians to late night bar conversations with Americans in Rome. Regular readers have been waiting for this update for a while now but I’ve been busy – and let’s face it, this is mostly for my benefit and those of my resident stalkers anyway. Suffice it to say that three return flights later I am slightly more comfortable with the flying thing and I have decided Ottawa is one of the most civilised and enjoyable places one could visit on planet Earth.
I encountered a large amount of change at Linux User as well as elsewhere and realised that life is about living and doing new and interesting things. I must travel more often and experience the richness that is out there – I want to go to the States this year (visiting New York and Washington would be a good start but I would also like to see Boulder in Colorado and other more scenic American locales), Paris (having only ever been around it and to other parts of France), and other parts of Europe and Northern America. On the magazine front, I am now writing for several Linux magazines and am considering ways in which I can take writing further.
Meeting my foreign counterparts reminds me of just how much fun working with GNU and Linux really is and how much I want to continue to assist that cute little furry penguin in his attempt at global domination. Speaking of domination, I randomly met a dominatrix on a train recently – I bet none of you can claim that (whether you would admit to it or not is another matter). She has only one client and he pays her to kick him in his nads…but hey he did pay for her to visit the UK and that made for somewhat of an interesting conversation on the way home one night.
I have been listening to Katie Melua and The Corrs although I am starting to see the appeal in a variety of other music (my ipod has everything from System Of A Down and Slayer to Kylie Minogue and Handel on it). ipod Linux is now installed on the ipod but it will need re-installing when the replacement unit arrives. I quite like the ipod hardware however the casing on my unit is suffering from some alignment issues and this necessitates that it be swapped out soon. Whatever you do avoid any situation where iTunes is syncing music and you
either lose power or disconnect the ipod as it may well trash its internal metadata which the ipod cannot independently regenerate itself – so in plain English this means that you lose access to your music and have to either do another resync or reinstall the unit from scratch (I have done this tiwce as a result of incidents using iTunes). Apple should fix their software and add support to the next ipod firmware for scanning its internal disk so that one does not have to use their software to upload music (so that will never happen because they obviously want you to use iTunes).
I have not had much chance at violin practice and my Maths related reading has taken too much of a backseat in preference to the Embedded Systems material on esoteric Microcontroller architectures (Z80 and MC6800 mostly) and ARM. I have now got several different ARM systems and have been built various toolchains with varying levels of success. Finally had a second driving test and managed to fail – mostly on maneouvres once again. Perhaps I can get a short notice test in August and finally get a piece of paper which says I can drive so I can quit worrying about getting a parallel park right first time every time! I might then buy a car at some point later this year – I am quite fond of Hannah and Joe Wrigley’s Ford Ka, but also like the economical VW Polo and a number of others – I am not sure that one can really get a “green” friendly car but it is probably worth researching a little to find out which manufacturer is rated least evil.
Visiting Italia
A large GNU/Linux vendor asked if I might give an Embedded Engineering training course in sunny Turin. Who was I to refuse such a proposal – I figured it would be something worth doing. I travelled up to Birmingham to meet Hannah and Joe Wrigley on the 3rd July, went with them to dfb’s BBQ in Nottingham at lunchtime on the 4th July, and then flew out to Milano Linate on the last flight from Heathrow (for those reading in lands afare, this means 19:50 because certain Londoners dislike the noise of planes taking off and landing late at night). I flew with Alitalia on a small Airbus plane, having checked out the airline safety record and plane total cabin loss statistics prior to travel. The only serious problem involving this airline in recent times was an incident in which a wing was removed after landing by a truck striking a plane, although there were apparently no injuries. Statistics say I can fly for more than 36000 years without incident but that does not in general make me feel any better when I am on a plane.
When I arrived in Milan I took a coach service to a nearby railway station (I believe that it did go to the Central Station but it was late, I was quite tired, and do not speak much Italian), travelled in to the Central Station and waited for a train to Torino. After some time a service did depart for Turin and arrived in the early hours of the Monday morning. I spent several hours setting up equipment on the Monday morning before the training session actually began. For the rest of the week I showed a group of experienced Embedded Systems engineers how to produce their own ARM Linux toolchains and compile up kernels and userland environments. The whole experience was most interesting indeed.
I had some time to explore the Torino area on a few occasions towards the end of the week and discovered that Turin is a stunning corner of the north west of Italy. It is well situated near to the Alps and is to be the home of the 2006 Winter Olympic Games. While it is true that English speaking Italians are less common in the area, the regional government are providing free English lessons to those in the service industries (such as taxi drivers) prior to the 2006 Games. As can be seen from the photos taken, I enjoyed the nightlife around the city center and River Po on the Friday evening. I especially enjoyed the local Pizza and Ice Cream, for which Italy is famous.
A complication at the Hotel meant that I left late on the Saturday and missed the originally planned flight. Consequently it was necessary to book a short notice replacement however this did give some time to explore the Milano area briefly. I took a train to the Cathedral area and saw a number of designer shops as well as what might be the world’s most stylish McDonalds (see photo). Milan is certainly an area that I would like to visit again sometime for a long lunch and an afternoon coffee intermixed with shopping expeditions.
A weekend in Rome
I spent a week in the UK following my trip to Torino and got some work done before popping in to Rome for a long weekend with some work colleagues. Hetal, Mark, and I flew out on the 16th of July on an early morning Ryanair flight and were in Rome in time for lunch. We stayed at the excellent Camping Tiber campsite and spent four days exploring the local area and mixing with other residents on the evenings. I met a group of girls from Las Vegas and their friends on the first night and we stayed up late drinking at the bar.
Rome really is a fascinating place to visit. There is of course a wonderful amount of ancient culture to be discovered although parts of the city are clearly in need of some investment – such as the area around the River Tiber itself. We visited the Vatican, the Colosseum, and the Pantheon, as well as the Spanish Steps, a number of eateries, fountains, and many other places besides. The weekend was quite an experience and I enjoyed it very much.
Calling America
I have just come back to the UK from the 2004 Ottawa Linux Symposium. This was my first visit to North America and I found the Canadians most welcoming and friendly indeed. Ottawa is surely one of the most wonderful places on Earth – so amazingly clean for a major city and yet full of an inspired mix of anglo-franco-American culture which one could surely not hope to rivial anywhere else. The City itself is young in comparison with most other major international cities however it has a number of interesting sites to be taken in and the view of the Parliament and Canal by night is quite simply breathtaking. I especially enjoyed walking across the Alexandra Bridge in to Quebec and taking some photos of Ottawa from the bridge itself.
The Ottawa Linux Symposium was an absolutely enjoyable experience, with so many major faces to be seen and even the chance to meet Linus himself (which gave me chance to quiz him over the issue of kernel debuggers and other related stuff). I flew to Canada on Air Canada flight AC889 from London Heathrow which departed terminal 3 at 15:30 on Tuesday (I was in Rome until Monday evening and so planned to go home and pack quickly however missed the last train in the evening so had to spend several hours sleeping at Paddington railway station and travelled on an early morning train. I missed the first train because I was asleep but did get a shower and then got home in time to quickly pack and catch the RailAir coach service from Reading to Heathrow) and arrived in Ottawa in time for the first night pre-OLS party.
I stayed at the Les Suites hotel very near to the conference center itself, with agk and Ken. We had good pizza next door to the bar on that first evening. Perhaps the highlight of the early evening was talking to Alan and various others while he demonstrated a novel way of using his homemade drinking straw. Later on I went to another pub (an Irish themed pub) with the guys from Montavista as well as a bunch of other embedded types and had a few softdrinks and enough coffee to keep an army going for a while (I has pretty tired and I decided alcohol was really not a good idea at that point). These guys stayed out until the bar closed and we had to return to the Hotel. Since I was increadibly tired by around 03:00, I decided to go to bed after that.
Les Suites is an excellent Hotel and has wifi in parts so I was able to read my email in the mornings. On the first day, I went to the talks but took some time out around lunchtime to look around the city and became infatuated with its amazing asthetical quality. I encountered two cyclists with GPSes and inquired as to whether they were Geocacheing. Chris and Diane said that they were and invited me to join them in locating an ellusive cache which had been recently installed by a local Ottawa resident and Linux user (it’s a small world really huh?). I have a snail Travel Bug which needs to be registered and sent on his way around the world (I should do that).
On the first evening I missed out on an apparently dissappointing dinner event which had been sponsored by AMD after I returned to the Hotel for a few minutes and passed out from excessive tiredness. Still I am told I did not miss much and the upshot of this was that I was awake bright and early on the following morning in time to explore. In fact I got distracted (in a good way) during breakfast and left the Hotel later than I had originally planned. The talks were typicaly of high quality – I concentrated mostly on those happening in Room A because they tended to be kernel related. On the first day Jens Axboe gave a very interesting talk on Block IO, while Keith Packard spoke about the trials of making X less dependent upon specific hardware. The talk on dynamic kernel modules was pretty interesting and needs some followup.
The second day included a very interesting talk on scalability of Linux 2.6 (did you know there was a livelock problem in the scheduler due to the time taken in cache coherency overhead meaning that timer interrupts came around too fast to be handled?). There was some material on the Power5 which would be even more cool if IBM would send me one to review. Rusty Russell discussed the issues of adding (reasonably straightforward) and removing (a lot more involved) CPUs from a running Linux system and Dave Hansen followed this up by giving a similar coverage for memory devices aswell. The crashdump BOF sessions were enlightening, mostly because of the level of conversation which the group collectively created – I have already mentioned that I met Linus and talked to him about the issues of kernel debugging and I have made a few observations in this month’s column. I hope that we do get some traceing support added to the kernel soon at any rate. I had some good chinese at a private party on Thursday night.
Friday was pretty cool. There were interesting talks on IO scheduling performance (do not use AS with RAID5 on any sizeable system was one observation which was noted there) and Power-aware sensor systems (but this could have been much more interesting if it had delved in to the coding issues), and I enjoyed these as much as any other, but what made my day was having a banana split with someone I met during my stay in Ottawa. I was invited to a club called the Firestation and did turn up but could not find the people I was trying to meet so left early – but I did grab some food at the restaurant below called Mash – I do however certainly have a motivation to return to Ottawa when I am next in Canada I hope.
On Saturday I went to part of Alan Robertson’s High-Availability talks and one talk which was changed at the last minute, before attending the GPG keysigning session which was hosted by Matthew Wilcox. As can be seen from the GPG web of trust statistics I am well on my way to becomming part of the strong set. I had some food in a little cafe with the Montavista folks as well as Liberty, Russell King, and a host of others, before I had to leave to catch the 23:20 Air Canada return flight AC888 to London Heathrow. On the return flight I was pre-occupied with thoughts of when I could next visit Canada.
Heathrow terminal 3 was quite busy and we were delayed in leaving the aircraft, and in obtaining our baggage afterwards, so I was glad to get to Paddington on the Heathrow Express in time to have a 5 minute shower and catch a train to Cornwall in order to join my extended family and grandmother in celebrating her 80th birthday. I have been in Cornwall for the last week and hope to provide an update with some photos of the wonderful countryside which I was able to experience. I probably need to post a few more updates here to get things completely up to date but this will do for now.
Jon.
[ from the random-update dept. ]
Photos (from left to right): Critical Mass, The Oxford Thames Path, A Wolvercote Canal Walk, Evening cycling around London.
Time does anything but stand still. It would seem that another few weeks have passed and this blog has lagged again – not that it really matters in the grand scheme of things but I would like to keep it a bit more up to date since it provides a useful account of what is going on. I am attempting to motivate myself to get some much needed work done over the next few days of this week. I have various articles to finish and a trip to Turin planned starting on this coming Sunday (more on that later). Over the next few weeks I am planning to be away in various foreign locations and this means that I should get myself up to date with miscellaneous stuff.
On a recent trip to London I noticed the Paddington Band had been playing or were about to – probably worth listening to at some point. I seem to be listening to a weird variety of music at the moment – from Sixpence none the richer to Vanessa Mae (thanks in part to a sale which happened recently at Borders in Oxford) and even A-Ha (Stay on these roads and other albulms which I have around here – I should return the best of disk to a friend of mine sometime as I have borrowed it for far too long I suppose). I finally got that music from Foyles and will learn Bach’s Concerto for Two Harpsichords which has been arranged for Oboe, Violin and Piano (although the original arrangement was lost so the one we are to use – those of us playing – is only an approximation). My cousins showed me their flute and trumpet – I am quite fascinated by the flute as an instrument although it seems difficult for me to create the right resonance for the lower D – I could only play higher octaves.
I went punting with my family a few weeks ago. I drove to Oxford in my parent’s car (good practice for the next driving test on Wednesday) and Hannah and Joe Wrigley drove in their shiny new Ford KA. I quite like that particular model and would be seriously interested in getting one for myself at some point (aside from the evil American corporation thing that is going on a little there – I need to ascertain how bad they are) – I need to get that bit of paper before any of this can happen however. Punting was enjoyable and both Joe and I took it in turn to propell the others from the Cherwell Boathouse through the University Parks and back again.
I have recently been visiting G&D’s on regular occasions for Ice Cream and Bagel based nurishment. They have the most exquisite home made flavours which go very well with a Salmon and Cream Cheese Bagel – I suppose I am experiencing a Bagel fad, given my trips to the Brick Lane Bagel shop also. Brick Lane is a fascinating place that I need to visit more often – and on a somewhat unrelated note, I should read the book by the same name which is still sitting on my bookshelf beside Bill Bryson’s A Short History Of Nearly Everything (which I should also read at some point). After punting with my family on the occasion I have mentioned above, I frequented George and Davis’s for a light tea before actually being around for OxLUG.
I went punting with OxLUG too – although only Dom turned up. He told me that he was performing at the Sheldonian Theatre with the Oxford Bach Choir and I decided that it would be a most interesting way of spending a Saturday night. I enjoyed their concert very much and will look out for the next concert season which is due in December. After the concert finished, I met some friends in town and managed to miss the last train home – so stayed with a workmate and caught an afternoon train. I bought a new bike from Cycle King on the way in to London and went cycling with Trevor Parsons, Paul Sladen, and of course also Hussein Jodiyawalla. We cycled up to Primrose Hill and I once more saw the fantastic view to be had from there.
I have not been walking so much since the last bike was stolen and have become very conscious of that fact. I have recently been walking along the Thames Path in Oxford, along the Oxford Canal, cyling around Oxford City, and of course meeting people for nighttime cycle experiences in London. Wolvercote still appeals to me as a location and I have been there on several occasions quite recently – on one occasion I inquired about rooms for rent but am yet certain I want to commit to living in Oxford when I might hopefully be able to drive over the next few months.
I went along to my first Critical Mass on Friday and enjoyed meeting lots of other cyclists as we went around London. We had a police escort from policepeople on Smith and Wesson cycles (these things really rule) and they closed off bits of roads for us as we went around. Cycling amongst us were a number of fellow geeks who knew who I am. I am now keen to get a GPS unit because I can hook this up to an iPAQ or Zaurus to offer realtime tracking of the route we are cycling for Critical Mass. Essentially it is trivial to do this with a GPRS enabled mobile phone and a few scripts and this would simplify finding the group when en route.
I have been reading more about various Matrix Mathematics and also some of the various other books that I have mentioned. In addition, I have experimented with various FETs and done some general electronics. I hope that over time I can improve my capability there – and I am increasingly becomming interested in amateur radio as I learn about the true nature of the signals around us. Waves are fascinating things. Talking to my cousin about her flute on Saturday evening, I was able to explain various mathematically defined behaviours but this did not make a bit of difference to my inability to produce the sound that I wanted from it – still I potentially may buy a flute at some point for general interest.
On Sunday I shall be at a friend’s BBQ in Nottingham and then travel to London Heathrow for an evening flight to Milan. I have been asked to give an Embedded Engineering training course by a certain large vendor and am currently updating bits of the material for use on the course. When I travel back to the UK I shall not have long before a weekend trip to Rome with some work friends. The day after we arrive in London once more, I am travelling to Ottawa for the Ottawa Linux Symposium 2004. At the Linux Symposium I hope to meet many people I have encountered at events such as FOSDEM and have chance to discuss various topics, do GPG keysigning stuff, and absorb a large quantity of information from the many experts in various different fields who will be attending. After Ottawa I am travelling to Cornwall for a week with my extended family in celebration of my grandmother’s 80th birthday.
Photos (from left to right): Oxford, The Oxford Sheldonian Theatre, Punting along the Cherwell, Paddington Band.
[ from the wibble-wibble-blog-blog dept. ]
Photos (from left to right): Walking around Wolvercote fields, playing with Embedded Debian on an iPaQ and getting Debian running on the Gamecube, Dinner with Richard Stallman, tidying up various crud.
Once again it has been a few weeks since I posted an update to this blog (sorry Chris and others) and a few things are worthy of note. I have been to London a few times, cycled around various random bits of countryside (until that bike was eventually stolen) and I have taken a number of long walks too. On the books front I finished the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time within a couple of days and have recently bought Brick Lane written by Monica Ali. I want to do a lot more reading on all manner of topics. I have done a bit of hardware and software hacking too; When Tom visited I built an LIRC receiver board for him and I have now got an Embedded Debian box as well as a Gamecube which plays A-Ha – Take On Me (Superior Techno Remix) whilst running Debian. There are a few framebuffer issues left to resolve and I want to look at IDE hacks too.
Oxford has both the Thames flowing through it and a canal for good measure. I work out in Witney and have cycled to the office a couple of times so it was cool to discover that one can join the canal half way from Witney and cycle or walk in to Oxford on a very pleasant (Tom says I need a new word other than pleasant to descibe such experiences as these….hmmm) towpath. I enjoy walking along the Thames or the Oxford Canal and especially in and around the Wolvercote area of Oxford – famous for the Trout but I believe that I have taken some photos of fantastic countryside on my travels. It is not only Wolvercote that I have been to recently – we went on a family picnic to Sonning and had to reliquinsh our first picnic location to a bunch of swans who really felt they should be there instead.
A few weeks ago I went in to London to locate Richard Stallman (I missed his patents talk but have heard him talk about such issues elsewhere) with a vague plan of eating some Chinese. Paul Sladen and Trevor Parsons were there too as well as a guy from GLLUG called Nick and a games programmer whose name I do not have available. We had some Cantonese cuisine somewhere and I talked to RMS about a variety of topics – from open hardware and embedded systems to LinuxBIOS and even his penchant for reading about the history of the East and the books he had bought.
Afterwards Richard returned to his hotel and several of us talked outside opposite a giant Napster projected advertisement on a wall. Paul, Trevor, and I went for a moonlit cycle around London: from a view at the top of Primrose Hill to a Biegel (London spelling) on Brick Lane and even skipraiding – we did a few variable things on three different styles of bike in a procession (Paul on a Brompton, Trevor on his recumbant and myself on a mountain bike which has since been stolen). Having a Bagal on Brick Lane at 02:00 is certainly a cool experience – especially when you have been cycling around and it is a hot fresh Bagal with Smoked Salmon on it. We found some PS/2 promotional branded mice in the skip and an LCD panal as well as some miscellaneous stuff (such as a desk) which I do not know if Paul ever got back at a later point.
I stayed in Seven Sisters that evening, having cycled with Paul after we left Trevor in London. In the morning we went to Tottenham for a brief meet up with our friend Hussein. Afterwards we cycled in to London, visited Foyles (I ordered a copy of Bach’s Concerto for Oboe, Violin and Piano so that I can play the violin part with a friend from work who plays the Oboe and one of his friend’s who plays the piano in a trio), and got some bread, Humous, and Olives in a Sainsbury’s before cycling to Hyde Park for a picnic. We met a guy on one of those Segway-like wheelchairs which is self balancing on two wheels using 5 gyroscopes and 3 computers. Unfortunately it did take 7 years for FDA approval but that’s probably because this is a useful invention we are talking about and they likely have no real interest in being nice to people who invent cool accessibility devices for the disabled. Anyway I enjoyed this extended period of cycling around London, playing a friend’s violin and generally enjoying the outdoor experience as a whole.
Image: 14 Black Bags of rubbish resulting from a recent clean out.
I cleaned up stuff. Not just a little cleaning, but a big clean that is of course fully photo documented for no particular reason. Notice the excessive state I had let the room get in to as well as the temporarily nice shiny look I have achieved on it for the moment (I hope it lasts but I also know that these things tend to like to make themselves messy almost without any real help). I throw out some stuff (I decided to keep some of my old academic computing work for posterity, as well as a complete copy of Slackware 96. The 5.25″ Windows 95 floppy disks that I happened to have on a shelf were probably a little obsolete by now) sometimes dating back to 1996-2000 because it is probably not so useful by now and I also removed a couple of old machines to the loft so that I now have no 10base-2 networking left at home. What is the world coming to? Anyway the process of cleaning allowed me to locate several items of interest – including a radio clock which sets itself to the rugby time signal and a talking clock which annoys Joe enough to remove its batteries.
I bought myself an adequate Cambridge Audio A1 Amplifier and some Eltax speakers from Richer Sounds. The total came to around 150 pounds and I enjoy the reasonable frequency response in output. While I was recently in a Borders store in Oxford I noticed that they had a half of half price sale and bought some more music. I have now relegated the shitty pop music to the back of a cupboard and am trying to listen to more interesting material. Currently I am enjoying an albulm of Vanessa Mae’s various works and last night bought an old album by Sixpence None The Richer for background music. I have been playing my violin a bit more and reading a book on the mechanics of the instrument. Bowed string motion is actually more complex that your average physicist would wrongly infer and have you believe.
I called Vodaphone recently and said that I wanted them to give me another six months of half price line rental and a new phone in exchange for roping me in to a new contract. Requring a quick confirmation from their supervisor person, the chap at the call center agreed to this and a shiny new 6230 turned up a few days later. I can now listen to MP3 and AAC audio files from my mobile phone if I really want to and at a cost of 10 pounds for the handest. I bet they still made money on that. It has a ring tone too – it goes something like “ring ring, ring ring” – like all phones should. This is coming from someone who once thought having the Free Software song as a ringtone was cool (it isn’t and don’t even go there please).
Image: Homebrew Linux Infra-Red Receiver made for Tom Hawley.
Tom came to visit me in Reading over this past weekend. We went in to town and saw The Day After Tomorrow, having been to the Zizzi in Reading for a quick pizza that actually turned in to more than an hour and necessitated moving the tickets to another time once we arrived at the cinema itself. To the credit of Vue (formally Warner Village cinemas) the chap there did allow us to move our tickets by an hour once we had missed the screening. Actually Zizzi annoyed me recently when I was in Birmingham because they refused to allow three of us (myself and Hannah and Joe Wrigley) to have only tea and coffee without ordering food, despite having free tables. Not good for overall customer relations.
Tom and I built another LIRC receiver unit for him to take home for his jukebox and I got my LCD module up and running again for demonstration. I recently also wrote a simple 2.6. driver for the ITE8212 PCI IDE controller as part of an article and have been reading a lot about the block layer stuff in 2.4. and 2.6. kernels. I also signed up to LWN with a paid subscription because Jonathan Corbet and co. are pretty damn cool.
I mailed in a kernel hacking article on Monday morning and then went to Oxford with Tom for a day trip thing. We went punting along the Cherwell from the boathouse and through the University Parks. A very enjoyable experience which went well with the G&D’s white chocolate homemade icecream which we had beforehand. Afterwards we had dinner at the Trout.
I have some plans to go to Cambridge over the next few weeks and am due for a trip to visit Nottingham also. I am at the moment assessing the options with regards to attending the Ottawa Linux Symposium 2004.
Photos (from left to right): Punting along the Cherwell to the Victoria Arms, A family picnic trip to Sonning, Cycling around London with Paul Sladen, Cycling along the Oxford Canal from beyond Wolvercote in to Oxford.