jcm's blog

[ from the have-you-updated-your... dept. ]

Photos (from left to right): James Brindley (Gas Street Basin on the canal in Birmingham), Nottingham Canal, Brindley Place (near to The Mailbox in Birmingham), Birmingham Canal.

It has again been a while since I last updated this online blog of mine. However I do have some things to note – chiefly involving a newfound interest in exercise and doing real world stuff outdoors on occasion. I have taken up cycling again and have been on a number of long walks. On the technology front, I went to the recent BCS Lovelace lecture from Adobe co-founder John Warnock (dfb and gang were there obviously, and I met John Oates from The Register and the guys from TopQuark (yes as in particles, we did actually spend a while discussing the different types…) – John Warnock discussed the original Postscript Hinting techniques for the first time officially and had great slides). I have also been doing quite a bit of reading of late – both on physics (waves, resonance, et al.) and mathematics (exponential forms of complex numbers and similar related stuff), and also recently some fiction too. I am half way through reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (very interesting so far).

I have been to visit Hannah and Joe Wrigley on a few occasions of late – once for a trip, once accompanying a younger relative visiting, and once to help out with some stuff. On two occasions I ended up visiting Coventry also – I have various rather bias reasons for enjoying visiting, but also find Warwick campus rather enthralling. Unfortunately the campus is rather outside of town, though pleasant. Journeying up to Coventry, I encountered a woman on the train who was rather distressed and probably suffering from a psychiatric disorder – some other passengers were typically offensive and distastefully untactful (they would feel quite differently if one of their drinking friends had an accident or was otherwise suffering from a similar condition. Essentially though, this is representative of the public as a whole and that is a sorry situation). Actually I was sitting opposite a woman called (I would approximate as) Liv. She had recently graduated from studying nursing and physcology at Warwick and shared a taxi with me to the campus.

When I have been in Birmingham I have had a number of walks along the Worcester and Birmingham Canal for exercise and for inspiration. On one occasion recently, I walked from Selly Oak in to Birmingham the equivalent of three times in one day, and went strolling around the town for a while too. I met my friend Dan when I was in the town [on the previous visit on the weekend before last - updated: 17/06/2004] and we had a very pleasant walk along the the Canal, some food and then saw the Jim Carey Eternal sunshine of a spotless mind film which has just recently come out. I had already seen Kill Bill vol. 2 for a second time on a previous visit, with Hannah and Joe and some of their friends who were around. I enjoy visiting Birmingham.

I seem to enjoy walking quite a lot now. Not only did I cycle 30 miles one day last week on my way to and from work one day, but then walked 12 miles on Saturday and cycled around London this evening with Paul Sladen. I hope that the narrowboat canal trip is happening – I spoke to some friends about it but have yet to mention it to some more, and in any case it should be fun.

I have been reading mostly mathematical and physics related stuff, but have also brushed up on some operating system theory and plan to resurrect the work that I was doing for my project on Genesis. At some point in the next few weeks I hope to get an Apple iPod so that I can get Linux up and running on it for the column, but I also need to get a writeup done on the EmDebian Stag Framework as well as Gamecube Linux – actually I need to do a few things for both of these projects. I have allowed my plan for fixing some PowerPC platform independence stuff to stagnate far too much and will do something about that.

This room needs cleaning up and I need to work at maintaining accurate mental records of what I want to do and when – I have a great tendency for persuing tangents, and this is a good thing, but I need to ensure that I also come back to what I was looking at before that. I have to examine electronics stuff that I have been meaning to look at, and I need to purchase a violin part for Bach’s Concerto for Violin, Oboe and Piano (a friend plays the Oboe and a friend of his plays the piano…as does obviously Hannah but I do not know any other Oboe players).

On Saturday morning, I went in to Birmingham and visited a number of bookshops in a quest for enlightening material to read (as well as a book on Embedded Systems which is on sale in the Warwick University Bookshop but which I have not seen in the flesh since, and I would rather buy from a real bookstore even if it is in my recommendations from that American online bookstore). I felt compelled to inform the management of Borders as to the decline of their Computing Section (it is now quite desperate in comparison to the state it was in when they first opened – and they have moved it downstairs from being in a sensible location next to the Engineering and Mathematical sciences, as a consequence of wishing to improve flow and their American mangement visiting) – it is not always about stocking books that sell, try stocking just one or two that are interesting so that people like myself will want to buy more.

Primark have a weird store layout in Birmingham and due to the nature of the fire shutters, I imagine certainly a number of issues in the event of an actual emergency – the shutters effectively isolate the escalators, but people will head for those in the first instance and become trapped. The engineer who designed that system needs to seriously consider when they last went shopping on a busy afternoon in the town. Zizzi also annoyed us on Saturday night because they refused to allow us to have “drinks only” because that is not their policy (I pointed out how often I go to that restaurant but to no avail, so I am less so inclined now). On a positive note, I bought The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time on Saturday and have read to around halfway now. A woman representing British Waterways asked me some survey questions at Gas Street Basin and I discussed maintainance, safety and accessibility issues.

On Saturday night I went to Symphony Hall in Birmingham and saw Carina Burana being performed by the Birmingham City Choir and Orchestra. Essentially a fantastic performance and I would certainly recommend a visit to anyone so inclined – especially as there was a good under 25 discount. Hannah and I spent some time commenting upon the performance afterwards and then we had some tea by the canal, before walking along it to Selly Oak and retiring for the evening.

This evening I went in to London for around 19:00 and met up with Paul Sladen. Meeting at Kings Cross, we went for a cycle around the City and along the Thames. Stopping off for Noodles, we eventually got back to Paddington and I caught a late train home. I enjoyed this evening very much indeed although my hayfever is starting to cause me some discomfort.

Jon.

Photos (from left to right): Cycling 30 miles to and from the office, Walking around London after the BCS Lovelace Lecture, John Warnock from Adobe, Symphony Hall, Jon Masters at Westminster.

[ from the doing-more-normal-stuff dept. ]

Photographs (from left to right): Philippe and Justin on the emDebian stand at Linux Expo Olympia 2004, Wookey cleaning up after the second day of the show, a walk along the River Cherwell in Oxford, a walk around London.

I have not updated this blog in a couple of weeks, and a few things have happened since the last update, so here we go. As I write this, I am in Birmingham with Hannah and Joe Wrigley, about to eat supper after a nice walk through a park in Selly Oak. I have been trying to get more regular exercise by taking longer walks whenever possible – either for the sake of a walk, or in place of a bus or taxi whenever.

I went to the Linux Expo Olympia 2004, and met what I would imagine was between 100-200 people that I know through some means or other. The show was interesting because of the sheer number of interesting conversations and people, and I enjoyed hanging out on the emDebian stand to talk to people about Embedded Linux. Various companies had offerings on show and the BBC especially were interesting because of their Open Source video and audio codec and interoperability software stack.

After the show ended on the Tuesday, we went to a dinner at Pizza Express (I am not as fond of them as I was, because I now prefer Zizzi), where I talked to Wookey, John Southern, and a few others. On the Wednesday evening there was a Debian pub meet, followed by a meeting of printk people (sladen managed to wonder off with a few people and was later to be heard on LUG Radio commenting about his plans, along with various revelations concerning the nature of products on sale on the Debian stand). I met Jono Bacon and some of the LUG Radio people again as well.

My column this month covers some general recent developments and touches upon GPL issues with embedded systems. I produced a piece on LIRC interfacing using a Sky Digital remote, and also finally got the CeBIT 2004 writeup in to a digital form which could actually be printed . Also did a bit of hacking on some block device code and spent a lot of time brushing up on my calculus, and getting up to speed with my understanding of NMR theory. I roughly understand how systems are built now, and how things like gradients work to add spacial information for determining the position of parts of an image or the movement of molecules within a sample for sizing.

Last weekend, we had a family outing along the River Cherwell in Oxford. We were going to hire a punt, but the queue was more than an hour long. I have recently made a number of trips along the Thames and wish to explore more of the Oxford area in general. On the Friday beforehand, I had located the Botanic Gardens and heard of a pub called “The Head Of The River” where I can apparently hire a punt for the Thames also. photos.jonmasters.org contains many more photos from these random events in the Random section.

This week, I had a driving test on Monday lunchtime. I managed to fail this first test because I performed a Parallel Park which resulted in the car being positioned too far from the curb, and subsequently decided that I had failed, so was not bothered when I picked up a couple of other faults on the way back to the test centre. The DSA waiting list in Oxford is currently absolutley ludicrous – September 2004. The surrounding areas are not much improved upon that and I have had to settle for a June test in Reading. This means I have to ask my instructor to drive from Oxford however.

I decided to follow the test with a little walk along the Thames, and then travelled from the Trout Inn back in to Oxford. I went in to London and walked around Regents Park, before meeting sladen and walking around bits of central London for a few hours. We saw some people setting up rigging in Trafalgar Square for Freedom Day and had some good Chinese food when we actually arrived in Leicester Square. I spent some time tracking down hardwareisms over the rest of the week and then went for a trip to Coventry.

Yesterday afternoon featured a visit to Warwick to see an old friend. Aftering eating some Pizza at Pizza Express we saw Kill Bill 2 at the Showcase Cinema. This morning, I walked in to Coventry and took a train to Birmingham in order to visit Hannah and Joe Wrigley. We went for a walk and I did a little reading on random Wave type physics.

I am hopefully speaking at the UKUUG Summer Conference 2004 and am spending much of my time learning stuff. Yesterday, I visited a bookshop next to the Rootes Social facility in Warwick, and saw a copy of the Embedded System Design book. This book definately requires a reservation on my bookshelf – there were a few others which I might need to add to my wishlist.

I recently saw a fantastic piece being performed on Classic FM TV, and I discovered the track on a compilation album in Borders on an evening of this week. Ludovico Einaudi performed Le Onde in a truly beautiful performace which had to be heard. I located a CD by the artist in preference to purchasing an entire compilation disc for a single track I wanted. Perhaps worth noting is that the Borders previewing system had incorrect details which resulted in the wrong previews being played for these tracks. Go buy his CD.

Jon.

[ from the memoirs-of-the-week dept. ]

Photographs (from left to right): A peacock at the Trout Inn, a non-talk by an absent esr (John Pinner’s impromptu talk), Paul Sladen and Jonathan Riddell on a Brompton, Victoria Square in Birmingham, and a homebrew LIRC Receiver.

I have been working on fixing an interesting (debugging printk’s reduce execution to a rate that makes things work type of problem) bug in a Compact Flash driver and had another driving lesson in preparation for the inevitable. Reading a bit more of the maths book and looking at harmonic functions and resonance in more depth. Everything in life is probably a waveform in a cunning disguise. I also have just started looking at the Derome NMR book (“Modern NMR Techniques for Chemistry Research” by Andrew E Derome). I have begun the process of connecting dots between information, in the quest for a higher understanding of what I am doing at the moment.
I like to think that I am gaining something from my exploration of the block layer in Linux and that I can use this to do some fairly positive things fairly soon.

I went to the Trout Inn again, and decided to borrow a GPS from a friend at work in order to try out Geocaching soon. Also I am strongly considering whether to run in the London Marathon next year (if you think that I should the please tell me – certainly I need to decide what to raise funds for if I do run). I spoke to a lock keeper at Godstow lock about narrowboats and got a couple of details, and a brochure for one of the companies who hire boats for a weekend. Currently I am contemplating hiring a boat for a long weekend with whichever friends are interested in the idea. At least one of the companies (Anglo Welsh, according to the lock keeper) have multiple locations where you can pick up and set down boats, rather than return to the journey origin.

On Thursday afternoon I was in Oxford following another driving lesson, and after a trip to a certain coffee house (yes I know but I could stop drinking Starbucks coffee whenever I wanted, honestly), and a trip to the Trout Inn for a juice, I headed to the railway station to catch a train I expected esr to be on board, en route to his planned talk in Birmingham for SBLUG. I met a chap with an ACCU badge and asked him if he knew where esr was, and discovered that Eric basically decided at the last minute to cancel and not give a talk which he first agreed to give around two years ago. Eric Reymond left a large number of people in the lurch in Birmingham and should not be invited to future meetings, in my opinion. It is no longer necessary to meet him in order to understand the views that some hold about him and his actions.

The chap with the ACCU badge turned out to be John Pinner. He had personally paid for esr to travel first class to Birmingham but I ended up having the seat myself. I had brought a pizza, some olives, and ciabatta at Oxford Zizzi and ate these on the way, while John and I had a pleasant conversation. John stood in for esr by giving a different talk for the group and Tim managed the meeting well despite the rudeness of the absent speaker (who was instead having a teleconference with Sun). Fortunately most people were quite understanding of the situation and the talk with panel discussion was as enjoyable as the preceeding buffet.

I enjoyed meeting up with Paul Sladen, jok and Jonathan Riddell. I also met Jono Bacon of LUG Radio and Linux Format fame. Paul, jok, Jonathan and I were given a lift to the station afterwards by John Pinner. At Birmingham New Street, we bought some drinks (thanks to Robin I have discovered that Oasis Summerfruits drink is a little in need of occasional consumption) and a bottle of wine with no opener. I recalled a situation once in Oxford where many of us spent hours trying to open a wine bottle with a biro. We went to Nottingham, and on Friday I met up with Paul and Jonathan. Note the photos of the pointless number of logos at the railway station – perhaps we are going to end up with renationalisation by the backdoor.

On Friday I walked in to Nottingham and bought some grapes and a smoothie before having a coffee with a biscotti. I read a little and subsequently caught a bus to facilitate venturing on to the Jubilee campus in a quest for meeting Paul and Jonathan and various others who we were going to look for. I took some photos of the campus and the wildlife, and spoke to a few people too. I did find a certain Dave and heard that my tickets for the BCS Lovelace award ceremony should arrive at my home soon (in fact they have). I introduced Paul and then we went to get ready for a train to Birmingham. While I went to town and had another coffee in that certain American establishment, Paul and Jonathan returned to Beeston and got themselves ready – we both caught trains from the two stations and met on the train. It randomly decided to hail as I was waiting for the train to turn up.

Paul, Jonathan and I were discussing various randomness on the train, and I saw the Debian logo being prepared for the Debian stand this week. They changed trains and I continued to Birmingham, where I had food at Cafe Rouge before travelling to Reading on the penultimate departing train. Over the past few days I have been syncing my email and built an LIRC receiver. I upgraded perihelion to kernel 2.6.5 and applied the LIRC patches to add the required Serial Driver Character Devices support to the configuration. Trying to make some progress with the UKUUG Embedded Systems stuff and dealing with another related event.

Jon.

[ from the not-a-duplicate-story dept. ]

I went for a walk along the Thames Path in Oxford, Chai Steamer in hand, until I arrived at the Trout Inn in time to read some of my book before some soup refreshment, some juice, and of course tea. I have decided that this walk to Wolvercote is a good way to exercise and then have food.

I sat by the river for a while, after dropping a glass from the end of a bench table that had been left by another customer (which they cleared up straight away), and read about Partial Fractions while drinking a juice. When the air become slightly more fresh, I ventured inside and ordered a chicken cockaleeky soup with some more juice and later some tea.

A pleasant place to watch peacocks and read a book.

When I returned home, I wanted to read more than I did but I settled for a few paragraphs from a book on Fourier Transforms for students. I would prefer to understand Fourier Analysis and Synthesis more than I do, but a hope is that I can over time master these topics.

Jon.

[ from the random-walking-is-good dept. ]



Photo: Trout Inn at Wolvercote, which is in Oxford (famous from Inspector Morse).

Yesterday I went for a walk with Hannah and Joe and my younger sister, along the Thames Path in Oxford. We arrived in Oxford by train and joined the river at the station in order to give a good 3-4 mile walk to the Trout. We had lunch at the Trout and walked back, stopping at the Perch (where we played chess on a giant board) for soft drink refreshment. Certainly this was an excellent outing, because not only was the weather enjoyable, but also we saw cattle grazing along the route, dogs running randomly in the river, horses running around too, and many other relaxing things of that nature. A good day for a good trip along the Thames. I now need to hire a narrowboat with some friends and journey along the river.

Photo: Jon Masters, in University Parks Oxford.

I went for a walk around University Parks on Thursday evening, and then decided to go to oxgo for a quick game on the way home. I met a couple of guys from Codemasters and had an enjoyable learning experience with a 6 Kyu player, and met a player with a rating of 4 Dan.

I bought the latest issue of the venerable Elektor Electronics only to find that they have restyled the content and tried to do a typical makeover in the aid of helping more people to get in to the magazine (i.e. to push up revenue one would imagine). Fortunately this has not been too determental to content and I actually found a couple of good items in this edition touching upon ATAPI interfacing and other random stuff. AMT now do a new “Chai Steamer” beverage which is quite an enjoyable alternative to a latte.

Jon.

[ from the sardines-in-a-tin dept. ]



Photo: Jubilee Campus of The University Of Nottingham.

I visited Nottingham twice during the period of Friday and the weekend, and stayed with Hannah and Joe in Birmingham on both occasions also. I arrived in Nottingham on Friday afternoon and visited some friends in the Computer Science department, before having dinner in Birmingham with Hannah and Joe. On Saturday evening I returned to Nottingham to meet with some friends, and encountered pkh randomly while walking through the town on the way to dinner.

I bought a book called “Mathematical Techniques” on Saturday and had a very enjoyable time especially on Sunday lunchtime in a nice pub. Also went for a stroll through Oxford last night and went to OxLUG on the way home.

Another update later on.

Jon.

[ from the who-should-I-support dept. ]

I visited fumo and Hussein in London last weekend, for a random meet up essentially. We had food in Wagamama and ended up going to Putney for the Oxford/Cambridge boat race of 2004. As the news reported, Cambridge won and I care little about the outcome – it was an experience which was worth doing. Perhaps I should have gone to a BBQ with a friend at one of the markers along the route but there was not time to do everything.

On the way home from the boat race, Hussein and I met Paul (who was with his Brompton as per what now seems the usual situation for meeting him) outside Baker Street underground station and Hussein took a video of the assembly time for the Brompton. Perhaps I could have done something else in London but I felt like going home to read Horrowitz and Hill (hereafter often called H&H) again. I have re-acquainted myself with differential equations over the last week, and I followed through some of the fundamental proofs for RC circuits while on the train to work on occasion this week.

I spoke to BSM in Oxford about the theft of my debit card details and am still unhappy with their cavalier attitude and the time which was allowed before proprogating details to customers who might have been affected quite severely. Apparently my personal details were not compromised and the suggestion that computers were taken was incorrect (apparently the mid level management type I spoke to who is in charge of this farce was not aware that only keyboards had been taken and not whole machines. They also apparently are centralised with only effectively terminals installed in branches, but this was not made clear to me initially). I had already called the DVLA by that point and am going to consider what to do with the information that they chose to leave card receipts in the till machines overnight rather than in the safe which I observed during my protracted conversation with a reluctant manager who proved quite ellusive. I like my instructor but I think the BSM company (part of the RAC) need to really sort out their definition of customer service to some sufficient level.

I considered cycling earlier but the weather was not good and my neck was extremely painful and unable to turn to the right on Thursday. I am currently seeking a violin teacher in the Oxford area and this week am planning to look out for some more sheet music I can play.

Over the last six months, my mail server processed 182759 messages of which approximately 26,000 were manually marked as SPAM and an additional 2239 were filtered by my installation of a popular mail filter which needs upgrading to a version which is not the old one in Woody. I now estimate that I will receive over 400,000 mails this year and that more than 15% is SPAM. Since the bulk of this is from mailing lists which are already SPAM filtered then we are looking at actual signal to noise ratios which are considerably different and closer to 50%. Two mails were in my Impersonal maildir folder too long so please use my official mail addresses whenever possible.

Jon.