One too many mornings

I’ve hesitated to use mplayer for Linux for while now as it never comes packaged for debian. This is because it includes support for non-free av codecs. While I don’t support the use of non-free codecs I do want to listen to the BBC archives. Since they are streamed as real media, which is a particularly ugly bastardisation of open standards, I’m forced to use them. I will also be petitioning the BBC to stop using non-free formats for transmitting their archives.

Due to the fact that mplayer is not included in debian, building it requires the editing configure scripts to resolve build dependencies, this probably the single most off-putting part of using an open operating system and one that is mostly solved by using debian. The sooner there are no widely used non-free av codecs the better (chance would be a fine thing!).

Today we succeeded in taking the first tentative steps toward getting Scapa running.
The board now boots Yamon. I’ve already got a working db1550 port of linux here, so minimal changes need to be made to get this onto the board. My next task is to add the bootloader into the build system so that it is built afresh each time. Good progress today.

Unfortunately we have a problem with signal termination for the DDR RAM so we must run the RAM at slow speed to avoid memory errors. Hopefully this will get put right by mods or in the worst case by a respin.

I’m pretty much a Finn, and I’m pretty happy about that.

My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 20% on finnpoints

Meeting old friends

When I was back in sunny Belfast last week I took the opportunity of visiting some old friends some I hadn’t seen in years. It was especially good to see James. It was because of him I got into computing, mostly by playing DungeonMaster and Falcon on Atari ST. I’ll have to get stonx or some Atari emulator working here for a laugh.

Back to Work

After the fun and games of last week it is back to the grind. This week I’ll be backporting Heirachical Token Buckets to the Cardhu build to see if smoothing out the network traffic helps a problem Dermot from Cork is seeing. And Scapa is back from prototyping so once Stu does the hardware debug we’ll be trying to get some linux running on it.

Bang!

Burnsy was in a crash yesterday. Someone hit the bus she was taking from work last night. She is OK now but whiplash takes a day or two to appear.

Announcing the arrival of David and Joanne’s first-born, Kirsti Charlotte Foster. She was born on 8th March 2005, wieghing an extremely healthy 9lbs 8 oz.
She is absolutely gorgeous and mother and baby are doing spot-on. My mum went up to the hospital shortly after Kirsti was born and here are some pictures.
She is only a few hours old and she has a huge head of hair!

(View the images.)

Since my flight was cancelled along with a lot of other flights I’ve got a hotel near Gatwick called Langshott Manor. It is absoltely gorgeous old hunting lodge or squires house dating back to Elizabethan times. Sure beats Holiday Inn.
The room I’ve got here at the Langshott is massive. About the size of my living room and the bathroom has a huge bath and double sinks all doen in pink marble. There are exposed oak beams and traditional furniture and oak panelling all round the room. I wish my camera worked but it is eating batteries like anything. I’ll need to get one that can be recharged.
I’ll have a hot bath and cooked breakfast this morning then head up to London for a bit of sight seeing. I’ve never been to St Paul’s so that is first on the agenda, and then of to Dulwish to see the Suttons in the afternoon.

Aaaahhh

Just took that hot bath. Wow. That was really hot. Got the works, bubble bath, exfoliating soap and body lotion. I might as well treat myself .

Now for that beakfast.

Breakfast at Langshot was beautiful as one would expect from a hotel that in the ten years or so that is has been operating has won the RAC gold ribband seven times. They smoke their own salmon here so I gave that a try. It had a beautiful flavour and freshness missing from even the most expensive shop bought stuff. There was a strange couple at the table next to me. A Slavic girl in her late twenties and a much older American gentleman, Sugar Daddy I love you

On Friday I visited Steve Clay from Go Present at his office near West Hampstead. There was a dump of snow in the morning which has thrown the airports into chaos. The meeting was of dubious value although hopefully with an altered traffic shaping policy on the encoder we can make it work. Result of the chaos at the airport however was that my flight home was cancelled. I’ve transferred my flight to Gatwick on Saturday evening, this gives me a chance to see Mary-Jo and John and baby Cordi.

One of the reasons I’ve not been blogging so much in the last week is that I’ve been using tomboy.
The main purpose of the journal is to help me organise by recording my thoughts and tasks, Tomboy
is a note taking application that lets me do this on my desktop. You can record notes, link them
together and search them for relevant terms. It is a great little tool for productivity can keeping
track of things. You can even set a date in each note when it will appear as a alert to do something.

It is written in Mono which means it should work for windows too.

Last week I bought an o’reilly book on lex and yacc from the Shelter book shop. It was only a few pounds, and I have never used these supposedly powerful tools. Most of the book is fully on pretty no functional examples, then it leaps into a simple menu compiler. In my life I have hand-coded menus maybe ten times. And it is bloodly boring. This lets me define a menu in a little langauge, add have the menuing system auto-generated. Can’t believe I’ve never used this before. I can’t wait to hear the groasn as I introduce another tool.

Couldn’t think of a better title for this entry. The last week or so has been spent trying to get a toolchain to work for scapa. Thankfully now I’ve got a gcc-3.4.1 that builds everything (kernel and app) phew! Spent most of this week hammering the build system into shape. Nearly there now I am very impressed with the new initramfs system for making embedded ramdisks. Thanks to Jeff Garzik for all his good work