One too many mornings

Michelle’s friend Jenny is visiting this weekend. We are being culture vultures, taking a ghost or literary tour of Edinburgh tonight and going to the ballet at the Festival Theatre on Saturday.

The production is the Highland Fling, it groks pretty good, bit of modern dance and working class grit in there, and arranged by Matthew Bourne, a guy who seems just genuinely passionate about his craft. I heard an interview with him on Radio Scotland last week.

This plugin for Rhythmbox sends details of the music played to audioscrobbler.com. You can view what I’m currently listening to and stats of my listening habits.

Revamped the build system for scapa. It now builds two projects.

• Hops: The firmware for the emma2 based dual tuner module
• Barley: The firmware for the au1550 based motherboard

There is a one touch build process that builds hops, copies the resulting firmware file into barley ramdisk, and builds barley. Extra features to be added are; compressed kernels for both firmwares and optional building of yamon.

Wow this is properly accurate.

Your Inner European is Irish!

Sprited and boisterous! You drink everyone under the table.

Last week all(most) the old gang from Dundee, went to Stockholm to surprise our friend Dave who is marrying his Danish lady, Lise, mother of his child, Maddy. He was appropriately shocked and confused to see us all turn up at Tom’s house as he thought he was going fishing. The inevitable messy drunken weekend ensued we really are scum and don’t mind sleeping on floors covered in stale ale and other smelly people. It is good to see that nothing has changed in the last ten years.

Stockholm was fantastic and I’ll definitely go back to spend more time exploring it. It was great to see Tom to now that he is engaged to Ulrika, and Barry now he is married. In fact Anna and Greg are engaged too, and so am I, Richard is the only bachelor among us now

Having ported YAMON to scapa a while back, I’ve been adding tests into it to make it a useful bootstrapper for our purposes. At present it performs a Power-On Self Test or POST specific to scapa, and will retrieve a new kernel image if
it’s own own is missing or corrupt. It also configures it’s network params using dhcp, something YAMON did not do, I ported this from u-boot.

POST consists of

1. Turn off LED
2. Start Yamon from flash
3. Perform RAM data bus and address bus tests.
4. Perform a checksum on the YAMON code to test the flash bus.
5. Check the RTC
6. Set up MAC/PHY and wait for link
7. Perform stress test on RAM (caches enabled)
8. Probe PCI bus for emma and setup emma RAM, also bring tuners out of reset
9. Perform EMMA RAM data bus and address bus tests.
10. Probe i2c buses.
11. Get Mac Addr from the iButton
12. Get network params from flash
13. Check the kernel image.
14. If required do DHCP
15. If required tftp the kernel image to flash (see note below)
16. Copy kernel to RAM.
17. Jump to kernel

If at any time the user types ‘exit’ over the serial line, test code will exit and present a YAMON prompt.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory Doctorow.

Cleaned up my python script so I can now detect all devices on the network, attach to and manage them. Just need to work out how to do a left click to bring up a menu now. Looking good though.

I learned something today. Something that dates back to the dawn of computing. In C a char can be either signed or unsigned. I had a bug were on one compiler it is signed and on another unsigned. Although today most compilers define char as signed this is left as an implementation detail (K&R second ed p.36).

So this is why they call C unportable.

This is my first Hemingway novel. It is a cracking read, yadyay I’ve come to it with much expectation and I’ve not been disappointed.