Advogato blog for Michael

26 Sep 2001

Wed, 26 Sep 2001 10:15:25 GMT

Wheels and the art of reinvention

ksandstr said earlier:

Sigh. Will we ever learn?

Doesn't look like it does it? :) Not only are we bloating stuff up with XML where it doesn't need to be (and for some things XML is good, I just feel it's overused), but thanks to work on PDAs and even the GBA, the period between invention and reinvention is getting smaller :)

VTWM

Found that of the two bugs I had fixed in VTWM, only one was a bug and the other was a user naivity error, as I'd failed to read the man page properly. Problem is that the fix (either my code fix or the configuration fix that I got from reading the man page) breaks my mail tool and fixes tgif. Bah. I'll need to try that one again.

25 Sep 2001

Tue, 25 Sep 2001 20:22:19 GMT

SWARM

Cool. Compiled up uCLinux with a patch from hanishkvc and it runs on SWARM. Excellent stuff. I need to go through hanishkvc's patches to SWARM, there's a few things I want to play with before I do a release. But, cool.

VTWM

Bah. Must set aside an hour to work on this tomorrow.

Misc

Today was another interrupt driven day. I hate those.

Oh, and I got a free Acorn A5000 today :) Works fine; now I just need to find a copy of Chocks Away!

24 Sep 2001

Mon, 24 Sep 2001 14:49:33 GMT

SWARM

Someone sent my a large patch for SWARM (my low level ARM simulator written in He's done some good work adding a UART and LCD controller to SWARM and is apparently working on port uCLinux to SWARM. Unfortunately I discovered the down side of being a project manager - having to send code back as I found it didn't work properly. I'd love to put this guy's work in, and feel guilty about having to complain as he's done all thei wonderful stuff, but if I accept something that hasn't been tested properly into the tree then it looks bad on other that have pitched in. Hopefully the guy won't be too peeved and will send me a checked version so I can release the enhanced version.

On a similar topic I discovered VTWM is being maintained, and am now discussing my patches with the maintainer :)

20 Sep 2001

Thu, 20 Sep 2001 16:38:27 GMT

Had a cold the last couple of days, so didn't do any work on my PhD, as that would require being able to think, and my brain feels like it's made of cotton wool at the moment. Instead I sat down and fixed two bugs in vtwm that have become increasingly annoying.

Both of the bugs related to positioning of dialog boxes. GTK dialog boxen tended to open at 0,0 on the first virtual desktop and the tgif ones would have their virtual offset added twice. So after poking about with the source this afternoon, I've managed to hunt it down and at least fix the symptoms. I'm no X expert, so I have no idea if I've done the right thing, but it seems to not have broken anything else. The annoying thing is that vtwm seems to be a dead project (last time I submitted a patch I got no ACK, and I know of others who have done so too). Perhaps it's time to set up a sourceforge vtwm project.

Anyway, my head hurts, so I must return to my course of leeches. If you have been, then keep doing so.

10 Sep 2001

Mon, 10 Sep 2001 22:50:54 GMT

Work

A frustrating day - interrupt driven. Managed to fire off a few simulation runs. Had some problems with my lack of Python grokking. [[]] * 5 didn't do what I thought it did :)

I have my 2nd year Viva in a few days. Worry time.

Hackerage

Did a bit more of gtk/python stuff. The list object doesn't seem to like having 1781 rows by 4 columns (the size of my inbox...). It took it, but the redraw was a bit sucky when resizing the columns. Not sure I like the GTK model, but it may just be that I haven't got the GTK mindset yet. I look back on my naive youth of MFC programming as halcyon days :)

9 Sep 2001

Sun, 9 Sep 2001 19:52:07 GMT

Hackerage

Decided to try and learn GTK again (for the n-th time), this time with the Python bindings. My project is to generate a GTK front end to MH, a more modern exmh if you like. After too many core dumpes (me missed the fact that subtress can only be attached to tree items linked to trees), I've managed to get a tree view to display my folder list, which is a start. Once I get something basic working I'll slap it on sourceforge.

Misc

Actually did non work stuff - restrung my telecaster and played with that for an hour or so, and also was reintroduced to the violin by my better half, so I can now play "twinkle twinkle little star" again :)

6 Sep 2001

Thu, 6 Sep 2001 16:30:48 GMT

Coding

My process simulator is coming along nicely, and I actually documented some of it today :) I've been adlibing data structures in Python, and thought I'd better document what it all means somewhere :)

BeOS

I keep playing a little with BeOS. I have the personal version installed on my workstation. I just can't really get into it, and I'm trying to decide if it's BeOS or I'm just too set in my ways. I tend to rely on having quick access to a hetrogenous network of machines at my fingertips and random files spaces spread about on other machines. Between network transparency in X and automounted nfs drives I no longer tend to think in terms of just one machine, I just tend to run processes where they're appropriate. Thus when I switch to Windows or BeOS I suddenly find myself feeling straight jacketed.

Is it just me? I have friends who try to convince me that other stuff is better, and while I admit my X setup is server steps behind in evolution (ha), it suits me perfectly (see here).

What I really want to see is a QoS OS like Nemesis. Perhaps I should try to find time to write it, or at least start the ball rolling. Oh for more hours in the day :)

3 Sep 2001

Mon, 3 Sep 2001 17:33:28 GMT

More mozilla rants

Submitted a mozilla bug report today for the first time. I was trying to access a page and it caused mozilla to lock up taking my X server with it after a minute or two. First time that's happened.

Coding

Managed to add more code to my simulator today. Having a pint of beer with my lunch wasn't very condusive to getting work done, but I struggled on regardless :)

Misc

Manged to get PRCS to build on my Ultra 10. Looks like there was a problem with the gcc 2.95.3 installation being corrupted when the 3.0 one was installed. In the end I built my own version of 2.95.3 and everything worked. I've reported it to partain, with details of what went wrong, so hopefully that'll fix it. At least for now I can use PRCS on the Ultra 10 now. Next time I'm bored I'll have a look at LaTeX :) How long before Will tells be to go and make everything Arusha compatible though... ;)

2 Sep 2001

Sun, 2 Sep 2001 17:26:29 GMT

Firstly, I really need to tweak my Mozilla setup, as I do not like how Advogato looks under XFree86 4.1.0 with the Windows fonts installed when using Mozilla 0.93. The font is way too big. In addition the diary boxes on the home page are no longer all the same size. Oh for more hours in the day.

Trying to get more work done on my instruction scheduler simulator but lacking the motivation to really get into it. Trying to page in my Python knowledge, as after using it for a few days I was away for two weeks, so I need to sort of relearn it. Anyway, I should try and get the work done, as I want to submit a paper on the work I'm doing at the moment to ISCA 2002, should I have enough work done by early October (the paper deadline is early November).

Spotted a 25yo Glenfarclas for 35 UKP in a shop near here - very tempting :) Actually, if anyone here knows the answer to this I'd be grateful: I have a US keyboard, and want to find a way to map the UK pound sign to a key, such as the windows key, under X (mainly, though for the console I woundn't object either). Any suggestions?

At FPL I saw both Xilinx and Altera come up with some neat looking products. Both are doing processor/FPGA hybrids, with Xilinx putting 4 PowerPCs into a Virtex device and Altera putting ARM and MIPS cores (only one core but what seems to be a better interconnect and some RAM) into an Apex device. Very Sexy.

1 Sep 2001

Sat, 1 Sep 2001 13:48:07 GMT

Long time no Advogato. Oh well. It's one of those things that's easy to put off then forget about once you get out of the habit.

What's changed? Well, I don't spend much time on SWARM these days. I've moved on to more OS research rather than low level processor stuff. I'm just back from FPL'01, where I presented a poster on my reconfigurable processor architecture. seemed to go down well, and had fun in Belfast.

Now I'm trying to write a simulator for the OS stuff in Python. I've only just learned Python, and I'm quite impressed. The simulator is essentially a list manager, so doing this sort of thing in Python is great.

Not done much on the OSS front I'm afraid. I did some hacking on VTWM to add GNOME compliance ;) I mailed off the source to the VTWM maintainer, but I doubt it made it into the source tree. I doubt there's much need for GNOME functionality in VTWM (I don't even use it, I just wrote it to prove a point :). I also wrote some XChat scripts (I've become an IRC user, sorry...) to implement part of the WimpCTCP stuff. At the moment clients that support the FACE CTCP can get my face image (it should return a 16x16 by 4 bpp grey image) and some other info, but I've not figured a neat way of using Perl/GTK from XChat scripts so that I can generate a face window. Anyway, what is there is up on the XChat scripts site. Not really rocket science I'm afraid.

Anyway, I'll try to keep this up to date for a while :)