Adios Rogers … you pirates!
I’ve had it with Rogers internet service. Slow (throttled) speed, laughably inadequate data caps, exhorbitant overage fees, no server policies, and boy do they know how to charge! Enough. Enough! Enough!! But it turns out the pain just keeps on coming, because even though I cancelled my Rogers service prior to the end of the billing cycle, they insisted on a 30 day cancellation policy, so they could sting me yet one more time! Injury to insult.
Last week I signed up with TekSavvy, intially with the intent of using the same network I was on, but without the burden of userous fees and stupid caps, but it turns out that Rogers is not cooperating with the resellers in my community, and TekSavvy called to say that in spite of the CRTC’s ruling to the contrary, they cannot resell the cable service owing to Rogers lack of cooperation. No problem, I simply returned the DOCIS 3.0 cable modem I purchased from Canada Computers (thanks guys for being so helpful), and I signed up for the 25MB/7MB DSL service from TekSavvy.
Just for fun, I ran a couple of speed tests on Rogers, and found their high speed service topping out at about 700Kbs download, and upload just a bit faster. So much for the “hi-speed” in the Hi-Speed product. TekSavvy is installing on Tuesday, and I just can’t wait. Rogers good bye, and good riddance — YOU TRULY SUCK and I won’t be back!
Something Ventured, Something gained.
I’ve been very busy these last few months, and in the process, had the opportunity to use, learn and extend the U-Boot boot firmware on a PowerPC (P4080) 8-cpu SOC on a custom designed board, ported the Linux kernel to the board, and exercised the I2C and localbus interfaces to allow programming onboard FPGA’s using the UIO platform driver to create a user space device driver. Needless to say, I have enjoyed immensely the effort of “board bringup”, and learned an incredible amount in the process. The best part was working as a part of a dedicated team of talented software and hardware engineers.
One thing which bears specific comment, are the efforts to support the Open Firmware device tree both within the U-Boot firmware, and in the Linux operating system. The device tree describes the SOC “bus” structure of the on-board devices, and possible the ancillary devices implemented upon a given board. In theory, this is a operating system agnostic description of the hardware which can be used by generic device drivers written to support the “flattened device tree” (FDT) model.
I haven’t fully realized all of the benefits of the device tree model yet, but as I consider the implications, I begin to fully appreciate the value of this approach. I suspect that this is a topic which will grow in importance not only in my own future work, but with any luck, in the future of all embedded development. Be sure that I will speak further on the device tree in future, and in the meanwhile, I hope that now that it is on your own radar, that you will give device trees the attention that they deserve.
Open Source Software Uncategorized: C development C programming embedded
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Very light weight scripting … in Forth(?).
I have been enamored by a small scripting language since my exposure to it at University. A little known language, Forth was invented by Chuck Moore in the 1970′s, and came to prominence at the NRAO as a telescope control language. Since then, Forth has found a niche in the embedded sphere, and while not well known in the general programming sphere, it has its adherents in certain very devoted circles.
Some time ago, I wrote my first C based Forth, which while anathema in some circles, afforded me the opportunity to play with forth in a hosted environment. More recently, I re-wrote the Forth, still in ANS-C, but designed it with the intention of making it very portable, variable word size, and most importantly, run natively on hardware which is sufficiently capable (Arm, AVR32, and even the more sophisiticated 8 bit SoC’s).
Forth purists would decry the fact that I implemented what is often referred to as a Fig or classic model, and more that I didn’t implement it in assembler, or even better, a Forth based umbilical system, but I did manage to accomplish my goals of a lightweight, extensible scripting language which could be used either hosted (Windows, Linux, BSD, and MAC/OSX), on 16, 32 or 64 bit, ARM, PPC, or Intel in its basic form without modification.
This miniforth is currently a glorified toy, but it I hope that it has the potential to evolve into a useful scripting tool in its own right. For now, it is certainly useful as an example of a portable C program, a primitive Forth scripting tool, a sandbox to learn Forth or an embedded scripting language, though that will take a bit more work.
If you’d like to play with MiniForth, simply download the single source file listed in the Linkroll on the right, or click here, and compile it with your favourite ANS-C compiler.
gcc -o mf MiniForth.c
clang -o mf MiniForth.c
mingw32-gcc -o mf MiniForth.c
Comments can be posted here, and if not spam, then I’ll publish them. As this language evolves, I’ll release under a permissive license (non-GPL), and hopefully, it might help put the Forth language on a few more radar screens.
IBM’s Watson makes history …
IBM has made many achievements over the past generation, but February 2011 marks a milestone in the area of machine learning, and what some have called over the years artificial intelligence. I’m referring to Watson’s very remarkable showing on the intellectual game show, Jeopardy.
Co-incidentally, Nova ran a documentary this week on Watson, and Dave Ferrucci’s team at IBM. Nova’s backgrounder was even more impressive than simply watching the performance of Watson’s avatar on the game show itself. Obviously, Watson’s talent was not easily come by, and only those who don’t fully understand the difficulty of the problem would have attempted it. Cue Dave Ferucci. Sure, critics might scoff, and say that the machine is not fool-proof, but by any measure, Watson is performing in a manner consistent with the best champions in Jeopardy history. No mean feat, even if the computer is the equivalent of over 6,000 powerful modern personal PC’s.
I’m not going to wax philosophic, I’m sure many bloggers will be chewing this one to cud, but I will touch upon one simple and blatantly obvious application of such powerful computing, and that is the field of medical diagnostics. Feeding the symptoms of known disease courses, and developing rules by using the talents of the experts in the field, the classic idea of an expert system might actually be achievable. What this will ultimately accomplish, is to bring the world’s best medical opinion to the masses. This may not happen in the immediate future, but obviously, Watson has legitimized the area of machine learning, and applied expert systems as not only feasible, but readily demonstrable. Kudos all around to IBM, Dave Ferrucci’s team, the Jeopardy people, and Nova for making us aware of this important and significant event.
Castor Commercial Development Software: C development useability
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Clang goes the compiler!
Ok, I’ll admit it, my goto language when not scripting is C. Not C++, though I’m not averse to using object oriented languages for where they work, but plain ANS C. C has taken a lot of bad raps for being a language suitable for shooting one’s self in the foot, thigh, and various other peripheral body parts, and this reputation has some basis in truth. On the other hand, it is a language where one can bit twiddle hardware ports, bring up a hardware platform at boot time, and run as fast as the machine will go. For this power and speed, there are some trade-offs, of course, but any who spend any significant time with the language, will learn, coding in C does take some discipline.
What’s my point? Well, for years I have been using gcc as my de facto lingua franca, but yesterday, I installed CLANG from the FreeBSD ports, and compiled my bu-D (for backup to [local] disk — pronounced ‘Beauty’) package with CLANG. Immediately, several warnings pertaining to recent standards came to light, and in a matter of about 5 minutes, I repaired the BlobStor library, and the bu-D top end. Most of the problems were simply style related warnings, but in repairing them, I felt that the resulting code was that much cleaner, and more robust. So once again, my point? I like the diagnostics and the speed of compilation of the CLANG compiler. Full stop.
I’ll be cleaning up the Q-Schema library with the aid of CLANG over the next couple of days, and I have the strong impression that the end result will be a truly “carrier grade” implementation of my backup tool. This is increasingly important as the alpha test program for the CAStor cloud project approaches. More on this project to come, but suffice it to say that integration tests are going well, as they must be to see me futzing about with a new compiler, and currently four distinct platforms are supported, with Windows and Mac OSX to come.
Home Entertainment Uncategorized: backup system administration
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How much backup is enough??
I fielded a call recently from an overwrought consumer, and by no means a naive one, asking whether I might be able to recover the data from his external hard drive. The drive was an external 250Gb in a USB housing, and a grandchild had inadvertently kicked the power cable, causing the spinning drive to hit the ground on a hard surface. Talk about an unsupported configuration!!?
I offer services to clients where I can recover data from sectors gone bad using a software approach which can re-calibrate the heads, and uses a persistent read to capture all but the most stubborn disk failures, but a head crash is a whole other kettle of fish. In this case, clean-room techniques are used to transfer the platters to a similar drive mechanism, and then intensive data recovery techniques are applied. I don’t have the facilities for this type of recovery, and my heart went out to the poor fellow, because the drive contained the sole copy of his family photos going back some years.
As I’ve indicated in previous posts, hard drives being mechanical devices, will fail at some point. All of them. The key to data recovery is not just backing up to a removable device, but keeping redundant copies. In this case, an educated consumer figured he was doing the right thing by moving his valuable data onto a backup device, but by removing the original photos from the computer, when he lost the backup drive, all was lost. Stay tuned, as I ‘m working on a backup system which will resolve most of the problems with backup systems in general, and will offer the kind of solution which will allow you to sleep peacefully.
Microsoft is not evil … just misguided!
My mother always taught me that if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. She also taught me that it was wrong to attribute malice when stupidity could suffice. In general this is true, but of late, I find myself wrestling with out of date Microsoft products, and tearing out my hair. Of course, I could have avoided the situation, but a good friend had complained that his nine year old computer was making noises, and was on its last legs. I made the suggestion that he get a de-branded refurb down at the local Cheap-Stuff outlet because they are cheap like borscht, but they are sold without operating systems, which while great for BSD or Linux users, are not so good for DUMMIES. This is where I come in.
No problem, I figured that I’d just move the relatively new hard drive (a previous favour when I used g4u to clone his dying hard drive onto a new larger one, and better still, I left the remainder of the disk unallocated). I figured (correctly) that XP Home would blow its cookies when it woke up on different hardware, but I figured I’d simply do a “repair install” over top, only after I backed up the hard drive of course.
The problem then became trying to find an XP Home install CD from which to install, and all I could find was an old XP Professional CD. Ok, I’ll do a straight install onto the unallocated remainder of the hard drive, and use the Microsoft utility to move “users and settings”. I had to re-install SP3, and some other updates as well, but that wasn’t a problem. On the surface, all went well, but after delivering the brand new and improved, faster and smaller computer, it seemed that the Outlook Express address book didn’t make the trip. Pardon me? Users and Settings apparently doesn’t include the Outlook address book! Go figure.
Apparently simply moving the .WAB (address book) file is not enough, and there are some registry settings which force the user specific address book to be recognized. I’d initially just tried to export the old address book, and import it over top of the new one, but I chose tab delimited file instead of .CSV (since XP Home didn’t offer to export as .WAB), and Outlook choked. Moving the .WAB directly had Outlook agree to import it, and then left the address book unchanged, even though it claimed to have successfully imported the 174K of data — but lied. Worse than any of that, all of the file bindings for Acrobat, Powerpoint and various other extensions were left behind along with the applications Ok, fine, there are hundreds of web pages which describe fixes for each and every one of the problems I encountered, and people who make a very good living out of Microsoft’s shortcomings, and given the market for broken computer services which Microsoft single handedly created why should’nt they?
Good software is generally written in a consistent manner with a set of reasonable defaults and consistent handling of configuration and settings. Good operating systems allow one to migrate licensed software from an older machine when the hardware is refreshed. Good commercial software doesn’t let the license manager get in the way of the user. Good system software doesn’t rely upon third party products for its security because corporate types thought the internet was just a fad. Yes, its true, Microsoft simply appropriated the BSD 4.4 TCP/IP Protocol stack when they found themselves late to the internet party.
Good software does not have arcane instructions, hidden functionality and impossibly unintuitive migration strategies. When Microsoft refers to Windows technology as innovation (and to be fair to Microsoft I’m not even going to mention the Vista debacle) it is instead inconsistent, arcane and unintuitive, and that’s just the user interface. The poor Windows System Administrators will be forever in a place which can use more air conditioning and Windows Programmers have a whole ‘nother ring of Hell to suffer.
The worst part of this rant is that it all could have been so different. The history I know has Dave Cutler coming from Digital to Microsoft to design the NT operating system. By all accounts he did it right, including an hardware abstraction layer (HAL) which allowed easy porting of the OS to multiple architectures. Then the bad part — Microsoft (presumably Gates, or Ballmer or some other bright wit) insisted upon keeping the Win16 API (updated to 32bits as Win32), and so the look and feel, and the fifty million or so poorly factored API’s were grafted onto an otherwise fine piece of work, and the crappy bloatware which had so ravaged the Dos/Windows environment was perpetuated onto what could have been a work of art — but was not. And don’t get me started on THE DAMN REGISTRY, which I’m pretty sure did not come from Mr. Cutler!
Propagating Windows onto NT was almost as bad a decision as IBM choosing Intel’s 8088/8086 segmented architecture over Motorola’s MC68000 (with 24bit linear addressing) for the original IBM PC. Sure, they saved some pennies on each machine, but created a segmented memory model conundrum for software developers for years to come. I suppose that’s what you get when marketing gets to tell engineering how to do their job.
If after reading this you believe that I have some antipathy towards Microsoft, you’d be right. It’s not that I hate them, I don’t. What I really hate are the incredibly stupid masses of PC users who actually believe that Microsoft has set a de facto standard simply because they have the market share, and who keep buying inferior products. If people started using alternatives in droves (and there are a bunch), then Microsoft would be forced to re-visit their crappy software, and fix it! Alas, the market leader has made DUMMIES of us all!
Cool Stuff Uncategorized Weird Stuff: equinox lunar eclipse photography
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I couldn’t resist a once in a lifetime opportunity.
Apparently, the last time a lunar eclipse fell on the winter equinox was circa 1634. The next one will not be in my lifetime, so I grabbed the faithful snapshooter, and decided to trade some sleep for a “Hell, I was there” moment (with apologies to Elmer Keith). The results were as expected, on a freezing night from my balcony and given my total lack of photographic abilities, but in spite of that, I managed to capture a shot or two.
At full eclipse, the moon appears a mars-like red colour, and as I varied the ISO settings, the exposure time varied from about 4 seconds to almost 20 seconds. This was one of the reasons for the blurred images, perched as I was upon my back deck, which while braced with steel, did have some movement. Oh, well, on December 21st, 2094 I’ll be better prepared for the next time that a lunar eclipse coincides with the hibernal equinox 8-)!
Shh! Don’t tell Karen!
Santa’s been busy this year, and my Elf has been very good … so perhaps there’ll be a surprise for her under the tree. More about this after Christmas when I get a chance to put my greasy paws all over it … for now its a … Book Reader! Yeah, that’s it, its a Book Reader …
Cool Stuff Open Source Software: Arm based embedded useability Window Managers
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At long last, the path to ENLIGHTENMENT!
You might ask why should I care that Enlightenment is about to release the DR17 release of its desktop manager? Perhaps you are a died in the wool Windows user, well if so then move on — there is nothing for you here. Perhaps you are a KDE afficcianado, or even a Gnome gnome, and if so, then perhaps you might also be interested in Enlightenment’s long awaited new release.
Profusion has just announced that they’ve embedded E17 into, of all things, a refrigerator. Canonical, makers of Ubuntu have looked at E17 for its Arm platform, and there are already some other commercial announcements where either E17 or the underlying Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (and therein lies the magic and for me, the appeal) have been embedded.
The EFL libraries have been carefully handcrafted, and indeed re-written over the past several years, and hence the delay between the E16 and E17 releases. Starting with libimlib’s replacement with Imlib2, the developers of E17 have carefully developed a layered foundation, the key to which is the Evas canvas manager (libEvas). By itself, Evas does nothing, but the simple C API allows objects to be described to the Evas canvas manager, and then manipulated by simply changing its state. This has lead to efficiencies using libGL where possible, and in the case of Arm, where the hardware acceleration may be absent, though even so, rendering performance is more than acceptable.
Adding to Evas are Edjie, Ecore and Eina which make up the E17 stack, and added the widgets, theme-ing meta-objects and user friendly icing which will make E17 into a fast, flexible and embeddable window manager which will be on tablets, OSX, Linux, BSD and apparently, even household appliances.
While the big guys (Google) are using unwieldy Java frameworks glued onto phones and tablets (Android), and HP pushes a javascript development environment for PalmOS, and MeeGo uses a Qt based development model, I truly believe that whoever uses the E17 EFL platform as the basis for their embedded products will have some serious performance advantages, not to mention some really cool eye-candy for their bright shiny object and more important than any of that, gain a real edge over the competition.