Finger info for luap@icculus.org...


[30/06/2003]

Seems to be an issue running a kernel(2.4.21) with local APIC support
built in on my toshiba 2430-402. Without APIC support, I've got problems
using my devices, which I think stem from the fact that they all *appear*
to be on the same interrup without APIC support. With APIC support built
in, the kernel falls at the first hurdle (something like "Decompressing
the kernel" then "ok, booting the kernel" then complete hardware lock-up.

From a bit of a shufty at Intel's tech. docs, it appears that the APIC
communication is done a bit differently in the P4 to previously, as in
the P4, the local APIC (in the processor) communicates with the i/o APIC
(on the pci bus / part of the pci chipset? southbridge?) via the system
bus, whereas previously there was a 3-wire APIC bus.

So, I'm going to have a shufty to make sure APIC support works properly on
my P4 desktop, then it probably involves getting heavy with the kernel,
which makes me feel like a fish out of water. I'm a hardware monkey,
not a software monkey. I'm more at home with a big hammer than a text
editor. Particularly of concern seems to be that the point at which
the kernel is doing bad stuff is before it has the console stuff worked
out, so I reckon debuggy messages are going to have to be output in the
same manner as the code that does the decompression uses its own _puts_
code to tell me what's going on.

Worthy of comment, I think, is the quality and availability
of documentation from Intel, particularly this monster:
ftp://download.intel.com/design/Pentium4/manuals/24547212.pdf

[24/06/2003]

I got me a laptop now. I went for a toshiba 2430-402. Its pretty much as
the spec below, but 40GB disk, 512MB ram, and a P4 2.53GHz cpu with the
533MHz bus. And the spare battery I ordered doesn't fit it. The toshiba UK
website misled me. Buggers! Credit to Micro Anvika, though, they agreed to
take it back, and give me a refund, even though it was my problem really.

[11/06/2003]

I don't think I can resist the urge to buy a laptop for much longer.

Unless I hear good representation why I shouldn't, the chances are I will
shortly part with about 1000squids in exchange for a Toshiba Satellite
2410-601 from Dixons.

It does things like this:
. Mobile Intel Pentium4M 1.9GHz Processor
. 256 mb RAM
. 30 Gb Hard Drive
. DVD/CD RW Dirve
. 15" TFT Display
. 32Mb nVIDIA GeForce4 420 Go Graphics
. 1 X Firewire Port
. Windows XP Home Edition
. 2.7 hours Battery life (up to)
. 1 Year FREE onsite Warranty

Then, I will just need to buy a ram upgrade, and prolly also a second
battery. I can't image why on earth they ship a laptop with only 256
milli-bits of memory. I wonder if that's like fuzzy-logic or something
"I'm 25.6% sure that it was a 1".

Fabulous.

[02/06/2003]

Been on holiday for a week, nice to get away, apart from mad drivers
who want to meld their car to mine, and the joy of the M25 on a really
hot friday afternoon rush hour.

Novatech have some CCD webcams pretty cheap, so I've bought a few,
and have ripped one apart for attachment to a telescope. Going to be
getting some input from a guy at work about mods for long-exposures with
ccd webcams, he seems to think its pretty easy.

I've now got 4 80GB Western Dig hard drives, so I'm going to be playing
with root-raid and stuff shortlyish. 320GB of storage in my box Woo-hoo!

Digital (freeview) TV has improved recently, I'd reccommend it now,
and I'm even thinking of buying a widescreen TV at some point to fully
apreciate its wonder (I had been an opponent of widescreen in the home,
as the majority of transmissions, dvds, videos were not widescreen. Plus,
a normal tv showing a widescreen picture wastes a smaller percentage of
the screen area than a widescreen tv displaying a normal picture.)

[21/05/2003 more...]

Time for some spleen venting on this "broadband" thing.

NTL say that their 128kbps cablemodem service is broadband. Well, at
least they include it in their figures when they talk about how many
broadband customers they have.

If this is narrowband (56kbps):
I

And this is 128kbps:
I
I

Then, this is what most people understand broadband to be (512kbps):
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I

They can yarn on all they like about "always on" and gumph, but the fact
is, it isn't very broad. In fact it bears more of a resemblance to a
narrow thing than to a broad thing.

Less of an information superhighway, more of a small and congested
single-trak road in the Yorkshire Moors.

[21/05/2003]

"Using this site means you accept its terms". Flankers.

Reading my .plan means you agree to join the cult of luaP, and be bound
by its laws and governance, and to participate fully in all of its
religious festivals.

Muhaha, soon the world shall be mine!

[12/05/2003]
Today is fantastic. I keep drifting off into these little surreal
daydreams. That's probably soemthing to do with the fact that I'm pretty
tired, as I spent those hours when I should have been sleeping instead
quaffing russian vodka, and playing that classic game Red Alert.

Girlfriend didn't look to impressed when she got up to go to work, and
realised I hadn't slept. She also looked as though she'd decided not to
bother getting into an argument with me about it.

Still, I got into work nice and early, made sure the work I'd done to
the compressed air system hadn't exploded, and then started consuming
caffeine. I've been here 9 hours now. I might go home at some point.

I started looking at getting a CEng with the IEE. It appears to involve
an IPD, lots of CPD, a PDR, making a DAP, filling out form RPD, having
a PRI, and submitting an ESR. Great.


[08/05/2003]

Its been a while since I updated .plan
I don't think my outlook has got any rosier.

This season, I am mostly "Lord Baron Von Hoffmeister".

I hate websites that force you to register and hand over your entire
life history for the simplest, most inconsequential piece of data that
you want from them.

Sadly my company (www.pascall.co.uk) don't seem to understand that
grievance, and stubbornly stick to the policy of forcing people to log
on with address, teledog number, etc.

I wanted some data from my own company's website, and so I thought "ha-ha
I'll give them a nice set of contact details..." Sadly the usernames
"Rudolf", "Mickey Mouse", "MMouse", "M Mouse", "Bart Simpson" and "Homer
Simpson" were already taken. No big surprise, I suppose.

Hence I am now "Lord Baron Von Hoffmeister", but if anyone asks, y'ain't
seen me, right ;)

In other news, having been quite impressed with Linux software RAID, I'm
giving serious consideration to investing in a couple more WD 80GB hard
drives (with 8MB buffers, of course), and having a go at RAIDing my root
partition, and scary voodoo like that. I'm a bit paranoid about losing
data, having had quite a few IBM drives fail on me recently (I spit on
you 60 and 75GXP series hard drives!), so my system will probably end
up a cunning mix of RAID levels 0,1,and 5 to suit the value and speed
requirement for my data.

Ho-hum.


[03/04/2003]
Ugh. Political activism, anti-war protest, Joe Stupid Public.

*All* the anti-war protesters I've seen interviewed on the TV have been
the most ill-informed, superficial, annoying, stupid people that I've
seen in a while.

That's not to say that I'm 100% behind the war. War causes me moral
dilemmas. War needs careful forethought. My standpoint comes from the
basis that one of our ten commandments is "Thou shalt not kill". This
extends fairly readily, so far as I know, to most cultures, religions
and backgrounds. We universally accept that killing other people is a
bad thing. Having said that, allowing an evil tyrant to brutalise his
people is also a bad thing. And that's as far as I'm going down that road.

More to the point: Our legally elected representatives sat down in our
accepting ruling establishment, and took a vote. Our democratic system
decided to go to war. You have no recourse. That is how our system
works. If you don't like it, vote for someone different next time, hell,
even stand for election as an MP yourself.

Do not disrupt my country with your un-democratic protests.

What pisses me off even more: "Violence is not the answer" said some
protesters, while others broke into council offices and smashed them up.

Surely using violence, and causing disruption in this way, in order to
try to change a decision which has been been made in the proper manner
by Parliament constitutes some form of terrorism.

Go on, ask me "What about my right to free speech?". You don't have
one. This is Britain, not America. You are one of Her Majesty's subjects,
not a citizen of a republic.

To sumarise, I'd like to say to the vast majority of anti-war protesters
"shut up, go home, educate yourself." To those few that have properly
researched the background of this, and are still angry about the
governments decision, go and talk to your MP, write letters to Tony Blair,
but please stop causing an impediment to normal people going about their
daily lives.

If protests like this keep happening, I think the future of democracy
could be in doubt, not necessarily because it isn't working properly, but
because people *feel* it isn't acting in the interests of the majority.


/me gets down of his soap-box, for today.



[01/04/2003]
Can't stop spleen venting...

Target: Dixons

"I can't properly view your website using mozilla 1.2 under windows 2000.

Please sack your web designers at your earliest convenience, and hire
someone who isn't a muppet."



[27/03/2002]
Aren't I a regular plan updater recently?

Yeah, well, its only to vent my spleen about crap things again.

Today's frustration (well, actually the frustration of the past few days)
is a 24GB tape being nothing of the sort. Damn you, HP, DAMN YOU! A
tiny little asterisk, and a footnote finally alerted me to the fact
that a "24GB tape" in a HP Surestore DAT 24 will only actually store
12GB. "24GB with compression" they say. Not when my files are already
compressed it won't.

Why not just market it as a 12GB tape drive? There's no shame in being
honest. I actually generally quite like HP gear. The stuff I've worked
with has quite impressed me.

On another note, I just noticed that music match and real-player are
having a little turf-war on my pc for who plays which files. Its quite
amusing really, the icons for the files keep changing randomly.

Little things please little minds.


[26/03/2003]
Today, a letter to the BBC news people (and a random fleeting daydream
about Miss Pringle, and Jessica Paterson...)

***********************************************************************

I'm often dissapointed by the news people's lack of grammatical
awareness. Surely a professional writer should not make mistakes like
this?

As an example, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2886811.stm
Matthew Price's piece on the Ark Royal.

In the first paragraph: "Today we had curry. Because it is Tuesday."
This should not be two separate sentences. "Because it is Tuesday" cannot
stand alone. It is not a sentence. I'll agree that what he required is
a troublesome construction, but it did not merit that ugly travesty.

"But you kind of have to get on with it. Keep your head down." I believe
keeping your head down in this construction is another thing that the
narrator believes you have to do. Again, this is not a separate sentence,
he was not issuing an imperative to the interviewer. It should have been
separated by a comma.

Matthew refers to the Ark Royal as "it". While I accept that there
is a move to defeminise ships in the English language, the Royal Navy
stated last year that it intends that its ships should remain female
(see http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-242471,00.html). Its an
arguable point, but I'd have followed good tradition, particularly as
a guest of the Royal Navy.

He refers to "The al-Faw peninsular". Shame on you! As a world-class
news agency, you really should be thoroughly ashamed if you don't know
the difference between an adjective and a noun. A good writer would
be acutely aware of this from the word's derivation from the latin
"Paene insula", which is "Almost an island".

I don't want to complain about that one article individually though,
my complaint is that the writing, and reporting coming from the BBC
seems rather sloppy in general. Some of you are professional writers,
and having no better qualification than a grade B at GCSE level English
Language, even I can spot your mistakes. Moreover, I'm an engineer,
a member of the group of people held responsible for the addition of
the word "antennas" to the English dictionary.

Don't you proof-read any more?

regards,

Paul Norton MEng (Hons.) MIEE


________________________________________________________________________

I still like having more letters after my name than there are in my
name ;)


[25/03/2003]
Is it just me, or is there something very wrong when Iraqi officialls
declare in the same breath that they have armed women and children with
kalashnikov rifles to repel the infidel invaders, and then that innocent
civilians have been killed in the conflict.

I read one report that said "The entire poulation is armed, and prepared
to fight against the Americans". If true, that means that anything and
anyone in Iraq is a valid target, there are no non-combatants.

You know, it actually really disturbs me that Iraq is arming children
with assault rifles.

Its all abit reminiscent of Vietnam to me, especially when I heard
an interview with one of the armed forces people who was saying how
demoralising the lack of support from the Iraqi people is.

And with the thing about sweeping through a place, and clearing out all
the enemy, liberating the people, then as soon as your back is turned,
one of the people you liberated is there with a rifle ready to shoot you.

I reckon Iraq is a very bad place to be.

[20/03/2003]
Luap's incredibly useful advice in preparing for war/terror/armageddon.

First and foremost, convince yourself, and your colleagues, friends,
neighbours, and random people on the street that this really is it,
death and destruction are coming to place near you soon.

What you need to buy: Torches. Lots of them. Ones with solar panels,
wind-up torches, even old-fashioned battery ones. And lots of
batteries. Remember, if you see someone else taking the last torch
from the shelf, you must beat them to a pulp and get that torch. Also
buy candles. Lots of candles. Candles will still give you light after
an electromagnetic pulse has fried your torch bulb. Candles are also
useful for gently warming your baked beans over. Don't forget to buy
baked beans. They come in trays of 24, and you'll probably get about 6
trays in your boot (trunk), which should be enough to survive on. Also,
buy plastic sheeting, and lots of rolls of gaffer tape.

Now, go home and prepare.

Pick a room in your house where you will stand the highest chance for
survival. Ideally you want no windows, just one door, and no drains or
vents that might let in dangerous gases from outside. If there are any
doors, windows or vents, nail them shut, gaffer over them so they're
airtight, then gaffer some plastic sheet over them, just to make sure. If
you have loved ones in the room with you, cocoon them in gaffer tape so
that they can't endanger themselves or you by breaking the seal on your
room when they lose their minds in panic. It might be wise to tape them
to the floor once they're securely cocooned.

While you're in your survival room, remember to make as little noise as
possible. The people outside are probably contaminated, and they want
your food and torches. Do not look out of the window, as the contaminated
people might see you. Do not open the door under any circumstances. Do
not believe anything that anybody on the other side of that door tells
you. Remember, they want your food and torches, you need your food and
torches to survive.

[04/03/2003]

Mantra for today: "A firewall is not a panacea".

(This results from my conversation with our IT manager today
"They've discovered a flaw in Sendmail. Our mailserver is vulnerable,
and needs patching"

"But its behind the firewall"

"Yes, but the firewall is configured to let people talk to the mailserver,
so they can send us mail"

"erm....")


[24/02/2003]

Press release: Intention to cease support for Microsoft products

On 24th February 2003, Paul Norton declared his intention to withdraw
his support for all microsoft products. He cited what he called the
"ridiculous amount of patching required" in order to keep up with security
updates, Microsoft's seeming inability to program software which cannot
be abused by a buffer overflow, and Microsoft's apparent hostility (on
its web pages) for anyone using "an alternative browser".

He also stated "It is evident, by Microsoft's own admissions that in
this day and age, we require trustworthy computing. Microsoft have,
for the past decade, been delivering to me untrustworthy, and unstable
computing products. They have failed to learn from their mistakes. Its
time to draw a line in sand, make a stand, stand up for what's right,
and read Microsoft's last rites". The audience was not impressed with
his flurry of cliches.

In a separate disclosure to currently supported users, Mr Norton detailed
that windows and MS office support will tail off over the forthcoming
month, and assistance will be provided to any users making the transition
to Open-source alternatives.


[19/02/2003]

Lots of little unfinished things. I've got to get better at taking a
concept to its conclusion. There's far too may projects loitering in
that stage where I've proved my idea, and got bored with it.

I've ordered a snakeboard now. That'll give me less time to finish
projects. Particularly if I break my legs, and become immobile.

Work is boring, and sucky.

[05/02/2003]
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US

[03/02/2003]

Erm. Bored. I plan to, when I can be bothered, do something about my
sidebar code, which is, I reckon, pants. I plan to tell Orange they can
stick their contract, because I'm not getting as much usefullness out
of this phone as I would from a new hard drive every three months; add
to that the fact that the handset is f'd, and Orange's best offer was
"hmm, you've been with us for nearly three years now, and, oh, you're
still using your original handset, hmm, I think I can authorise 20% off
our over-inflated price". Well, their 20% off loyalty deal thing still
doesn't beat the marketplace price for a new contract. The only thing
I'll be sorry to lose is the everyday-50-ness of my contract, which you
just can't get anymore. I can't even find a new mobile contract that gets
you 1p/minute for calls off-peak after you've run out of free minutes.
  
I think generally, I'm stepping out of line, and saying "not for me,
not at that cost" on a lot of things. Maybe if I go far enough down this
road, I'll go and live in a commune and raise goats or something.

[16/01/2003]

You really do have to despair when you're trying to talk techinal with
a guy from the drawing office, and he looks at something you've written
on a diagram, and says "200um, what's that? What units are they?"

________________________________________________________________

Old plan entries at http://icculus.org/~luap/oldplan.txt

When this .plan was written: 2003-06-30 12:27:30
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