Older blog entries for claudio (starting at number 91)

Ah! Finally finished that robot dynamics thesis. I'm back to life! No more Recursive Newton-Euler and Composite Rigid-Body Method! Bwahahaha!

Erm.. wait. I still have to present it and stuff. Blah.

You are on the way to destruction!!

Notes regarding the past few days:

  • Got a new machine at Conectiva and installed a fresh 6.0 (the old machine collapsed , disk AND mobo). GRUB is a bit strange at first but I'll get used to it (or so I hope). I installed only the essential packages and got the rest using APT. The new machine has an OHCI controller, so I'll finally be able to play with the OHCI drivers.
  • Writing the dissertation. Found an error in the previous data sets, so I ran all the experiments once again.
  • Tried FreeSCI and XRally on the PowerPC machine.
  • Updating Conectiva's aptitude RPM to 0.0.7.11.
  • DSL kicks ass. It's not exactly fast, affordable or reliable, but it's way better than dial-up! :)
  • The dissertation deadline approaches. Don't panic. Don't panic.

Notes regarding the past few days:

  • The DSL link is fine now. Of course the telco will now make external modems available for half the price I paid for mine, but who cares.
  • Back to USB devel. Now reading docs and getting in sync. Maybe we can build a cheap protocol analyser using the host-to-host cable and a windows box.
  • Thesis. Rewrote a chapter, reorganizing stuff. Chapters 1, 2, and 4 are pretty much done, must finish 3 and plot the graphs for 5. Chapter 6 is almost complete too.
  • Playing with QoS and sch_cbq. Let's see the difference it will make.
  • Fixed intro/hiscores music in XRally.
  • Met some old kindergarten classmates :) Ouch, they're really OLD!
9 Nov 2000 (updated 9 Nov 2000 at 19:14 UTC) »

After focusing all my efforts on Conectiva, and to put my DSL connection to work, it's time to finish my thesis once and for all. It seems that DSL is finally working as expected (well, sort of, I'm still experiencing some frequent LCP timeouts and stuff. But it works! Oh boy.).

So, the thesis. Finish it. Collect data. Write. Once and for all. Hmm... new South Park season... No! Thesis. Thesis. Finish it!

Interesting news from the DSL front (and it seems, from wainstead's diary, that DSL is sort of a nightmare everywhere).

So my DSL link stopped working, and I called tech support again. They came to measure my line with a lot of nifty gadgets and declared it perfect. To my surprise, my modem actually sync'd after the test, and the tech guy smiled in the "I told you, stupid user" way. BUT -- it stopped working after the first modem reboot. Hmm. Only then they actually believed thet "may need to check" their perfect equipment. Telcos are stupid everywhere *sigh*.

The diagnostic is that Lucent Stinger DSL concentrators doesn't interoperate well with 3Com Homeconnect Dual Link modems -- no comments about the Lucent and 3Com Corporation design specification for ADSL interoperability, which seems to be vapour, like the 3Com concerns on interoperability (either that, or those telco guys are too stupid to know how to configure their own equipment):

In the effort to make interoperability a reality 3Com has announced agreements with several central office equipment vendors. These agreements call for 3Com to perform a variety of tests to ensure interoperability between the central office and 3Com's customer premise equipment. Current ADSL interoperability partners include Advanced Fibre Communications (AFC), Alcatel, Diamond Lane/Nokia, Lucent, Nortel, Newbridge and Redback Networks.
And they say more (heh, this part is kinda funny!):
3Com strives to achieve interoperability with all leading central office equipment vendors. The ultimate goal is to allow anyone who is qualified for ADSL service to use 3Com ADSL Modems at their home or office. It won't matter what equipment is at the central office'a 3Com ADSL modem will "talk" with it.
For some reason I'm believing more and more in the fact that the industry isn't able to follow standards. They're too dumb for that.

Woohoo!

Starvin-Marvin> show atm status

ATM StatusReport:

  • Cell delineation YES
  • Rx No Pkt Avail 0
  • Rx Bad Vpi or Vci 2
Starvin-Marvin> show adsl transceiver_status

ADSL Transceiver Status Report:

  • Operational Mode: operational

  • Attenuation Upstream: 31.5dB
  • Attenuation Downstream: 37.0dB

  • Noise Margin Upstream: 28.0dB
  • Noise Margin Downstream: 34.5dB

  • Transmit Power (ATUR):10.5dBm
  • Transmit Power (ATUC): 19.0dBm

  • Actual Negotiated Downstream Baud Rate: 256000bps
  • Actual Negotiated Upstream Baud Rate: 64000bps

Hmm. Third day with broken phone. Luckily I still have fresh water and electricity. The quality of the local telco's service really really sucks :\

On the other hand, TIM promptly replaced my years-old Nokia 6120 for a shiny new phone, with a better firmware (6110/6160?), new warranty and all, no questions asked after I complained about not being able to use my phone (yes, I spent the week without a mobile phone too). What a difference in the way these two companies solve the client's problems! Applause for TIM, thumbs down (boo! hiss!) to BrasilTelecom.

Ok, it's time to sharpen a few rocks and go out and hunt something for dinner, a mamooth maybe. Tonight I'll paint more hunt scenes in the cave walls, and with luck I'll even discover fire!

AAARGH!

I hate this damn stupid fscking morons from the local telco. Not only they didn't fix my DSL line, they damaged my voice line as well! Aaargh! These incompetent idiots should have their testicles squeezed with nutcrackers, each rib broken in four parts and their knee and jaw bones surgically removed, wrapped with fancy paper and ribbons and sent to their families for Christmas!

Blah >:(

Oct 22 02:21:03 mrhankey At 05:06:31, Facility "VATM Driver", Level "UNUSUAL":: ATM Link Up - Cell Delineation detected.
Oct 22 02:21:03 mrhankey At 05:06:32, Facility "VATM Driver", Level "UNUSUAL":: ATM Link Down - Cell Delineation lost.
Oct 22 02:21:03 mrhankey At 05:06:32, Facility "PPPoE", Level "UNUSUAL":: POE_PPP: Connection DOWN to telco.
Oct 22 02:21:03 mrhankey At 05:06:32, Facility "PPPoE", Level "UNUSUAL":: ../../src/poe_main.c: PPPoe Drop Connection Rejected, (bad status)

Blargh.

19 Oct 2000 (updated 19 Oct 2000 at 00:19 UTC) »

Ohboyohboyohboy. After three long months, I'm finally receiving my DSL modem. Already got a bunch of microfilters, installed PPPoE and set up an account at DynDNS. I can't wait to have a semi-decent broadband link up and running.

Fixed a couple of bloopers in the transaction progress bar in rpm, packaged the new aptitude and a fresh CVS snapshot of the RPM-enabled APT. apt-get still spits out some weird percentages and reports bad installed package sizes, and I expect to squish these bugs tomorrow. Scheduled for a future release: a more sophisticated dependency checking algorithm (rpmlib's isn't exactly fast, and doesn't seem to be completely bug-free).

The strange hardware zoo is growing at Conectiva. Aris dumped his PC workstation and installed an old Sparc SLC (mono, of course). At my left is pcpa's Xinerama monster. USB ethernet and wireless stuff are gaining popularity. Also in the neighbourhood: aris' Philips Velo running Linux, an iMac DV with Debian, a rackmount Compaq server, Happy Hacking keyboards, Sony VAIOs, MP3 players, nerf guns, and an impressive pile of empty coke cans.

Let's see how usbmgr deals with mice hot-plugging in X. If it doesn't work out of the box, I have a cheat ready >:)

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