Back from Chicago for good now. Had a presentation out in Cincinnati for another project last week. I really don't want to be travelling back and forward again for another 3 years. I do have a project to work on back here so at least I'm off the non-billable radar screen.

Just sent back the Thinkpad T23 to IBM that they leant me to hunt down the bug. I have a solution for the problem, its not particularly nice, so I've added an extra module parameter called thinkpad_bug that can be set to enable the workaround.

On another front I've been play with monkeyglobs (a javascript wrapper for OpenGL) recently. Lots of fun, hacked in support for multiple graphic formats and converted a load of demos to test out the code.

Current mission is to get md3 support in the code. (This is the format Quake 3 uses for the characters). I have the object model built now, just need to write the javascript wrappers to render the model. This took a lot longer than I expected. I was judging a couple of days to get the model together, instead it took a whole week of serious coding (6+ hrs a day) to get it working. Most of the initial time was me getting up to speed with the jsapi though. I can now create classes and subclasses in a flash.

Received a nice Thinkpad T23 to try to fix the cardbus adapter issue with these machines. It only took me around 4 hrs to track the problem down. The open command on the adapter takes anywhere from 5 - 40 seconds to complete and during this time there is no activity on the pci bus. So the bios power management system decides to put the adapter into a sleep state, and, of course, as the adapter is in the sleep state we never get the open completed interrupt.

I already have a really nasty hack to get around this, but it holds the kernel hostage during the open command. As this may be a 40 second period, that's completely unacceptable. Over the next few weeks I will be delving into the olympic tech docs and the pci power management specs to try to come up with the correct solution (i.e. somehow tell the bios not to power down the adapter).

Wahhey, problem on the thinkpads solved. Turns out to be a bios setting that must be turned off. Its the PCI Power Management that is causing the problem. Personally I think the kernel should be able to handle this properly, i.e. power back up the pci subsystem to enable access to the adapters.
This may take some hacking around to achieve, so for the moment if you're having this problem, simply turn off the setting in the bios.

OK, last fix to olympic enabled a subtle bug to surface when network_monitor was enabled.The bug has been there all the time, but before the last patch the problem (an out of bounds mmio write) was ignored.
I'm going to wait a little while before sending this one off, with all the patches floating around at the moment, the previous updates haven't fully percolated into the final kernel releases. Once its there, I'll update with the patch. If you've having the problem, simply turn off the network_monitor mode in the interim.

Still have the issue with the cardbus adapters on certain thinkpads, this is not a pleasant one to hunt down. I don't have a thinkpad to emulate the problem with and working with somebody who does via email is tough. I'm still not convinced that the cardbus controller/subsytem isn't to blame somewhere along the line.

Olympic and ibmtr updates have made it into the pre-release kernels (there are so many of them now, from Marcelo's rc-, to Alan's rc-ac, to Davej's -dj and everybody else's that I'm not going to even try to list them all. Unfortunately the first olympic patch has caused a problem with one person's machine. Now the driver actively reports error conditions rather than just subtly ignoring them as it used to. This one machine seems to have hit upon one of the errors. Not good. Hopefully this will be an isolated case, if not it'll be back to the grindstone to create a driver that will handle all this.

Finally, only more than a year after finishing it, I updated the 3c359 driver to all the latest api's and sent it off for inclusion in the kernel. Alan and Jeff have picked it up and hopefully it will be in a kernel near you very shortly.

Perhaps more importantly though, I took and passed my private pilot check ride on Friday, so now I'm a fully qualified private pilot. (Kinda of scary really that they'll trust me with a plane !!).