Older blog entries for mike750 (starting at number 30)

Couple of updates to ibmtr and olympic as part of the kernel janitor effort. Basically getting rid of old api call that are going to disappear in the future.

Started playing with Bitkeeper as this now appears to be the source tree control tool of choice. This may work out quite well, I've got several patches that need to go into the kernel and using bk to manage the process may make my life easier.

Took the written test for the private pilot and passed that fine, now its just the check ride...eeek !!
Last week was on the way back from Reading at night and Philadelphia ATC cleared us to fly right over the top of the city at 2,6000ft. The view was great, planes coming in to land at Philadelphia International on our left and planes taking off to our right.

Several patches are available from the site for minor updates to the token ring code. One of the more important patches is the support for big endian machines in ibmtr. I've now got two independant patches for this, one developed for the ppc and one for parisc. Of course, they both take a different approach to the situation and are not interoperable. I've got to got through the patches and get a consolidated approach to the issue.

Started putting up the old linux-tr mailing list archives on the web site for people to look at. It's quite amusing and informative looking back at the old posts and realizing just how far the token ring support has come over the past 5 years.

Still working on the flying, getting close to taking the check ride now. Hopefully this will be in February some time so I'll have my license after that.

Still working away in Chicago during the week. Its been a year now from what should have been a 6 month assignment. The travelling up and down is definately getting tiring, but its better than not being employed at all.

Long time, no diary update. Work has been far too busy over the past few months and I've had very little time to work on the Linux stuff. Still been keeping the web site up to date and answering questions on the mailing list.

Now that the 2.5 development kernels have started its time to polish up the outstanding patches (the new source routing and 3c359 driver mainly) and get them send off.

Flying is coming along nicely, went solo a couple of weeks ago. Found some very nice open source flight planning software so I'm getting involved with updating it.

Right, outlaws have left after a three week invasion, life can get back to some semblance of normality now.

I've started learning to fly so this has given me all sorts of new "toys" to acquire and opportunities to hack up some new code just for aviation stuff. I'm thinking of doing an fplan equivalent for the Psion Revo at the moment.

On the token-ring front, things are fairly quiet at the moment, I've still got to track down a performance problem with the ISA Turbo adapters and once 2.5 starts I'll update the 3c359 driver and submit it.

Freaky, Friday 13th and I've got to catch a plane today, could be fun.

Been fighting with thinkpads recently. It appears that on the a22p the internal ethernet adapter is hardwired to irq 11. Failure to load a driver or activate the adapter stops all other interrupts from getting to the cardbus subsystem.
Need to see if there is a way to move the cardbus stuff around to use a different interrupt.

On a more positive note, all the latest olympic changes made it into 2.4.6, the ibmtr changes are still in the -ac patches and hopefully will make it in for 2.4.7.

Well, I'm shocked, my flight was 3 hours late on Friday so didn't get home until 4am. Then had to get up at 6am to take the car to the garage only to be told it would cost $1200 to fix the air conditioning. As the car is only worth $3000, it ain't getting fixed.

Due to this spent most of Saturday asleep and then spent 2 hours cutting the grass Sunday morning and went out to the wench's bosses place in the afternoon.

So, I still haven't got around to installing Linux on the HP even though I've now got hold of a cdrom that should boot the sucker.

More fun today, the latest pam packages from debian screw up badly, no login, no nothing. Not impressed.

Got delayed for over a day by the airline on Friday. Didn't make it back home until 1am Sunday morning. Not a happy camper

The 4.3g barracuda drive for the HP712/80 turned up so I spent some time installing it (exacto knife to the hard drive supports). Fired up hpux, it found the extra drive no trouble at all.

So, onto the installation of hppa-linux 0.9. No matter what I did, the machine would not boot from the cd. Remembering deep back into the subconscious, I seem to remember that the cd-rom drive has to have a certain block size to boot the machine. So onto ebay we go, found an old 4x toshiba external for $12.50 that should do the trick. Hopefully this will be delivered this week so I can try to get this up and running next weekend.

Received comments back from Anton for the ppc changes to ibmtr, just a small change and then it looks good. I really need to get an older powerbook so that I can test all this stuff, unfortunately only the later models support cardbus as well, and they are still too expensive.

I've actually had to do some work this week, so not too much on the hacking front.

Beat up framebuffer and it still won't work on the laptop. Seems that the ATI Mach64 chipset in the laptop is not properly supported, I just get a blank screen. Everything else continues working, so I'm listening to the harddrive so I can work out when it has finally booted and is at a login prompt to be able to reboot and go back to a regular kernel. This is annoying because mplayer won't scale the image on regular x11 output.

Olympic patch sent off for inclusion :) Of course there is the next stage of work to start on for olympic now.

Fixed up net-tools properly, it will now allow setting of the token ring hardware address (LAA) properly for both the 2.2 and 2.4 kernels.Although I did have to grep through all the 2.3 patches to find out at which point we changed the token ring definittion.

Time to relax for the afternoon and play with some gtk/ui stuff.

Web site update done. All uploaded and operational. Couple of dead links found, but nothing drastic. The source web site is completely dynamic now, so updating is just a matter of updating the database and not hacking raw html anymore :)

Final testing of the latest olympic patch is underway. This patch cleans up the driver a little and add the copy packet if len < 1500 to stop the socket code dropping all our packets.If this doesn't die it's getting submitted this weekend.

Next task for olympic is to enable the sending of mac frames and enhance the error routines, i.e. get the adapter to close gracefully and retry to open if possible.

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