Archive for July, 2006

M minus 4 days and counting..

Tuesday, July 18th, 2006

I’m getting married on Saturday. I’m pretty excited about it, especially after most of the major organisation has been finalised. But I’ve learned a few things during the organisation.

Fedora sucks if you upgrade it. I tend to follow a stable->RawHide for a while-> next stable pattern for my desktop Linux usage. This is perfectly fine for Ubuntu, but not for Fedora. It seems that apt just beats rpm for this kind of usage. So I’m going to wipe my work system and reinstall Fedora from scratch when I get back.

My laptop is dead. It’s about four years old, but it died. I’ve removed the hard-drive and the RAM and I hope to get another laptop as soon as I can afford one. Living without a laptop sucks….well I do have a laptop, Lori’s old G3 iBook. Unfortunatly it thinks that the current date is 1904.

1904 was not a good year for laptops. I think I’ve run across two bugs here. (a) a failing internal clock should either run slow or default to 1st Jan 1970 and (b) D-Bus cares too much about what year it is. The first is a hardware or kernel issue. I’ll have a look at it when I get back. The second I can definatly fix, and will, um….soon (after I get married). I should add that the iBook runs Ubuntu (naturally).

Apart from that I’ve put aside all course development until after the honeymoon. Lori and I havn’t been on holiday in about four years, so we splashed out to go to Dubai and then the Maldives. I really want to go to some museums in Dubai, so if anyone has some good suggestions feel free to leave them. I think I’ll just sit down and relax in the Maldives.

I hope to put up some pictures of the wedding soon after, but I may not get to it.

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M minus ten days and counting

Wednesday, July 12th, 2006

I’m getting married in ten days. Unsurprisingly I’ve little else on my mind. However I do still have to work.

I just submitted a camera-ready copy of my paper to PPIG2006 (change history is available at ‘svn co http://foss.it.brighton.ac.uk/svn/ppig2006/ppig2006-release’). I think it’s a good paper, but it needs to be developed over a longer term, which is something that I want to do.

I’ve also inherited next years real-time systems course. Which places me in a strange position. I’m going to blog about it but….. Some of the techniques I’ll be using to teach the course are experimental. The problem is with the “Show no fear” mantra, where lecturers are advised not to show that they are non-expert in an area or that they make mistakes. I may use a technique that turns out to be a mistake. If I don’t blog I can always “show no fear” and point-blank refuse to accept that I made a mistake, if I do blog I may be land in some interesting situations. I’m willing to trust that students want the best from me that I can provide, and I’m willing to trust that they understand that in order to do this I have to push the limits of my knowledge, technical skills and teaching skills. Basically, I want to turn this away from me teaching the students and more towards having a conversation with the students. In this way they can tell me how they learn best and I can accommodate them.

So at the moment the set-up for real-time systems reflects my wish that students actually get down and dirty with a real time system. In order to do this we’ll be using RTLinux on ARM emulated by Qemu. I’m getting two ARM development boards (thanks JD) and I have two robotic armatures. I want to “simulate” the control rods in a nuclear power plant using the armatures and a childrens’ toy (you know the one where kids get to put cylinders into cylindrical holes). So we’ll see how this all goes :)

Posted in General, Teaching | No Comments »

Linux 2006 conference rocked

Monday, July 3rd, 2006

What a great conference. I learned a hell of a lot and met a lot of cool interesting people. I had been so busy with correcting exams and writing a few papers that I’ve neglected to post the graphics of the visualisation lab that I presented at linux 2006.

This
* Planet Penguin Racer
is a 14Mb image of Planet Penguin racer (formerly TuxRacer) running on the visualisation cluster. The paper is here
* linux 2006 paper
The paper is not the best written paper I’ve ever produced as it was mostly written the days after my stag night!

Got lots of useful feedback from a mad Norn’ Irish Therapy? loving kernel hacker. The other Debian people were encouraging me to package some of the stuff that I’ve been working on. And one of them in particular, Ellie, seemed to enjoy my presentation.

So my plan for the next week is to finish a paper, work on the lab and go get married. After that I’m going to fix Linux, fix Open Office, fix the U.N. and finsh my Ph.D.

Aidan…enthusiastic on a Monday morning…even before coffee!

Posted in General, Gnome, Teaching | 3 Comments »