fidzu : Linux-to-go

Some time ago there was decision that BUG 1.x will not be supported with next version of BUG Linux. As a result I ended in situation when I worked on handling device which I never saw.

It was not first time - in OpenedHand times I had this quite often but it is not a problem because my "hardware park" covers nearly whole ARM family:

• armv4t (s3c2410 in Openmoko GTA01, EP3907 in Sim.One)
• armv5te (at91sam9263, at91sam9m10 on Atmel boards, PXA255 in Zaurus c760, Sheeva in Marvell Sheevaplug, omap1510 in Nokia 770 tablet, ST88n15 in NHK-15)
• armv6 (omap24xx in Nokia N810, i.mx31 in BUG 1.2/1.3)
• armv7a (omap3530 in BeagleBoard B7/C3 and in Nokia N900)

So I am able to test binaries on other hardware or even in QEMU.

But few days ago I got information that developer version of BUG 2.0 will be sent to me. To make me more happy I ordered few books from Amazon to get them with package (inside US I got free posting). And today package was delivered by FedEx courier (their tracking page said Friday as delivery day).

Package reminds why recycling is easy: UPS package from Amazon (the one with books which I ordered) was repacked and got FedEx papers:

But box itself is not interesting - stuff in matters. After taking books out I got lot of packing bubbles and my eyes were presented with first level of things:

And then second one:

Everything unboxed:

And again but this time without packaging. From left-top to right-left:

• BUGduino module
• camera module
• OMAP3 video module with HDMI and VGA outputs
• new LCD module
• LCD screen with touchscreen (for LCD module)
• battery
• BUG 2.0 dock with serial (miniUSB), Ethernet, USB host, JTAG connectors
• BUG 2.0 rev. A
• two BMI adapters
• BMI cable extender

Look at new modules. First goes BUGduino which is Arduino thing with BUG connection. I do not know how it works but I knew that John Connolly did some programming for it.

New LCD module - QVGA like before.

Video module with HDMI and VGA outputs. This one is BUG 2.0 only as it uses OMAP3 signals and needs BMI slot with video signals. Yes, new BUG has only one slot for video - two screens configuration is not possible anymore. But hey - you can even connect 150″ LCD ;)

New camera module. I do not remember how many Mpx it has (old one had 2Mpx).

BUG 2.0 itself. Notice two microSD slots - one will be used for system, second is for user. There are just two buttons now, no LCD, no joystick. Also buzzer got removed in favour of headphone connector.

New hardware requires new BUGDock. What got changed? Serial is now present as miniUSB connector instead of DB9 so is easier to use with today computers (not everyone has 7 serial ports in desktop). Power and headphones connectors were removed because on-board ones are reachable. And JTAG connector is present. To tell the true I like old dock more then current one. But thats mostly because of angle connector instead of flat one. Anyway before BUG 2.0 will hit market there will be new dock for it.

And thats how system can look. BUG 2.0 with Dock and two modules connected by adapters.

Now I am waiting for Bug Labs guys to appear in the office to get informations how to boot it ;D

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All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz BUG 2.0 arrived was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. Serial cables for BUG
2. New BUGbase - now with WiFi & Bluetooth
3. BUG has arrived

10 Mar 2010 3:53pm GMT

I'm worried about the EURO's M3 if a European version of the IMF (a EMF) is to be installed.

Nonetheless, I think the European community should do it just to strengthen Europe's economy. I'm not satisfied by Europe's economic strength: I want it to be undefeatable.

We must not let the IMF solve our problems. Europe might be a political dwarf, but we Europeans should show that we will solve our own problems. We're an adult composition of cultures with vast amounts of experience. We know how to solve any imaginable problem. And let's not, in our defeatism, pretend we don't.

A EMF is a commitment to future member states: Europe often asks them fundamental changes; economic strength is what Europe offers in return. This needs to come at a highest price: Greece will have to fix their deficit problem. Even if their entire population goes on strike. Greece will be an example for countries like my own: Belgium has to fix a serious deficit problem, too.

An EMF comes at an equally high price, and that frightens me a bit: I don't want the ECB to go as ballistic on money creation as the FED has been last two years. I want the EURO to be the strongest relevant currency mankind has ever created. No matter how insane the rest of the world thinks that ambition is: I believe that keeping the EURO's M3 in check is a key to creating a wealthy society in Europe.

Politically I want European nations to negotiate more and more often. The European Union is a political dwarf only because finding agreement is hard. But in the long run will our solution be the most negotiated, most tested on this planet.

Together we can deal with anything. That doesn't mean it'll be easy; it has never been easy: just seventy years ago we were still killing each other. We're all guilty of that one way or another. And before that it wasn't any better. Today, not that many people still care: "it wasn't me", right? So stop being a bitch about it, then.

It's time to let it be. It's time to start a new European century that will be better. With respect for all European cultures, languages, nations, nationalities, values, borders and interests.

But also a European century with economic responsibilities for each member. It's our strength: we figured out how to keep our population wealthy: let's continue doing so in the future.

08 Mar 2010 9:51pm GMT

It was the dawn of the 1970s, at the height of worldwide student protests against the Vietnam War, and a librarian stationed at a U.S. Information Agency post abroad had received bad news: A student group was threatening to burn down her library.

But the librarian had friends among the group of student activists who made the threat. Her response on first glance might seem either naïve or foolhardy - or both: She invited the group to use the library facilities for some of their meetings.

But she also brought Americans living in the country there to listen to them - and so engineered a dialogue instead of a confrontation.

In doing so, she was capitalizing on her personal relationship with the handful of student leaders she knew well enough to trust - and for them to trust her. The tactic opened new channels of mutual understanding, and it strengthened her friendship with the student leaders. The library was never touched.

(More available at the flash preview widget's page 21)

- Daniel Goleman, Working With Emotional Intelligence, Competencies of the stars. 1998

In Working with Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman explains several practical methods to improve the social skills of people. Before I bought this book a year or two ago, I read Daniel's first book Emotional Intelligence. This weekend I finally started reading Working With.

I recommend the section Some Misconceptions. Regretfully ain't this section available for display in the flash preview widget. Instead of violating copyright laws by typing it down here, I'm recommending to just buy the book.

You can find audiobooks online. The section about misconceptions is at track three. Track five talks about two computer programmers, which is very illustrative for many of my blog's readers (and possibly myself). I hope you wont illegally download using torrents. Instead, buy the material.

Also very interesting is this lecture by Daniel:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Here you can also find a Authors@Google talk by Daniel Goleman:

What distinguishes Daniel Goleman from old line proponents of positive thinking, however, is his grounding in psychology and neuroscience. Armed with a Ph.D in psychology from Harvard and a first-grade journalism background at the New York Times, Dr. Goleman has authored half a dozen books that explore the physical and chemical workings on the brain and their relationship with what we experience as everyday life.

- Peter Allen, director of Google university, introduction to Daniel Goleman. August 3, 2007

I hope readers of my blog will shun away from pseudo science when it comes to emotional and social intelligence, but instead read and learn from authors like Daniel Goleman. I also (still) recommend the books available at The Moral Brain by for example Dr. Jan Verplaetse.

07 Mar 2010 12:17pm GMT

Tinymail's co-maintainer Sergio Villar just released Tinymail's first release.

psst. I have inside information that I might not be allowed to share that 1.2 is being prepared already, and will have bodystructure and envelope summary fetch. And it'll fetch E-mail body content per requested MIME part, instead of always entire E-mails. Whoohoo!

05 Mar 2010 5:35pm GMT

Few days ago I decided to migrate from Ångström to Debian on my Sheevaplug. Fetched installer images, booted them and installed system to 4GB microSD card. All was fine.

System was running nicely until today…

MicroSD card started to generate timeouts, read/write errors and other not nice messages. End effect: not booting system. Now I started Ångström and plan to rescue as much as possible from card. Next attempt will be with rootfs on USB stick.

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All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz Sheeva SD controller + rootfs on SD == FAIL? was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. PC Engines Alix1c arrived
2. Reinstallation
3. WPA in Debian and Poky

02 Mar 2010 3:31pm GMT

You know about those guys that use your software against huge datasets like their entire filesystem, with thousands of files?

We do. His name is Tshepang Lekhonkhobe and we owe him a few beers for reporting to us many scalability issues.

Today we found and fixed such a scalability issue: the update query to reset the availability of file resources (this is for support for removable media) was causing at least a linear increase of VmRss usage per amount of file resources. For Tshepang's situation that meant 600 MB of VmRss. Jürg reduced this to 30 MB of peak VmRss in the same use-case, and a performance improvement from minutes to a second or two, three. Without memory fragmentation as glibc is returning almost all of the VmRss back to the kernel.

Thursday is our usual release day. I invite all of the 0.7 pioneers to test us with your huge filesystems, just like Tshepang always does.

So long and thanks for all the testing, Tshepang! I'm glad we finally found it.

02 Mar 2010 1:49pm GMT

We would rather suffer the visible costs of a few bad decisions than incur the many invisible costs that come from decisions made too slowly - or not at all - because of a stifling bureaucracy.

- Letter by Warren E. Buffett to the shareholders of Berkshire, February 26, 2010

01 Mar 2010 5:49pm GMT

In May last year the Freerunner had its debut in outer space. The Mobile Rocket Base department of the German Aerospace Center launched a research rocket into the aerospace (140Km height). On board was the pictured Freerunner. Although the metal case you can see on the picture is new and was not used.

The mission of the rocket was to experiment with materials physics under conditions of weightlessness. The Freerunner had nothing to do with this experiments and was only on board to verify that it survives the launch, travel and landing. Battery, GSM and GPS antenna has been removed before launch. Everything survived. During the flight the accelerometers have been used to collect measurements.

In May this year it will enjoy its second trip into space. The case was designed and build to offer space for the Freerunner as well as an extension board connected to it. The board is connected to the debug board connector of the Freerunner which offers a SPI and an I2C bus. It was designed to hold different sensors the Freerunner does not offer and is equipped with a BMP085 pressure sensor and two gyroscopes. The Melexis MLX90609 and the Sensonor SAR100.

Over the next month I'll working on drivers for these two gyroscopes and after the flight we will see if the chips survived and if the data they had produced will show that they are good enough for further testing.

All in all this shows pretty nicely how an open device with available schematics, CAD files and hardware interfaces can serve together with an open software stack for vertical markets. Be it for research purpose like in this case or a crazy business idea on the other side. The fact that you have all resources to understand the electrical design as well as being able to make changes over the complete software stack brings you into the position to easily adapt it for your needs.

Some more picture with a higher resolution can be found here.

UPDATE: Fix typos and rewrite some parts so people have a chance to understand it.

28 Feb 2010 2:40pm GMT

Oh my god... Looking at an AMR payload wrapped in RTP, wrapped in UDP, wrapped in IP... one will recognize that there is a +70% overhead on payload vs. header... The other thing is... the AMR payload can have a CRC or not but it is not indicated in the RTP header and must be signalized out of band... it took someone a while to figure it out. Hurray on having clever colleagues.

28 Feb 2010 11:45am GMT

I hope this post is educational and help the ones among us doing performance optimisations without any kind of measurement. If you do these things without a benchmark you are either a genuis or very likely your application is going to run slower. I'm not going to talk about performance analysis right now but tools like OProfile, callgrind, sysprof and speedprof are very handy utilities. The reason I'm writing this up is that I saw a performance regression in one of my testcase reductions and this is something which I don't appreciate and in general I see a lot of claims about performance tuning but little bit in regard to measurements and this part is very worrying.

For QtWebKit we have the performance repository with utilities, high level tests and something I labeled reductions. In detail we do have the following things:

1. 
   
2. Macros for benchmarking. I started with the QBENCHMARK macros but they didn't really provide what I needed and changing them turned out to be a task I didn't have time for. I create WEB_BENCHMARK macros that work the same as the QBENCHMARK macros. One of the benefits is to provide better statistics, it prints the mean, std deviation and these things at the end of the run. And it has a different metric for measuring time. I'm using the setitimer(2) syscall to measure the CPU time we are executing in userspace and kernelspace on behalf of the application. This metric is a robust way to avoid issues like CPU scheduling and such. It would be the wrong metric to measure latency and such though, as we are not executing anything when waiting.
   
   
3. Pick the area you want to optimize. With the QtWebKit performance repository we do have a set of reductions. These reductions consist of real code, a test pattern and test data. The real code is coming from WebCore and is driving Qt, the test pattern comes from loading real webpages. It is created by adding printf and such to the code and the test data is the data that was used when creating the test pattern. We do have these reductions for all image decoding operations we are doing on the webpages, for our font usage, for QTextLayout usage.
   The really awesome bit about these reductions is that they generate stable timings, are/should be fully deterministic. This allows to really measure any change I'm doing to let's say QImageReader and the decoders.
   
   

Using the setitimer(2) syscall we will have pretty accurate CPU usage of the benchmark, using the /lib/libmemusage.so of GLIBC we should have an accurate graph of the memory usage of the application. It is simple to create a benchmark, it is simple to run the benchmark, it is simple to run the benchmark with memory profiling. By looking both at CPU and Memory usage it will become pretty clear if and where you have tradeoffs between memory and CPU.

And I think that is the key of a benchmark. It must be simple so people can understand what is going on and it must be simple to execute so everyone can do their own measurements and verify your claims. And specially having a benchmark and having people verify your measurements is keeping you honest.

Finally the commit message should state that you have measured the change, it should show the result of the measurement and it should contain some interpretation. e.g. you are optimizing for memory usage and then a small CPU usage hit is acceptable...

28 Feb 2010 11:42am GMT

After Trolltech dropping the ball with the community back in the old days of Opie, I pretty much gave up on Qt (and C++) apart from accepting some contract work, so my C++/Qt skills would not get too rusty. Since my nightmares with getting something fluid out of Gtk+ (back in the Openmoko days), I did not have the chance to do much UI work - the freesmartphone.org middleware kept me busy enough.

I have been watching Qt progressing though, and ever since they introduced Qt Kinetic and QML it became very interesting for me again. QML looks like EFL's Edje been thought through - don't get me wrong, Edje was groundbreaking (as most of Rasterman's work) when it made its debut, however in my opinion it got stuck in the middle and never lived up to what I was expecting from it.

Once QML ships with Qt - hopefully in the next minor or at least major version of Qt, I will get back on doing some FOSS work on application level to complete creating a smart phone stack. That's going to be fun!

27 Feb 2010 3:44pm GMT

New versions of the Sid Player and the Module Player are now available via the AppStore. While Sid Player just received a minor update with some performance tweaks, Module Player received a major content and performance update. Here's the changelog:

• Artwork: Module Player has a blueish tone now which leads to better identification if you also own Sid Player and Pokey Player.
• Performance: Database access has been completely rewritten for improved performance and less impact on the audio engine. It also helps with battery life.
• Database: Module Player now doubles the amount of available songs, we have added 70.000 songs in multiple new formats, such as 669, ABC, AMF, AMS, DBM, DMF, FAR, IT, J2B, MDL, MID, MT2, OKT, PSM, S3M, STM, ULT, UMX, WAV, and XM. The database has also been updated to incorporate new MOD songs uploaded since the last release.
• Authors & Songs: The number of songs per author is now being displayed next to the composer. Since there are so many song formats now, the type of song is shown next to the song title.
• Playlists: Double tapping on a song moves you into the author's view where you can see all songs of said authors. You can shuffle any of the playlists now. The random playlist will come up with new titles on every query.
• Player: The currently played pattern and row is now shown. Release notes longer than the screen width are now presented in old-style scrolltext fashion. We also added a seek bar (#1 feature wish), so you can jump to your favourite parts of the songs. The Oscillator view has been rewritten in OpenGL for improved performance. If you still experience audio glitches, you can turn off the Oscillator in the settings.

I also finally took the time to work on an updated website for our team. Since I do not fancy direct HTML or CSS editing any more (I'm a big fan of frontends of all kinds), I did a small survey on website creation tools. I have settled down on Freeway Pro now, which is really amazing and allows me to realize my layout without having to care about the nitty details.

Update: Sid Player Pro has just been updated as well, receiving all the internal goodies from the Mod Player plus an update to HVSC.52+PSID

27 Feb 2010 9:59am GMT

Something like 14 months ago I had no idea about GSM protocols, 12 months ago I was implementing paging for OpenBSC, beginning from last summer I explored SS7 and SCCP, wrote a simple SCCP stack for On-Waves. Started to implement the GSM A Interface for OpenBSC, the last week I saw myself learning more about MTP Level3. With the Osmocom I start to explore GSM Layer 1 (TDMA, bursts, syncing), GSM Layer 2 (LAPDm) and on GSM Layer3 we mostly see the counterpart of OpenBSC.

I feel like I am back to school (in the positive way) and I have learned a lot in the recent year and looking forward I will learn more about protocols used at the MSC side and such. I'm very excited about what the future is going to be like. Will we have a complete GSM Network (BTS, BSC, MSC, MS, SMSC, GPRS gateway(s)) with GPL software by the end of the year?

26 Feb 2010 1:32pm GMT

• On MicroSD Problems « bunnie's blog
  Is your Kingston MicroSD card original or fake?

26 Feb 2010 8:00am GMT

We both agree that Nigel Farage is a complete moron.

Perhaps we should put a damp rag like the one he mentions in his mouth next time he opens it?

Nigel Farage, you're an disgrace to yourself. The European parliament is no place for personal attacks, and you aren't fit to carry the title Member of the European Parliament. Please keep the honour to yourself and resign.

Every sensible person outside of the U.K. thinks you should. Even the Euro skeptics do. You're an embarrassment for your country and its culture, so I hope for the people in the U.K. that they'll kick you out of politics.

I fear you're just playing the populist card, and that you'll even get votes for this from other morons.

25 Feb 2010 12:23pm GMT

Few days ago I found Gource - a software version control visualization tool. Software projects are displayed as an animated tree with the root directory of the project at its centre. Directories appear as branches with files as leaves. Developers can be seen working on the tree at the times they contributed to the project.

I started it against OpenEmbedded repository and was amazed. Looks really nice but also shows that we are too big project for that tool. After experimenting with arguments I generated short video which shows how we worked:

It took over 9 (nine!) hours to generate but was worth it. Especially I suggest to check moment when stable/2009 branch was created (1st April 2009) - it is best seen with frame by frame mode.

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All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz Gource + OpenEmbedded was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. My OpenEmbedded environment II
2. ELC-E 2009
3. Palm SDK has leaked

23 Feb 2010 10:03am GMT