The Perpetual Notion

20111216

Yum ;-)

A nearly-vegan pad thai (no eggs, but crab & otherwise some fish sauce).

20111129

I just installed & tweeked Koush's Cyanogen Mod 9 alpha 11 for my Nexus S running Ice Cream Sandwich from AOSP. You can read his original message on the XDA forums.

For an engineering build it's running quite smoothly. I'm certainly looking forward to mirroring his git and building a userdebug variant. Typically this speeds up most aspects of the UI and other software since debug messages are less frequent.

A few pointers:

If you feel that the boot animation is continuing infinitely, you probably forgot to erase the data partition (I did, originally)
If you like Google Car Home, which is a great home-replacement while driving, then install it manually from a backed-up apk and install the 3rd party Car Mode Control app. The original google car home will install, but it is claimed not to work with ICS and does not show up in the launcher so there is no way to use it unless Car Mode Control is installed.
If you encounter "Unfortunately, Google TTS Engine has stopped" Select PicoTTS to get Navigation and My Tracks to work.

20111111

An Update

Just to dispel any confusion that might arise if people google me to dig up 'dirt'.

Yes, I am in fact single again. Yes, there may be photos of me & my ex floating around on the interwebs that seem to be very recent - and they are! I only did become single again recently, and it was a bit sudden for me too!

So is life, however, and it does go on, as they say.

It's actually really surprising how little I'm blogging these days, with the major shift changing from blogging to micro-blogging via Twitter, FaceBook, and Google+ . Sorry if I haven't been terribly vocal.

Just thought I would post an update.

Ciao!

C

20110831

Google Nexus S Android Phone Suffers USB Death

Today I am a very lucky guy, in spite of the fact that the USB OTG functionality on my Google Nexus S has just vanished. Why does that make me lucky? Well, it doesn't, but luckily I had ordered a second Nexus S that works properly with Canadian HSDPA frequencies on the Rogers network, and it arrived literally the same second that my old Nexus S stopped working. Total coincidence... I think.

Actually, I should be more specific - nothing on the old phone has stopped working except for the USB OTG controller. So when I plug my in my phone to my workstation, I receive "unable to enumerate device on port... " under Linux and "USB Device Not Recognized" under Windows 7. In layman's terms, my phone no longer works as a USB disk.

Being a clever hacker, I managed to get the dmesg output on my Nexus S, which I hope will be of some use for people at either Google or Samsung. The source code for the Nexus S (codenamed crespo) is available, so I might look into it further some time later.

In reference to the dmesg output below,

"The FSA9480 chip is used on some Samsung phones to detect various accessories using sensing resistors on the ID pin of the USB port." [1]

It's likely an authentication chip - there are several vendors that provide something similar. The datasheet is only available under NDA of course. Naturally, I've tried several cables, and several different workstations, to no avail. There are many layers of software and electronics at work (or rather not at work) here, so without some chip documentation / resources, there's not really a way that I can debug this just using the source code of the Linux driver.

But just to clarify - anytime an 'err -6' appears, that corresponds to with -ENXIO "No such device or address", and anytime 'err -5' appears, it corresponds to -EIO "I/O error", so the outlook is not good. It's likely that the chip in question had a bad solder joint and is not powering up with the rest of the phone, or it experienced a "massive" current spike from my laptop that it couldn't handle.

I believe my device is still under warranty though, so I'll certainly be shipping it back for repair soon.

The strangest part of this whole thing is that I've kept my phone in pristine condition, which (sadly) suggests that the design quality of this Nexus S was lacking, in spite of what Google has said in various marketing videos. It could also be Fairchild's fault, if in fact it turned out to be an ESD issue. Anything that's connected on the USB should be able to handle 'typical' levels of ESD from a PC's USB pins.

[ 2066.560942] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x0, dev2: 0x0

[ 2068.234132] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

[ 2068.362855] fsa9480 7-0025: fsa9480_irq_thread: err -6

[ 2068.363813] fsa9480 7-0025: fsa9480_detect_dev: err -6

[ 2068.363919] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0xfa, dev2: 0xff

[ 2068.374642] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

...

[ 2068.377227] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

[ 2068.377957] i2c i2c-7: sendbytes: NAK bailout.

[ 2068.378051] fsa9480 7-0025: fsa9480_reg_init: err -5

[ 2068.379090] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

...

[ 2068.975317] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

[ 2068.977052] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x1f, dev2: 0xff

[ 2068.978903] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

...

[ 2068.991221] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

[ 2068.992016] i2c i2c-7: sendbytes: NAK bailout.

[ 2068.992109] fsa9480 7-0025: fsa9480_reg_init: err -5

[ 2068.993178] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

[ 2068.994968] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

...

[ 2069.003127] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

[ 2069.004982] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x3

[ 2069.006708] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

[ 2069.008463] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

[ 2069.009962] i2c i2c-7: sendbytes: NAK bailout.

[ 2069.010054] fsa9480 7-0025: fsa9480_reg_init: err -5

[ 2069.010498] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

...

[ 2069.012253] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

[ 2069.014000] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x1f

[ 2069.015793] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

...

[ 2069.035247] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

[ 2069.037069] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0xff, dev2: 0xff

[ 2069.038796] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

...

[ 2069.041289] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

[ 2069.043017] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0xff

[ 2069.044765] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

...

[ 2069.048313] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

[ 2069.050040] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x17, dev2: 0xff

[ 2069.051853] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

...

[ 2069.060308] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

[ 2069.062035] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x13, dev2: 0xff

[ 2069.063858] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

...

[ 2069.067409] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

[ 2069.068963] i2c i2c-7: sendbytes: NAK bailout.

[ 2069.069124] fsa9480 7-0025: fsa9480_detect_dev: err -5

[ 2069.069209] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0xfb, dev2: 0xff

[ 2069.070971] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

...

[ 2069.091186] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

[ 2069.092983] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x3

[ 2069.094731] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

...

[ 2069.104292] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

[ 2069.105018] i2c i2c-7: sendbytes: NAK bailout.

[ 2069.105108] fsa9480 7-0025: fsa9480_reg_init: err -5

[ 2069.106102] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

...

[ 2070.150280] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

[ 2070.152079] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0xff, dev2: 0xff

[ 2070.153836] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

...

[ 2070.166528] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

[ 2070.167026] i2c i2c-7: sendbytes: NAK bailout.

[ 2070.167188] fsa9480 7-0025: fsa9480_reg_init: err -5

[ 2070.168389] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

...

[ 2070.192257] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

[ 2070.193986] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x1

[ 2070.195786] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

...

[ 2070.210682] fsa9480 7-0025: dev1: 0x10, dev2: 0x0

[1] http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/13041/how-do-i-make-the-fairchild-fsa9280-fsa9480-fsa880-boot-pin-trigger-samsung-gal

20110829

UNetbootin on Mac OS X

Just in case anyone wants to use UNetbootin to create e.g. an Ubuntu Live USB device and it isn't working, there are two key steps that are not performed by the UNetbootin binary for OS X.

After downloading the ISO, use Disk Utility to partition your USB device. Ensure that you've selected Options -> MBR . After formatting the disk...

1) Ensure that you've marked the partition active

fdisk -e /dev/rdisk1

f 1

 write

exit

2) Download syslinux and write the critical mbr binary your device.

dd conv=notrunc bs=440 count=1 if=mbr.bin of=/dev/rdisk1

After that, just use UNetbootin as usual.

20110803

OMAP3 SGX EGL Drivers Add Wayland Support

Just in case anyone was wondering this is a pretty big deal. Imagination Technologies, whose 3D graphics cores drive most mobile displays, has announced support for the EGL_KHR_Image_Pixmap extensions used by the Wayland display server protocol.

For those who haven't been following, Wayland has gained a lot of momentum as a non-X-based window compositor for Linux-based operating systems. Wayland facilitates client-side rendering, similar to the Quartz compositor used in Mac OS X. It has since been adopted by Meego and Ubuntu as their preferred compositing backend.

The stated goal of Wayland is to provide a user experience where "every frame is perfect". This is a rather necessary and long overdue improvement since traditional Linux desktops based on the aging X11 display server tended to suffer from artifacts such as tearing, visible redrawing, and flickering. However, Wayland retains the capabilities to encapsulate the traditional rootless X server for legacy applications. Wayland rendering targets already exist for popular toolkits such as GTK+ and QT among others.

Check out the video below for a (slightly older) demo.

Today, Wayland support exists for graphics chipsets from Intel, AMD, NVIDIA (nouveau) and SGX (OMAP3) platforms. OMAP4 support probably isn't far off.

I guess it's time to fire up the old BeagleBoard ;-) Incidentally, happy birthday!

20110726

Canon Printer Drivers under Mac OS X

20110706

Parc Oka for the Canada Day Long Weekend

We went on a bike & camping trip to Parc Oka for the weekend and documented the trip with some photos.

Originally we were supposed to take a train to and from Deux Montagnes, which would have made this trip very easy, but the AMT had some unannounced line work. So Erin threw together some last minute improvisational plans and the "to" portion of our trip included a horrific STM then CIT commuting.

We ended up biking from St. Eustache, which was only about 5 km further. Taking the AMT from Deux Montagnes on the way back was much more accommodating for our bikes, and our bike-seats and Croozer full of camping gear / 3yo child.

I also traced our trip using MyTracks for Android, and it worked quite well. Considering how much I'm on my bike, MyTracks is practically like a personal trainer given that it records all of the stats you can imagine (latitude, longitude, bearing, speed, elevation, time, etc).

It was the perfect weekend to get away, and Parc Oka was awesome. The water provided an excellent escape from the heat that weekend.

20110524

The End of an Era

Today I arrived at my office (which just happens to be wherever I sit down with my notebook), and was quite contented to read that Linus has seemingly decided to move on to the next major version change. This will probably also include a change in the numbering system that is currently used for kernal releases, much to the appeal of GregKH.

I have been using Linux since around the 2.2 days, and have been actively hacking / employed with Linux related projects on various architectures with both the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. I guess you could say that I have Linus and many other kernel, arch, & subsystem maintainers to thank for that.
Sentimentally speaking, I find it immensely cool that I am currently writing this blog post using a phone running Linux/Android released by a company that leveraged the power of Linux for a significant part of their commercial success. If anyone is wondering, the phone is a Nexus S and the company is Google.

Here's to all Linux hackers, wherever your workstations may be.

update-20110529: 3.0!

20110503

Time for Change

Lately I've been trying to write less political editorial on my blog, but I'll make an exception just for today.

There are some things that I'm very (indeed, historically) happy about after yesterday's Canadian Federal Election and there are things that also make my skin crawl. What those things are is an exercise for the reader to determine.

Regardless of the winners and losers of the election, I wanted to write about the topic of proportional representation in the house of commons.

Most of the time

... when somebody argues against proportional representation, they usually make the argument that small communities will suffer if they do not share the same ideals as the majority

That argument has some merit particularly when considering the right to maintain a cultural identity or a specific type of business or industry in Canada.

In this context, there are some cases where locality does play a major role. However, for the most part, Canada is everywhere-diverse in terms of culture. Almost everywhere in the country, there are people celebrating and learning about their own and different cultures, together as Canadians.

In terms of industrial locality, the issue can be fairly easily solved by transferring more power to the provincial governments and by supporting particular focus groups rather than dismantling them. It also affords voters the privilege of having an equal voice at the federal level.

That is the argument... most of the time.

Occasionally

... when somebody argues for proportional representation, they usually make the argument that large communities will suffer if they do not share the same ideals as the minority. To put more of a positive spin on it, one could also make the argument that the majority would not have the benefit of hearing the oft important message of a marginalized voice.

Why not let our political system reflect the diversity of our population? Let unique voices be heard & eliminate redundancy.