Back in Montréal ! Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Wow, what a wild month this last one has been!

I guess my last post was just 2 weeks before when I started studying day and night for my DSP and Signals exams. Before then I was working a bunch on my most recent project for work, which has resulted in 2 main articles so far. Those are Gentoo for the TS72xx Single Board Computer (Full Distro), and Gentoo for the TS72xx (Old Toolchain). The first of the two links contains information on how to put the ARM EABI kernel and userland on your TS72xx board, for a 25 time speedup in floating point processing. The second link contains information on how to create a 'compatibility' toolchain for building software that is compatible with the existing programs and libraries on the board as it is shipped.

After I finish one small project for my company, I would like to write up some information on replacing glibc with uClibc, for added space savings.

Anyway, I just finished writing my two exams! I passed them both, although not by any means with outstanding grades. I suppose that has to do with several things: having less time to study than my classmates, having an actual engineering job (not some job as a lab assistant), moving from Germany to Canada the same week that the exams were being written, and just organizing things. So, needless to say, it has been a bit stressful.

In any event, I'm very happy to be back in Montréal! Erin and I have a new apartment too, with an excellent location right across the street from Parc LaFontaine. It's beautiful! Also, I can't begin to express how nice it is to see the sun again on a daily basis - Kiel gets nothing but cloud and rain in the winter. The snow is also a very welcome sight. I know that most of you in the area are pretty sick of snow, but believe me, if you had nothing but rain all winter, you would beg to have the piles of snow back, and you would be happy about it too!

Erin & I just came from the radiology department at St. Mary's hospital here in Montréal, and we got the 2nd round of ultrasounds for Julien. It was quite funny actually, I asked them if I could put the images on my USB memory stick instead of a CD and they said that was fine if I could figure it out (they have some custom made software which is a bit confusing). So I did it and showed them how to do it and they gave us the images free of charge! I'll put them up on something like Picassa soon enough.

Happy St. Patty's Day by the way! Dr. Shine, our obstetrician, is also from Ireland and I think that today he was pretty happy when we said happy St. Patrick's day to him too!

I also just figured out a problem I was having with linux-2.4.26 and glibc-2.3.2 trying to get the aforementioned compatibility toolchain working. The problem was quite simple - __NR_waitpid, which is a syscall constant, was being defined in the ARM/linux headers, but the function is actually unimplemented for the ARM and is replaced by wait4.

The effects of this bug were, for instance

• Bash saying "wait_for(): Function not implemented
• waitpid and popen not working, returning errno 83 (ENOSYS/Function not implemented)

The problem was easy to fix by simply removing the definition in include/asm-arm/unistd.h for __NR_waitpid. (see Gentoo bug 213690). It's not defined in the 2.6 kernel headers either, and I think it was probably put there by accident.

Heading Home

Woo-hoo!

Today I booked my flight back to Canada on the 14th of March, from Hamburg to Montréal. Can you tell that I have a huge smile on my face as I write this? Hehehe..

In the next month, I'll be writing my exams in Advanced Signals & Systems, Advanced Digital Signal Processing, and then I'm organizing to write my exam in Digital Communications at McGill via some awesome department that will proctor exams for external universities ;-) I've never even heard of that before.

But hey, if it means that I don't miss out on an exam and I get to be in my new apartment with my lady friend and Julien, then that's entirely wicked in my opinion!

Oh yes, and by the way, version 2.0 will be named Julien Jacob Friedt - although I'm not 100% sure of the spelling of all of it - Erin and I both agree that Julien should be with an 'e', but I sort of feel like using a 'k' in Jakob just because that's how they would spell it over here.

By the way, if anyone feels like buying a few baby clothes, these ones are definitely on the wish list:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/kids/5ace/
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/kids/59cc/
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/kids/6c71/
and my personal favorite
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/kids/9b11/

Sigh, comic relief ;-)

I spoke to Sammy D.J. just yesterday, and He and Emily are also expecting a newcomer in July - Ethan Donald. Dwayne Williams also has one (or two) little ones already, and countless numbers of others must be married at this point - jeez, I'm starting to sound like a 30 year old! AAAAGGHH!!

It seems as if it were yesterday that we were wearing hospital pants and hardhats and getting completely $h17-faced in the 4th floor of Pitman Hall. I know, I'm a bit of a sentimental, but hey - what a wild time; the nights without sleep studying for exams, practically living in the basement of the building formerly known as T... sometimes I can't even believe that I'm here in Germany now doing my master's. I'm meeting so many people from all over the world - I hope I stay good friends with all of them, just because having friends in other countries just makes the best excuse to travel ;-)

Speaking of travel, the feeling that I will be 'going home' to Montréal hasn't even really sunk in yet. What I mean, is that it seems like I've been renting rooms for literally the last decade of my life! Moving from city to city, province to province, country, continent, etc. Now Erin & I are pretty much starting out together in a beautiful plateau apartement à côté du Parc LaFontaine. I can't wait! The next year of my life is going to be full of the most amazing experiences.

Well, I'd better get back to work / studying

Hasta Luego

Montréal: Hacking the Kernel

So I've been back in Canada for slightly longer than a week and I'm working full time for Visible Assets until the end of September.

I've decided to postpone my flight back to Hamburg until the end of September so that I can spend a bit more time with friends and also get a bit more done for work.

Right now, I'm sitting in Montréal at Erin's place. It's been nice to be back - actually, I think I'm suffering less culture shock in Montréal than I would be in Toronto. To tell you the truth, I think mon fronçais went straight down the garbage chute since October, as if German had totally displaced it in my brain. I really think that I'm going to have to work hard at it when I get back to Canada full time, and it would be nice to work towards some sort of bilingual certification or something.

A good friend of mine from the undergrad days, Ed Cote, is in Montréal at a conference presenting some of the work he's done at Queen's, in his master's program. He just finished this past semester (I'm jealous!). Today we're going to be meeting up for a 'cinque à sept', which basically means to have a few drinks at the end of the work day. I'm looking forward to getting out on a patio and having a couple of cold ones, especially in this heat!

For the next month and a half I will be porting much of the code that I've done in user space to kernel space - well, as much as possible, i suppose. Things that I won't be able to convert to kernel space are services and so on.

Particularly, one thing that I'm working on at the moment is a virtual block device that represents tracked / timed connections to the blaster device. What's particularly strange about this, is that I'm hijacking a serial device from within kernel space, albeit with a removeable module.

So far, it's going pretty well and I even have my module initializing the uart, but I've encountered a couple of segfaults. Luckily, I'm testing all of this using Qemu ;-)

Update (2007-08-09): I've managed to fix all segfault issues with serial hijacking by exporting a function init_tty_dev, which is just a wrapper for init_dev, in drivers/char/tty_io.c . Now the uart_driver->tty_driver->tty_struct array will contain a non-NULL pointer to a tty_struct which init_dev initializes. This must always be released with release_tty_dev( struct tty_struct * tty, int idx ) when the module unloads in order to return the refcount.

Done Exams!

I've finished my exams for the 2007 summer semester here in Kiel. Both of them went pretty well. The first was Computer Vision II: Stochastic and Topological Approaches to Image Processing, and the second one was Neuroinformatik. CVII went pretty well, although I was a bit pissed about the last question. Neuro went better actually, although I like CV a bit more. CVII is actually a fairly hard course, not as hard as CVI, but still.

I had a beer, as per tradition, as soon as I got out of the last exam, and then on the walk home, the air smelled fresher, the sun felt brighter, all of the music on my iPod seemed to fit perfectly with everything - a good sign ;-) Actually, having the ability to take time and walk home was a big change all by itself ;-) Usually I have no time what so ever, and am racing to catch the next bus too hand something in, or meet up with my study groups.

I'm looking forward to coming home ____SO____ much!!!

Now I can focus on my work a bit more, and get a couple of big projects out of the way. I'm excited to actually be able to concentrate on one 'job' for the summer, getting new toys to play with (i.e. embedded devices), and doing some electrical design / hacking too! I'm also planning on hacking a couple of open source apps like Banshee, iPodLinux, and writing more interesting code for my various embedded devices.

Finally, I can design some image processing hardware too, once I learn about the PCI bus and interface with the new TS-7800 boards ;-) Since I tore apart my old crappy 1.3 megapixel digital camera, I'm also hoping to put linux on it.

As of next semester I'm going to be registered in the M.Sc. in Digital Communications, which is taught in english, as opposed to Informatik, which is taught in german. That should lighten my load considerably, but also provide the same type of challenges that I'm used to in areas such as DSP, communication theory, analog & digital circuit design, and so on.

Digital Communications is an engineering program, which I like better. Not to say that I didn't like all of the experiences I had in Informatik - Professor Sommer's lectures are exactly what I was looking for by travelling halfway across the world, and I can't even put a price on some of the things I learned studying with him. The things that I have yet to develop will likely be some of the most advanced in my life.

I've also learned some very interesting things in CV, Neuro, Numerische Math., and yes, even Mathematical Logic!! Unfortunately, I have to give up my office, which is a bummer, but the change to Digital Communication will surely have plenty of benefits to make up for it ;-)

The best and most important part everything now, though, is enjoying the summer!!! I'm really looking forward to meeting up with all of my friends in Canada, seeing all of my family, and of course Erin too :) woohoo!