Random mumblings of ARM developer
Today is second day of Maemo Summit 2008. I had the presentation about running Maemo in QEMU’s N8x0 emulation.
From what people told me after it was made fine. I think that this is good as this was my first presentation in English :)
All materials are of course available to download:
Today I unpacked new Ethernet switch — D-Link DSG-1008D “green” edition. It has 8 GbE ports so I hooked my devices:
In theory only router is 100Mbps — rest are 1GbE devices. But not quite… I was unable to get Intel adapter (which use “e1000e” driver) to switch to full speed — it used only 100Mbps speed. Tried ethtool -s eth0 speed 1000 but it refuses :(
What was a reason? Wrong cable… I tested all my Ethernet cables and it looks like I am out of real cat5e cables… This will have to wait then until I will end organizing my workplace as there will be rewiring of everything done.
And the Lenovo T61 working on 100Mbps only is not a problem as this machine soon goes back to it’s owner.
As some of you probably noticed from time to time comment which you enter is not visible on site. This does not always mean that it got into moderation queue — sometimes it is somewhere but I do not have idea where and why.
Maybe it is because of software setup which I use: WordPress MultiUser + SpamKarma, maybe it has other reason. This does not change a fact that sometimes some comments just do not land.
And the funny part is that I am getting e-mails with those comments contents without problems…
Two years passed since I started HaeRWu company.
First it was just for being able to provide invoices for companies which needed help with OpenEmbedded. Later it helped me to co-operate with OpenedHand without paying big taxes. What future will bring… will see.
During last weekend we finally moved from Poznań to Szczecin. New flat, new internet connection (10Mbps in, 1Mbps out instead of 3M/0.5M)…
Still lot of boxes to unpack, furniture to buy, paperwork to do but we are here and have much more space to live then we had before :)
We spent previous two weeks on so called holidays. Why “so called”?
They were quite exhausting two weeks — first two days trip from Poznań to my parents which live in Olecko. We did a break in Grudziądz — I recommend “City” hotel if someone will go there.
On Tuesday I had crazy trip to London, UK… First train, then train, then 3rd train… Lunch in “Złote tarasy” shopping centre and then public bus to Warsaw “Okęcie” airport. Few hours later landed on Luton airport and finally after 13h trip I was at hotel. But that trip was worth it — we were informed that there is no OpenedHand anymore, we “are” Intel now (“” because we needs to sign papers etc).
Two days later even more crazy trip back… This time from Heathrow airport to Warsaw and then night public bus to Olecko (I got sitting place after 4h of standing). Nothing strange that I was zombie on my brother’s wedding which took place on same day when I got back…
But finally I was able to make use of free time — walking though Olecko is good thing. There are many green places, no big traffic etc. Great place for holidays. And there are many lakes around… This year (as we do each year) we also walked around “Olecko Duże” lake — this takes few hours as whole path is over 12 km long but it is worth doing.
In meantime we made short trip to Vilnius, Lithuania where we visited some interesting places and on back trip enjoyed visiting Trakai castle.
It was maybe a bit exhausting some times but overall I enjoyed that time.
Recently my mother asked me what exactly I do for a living. As she is not type of computer person I had to create definition which would be easy to understand for normal people. And as from time to time people asks me same question here is what I told her.
When hardware vendor builds new hardware and want to sell it to end customers he cames to us to get help on software side. As my part is building whole systems rather then single applications I took her phone as example of device and told:
Your phone is able to do many things:
- make, receive and reject calls
- send/receive text/voice/video messages
- make/show/send photos/videos
- has addressbook
- has calendar
- has menu to choose functions etc…
Each part is handled by separate application and my job is to build them into something what hardware vendor can put on a device before shipping it to end customer.
She was happy with that explanation, even my wife told that it is nice summary of what I do for a living. Of course there are more things which I do at work, but how to tell that I am fixing badly written software or do some testing of new ways to build it…
I am using KDE since switched from Duron 600 to Athlon XP (few years ago). IIRC it was 3.1.something then. It was nice improvement from my desktop built on ROX-Filer + gnome-panel and WindowMaker. Time passed, my machines got faster and faster, 3D hardware acceleration was added with NVidia cards and then KDE 4 started to appear…
I installed KDE 4 on my desktop and tried to use it for few months. First it was 4.0.x but I upgraded to 4.1-svn packages when they started to be available for Debian. Ideas which KDE team has are nice but usability of such desktop is much worse then KDE 3.5.9 one :( Too much bling, too less features so I “upgraded” back to 3.5.9 to get nicely working system.
What did I lose with KDE 4.1 (tried final release yesterday):
From what I read on KDE website Konsole problems are related to NVidia cards and workaround is given. I wonder why there is no check in preferences “I have NVidia — do not use ARGB windows then” or other way. I think that it should be easy to check with few function calls which OpenGL libs are in use…
Looks like now I have to wait to 2009 for KDE 4.2 and then check does it behave or not. Or maybe it is time to check XFCE or other environment?