Marcin Juszkiewicz

Recently my wife decided that her next cellphone needs to have a mirror. This was after her last trip when she forgot to pack mirror into her purse…

Why such requirement? Currently Ania use SonyEricsson k510i cellphone. It has Bluetooth, Irda, camera, J2ME games/applications, possibility to use own themes and many many more functions. But to tell the truth — how many people really use such things? During phone numbers exchange they just manually create new entry in addressbook because even if they have BT or Irda they do not know how to use it or are afraid of catching viruses (really!). She sometimes play pre-installed J2ME games or use one application: public communication timetable (which I installed and take care of updates).

Will Neo1973 running OpenMoko be good for such users? I asked my wife and she told:

Yes, if I would do jogging — it fits nicely to tracksuit.

My brother-in-law is more interested, but he like technical things. Not like my wife — she just wants to call, message and use a mirror when to comes to using a cellphone. And of course it has to good look and fit her style ;)

I usually did big computer upgrades (AMD Duron with SDRAM -> AMD Athlon with DDR, then to AMD Athlon64 with DDR) but this time it was only CPU. From Athlon64 3200+ (2GHz) I switched to Athlon64 X2 4200+ (2.2GHz). Operation was quite simple — take one CPU, insert another but old one glued to radiator so I had to use some force :(

Then first boot and question… will BIOS recognize new CPU or not. It properly displayed information and then Linux started — just to show me 1 CPU. Quick installation of already prepared SMP kernel and /proc/cpuinfo had more informations.

Machine is quite loud when operating on full speed but most of time CPUFreq is able to lower frequency (1.0/1.8/2.0/2.2GHz steps are available) so it is noiseless. It is nice to see how CPU usage is split into two cores — now I do not have to wait when two builds are progressing and I want to run some applications.

Now doing builds will be more comfortable :)

One month ended, another started so it is time to prepare invoice. As always value is in Euro even if it is not ‘native’ currency for me or client. But what to choose in today’s times…

USD is useless — value goes down faster then leaves from trees, yesterday it had lowest value compared to Euro or British Pound.

PLN is strong but I prefer to use more universal currency in payments.

Euro is strong — many countries use it so it will not drop too much compared to other currencies. But it lost few percents to PLN during last months.

GBP… it is currency of current client so probably we can even discuss about switching to it but exchange rate GBP/PLN changes are bigger then EUR/PLN.

So I want to live in Euro part of world but without having to move from Poland. All hope in new government that we will switch to Euro during next few years (without too big price changes)… It would simplify many things — transactions between companies, no need to exchange PLN to Euro when going to visit friends, conferences or vacations…

Some time ago I upgraded to one of Release Candidate of Wordpress MU. It was working but only partially (tag links get broken on my setup). Today I fetched fresh 1.3 release (based on WordPress 2.3.1) and installed on my website.

New thing which got added is native tags support — no more UltimateTagWarrior usage but instead WP tags. Some hints for those who will also upgrade:

1. Importing tags from UTW is in Manage -> Import and works great (require enabled UTW).
2. After import UTW can be disabled and removed
3. Tag cloud is not so nice as it was with UTW tag cloud widget and is not configurable :(
4. Install Recommended Tags plugin to get help on tagging during writing (very configurable plugin). If you have lot of tags then disable “Display all tags” option (Options-> Recommended Tags).
5. If you use theme not ready for WordPress 2.3 then you have to edit it and use the_tags function to list tags.

Then — happy tagging and using WordPress 2.3.x or WPMU 1.3.x :)

When last time we were in Szczecin to visit her family one of my brothers-in-law told me that he would like to get Neo1973 phone as replacement for his current Nokia one. So this time I took GTA01Bv4 (plus additional battery and external battery charger) to give him for playing during weekend.

He likes overall look of phone and started playing with software. After some time he managed to enter data into Contacts and Tasks, also tried to play few games. We found few small bugs and I entered them into bugtracker:

• ApplicationManager: list of packages lack kinematic scrolling
• ApplicationManager: scrolling of packages list produce unreadable content
• Mediaplayer SHOULD depend on gst-plugin-pulse
• Neod cannot close application when menu is open
• Neod menus are wrongly placed after screen rotate

Last one is probably hard to fix as I do not know is there a way to get notification on screen rotation. I suggested to Mickeyl that ‘on Power hold’ menu should be rather replaced by fullscreen window with status of GPS/Bluetooth/WiFi/GSM and options to disable/enable each of them. Also possibility to switch on “Flight Mode” and change profile should be there. If it would be made in proper way then there would be no problem on screen rotation.

Today I wanted to check status support of TC6393XB companion chip (used in Zaurus SL-6000 for USB Host and few other things) in Linux kernel as the last working version which we (OpenEmbedded kernel hacking team) have is 2.6.17 (a bit old). Most of Google search results pointed to our patches so I tried to search also for “Toshiba Mobile I/O Controller” which also gave me pointer to handhelds.org fork of Linux kernel.

I fetched CVS HEAD (had to remind how to use it since most of projects which I use switched to Subversion or Git). After browsing their repository it looked like they have driver but marked as non functional so no use for me rather.

By curiousity I diffed handhelds.org fork against vanilla 2.6.21 (as hh.org kernel is still 2.6.21). Result was 10 megabytes file (with -X dontdiff -x CVS switches) — I wonder did they ever considered merging with upstream…

On my system (2.6.23-rc9) I have Serial-ATA DVD/RW drive connected to sata_sil controller:

[   96.858283] ata6: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 310)
[   97.012480] ata6.00: ATAPI: TSSTcorpCD/DVDW SH-S183A, SB02, max UDMA/33
[   97.012482] ata6.00: applying bridge limits
[   97.169126] ata6.00: configured for UDMA/33

Sometimes when there is a problem with CD or DVD disk controller shutdowns drive:

[53560.095573] cdrom: sr0: mrw address space DMA selected
[53561.001946] ISO 9660 Extensions: Microsoft Joliet Level 3
[53561.002777] ISOFS: changing to secondary root
[53621.380238] ata6.00: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x90000 action 0x2
[53621.380249] ata6.00: cmd a0/00:00:00:00:20/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0 cdb 0x0 data 0
[53621.380252]          res 51/60:03:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error)
[53621.380263] ata6: hard resetting port
[53623.783961] ata6: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 310)
[53642.595278] ata6.00: qc timeout (cmd 0xa1)
[53642.595285] ata6.00: failed to IDENTIFY (I/O error, err_mask=0x4)
[53642.595288] ata6.00: revalidation failed (errno=-5)
[53642.595292] ata6: failed to recover some devices, retrying in 5 secs
[53645.092046] ata6: hard resetting port
[53646.193870] ata6: SATA link down (SStatus 1 SControl 310)
[53646.193881] ata6.00: limiting speed to UDMA/25:PIO3
[53646.193884] ata6: failed to recover some devices, retrying in 5 secs
[53648.690501] ata6: hard resetting port
[53649.792323] ata6: SATA link down (SStatus 1 SControl 310)
[53649.792333] ata6.00: disabled
[53650.042442] ata6: EH pending after completion, repeating EH (cnt=4)
[53650.042459] ata6: EH complete
[53650.042512] sr 6:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
[53650.042518] sr 6:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
[53650.042522] sr 6:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
[53650.042536] sr 6:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
[53650.042632] ata6.00: detaching (SCSI 6:0:0:0)

I wonder is there a way to re-enable ata6.00 in other way then power down/power up whole machine because it looks like reboot is not a way to get it working again.

Few days ago my wife brought some stuff from work. One of them was floppy disk. During evening when we were sitting and talking I saw that disk. After few moments of thinking I told: “Do you know that none of our computers is capable of reading it?”

Computers are changing so fast… I remember my first computer less then 20 years ago — it was Atari 65XE and it used data tapes for storage, then I bought 360KB 5.25” disk drive for it. Next machine used 880KB 3.5” floppies (Amiga 600) and 425MB hard disk. After another Amiga I bought PC which got 1.44MB 3.5” floppy drive which I rarely used. During few upgrades I was keeping this drive ‘just in case’ but finally decided that drive bay occupied by floppy can get better usage so it landed in drawer somewhere.

Now we use pendrives, memory cards etc. One of my phones has more storage then my first Amiga had, other has 128MB card which is unused but needed due to crappy card/SIM holder in GTA01 Bv3, other has 64MB card and last one has 32MB one.

And imagine that there are places where people still use floppies…