Fred's Home Page

02/05/2008

Been another busy month! Got the systems architecture research group web-pages up and running properly, looking quite nice now :-). Put a decent amount of time into some schools activities led by Creative Partnerships, a fun bunch of folk who do interesting things. The other week 60-ish of us from the University visited a school in Kent and did a variety of activities with the pupils there; think it was successful, and hopefully taught the kids a bit about what Computer Science is! Also visited Nexor and gave them a talk about the Cell BE processor. Spent some time doing Cell programming on a Playstation 3, which is pretty interesting. Got Ubuntu Linux running on my own PS3, albeit with 2.6.22 rather than 2.6.24 at the moment; couple of cool-points to Sony for producing a console that actually allows you to install another OS without completely breaking its use as a games console! Still not played any games on it yet, but will be experimenting with its Blu-ray video functionality at some point. Some of those cool points lost for requiring a display with HDCP to get hi-def output. HDCP joins my list of annoying technologies, designed foremost for copy protection, but in reality just irritating (and a bit flawed). Had our quarterly CoSMoS meeting, and learnt lots of fun things about immune systems and the like! Put lots of programming time into NOCC, in particular to support occam-pi PROTOCOLs (including protocol inheritance), better type-checks, traces-checks and some experimental support for a PLACED PAR (thinking of the Cell). At the point where basic occam-pi programs compile and run okay, although still some distance from compiling the CG-tests. Did at least fix the NOCC parser to cope with occam-pi's sometimes odd positioning of declarations.

28/03/2008

Second blog entry for 2008..! Been busy.. Spent some portion of time writing papers (though they may not go anywhere!), writing slides, lecturing and other admin stuffs. Been hacking around on RMoX as well. Finished off the i8042 driver (for keyboard and mouse ports), and this seems to be working sensibly now! Not done much with the pointer data yet, but it appears to deliver the correct values :-). Put some more infrastructure into RMoX for handling pointer devices generally -- the PC/104 board we have (SBC-GX533 AMD Geode board and dev-kit), has a touchscreen on the flat-panel display which it would be nice to use.

Finished off (mostly) the multiple-choice-quiz software too, which seems to have worked quite nicely! (even if it is text-based and Unix only). Put this on the software page ("aquest"). Also spent some time knocking up a bunch of PHP scripts and PostgreSQL tables to look after our research group's data, but not live yet.

04/02/2008

2008! January seems to have escaped a blogging, never mind.. Mostly been doing work stuff, reasonable teaching load this term (and renewing slides/module-content). Still need to solder up some H-bridge circuits, ended up using a design found on Chuck's robotics notebook, which successfully switches LEGO train points :-). Train simulator (screenshot) is mostly there now, just need to do the low-level bit and connect it up with the hardware. May end up using RMoX to do this, as we've got a collection of PC/104 I/O boards which can drive/sense the hardware quite nicely. Spent the last couple of weeks working on some software to do multiple-choice question asking. Unfortunately software like WebCT is incapable of doing what I want, and everything else I've looked at is a total sod to setup/configure. About 15,000 lines of C later and I've got something pretty much working — hopefully so anyway, as it's being used in coursework very soon! The program reads and writes XML files (yeah, bloat-mode, but easy to post-process with XSLT and the plethora of XML tools out there), and is capable of giving each student a different quiz (different questions and answers, randomly selected mostly). Questions have different weighting depending on their difficulty, with each section either having N questions, or a weighting of up to W. Some negative scoring and some partially-correct answers thrown in to make it more interesting (and to discourage random answering). Time to finish that off and write some instructions..

30/12/2007

Nearly the end of 2007! Plodding on with work, still got a small pile of marking to attend to and some exam questions to get written.. Been taking some time out to work on a train simulation framework, to be combined with the RS422 bus, which now has a "train controller" — basically a bunch of input and output ports (which has been sat on the desk since September waiting to be finished..). Do need to solder up the motor H-bridge circuits (for changing track points) and build some sensor circuits soon.. Maybe early in the new year :-).

02/12/2007

December already! Did some more work on NOCC, which is now looking quite hopeful (imo!). Support for trace analysis is mostly there, and started adding support for exceptions in occam-pi — for sequential process use only (avoiding the problem of what happens to processes parallel to an exception).

Put together a new KRoC release, kroc-1.5.0-pre3 (tgz) which is now the merged multiprocessor branch. Carl also got RMoX working with this, although that's not multiprocessor-capable yet (needs the relevant MP startup code adding!). Also found a bit of time to finish off some music, Crystal Worlds (MP3). Now to put some more pictures on the UKCMC website!

12/11/2007

November already, busy busy. More work on NOCC's support for trace analysis (OEP), looking fairly sensible so far! Also updated some of the compiler documentation (need to regenerate the diagram at some point..). KRoC, NOCC, RMoX, jctld, UWG/UWGBuilder and RAPP have now moved to the CSProjects subversion repository (easier public access!). Found a bit of time to update some music, Crystal Worlds (pre6, MP3), almost there with that one I think!

Put together a new KRoC release, kroc-1.5.0-pre2 (tgz), which builds with multiprocessor support by default (well, attempts to auto-detect whether or not it's supported). This is pulling from Carl's "cgr-mp" branch in CSProjects, due to be merged back into "trunk" soonish, but still a few small things to fix! Recently put some more demo programs into the repository, will emerge in the next release.

30/10/2007

Almost the end of October, and a pretty busy one! Got the Sipura boxen all configured and working right now, so all voicemail enabled (including silly messages!). There was a problem with the PSTN line disconnecting after 10 minutes or so, but that's now fixed :-). Caller ID also works nicely. Next stop, Zapateller.. Spent quite a bit of time fiddling around with the KRoC distribution and its repository. The sources have now moved to CSProjects (projects.cs.kent.ac.uk), and the next release (1.5.0-pre2) will be the multi-processor enabled version (soon to be moved back into the main trunk). NOCC is moving over there currently. Put in some hacking time to NOCC as well, working on trace specifications (e.g. to guarantee that a process behaves in a particular way); CSP really helps here! However, it means that the "trace specifications" are really minature CSP programs, rather than strict sets of traces. This has the advantage of [later] enabling the failures and divergences of an occam-pi process to be calculated (by the compiler). Also been doing some related work on escape analysis for occam-pi, although here that could be more readily described as memory reference segregation (and obvious implications for network distribution).

Recently upgraded my PC, all new and shiny now! Got a 24" TFT display (widescreen), which is excellent for getting vast amounts of code on the screen (and good for firefox tabs). Plus a new mobo, core-2 quad (2.4 GHz), 4 gigs of RAM and a GeForce 8600 GT. Not quite got the native NVIDIA drivers working in Linux yet, but the Xorg are doing a decent enough job! One of the really neat things is that I can now run DOSBox with all the old assembly demos (and some not so old ones!) at a sensible speed. Mouse behaviour is a little erratic though..

01/10/2007

Back from a fun walk with the Uni. mountaineering club, though feet a bit sore! (out of practice..). Walked from Wye back to Canterbury, stopping in a pub (or three) for lunch and refreshments. Somebody posted a link to this funny synthetic music video (quite a while ago, but only just got around to watching it).