I've been in a deep funk for the last four months: At the end of August one of our cats (Prudence) died suddenly, then there was the 'election' and my ongoing (and increasing) dissatisfaction with my job. I just can't seem to pull it together, so I tend to do neurotic web-surfing late at night. Tonight, I tried to look up some old, old friends. In the process I stumbled across the alumni page for my highschool.
Just some thoughts on an abstract checkpointed file library:
The interest in checkpointing comes from the desire to preserve a known good state of an actively read or written file in the face of unpredictable system failure. We would like to be able to resume processing from the last known good point.
It seems that we only really need a small set of operations to support checkpointed files:
First, we need routines to open and close a checkpointed file:
Ok, again, not much has happened since last October, but a bit of progress has been made in the last few weeks:
Ok, either the state of support in the Linux community has gotten a lot worse in recent years, or I've gotten a lot grumpier. Since I was pretty grumpy to begin with, I'll have to lay the blame at the feet of the Linux community.
We are beset by a multitudinous terror. They have arisen from the long sleep to reclaim the world we, mistakenly, call our own. The stride a century as if it were a week. Their long, slow march treading patiently back into dark prehistory and forward to the unknowable future. A crawling horror with a million legs, lofted on chitonous wings. Their red eyes peering from every corner and crease, from the sky above our heads and the ground below our feet.
I was a bit peeved today to find out that a google search for my name didn't turn up my web-page. It turns out, at least in part, that the problem was in the search. I searched for the string "Jeffrey Dutky", because that's what I call myself, but it appears that I wrote my page using the name "Jeff Dutky" because that's what I'm usually called by others. The search using
A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine gave me an old Athlon CPU chip he had lying around. It's nothing exciting (800MHz K7, 200MHz FSB), by objective standards, but when you compare to what I'm using as my current Linux desktop (350MHz K6), it doesn't look half bad.
I haven't done too much on the project since October of last year (the holiday season was pretty distracting), though I've put a little work into the power supply for the LCD. A friend, however, gave me a better name for the project than I am currently using: DayTripper, becuase the device is meant to be able to run for a full day (at least a full work-day) on a single battery charge.
At least I won't have to think too hard about what the product's theme music should be.
Success! I got the kernel to compile: all it took was a the right configuration options and a bit of manual fiddling (I needed to recompile mm/filemap.o to fix a mess of undefined references). After you've applied the Sharp patches for the LH79520 and LH7A400, you should be be good to go. If you run into probelms, however, the best advice I can offer is: 1) only select the configuration options you absolutely must have and 2) use the FastFPE rather than NWFPE (NWFPE didn't seem to comp
Not much new to report: I've been pretty busy with other things for the past few weekends, so I haven't had lots of time to devote to the project. I did get a Linux kernel that is supposed to work with the Cogent board (directly from Sharp), or, at least, with the MCU on the board (I can dummy up a driver for anything that doesn't already have something in the kernel tree). I've tried to compile the kernel a couple of times so far, with no real s
Well, I figured out what was wrong with minicom: the default configuration referred to various upload/download utilities that didn't exist in the locations the configuration referenced. Some of them (sx/rx) didn't exist at all, others (ascii-xfr) were just in other places (/usr/local/bin instead of
We got clobbered by hurricane Irene (if you heard on the news that there were 6000 people still wihtout power a week after the hurricane, we were two of those people.) so I haven't touched the project for about a week. When I was able to get back to it, I had to regain my bearings.
I've gotten a lot of really good advice from friends, both about the project and about the prospective business concerns surrounding it. Here is an ad-hoc redux:
I've got the LCD and SBC that I ordered. There was a slight delay on the SBC, due to a miscommunication between the reseller, Microcross, and Cogent, but the reseller was very nice, once I infromed them of the problem, and overnighted the package to me at no extra charge.
"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."
