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 compile successfully).

I haven't downloaded the kernel to the board yet, but at least it compiled. I need to read a bit about how to boot a linux kernel from the micromonitor.

In other (somewhat premature) news, I've ordered a bunch of hardware for a custom breakout board for the CSB335. I've also been looking into USB controllers. The ISP1161A1 and ISP1362, from Philips, look pretty good. They both support host and device modes, and they both have 16-bit bus interfaces. Connecting them to the ARM system bus shouldn't be too hard. The ISP1161A1 supports standard USB 2.0, while the ISP1362 supports USB-OTG.

Anyhow, assuming that the linux kernel boots and works minimally, the next task is getting the LCD connected. I've ordered the connector for the LCD data cable, now I need to generate the required voltages. Part of this can be done with a relatively straightforward switching power supply (the LCD drive power requires 42V), but the other part requires an inverter (the backlight CCFL requires 450V under normal operation and over 1000V to start up), which I can get either from ERG Power or, probably, pick up something acceptable from a a car or computer customization place (both of which sell cold-cathode lamps like the one used in my LCD backlight).

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 success, but I think I'm just a few configuration options away from a successfull compile.

Next up, once the kernel is minimally functional (booting to a serial console) is to build my own breakout board with some custom interfaces: Line Power and power supplies, IDE connector, LCD connector (for the LCD I have), serial and ethernet ports, a PIC MCU on the SBC's I2C bus, and, possibly, a USB interface hanging off the system bus. I'll do the board layout in the Douglas CAD/CAM program (I'm pretty familiar with it and they can manufacture the breakout board) and I'll give a try at stuffing and soldering the board myself (the SMT stuff, like the LCD and touchscreen connectors, might be a bit of a challenge, but if I can't do it by hand, I can always use this approach).

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 /usr/bin). So, off I went in search of the XModem/YModem/ZModem transfer commands (which don't appear to be in my Linux installation).

The main X/Y/ZModem tools, unfortunately, are a commercial product and the free alternative is not, currently, on-line (WARNING: following the link for lrzsz will lead to the Verisign Sitefinder page, not to www.ohse.de ). I did find alternative sources for both lrzsz and its predecessor, rzsz.

One problem with lrzsz: it doesn't compile right out of the box. I had to make some modifications to the source. I won't bore you with all the details, but I'll summarize my modifications (since I can't send them to the maintainer while his domain is off-line): There are two offending lines of code, in rz.c and sz.c (you will see the error in sz.c after fixing the one in rz.c). All I did was comment out the offending lines and include the string.h header file at the top of the modified files.

So, after downloading, building and installing lrzsz, I edited the minicom configuration to point to the proper binaries and all was well. Off I go.

Anyhow, I've been able to download my micromonitor script and seen it run (with a few bugs of my own making). I've also downloaded my compiled C program and seen it fail (with a memory failure, whatever that means. Maybe I need to initialize the SDRAM on the board, but I thought the micromonitor did that for me). I'll bet I need to specify some other flags to the gcc linker, something to make a standalone executable or something. I also still need to find out how to configure the Linux kernel for my hardware.

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 cleared off some space on my main Linux box (which I haven't backed up in far too long), installed the ARM cross compiler and tried building a little test program (it monitors the switches and blinks the lights in response to switch actuations). The program compiled just fine, but I'm having trouble downloading the program to the board: I need to re-read the micromonitor docs.

I've also tried writing a micromonitor script to do the switches and lights thing, but I'm also having trouble getting that downloaded to the board. In this case it's a problem I've seen before: I can't simply paste the text of the program into minicom with an editor running on the SBC. The paste operation sends data far too fast for the SBC to digest and you only get bits of the pasted text. Minicom's own ASCII transafer program doesn't seem to work, at least not as configured, so I need to do some fiddling to either

1. reconfigure minicom to send the script file successfully, or
2. figure out how to send files to the SBC using XModem (again, I need to re-RTFM).

The program, whether as a C program or a micormonitor script, is pretty straightforward and should work just fine. I've been able to test all the major functionality from the micromonitor command line, so at least I've seen some blinkenlights and can verify that the sense switches are actually sensed.

I also spent some time trying to configure the linux kernel (a fresh source tree for the 2.4.22 kernel) to run on the board. First, I can't run the menuconfig process when ARCH := arm. The AWK script that builds the menuconfig scripts fails early on. Second, the prompted config process only lists a handfull of supported boards, and the CSB335 isn't amoung them. I googled for "linux csb335 kernel" (and a few similar searches) but didn't come up with anything pertinent. I guess I'll need to post a few questions to USENET, maybe send email to Cogent.

I need to do some digging to find out how to configure linux for a specific CPU and then for the resources on my board (especially becuase, once I have built my own breakout board with custom peripherals and memory map, the target platform will be completely unique).

The breakout board will have a USB interface chip, an EIDE interface, some switches and LEDs, and a PIC MCU to deal with the 4-wire touchscreen. Later, the board will also include a PIC MCU to monitor line and battery voltage and charge the batteries when line power is available. The USB interface and EIDE port should work just fine with default Linux drivers (I just need to specify the memory locations), but the switches, LEDs and PICs will need custom drivers of some sort. I may also need to write a driver for the CSB335 I2C interface, which is, I think, a custom job from Cogent.

More reading to do.

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:

• Never borrow money if you can help it. Borrowing money on a business venture like this is a great way to lose not only your business, but your house, car and life's savings. If the business doesn't work out, or doesn't work out as rapidly as you planned, you are much better off not having to pay off thousands of dollars in short-term loans.
• Get good legal advice: there are all sorts of things you will need to know of a legal and financial nature. A good tax attorney will be worth every penny of their fee. (I haven't consulted an attorney, yet, but I mean to in the near future).
• Incorporate, but not till you are close to bringing is money. It costs a fair amount of money just to maintain the corporation, but you are better off if the corporation can take the heat for liability, rather than lose your house and personall savings. I was told to incorporate about 3 months before you expect money to start coming in. I also plan on incorporating before signing any long-term contracts.
• Put together a business plan: know your marginal costs, overhead costs, and minimal sales levels to support operations. (I haven't really done this, either, but I have a few back-of-the-envelope approximations that are encouraging)
• Research: the Small Business Administration (assuming you are in the U.S.A) is a great source for all kinds of information and services. Your home state probably has similar resources. Go to your local library, search the web, ask friends, relatives and aquaintances. Get as much information as you can.

Anyhow, that's what I can think of at the moment. I'm probably forgetting a number of things, but this sort of advice has prevented me from doing a number of stupid things or getting permanently distracted by trivialities (or, at least, important issues that don't need to be considered at this time).

Also, I have to say that I have a bunch of really great friends. Not all of them have been supportive of my ideas, but they have all given me good advice. I try to take all the advice to heart, whether I like it or not, whether I agree with it or not.

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.

I might have brought some of this on myself, since I changed my order between the time I talked with the folks at Cogent and when I placed the order with Microcross: the Cogent folks were expecting an order for a CSB336 and I orderd the CSB335 instead. I went with the 335 because it was cheaper and slower (I want to see just what the worst case would be) and lacked some of the peripherals I need (I want to get my hands dirty with some custom electronics. This is, at least partly, a hobby, and what fun is a hobby unless you get to build stuff?). I'll go back and get the 336 or 337 in a few months, when I'm comfortable with the development process.

Speaking of the development process: I've only played around with the board for a few hours, but it's pretty impressive. It comes with a JTAG port but you can do everything via the serial or ethernet ports and the built-in micromonitor (which is good, since I don't have a JTAG interface cable for my Linux box). The micromonitor is pretty nice, at least as good as the boot monitor on my old PDP-11/44. You can set and examine memory, download stuff via xmodem or tftp, run executables either from memory or from on-board FlashRAM, and save things into the on-board FlashRAM as if it were a disk drive. The only time I might need JTAG is if I want to update the micromonitor: you can update the micromonitor just fine over serial or ethernet, but if you screw up, you need JTAG to recover!

I also bought the CSB300 breakout board. The boards were shipped together, preassembled into a single unit. The breakout board has two 9-pin D-shell serial ports, two 9-pin D-shell CAN ports, a reset button, three user defined sense switches, two user defined LEDs, an ethernet port w/ activity LEDs, a USB device port (not supported by the CSB335) and a 5V power jack. Along with the two boards, the shipment included an ethernet cable, a null-modem cable, a 5 volt 2 Amp external power supply and a print-out of the CSB335 Hardware Reference Manual (available for download as a PDF from the Cogent website). If I'd had things together on my end, I would have been all set to start development (I didn't have minicom, or the ARM cross-compiler, installed on my Linux box).

My next tasks are, probably, to get Linux booting on the SBC, and then to build an adapter from the SBC's LCD interface pins to the cable on my LCD. Beyond that, I need to build boards to 1) poll the touchscreen and present the data to the SBC (I have found an article that describes how to do this with a PIC microcontroller, as well as another article that presents a pretty good overview of resistive touchscreens), 2) adds USB host and device controllers to the system via the memory/system bus and 3) add an IDE interface to the system bus (there are some reasonable references for this on the net). In the short term, however, I'm just going to play around with the micromonitor and try to get the ARM cross-compiler working.

Well, Since my last entry I have found a couple sources for single board computers (SBC) that are just within my price range: I'm going to purchase an SBC from Cogent Computers that looks pretty good for my use (at least for a prototype), but there are other offerings from DigiKey and from EarthLCD (the EarthLCD mARMalade doesn't seem to be in production yet, unfortunately). I am also going to buy a cheap, 7.8" LCD from EarthLCD, and keep them in mind for production, since their prices are really good. Along with a spare 2.5" hard disk and some custom circuitry, I should have a working prototype by New Years.

Total cost, out of pocket, will be around $500. Considering that this is more of a tablet PC than a PDA, I think that's pretty good.

I'm still interested in desgining my own SBC, but I'll only persue that route if I really can't get anything in my price range from other sources. I've been told that I can get a custom design from Cogent, but I haven't asked what NRE and per-unit prices would be.

It's been quite a while since I last wrote about this: I have been distracted by family medical issues and am just now getting back to the project.

I have mostly completed the schematic for the MCU development board. It's basically a stripped down version of the Samsung SMDK2410X, so I got to crib a lot of stuff off the Samsung schematics. I still need to fill in a few component values, but it is, otherwise, complete.

I gave up on the commercial EDA packages and hav been using gEDA's gschem and, while I still think that the user interface is pathological, I've been able to get a fair amount of work done. My next step, after I've filled in the last component values, is to generate the net list and try importing in to PCB. That will at least tell me what I've done wrong. if the needed corrections are few, I can do them in gscheme. If there are many corrections needed, I can run the netlilst through an awk script. Either way, I'm good to go.

Due to these delays, whatever schedule I was following (if any) has slipped a good two or three months. Which is probably fine, so long as this all remains a hobby.

In other related news, I got my father's Tek 475 set up. After 'baking' the scope in the upstairs apartment for several weeks (it finally got somewhat hot in D.C.) I felt confident enough to power it up. It seems to work pretty well, except that channel 2 show impulses rather than the calibration square wave, and the timebase seems to be a bit off (or the calibration signal is). I've been told to clean the contacts on volts/div switch, and I can test the calibration signal with the 2213 (which may not be calibrated either, of course).

On a last note, I am discouraged by the price of SDRAM chips: in small quantities, the chips themselves cost more than COTS DIMMs containing several of the same chip! I'd be happy to use a DIMM for the memory, but the S3C2410 only has a 32-bit wide memory bus, and all the DIMMs I see have 64-bit busses.

I have come up with a way to interface a wide memory to a narrow memory bus, but it's a bit tricky: what I plan to do is re-map the memory addresses so that contiguous 8-word blocks occupy the upper and lower halves of 8 double-words. A single bank of memory now looks like two banks of memory, each half the size of the actual bank.

The only problem I see with this scheme is if the MCU memory controller tries to keep multiple memory pages open at once. Since there is really only a single memory device (or set of devices) there is only a single set of pages that can be open at once. I'll have to read more about the S3C2410 SDRAM memory controller.

Ok, it's been quite a while since the last entry, here is the status:

• The LCD that I was interested in is outside my price range, so I'll have to rethink that. This is a potential deal breaker, but, fortunately, it is also off the table for the moment, because:
• I looked at a number of COTS boards, but they all cost too much to fit in my target price, so I decided that I had to design the board myself. I have found a number of good candidates for the CPU (all ARM9 based microcontrollers) and the board design doesn't look too difficult (aside from the whole fine-pitch surface mount issue, but I think that should be Ok, so long as I find a good manufacturing house to do the boards).
• I got some nice PCB layout software for the Mac, only to find that it doesn't run on OS X (the companion schematic capture software does have an OS X port, but costs boku bucks for the version that will output a netlist). I am now exploring open source alternatives.
• I dug out a bunch of my father's electronics stuff -- proto-boards, components, soldering iron, multi-meters and two nice analog oscilloscopes (a Tek 475 and a Tek 2213) -- and have been brushing up on my basic electronics and some circuit analysis.

The plan is like this: There don't seem to be any good, inexpensive, embedded boards for the MCUs I'm looking at (and everything that is cheap and available doen't have the kind of integrated peripherals I need), so I'm going to build the kind of board I'd like to buy. The good part of this is that I can probably sell the bare board as a development tool for these MCUs, thus bringing in some profit while working on the final goal. The bad news is that my immediate mission has changed: rather than building a hacker's PDA, I'm building an embedded computer board.

So long as I think of this a more of a hobby than anything else, however, the meandering missing objective isn't much of an issue.

Some notes:

1. I despise the user interfaces of the EDA CAD tools I've seen (even the Mac ones). They are obscure and clumsy, but, once you have a little experience you can get the job done. (NOTE: this is still an indictment of the interface. To paraphrase Nietche: that which doesn't kill me deserves to get stomped into oblivion!)
2. My father's 'scopes were stored in a humid basement for about five years (nobody's fault but my own) and I'm having a bit of trouble reconditioning them. The 2213 started up and runs just fine, but I'm scared to power up the 475 until I've had a chance to dry it out. I've got a plan on how to do that, but it needs to get hot and sunny in the D.C. area before I can do it. In the meantime, the 2213 is probably plenty for my uses.
3. The fact that there isn't anything out there like what I want to build at anything close to the price range I want to sell at, gives me pause. There is a good chance that I just can't put the Hacker's Handheld together for anything less than $1000 (way outside my original target price) and that would be too bad. Still, it looks like I could get pretty close, which means that, in a few years, this kind of thing will be a commonplace item. I prefer to think of myself as a visionary rather than a fool.

Ok, it's been a few weeks since my last entry, and I've been a busy boy: First, I've done a fair amount more research, read a bunch of data-sheets and technical notes, and scoped out a few suppliers. The hackers handheld is looking more and more do-able, the only remaining questions are price and demand (which are, to a large degree, linked quantities).

Here are the results of my research so far:

1. Batteries: Li-ION cells seem to be out of the question, since I havent found any suppliers of standard size cells and I'm not willing, at this point, to shell out for custom stuff (or try to wrap my design around an existing part). The good news is that AA and AAA NiMH cells are cheap and easy to get. Next stop: charging issues.
2. Inputs (keyboard and mouse): I haven't found anywhere that will sell me custom layouts of laptop style keyboards, and I'm daunted by the engineering issues of a clamshell case (I've seen enough hinge splitting to know that this is over my head). My current solution is to foregoe an integrated keyboard and rely on a USB port for user input.
3. The PCB: I've found several companies that build embedded computers and offer engineering consulting services. Their standard products go about 90% of the way toward what I want, I just have to find out what they charge for custom designs.
4. The case: I'm working on the prototype. I broke out the drafting tools and bought a couple square-feet of Acrylite sheet and rod. Actuall fabrication shouldn't be too difficult. I'll look into injection molding after everything else is done.
5. The display: I'm pretty much settled on the Sharp LM8V311 passive matrix LCD. It's small, low power (less than 2 Watts with backlight) and has an integrated touchscreen. I still need to get quotes for both sample and production quantities.
6. The software: I'm working on a platform independant GUI library targeted at small size displays. I've been plugging away at this library for quite some time, largely as a result of my X11 hacking (I refuse to use Motif, and it doesn't take too long, working with Xt, to see some strong patterns in your code). I'm calling the project stdgui and will be putting it up on my web-page as soon as it's a little bit functional. Otherwise, I've been really impressed with a lot of the work around uClinux.
7. Sales and Marketing: I'll need to get some idea of how much demand there is for this thing. I have some ideas of how to do this, but it will require setting up a web-site, and, probably, starting a company. Distribution is still a mystery.

The thing that really shocks me is just how little I need to do (or even know) myself (which is good, because I'm not much of an electrical or mechanical engineer, not even much of a hobbiest). It seems I can almost build this project with COTS items (I could, if I were willing to sacrifice one or two specific features). Think of the scene in The Fly (the Cronenburg remake, not the original) where Jeff Goldblum explains to Geena Davis what an OEM is.

On my recent trip to Viet Nam I tried to use a PDA (Palm 135) as a portable computing environment, with only limited success:

A week or so before we left, my wife asked what I would do on the trip if I couldn't program. I laughed the question off, saying that there would be no time to program while on the trip. However, her question preyed on my mind, and two days before the trip I snapped: I ran out an tried to throw together something that would address my needs. Since I was doing this three days before Christmass, I paid more than I should have and got less than I wanted.

The upshot of this is that I've been thinking about how there isn't anything on the market that addresses my needs, and how this might be remedied. My needs are fairly moderate:

• Take electronic notes.
• Compile and run small programs (in my choice of language).
• Synchronize with a host computer.
• Synchronize with a client device (PDA, camera, etc.)
• Save/access data on external storage (Flash media cards).
• Work for long periods (more than 4 hours) on battery power.
• Be fairly inexpensive, just in case it gets lost/stolen/dropped off a cliff.

The Palm 135 could have done most of this, except that the device doesn't come with a keyboard (and the keyboard I bought required driver software, which got wiped out during the flight to VN when the PDA had to be reset after locking up). What I really wanted, however, was a cheap, low power, portable Linux box.

I don't need all that much processing power, but I do need a real operating system with a full toolset. I don't need a huge display, but enough to see 80 columns x 35 lines and color highlighted syntax. I absolutely require long battery life and I need the entire device to be no larger than a hard-cover book. This doesn't really sound that hard to do, does it?

I've done some research since I got back:

• I can get a nice ARM processor that will drive an LCD, provides both USB host and device interfaces, and disipates less than a Watt of power.
• I can get small, color LCD (8"-10") that draws about 7W with the backlight.
• An IBM microdrive (500MB-1GB) fits in a CF+ slot and draws about 1W when active.
• 8 AA Li-Ion cells deliver about 28 Watt Hours (2.6 Amp Hours at 10.8 V).

So, I figure I could build something like this:

• about the size of a hard cover book
• with a 133MHz ARM CPU
• 1 USB type-A port (for connection to USB devices)
• 1 USB type-B port (for connection to a host computer or for recharging the batteries)
• an ethernet port (or combined ethernet/modem port)
• two CF+ slots
• a small LCD (640x480 with 12-bit color)
• and a moderate amount of DRAM and Flash RAM.

Put an IBM microdrive in one of the CF+ slots and run Linux on the thing and I'd be set.

The obvious next question is: How many other folks out there are interested in this kind of thing? If I build just one device, I'll end up paying a huge amount for it, since I can't buy in bulk, and I can't amortize any of the engineering effort. If I could sell just a few hundered, I could recoupe the NRE costs and get a discount on the parts as well.

I suspect there is at least as much interest for something like this as there was for the iOpener or any of the Linux PDAs. I would actually hesitate to try building and marketing such a device out of fear of getting swamped with orders I couldn't meet in any reasonable time. It looks like the initial investment for manufacturing is fairly modest (less than $10,000), as long as I don't want to build thousands of units, and I really am curious to know if I'm just a freak, or if there is a latent, untapped, market for a hacker's handheld.

I don't quite remember how I found this site, (probably linked to from a /. article, but it's already rolled off the end of short term memory and into oblivion) but I really like it: The War Against Silence. Maybe it's just 'cause this guy has a 'tude, or maybe it's because he likes OS X (with a 'tude, no less). Whatever the reason, after reading only half of one article, I'm hooked.

Originally posted January 14, 2003:

We arrived on Saturday in Hanoi and took a 2 day tour of Halong Bay. Eventhough we had thought we had enough time in Vietnam, we found the trip was far too short. Jeffrey decided to cancel our trip to Ankor Wat so we could stay in Vietnam.

More on Hue

Hue was the seat of power during the two hundred year Nguyen Dynasty and the site of intricate royal palaces built in an ornate ancient Chinese fashion. Though most of these have been levelled to the ground by the French and Americans, you can still get a sense of the imperial life by visiting the citadel at Hue. Emperor Tu Duc, whose tomb we visited, was the most powerful of the Nguyen Lords and demanded that 50 dishes be presented to him by 50 servers at every meal. His chefs acquiesced and developed a highly ornate cuisine to serve him. Hue food is considered to be the height of haute cuisine in Vietnam. When we were in Hue we visited a restaurant that specialized in serving dishes in the Emperor's style and ate only 10 courses like the king...

Hanoi

When we were in Hue and Hoi An it rained all day and the wind whipped up to about 25 mph. It got down to 40 F and all the buildings were not heated. Also they had an odd habit of leaving all the doors and windows open to let in the "fresh air." By the time we got to Hanoi Jeffrey insisted on staying at a really nice hotel. I had aslo developed a nasty cold. So we stayed at the Guoman, which like the Rex, is considered ridiculously expensive but is warm. They have heat, and every convenience. I felt warm for the first time since we left Nha Trang. I'm learning that everything can be gotten here as well, just at acertain price, like it is the US.

As it would happen the weather in Hanoi turned warm once we arrived, it's ten degrees warmer here than it was in Hue. We spent a beautiful spring-like day walking around Hoa Kiem Lake, the lake that is the symbol of Hanoi. Hanoi was first established as the town of Thang Long in the 11th century and expanded with the increasing trade guilds that settled here. Today the Old quarter of Hanoi is still split up in streets by trade and you can do your shopping by street name. For instance, all the silversmiths are on a specific street or all the paper goods on another. The 11th century buildings are still standing and in use.

The lake has a charming legend similar to the legend of King Arthur. It is legend that the Emperor Le Loi was given a special sword by heaven to fend off the Mongul hordes with. After defeating the hordes, the emperor was sailing the lake with the sword and a large turtle came up and took the sword back. The lake has since been called the lake of the returned sword or Hoa Kiem. They have found gigantic turtles in the lake known to be hundreds of years old.

We took a 2 day tour of Ha Long Bay on a cruising motorboat through Handspan tours. It was both relaxing and beautiful. The Bay is has a mystic, premordial beauty about it, with mountains( really limestone islands) rising straight out of the sea. The islands in the distance are shrouded in haze and fog so you just get just the impressions ofdistant mountains.

Our flight to LA leaves from Kuala Lumpar, Malaysia tommorrow, and it will still be Thursday when we arrive in California.

This log was originally posted on January 10, 2003.
Pollution, Plumbing and Heating

Sorry about all the typos in that last post. There are 3 things I thought I should mention about Vietnam to anyone who is consider coming here. There are so many beautiful things about the landscape. Here the mountains meet the seat and the land between the mountains is fertile green valleys. It's an ideal agricultural area and everywhere you see people farming every inch of available land. But there are things you should be warned of.

Pollution

Motorbikes and motorboats have taken over this once sleepy nation of bicycles and boathouses. The smog and dust, debris and exhaust fumes are non-stop. Everyone covers their entire face with cloth except for 2 eye holes while walking through a village because the dust and pollution are so bad. This grieves me because it seems like the people are ruining the one resource that they have: their land.

Plumbing and Heating

In most places, except for expensive hotels that cater to Americans, a toilet is a hole in the ground or a squat toilet. When we were on the train, the toilet was literally a hole in the train. What's worse the toilets are not well cleaned or hygienic by any stretch of the imagination. It takes a strong stomach to use them.

I was suprised to find out that almost all of the buildings in Vietnam have no heat, no even the buildings in Hanoi where this year it snowed twice over the Christmas holidays. The buildings are not outfitted for heat and the best any hotel can do is give you extra blankets. This is unlucky for us because we have come in a season marked by record cold spells in the Southeast Asia region. We are in the Hue and nights are in the 40's Farenheit, which would be okay if we had a bit of heat. Next we are going to Hanoi, where temperatures are dropping to the 30's and still they have no heat.

Sorry, again we lost the ability to log into Slashdot while in Vietnam. This log was originally post January 10, 2003.
On our last day in Hoi An we took a trip to the Marble Mountains via taxi. The mountains were once a chain of five marble islets that were submerged under water, now they loom poetically over the landscape. They are named for the five elements that the Vietnamese thought made up the world: earth, fire, water, metal and wood. If you have time and you are on the Central Coast, I recommend that you go. The mountains' are like the realization of a childhood dream, the embodiment of Tolkein's stories of civilizations carved into a mountain. The mountains really are made of marble, and many civilizations from the Cham to the current day Buddist have carved temples and sculptures into the caves inside the mountains and used the mountain as their secret sanctuary. During the American war, the Viet Cong used the temples inside the mountain as hospitals. The water dripping from the stalagmites is said to have healing properties. If you can climb to the top of the largest peak, you are rewarded with an inspiring view of all five mountains and China Beach. Come prepared to climb though, Jeff and I came thinking that we could just walk up the mountain. Not so. This one requires a bit a of climbing, sometimes on all fours.

We took the train to Hue from Danang, and I don't recommend the train if you are travelling with large backpacks or suitcases. The train is used by the domestic Vietnamese who are usually only going to a city for a day or two and have packed all their necessities into a very slim briefcase. They didn't seem to understand that we had large bags that had to be properly secured or they would just fall and hurt someone. I got repeatedly pushed and shoved aside by everyone from the travellers to the train attendants, and no one ever thought of stopping to apologize or see if I was okay. When we arrived in Hue, I was unable to get off the train because of all the people getting on. Finally I had to be heaved off the train by two young men who could build up the moment to get past all the people getting on.

Yesterday we visited the remains of the Imperial City in Hue. The city was repeately burned, looted and bombed by the French in 1947 and the Americans in 1968. Between them the French and Americans seemed to take everything from the Imperial City that was of value. Walking through the city for me was like visiting a cemetary, you could see the foundations of five large palaces that had been completely levelled by the Americans in the Tet Offensive of 1968. Nothing was left of their former grandeur, only old pictures and models. I felt very sad and slightly violated by the unnecessary autrocities of the American War.

Today we visited the Tomb of the Nguyen Dynasty Emperor Tu Duc. His tomb is set on the area that used to be his summer villa. He had a penchant for poetry and painting the areas his filled with pine forests, wildflowers and man-made lakes and islets. There is a flowing grace about the place that is calming and tranquil.

Lina