stas' weblog

Don’t ask me why, but I decided to take a part in this virus-like game striked a lot of Planet’s blogs lately. Here’re the rules:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the closest.

The result for me comes from the “Paradigms of Artifical Intellegence Programming” by Peter Norvig. This great book has been living on my table for month already awaiting for me to finally find some time to get into the wonderful world of the Lisp and AI. The quote is following:

The special form let* is appropriate when you want to use one of the newly introduced variables in a subsequent value computation.

I hope the book will stop having a bad time soon and we’ll be enjoying working together on the fascinating AI stuff for a long time.

There were a lot of noise recently about a new little toy project that anyalizes your “writing personality” based on your blog posts. So I tried to test it within my blog as well. As it comes my writing personality is of the “ESTP - The Doers” class. The meaning of that is given on the projects’s website as the following:

The active and play-ful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.

The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.

Well, probably it is not far from reality.:-) At least, they assure your blog writing style has nothing to do with self-percieved personality.

What is your blog writing style? Check it here.

Картинка из офиса, не мог не сфотографировать. “Кризис” наступает, чего уж там…

Google started to publish scanned photographs from the LIFE magazine stretching from the 1750s to today. Some of them have never been published and comes directly from the LIFE archive. There’re a lot of really brilliant photos, and those are now available in free and accessible form.

Be sure to check the archive here.

Thanks, Google!

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Recently I was involved into the practical part of microprocessor's course, included into our department's masters program, where I served as TA. Well, in fact, not just TA, but the entire 2x2 hour course was developed and teached by me and my friend.

The primary goal of this classes was to make students familar with our national processor boards, produced by NIISI (research institute of systems development). Theses boards include our first MIPS R3000-compatible KOMDIV32 microprocessor with technological sizes of 35 microns, "PRIME" boot monitor and various peripheral devices like speaker, uarts, light diods and so on. The processor runs at 90 MHz clock.

The board still very buggy and has a lot of features hardcoded and/or hardwired, but pretty usable. Especially interesting looks PRIME boot monitor, that can handle almost all development task, including but not limited to downloading executables via FTP/TFTP/NFS or Z-Modem, dumping/writing memory and working with FLASH memory. The board has two modes of operation - depending on switch setting it can either go to PRIME on boot, or start executing the code located at the start of flash memory. This feature has shown itself to be very handy in development.

The development kit was also accomplished by the proprietary OS2000 real-time operating system, which seems to be an evil mix of FreeBSD 4.x and VxWorks source code. E.g. their second stage boot loader fully resembles VxWorks loader, though with a lot of parsing bugs. Similary, the kernel object archives contains files like ipfw.ko with full debug info and CVS id's, although it seems to not use it:-) The operating system claims to be POSIX-compatible, though I had no enough time to check it fully. The course was featuring work with some multiprogramming APIs like POSIX threads and message passing, but unfortunately very few studens were able to understand this fully due to lack of C programming experience in past.

We were using FreeBSD as a host enviropment instead of NIISI-recommended Red Hat Linux. All the SDK software was ported to FreeBSD with a little effort (thanks to SDK developers - the didn't used bash/gawk/etc feature much). However, we used their proprietary GCC-based compiler (GPL violation?) under Linux emulation to compile target source code. Probably, gcc's mips target can do that too, but I didn't tried that.

One funny bug we were experiencing - the BSP we got with board was not fully compatible with it, thus it was producing a continuous high-frequency beep after startup. This way we could always say when yet one student managed to get his board running OS2000:-) Although a little room with 8 beeping boards looked slightly crazy...

A good project will be to try to run FreeBSD/mips on these boards and use it as a basis of course, but the lack of documentation and OS source code makes this nearly impossible. Hopefully, they'll understand soon that distributing a research OS without the source code in 21th century is a no-way.

Today I have received an approve from portmgr@ to allow Marcelo Araujo to join the developers community as a ports committer. He've done a great work of submitting new ports and fixes, so it's the time to reward him.

I'll drive his first steps as ports committer and will be responsible for his possible errors (and receive pointy hats for that:-)).

Please, wish him a luck!

Happy new year to everyone! Good luck and best wishes!

One more year for hacking FreeBSD, working on other projects and figthing for the freedom and truth... One step closer to our targets.

Just installed the typo engine on my schiny new dual-ppro 200mhz server;-)

Really impressed by the power of this framework and by the AJAX sweets.