Stu's Rusty Bucket

Wednesday, December 31, 2003

ishka?

does this look like ishka? the sexy monkey with glasses??

Saturday, December 27, 2003

Bits and Pieces

Well with four days off to do nothing.. when stuck inside on shitty grey days.. life invariably turns to coding…

So…

I am writing a new homepage..  The old one hasnt been updated since Raster did my original one for me! Boy is that going back a long way....

I also spent the last two days on various development projects I have going;

ISLAY
This is my SPARC emulator (v7 + v8 SPARC CPU)… Hopefully when its done I’ll have a full ss20/10/5/4/LX emulator!

Worked on the mbus stuff, mbus stuff… did some v7 cpu stuff…

VMXASM
This is the assembler for my virtual machine (part of my book...) I did some more work on this.. Fixed a few bugs in the parser/lexer… Made it recognise hex numbers by a lead ‘0x’… Now we are at the stage of recognising rules and adding symbols.

Looks like this will be a two pass assembler… We are still on first pass, which is partial link and symbol recogniser.

KLINKERS
My win32-ecoff linker that produces my own exec fileformat, which is kinda like an IFF/FORM file format for binary executables with relocation info. All relocations are 32bit so its very simple. Kinda like an old dos MZ exec format… only not…

Thursday, December 25, 2003

xmas!

Its christmas day.. Spoke to mum last night, when it was xmas for her, as well as being rung this morning when it was xmas for me! I think I had 3 or 4 xmas calls to and from home!! hahaha!

I got lots of edible goodies, which is cool. Stu and Helen sent me a bottle of plonk, which I was gonna have with my dinner but.. I found I had no bottle opener!! doh! (The little italian cake they sent me was great for dessert!! It was like a french brioche, a sweet bread… very nice).

So I cooked a whole roast chicken for myself with a few roast potatoes and some veg… yay for me. Sadass having dinner on his own. tasted great! Left over chicken will be tomorow nights dinner…

Have not seen my flatmates all day so far. bloody ripper!!

I Had a great christmas so far, hope everyone else is having a good-un too!

Saturday, December 20, 2003

How to make Gravy

How To Make Gravy

Hello Dan, it’s Joe here, I hope you’re keeping well
It’s the 21st of December, and now they’re ringing the last bells
If I get good behaviour, I’ll be out of here by July
Won’t you kiss my kids on Christmas Day, please don’t let ‘em cry for me
I guess the brothers are driving down from Queensland and Stella’s flying in from the coast
They say it’s gonna be a hundred degrees, even more maybe, but that won’t stop the roast
Who’s gonna make the gravy now? I bet it won’t taste the same
Just add flour, salt, a little red wine and don’t forget a dollop of tomato sauce for sweetness and that extra tang
And give my love to Angus and to Frank and Dolly,
Tell ‘em all I’m sorry I screwed up this time
And look after Rita, I’ll be thinking of her early Christmas morning
When I’m standing in line

I hear Mary’s got a new boyfriend, I hope he can hold his own
Do you remember the last one? What was his name again?
(Just a little too much cologne)
And Roger, you know I’m even gonna miss Roger
‘Cause there’s sure as hell no one in here I want to fight
Oh praise the Baby Jesus, have a Merry Christmas,
I’m really gonna miss it, all the treasure and the trash
And later in the evening, I can just imagine,
You’ll put on Junior Murvin and push the tables back
And you’ll dance with Rita, I know you really like her,
Just don’t hold her too close, oh brother please don’t stab me in the back
I didn’t mean to say that, it’s just my mind it plays up,
Multiplies each matter, turns imagination into fact
You know I love her badly, she’s the one to save me,
I’m gonna make some gravy, I’m gonna taste the fat
Tell her that I’m sorry, yeah I love her badly, tell ‘em all I’m sorry,
And kiss the sleepy children for me
You know one of these days, I’ll be making gravy,
I’ll be making plenty, I’m gonna pay ‘em all back. 

Friday, December 19, 2003

xmas party

Well I survived the xmas party. The night start off in Bodeans (some american style ‘rib’ place). i managed to pick over a ceaser salad whilst fighting off the smell of 7 people eating ‘baby back ribs’ or something.

Then we ended up in a pub down toward Regeant street. not too shabby either. a couple of vodka and oranges whilst the other boys downed a few pints of larger then it was off to the club.

Tantra. Smaller than I expected, we had a good size crowd. Everyone was ogling everyone else.

There were no fights this year and no visible falling down drunks or assualting potplants either..

The company booked taxis for everyone, cept my driver had never driven to the east end.. and he’s like “I’ll drive east. we’ll find it” yep.. after an hour we managed! Bloody hell, we drove round hackney for like 15 minutes. I was like “If the lights turn red, you DO NOT STOP!” man hackney is hole.

I was a little dehydrated the next day but ohwell…

There was a few birds that scrubbed up really well… heh.

Tuesday, December 16, 2003

winamp5

well.. been playing with winamp5 all night. damn its funky. I really like it.. music library is cool. better playlist editor etc. no downsides so-far…

at least I can upgrade from 2.91 now!! (never tried 3)…

the new skin is nice too.

On the work front, I have the office xmas party tomorow. 300 odd people taking advantage of free beer and free alchopops al night… i dont particuarly want to go, but I will as my last staff xmas party..

Its in some club I cant recall… Nobody has any idea what this years theme will be.. there was naked dwarves last year.. and the year before was mulin rouge can can girly dancers and nake muscled blokes handing out lollies and vodka shots..

movie trailers

well I just watched, Spiderman 2! that looks awesome! dr octopus… very cool looking.

hellboy.. mm again, looks cool. looks true to the comic. i was never a hellboy fan tho. give me a hellblaizer movie instead!!

mona lisa smile.. hmm a julia roberts film.. looking like a womens version of robin williams + dead poets society… i bet this is a hit for her.. looks like that kind of film..

Thursday, December 11, 2003

T.A.T.U animated movie! aaaaaaergh

Yes the manufactured russian pop lesbian lolita duo have been animised! something about a paranormal gateway. looks actionish.  Some big names behind the production too (if you know your anime director is Kashima Norio (who did Crusher Joe, Dirty Pair) with Susume Kudoh (Sakura Wars) and the openening squence is by the director of Cowbow BeBop…

100 minutes of tatuness

http://www.tatu-paragate.jp/index.html (japanese)

i’m an anime junkie! i own a internet domain name called mega-tokyo, but for bloody hell, dont force a tatu anime on us! aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!

it pains it pains

100 minutes of pain

released in november…

bleach…

Monday, December 08, 2003

OpenBios?

been reading this Freenix 03 paper on LinuxBIOS.

Very interesting stuff.. not sure I like some of its implementation details like the bochs bios and other bits. Its long overdue to remove and overhaul the BIOS. its a useless subsystem thats a shackle on os developers.

They dont really go into detail on how they expose things. USB stack etc.. do I use the Linux syscalls? what about a nice homogenous API.. does that mean the system is in protected mode now? No more real mode… that would be nice.. Will I need a BIOS32 system interface or is a PCI routing table enough? A couple of BIOS Virutal Consoles would be ultra sweeeeet…

GRUB with an exported API is what I want… exporting consoles, usb stack, small network stack maybe, syscons and ability to use its FS layer like some kind of INT 0x13 subsystem.

There are some other really cool things off off Freenix 03 track…

An Implementation of User-level Restartable Atomic Sequences on the NetBSD Operating System here

The TrustedBSD MAC Framework: Extensible Kernel Access Control for FreeBSD 5.0 here

StarFish: Highly-Available Block Storage here

Sunday, December 07, 2003

Gilbert??

You are Gilbert!  You’re sweet and considerate and
everyone seems to like you.  You also stand up
for yourself and never take anyone’s crap.
Hooray!


Which “Revenge of the Nerds” Character Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Minix Filesystems Part 2

When loading direntries, if an inode > 0 add it to our list, else it is a unused/deleted inode entry. Simple.. now it works as it should! wheeeeee

minix filesystems

managed to finally implement a read-only Minix filesystem tonight. works on v1 and v2 FS’s with 14 and 30 name size defines.

Internally it maps a v1 to a v2 inode structure.

Currently only reads direct blocks and wont read into double and triple indirect block mappings.

One bizzaro thing is that all my inode numbers seem to be +1, so all referencing must be done with a -1

but if you reference the mde-inode as -1 when its built, everything fails… Since you must request the root as inode 0… doing a minus one buggers it up…

Requires some more indepth looking into......

apart from this one thing that annoys me, so far, so good.. then its write-mode implementing, then finishing the minix_tools (fsck, mkfs, mkdir, rmdir, cp, ls, mv, etc)… currently we have an ls… so..... hmm…

Thursday, December 04, 2003

Wiki’s

Fiiinally got my WIKI working… no more errors and stuff… yay… but we will see how well it works or not..

Now I can properly move the OS-FAQ into editable wiki format....

Tuesday, December 02, 2003

store visits

im working in store tomorow. If i dont write any more entries after this, you know I have died of boredom stacking cds on a shelf or zombiefied in the stockroom unpacking boxes of cds…

should a whizz bang fantastic action-a-plenty excitement all round day tomorow… :(

really looking forward to it.. nothing better i could think of doing all day..... really....

Monday, December 01, 2003

Budgets

well.. Ive worked out my budgets! (I have an elaborate spreadsheet, conditional formatting etc). At first i was very worried, it was very grim reading.. but Ive worked it so it now balances just fine!

(It takes into acount a range of 10 USD/GBP exchange rates and 10 GBP/AUD rates)..

but… well its a big but… I had to factor lots of things in. My original budget only covered 6 months of car payments, but then I realised, I need to cover them for when I return to the UK, and take into account I wont have a job immediatly opon returning etc.. ack!

So some refactorisation was in order. Reduction of monthly expenditures, etc. Thankfully I already own all my gear and have no major purchases. Plane tickets were factored in ages ago so thats already taken care of. I should be in a good position to have a budget of 2500USD for my hike. Since I dont plan on staying in every town I go through, my expenses should be only food, maybe a gear breakage or two. Some town stopovers will be a nescesity, so thats ok. I have enough GBP behind me for when I finish the hike, that an unexpected town stay should be ok...... and since I dont drink or smoke, there is none of that to worry my expenses.

I should be able to afford to eat when I return to the UK.

If the pound looses to the dollar (if it drops < 1.6) I am well screwed! But you get into the predicament of, do you transfer a large chunk at a set rate, or leave it dynamic and hope that 2 months into the hike that britain does not hit a majour recession and sterling v dollar drops to 1.1 or something…

So much at risk, so much is left to the vagaries of the world market.

Also my last pay cheque arrives the day I start the trail… So… should there be any inconcistency in my pay.. I am well beyond screwed and into haemoraghing status.