Today included a trip to the zoo with Kitty’s niece, Wei. You can get a lot more information about all these animals from the zoo’s own website. Here are some photos of the animals I took today:
Some of the photos were taken using my camera’s digital zoom feature, hence they are not overly sharp. I thought I’d try the digital zoom feature since I normally have it disabled and simply use PhotoShop to crop & zoom later. Given these results, I think I’ll go back to that strategy.
Yesterday evening I finally published the changes to add support for remote debugging to the NetBSD latest source base for PowerPC devices. This includes support for the scheduler activations based threading via the remote debugger connection as well.
More information can be found here. The change was also filed as change-request problem report with the NetBSD project.
Spent the weekend down in Los Angeles. Saturday we got an early start due to a “general alarm” at 6am in the hotel. Hotel alarm systems are pretty cool – not only was there a very loud siren, but it also tells you that there is an emergency and that you should leave the building. Of course, at 6am this was not particularly what I wanted to hear!
Still, it got us to Disneyland nice and early, and we spent the whole day there (not leaving until after midnight). Some of the older rides were not open (e.g. Space Mountain), and the new Winnie the Pooh ride in Critter Country was having a bad day (several temporary closures). Apart from that we had no real problems all day there.
The rest of the weekend was more relaxed. Just shopping and driving around sightseeing. Back here Monday evening.
The kind folks at phpwebhosting.com who host blueDonkey.org for me have fixed the problems with the server that was causing the site to be painfully slow for most of Sunday and Monday. Hopefully it will stay that way, but I’ll be watching it over the next few days in case.
Actually, I’ve been using it quite heavily over the past week or so as I add new information to the VxWorks Cookbook. That will probably be continuing on and off for the next week too, so I should see any performance problems pretty quickly, at least during Californian daytime hours.
blueDonkey.org now has a favicon.ico file. Not very imaginative I know, but the donkey logo did not scale down too well to the 16×16 size that the favicon.ico file needs to be.
Oddly though, my copy of Internet Explorer, which is the browser that first added support for this file, doesn’t see it. Nor does it see the icons for any other web sites I visit. The Microsoft site doesn’t even seem to have such a file anymore.
So, those using IE might, or might not see the icon. Use a real browser if you want to be sure of seeing it (not to mention avoiding the security and rendering problems that IE has as well).
While at Embedded Systems I was forced to use IE to view and edit the weblog since that’s what the free internet access machines were running. I noticed that IE was not rendering the main index page that well (the text flowed off the right hand side of the screen requiring use of the scroll bars to read it). On real browsers, like Mozilla, Netscape and Galeon, this was not the case.
Seems that IE is still unable to process style sheets correctly, but by rearranging the content a little I have been able to get it to look the same on both browsers. Hopefully one day MS will learn to actually (a) follow a standard rather than doing their own little variations, and (b) produce software of sufficient quality that it might be worth using. Meanwhile, I would strongly recommend that people switch to Mozilla or Netscape for browsing (less chance of viral infection with those browsers too 😉
Here I am at an ARM-sponsored internet terminal in the mezzanine level of the Moscone Center. Thought I post a short note now, add more detail perhaps later.
Spent the morning at a breakfast session about the Eclipse IDE hosted by QNX and Rational. Very interesting, and it looks as though it might well become the IDE of the future. I don’t think the others out there, especially the proprietary ones from other embedded players, stand much chance against this. IBM’s backing is obvious, Rational and QNX seem very committed not only to using it, but also feeding back work in the open source community.
As a side note, I am wondering when IBM will buy QNX… I think that would have a big impact on the embedded industry in general, and would certainly push QNX into the spotlight a little more than they have been.
Just spent 10 minutes tweaking the style sheet and the view template to improve the navigational links inside the TWiki system. The change basically adds the parents to the footer of each page, but it also tidies up some of the layout in the header.
April Fools Day is here again, and that means only 2 weeks to tax filing deadline. As a result, I spent yesterday updating Quicken with my last year’s financial transactions ready for the second phase: a day with TurboTax.
Today though I thought I’d upload a couple of photos taken during my day of site-seeing with Mark (West):
1) Another shot of the Cupid’s bow & arrow sculpture on the Embarcadero in downtown SF:
2) The Golden Gate Bridge, from the SF side. Not the clearest day I’ve been there, but still pretty good.
I did take some shots from the top of Twin Peaks too, but with the digital camera you can’t really make out much as the city is so far away. One day I’ll try to get up there and take a panoramic sequence, then stitch them together into a QuickTime VR.
Well, I finally got around to writing some software for my Palm OS device. It was actually trying to follow directions transcribed from Yahoo! Maps Driving Directions onto a post-it note at the weekend that prompted this idea.
Now I have a simple little application that, when combined with a PHP script running on blueDonkey.org is able to display the directions, one step at a time, on my PDA screen. Here’s an example of the screen layout:
Download your copy today, and let me know what else you’d like to see in it by going to the new TWiki web I’ve set up for it at, and any other Palm OS applications I end up writing.
