About Me

Michael Zucchi

 B.E. (Comp. Sys. Eng.)

  also known as Zed
  to his mates & enemies!

notzed at gmail >
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Monday, 05 April 2010, 11:09

That's it for summer I guess.

Daylight savings just finished here - and it's already throwing me out. After plugging away at the computer all afternoon I thought it must've been 10 or something as it seemed to have been dark for so long, but it was only 7:30 ... Good time to call it a day I guess.

Yesterday I got a whole lot of work out of the way on the retaining wall, I should've done more today but I was too lazy. The weather was too nice too - although then I just spent most of the day inside instead of taking advantage of it. Once I sit down to hack it's pretty well game over ... Probably should've made the effort though - looks like weather is turning wet soon, and I need to get some of the stuff done whilst it's still try. Maybe an hour or two over the next two days might do it.

Well that's Easter done, back to work tomorrow.

WoofƆs

Was up pretty late hacking away on some WoofƆs stuff, and then continued it for most of today. For the most part it's just re-arranging stuff I already have from puppybits, or my previous x86 hacking. Pretty time consuming though, trying to tie it all together. It also needed quite a bit of re-thinking and re-jigging along the way.

I've got it all building, and it currently launches two tasks, one which immediately goes to sleep waiting for work to do, and the idle task which blinks the led. But that isn't really any more than I already have in puppybits, so I need to start testing the other stuff - per-process virtual memory, message passing, and so on. These things are a bit hard to play with in isolation since so much support is needed first. Hmm, I really need to get timers and timer interrupts working too, but I can test that in isolation.

The architecture which i've thought about so far does seem to be holding together at least - no big surprises have come along ... yet. Although that assumes the stuff i've written actually works too. So far I have a 'memserver' which is tightly bound to the kernel - it is basically a kernel thread since it accesses the kernel memory directly. It is used to create all in-kernel objects - directly adding them to the kernel in some cases, or where necessary through lightweight system calls to register the new resource. This lets me avoid any dynamic memory in the kernel itself, and by using the right data structures or the occasional lightweight system call I don't have to worry about serialisation either (well, once i've got it right).

I had been thinking about all sort of exotic data structures like trees or hash tables to locate resources based on an object id - but these all have various issues. Execution time, serialisation, and so on (I have implementations that use no dynamic memory, so that wasn't an issue). So in the end I settled for a simple array for many of the objects - it probably uses less memory anyway, and certainly needs less code. It also allows me to update and access it atomically from multiple threads of execution without trouble.

The whole 'kernel' is only 10 system calls so far - and although I still need a few more for interrupts, it shouldn't be many ... I think. Of course most of the work is in the servers, and the kernel is just passing data around. Even in those 10 I already have some 'helper' syscalls too - they aren't strictly necessary but combine a couple of system calls into one, there is probably scope for some more of those.

I had a little chicken and egg problem with message allocating - you need to send a message to the memory server to allocate new messages before they can be sent via the kernel. I think I have worked out a solution - part of the process start-up will be to send a system message to the new process. This message can then be used to ask for more, or just as a general purpose message container. Still, I might need some other more direct mechanism since message ownership passes every time they are forwarded, and it is possible for them to get `lost'.

I might have to look into a mailbox mechanism I guess, although I don't want to have too many options for IPC. After I'd written the basic message allocation system I thought it would be a bit bulky to do too often - well the point is not to in the first place, but it seemed a bit heavy. I looked into a simpler mechanism of message passing using limited registered arguments. But it just didn't seem that useful - because you can only pass primitive non-pointer types. As soon as you want to pass buffers around the mechanism falls down, and you need even more complex support code (like 'far' copies), which then needs to perform extra security checks, and so on. One `freebie' of the message passing mechanism as i've envisioned it so far is it sort of self-checks. Nothing the kernel deals with needs checking in detail because any addresses are from trusted sources or have already been verified, or just integer representations of virtual addresses it never looks at. And servers can perform fairly cheap checking since all data must fit in a fixed bound.

Might sit on all that for a while now.

Tagged beagle, os, puppybits.
Sunday, 04 April 2010, 02:32

New project

Finally cleaned up and checked in the kernel start code, and a simple demo which uses it.

I still need to do some prototyping of various low-level components before I can make a whole, but I might kick off the part of the whole I can do already because i'm getting a bit bored of just working on these small fragments.

Keeping with the canine theme, i'm going to call it ...

WoofƆs

Or maybe WʊfƆs, although I think the larger one is more aesthetically pleasing (the letters are based on the international phonetic alphabet if you were wondering).

I'll probably just keep it in the puppybits project, although keep the code separate. With work and home being as they are I haven't had much time nor energy to work on this stuff, so things aren't going to progress at any great rate. Speaking of which I think it's time to hit the yard and get dirty shoveling. Two days of Easter down and all i've managed so far is ~97km of cycling, a hangover, and an improved tan.

Tagged beagle, os, puppybits.
Thursday, 01 April 2010, 13:46

Woof!

Tagged beagle.
Wednesday, 31 March 2010, 23:30

CentOS isn't worth the paper ... oh hang on

After a few more hiccups I finally gave up on CentOS on my workstation last week - I don't mean to diss on the CentOS project and people as such, but I have to say I had a pretty negative experience with it and probably wont be considering it again (there just isn't any need). I hadn't tried it before, and thought i'd give it a go, mostly because I was expecting simple reliability.

Unfortunately not.

Lack of packages
Just how limited was a little bit of a shock ... but this was something entirely reasonable and had no major problem with this.
Lack of stability
This was both shocking and surprising. I had a lot of stability issues from day one. Primarily that xterm's constantly locked up when trying to do ordinary things like 'man blah' or 'less foo' (and I need to use the real xterm - the other `desktop project' knockoff's are unusably slow at full screen, and barely usable even at 80x24). I got around it using info, or emacs shell but it got old very fast. Firefox also had a habit of grabbing the pointer if I accidentally dragged something which is too easy to do. For the most part I loathe DnD because generally it's too easy to trigger and used in some really stupid places, and where it could be useful - e.g. dropping files into an application or filename selector, it isn't implemented, sigh. I wish GUI designers of the free `desktops' had a wider GUI experience than just MacOS and Windows 95.
Bloody slow (not just slow)
Ok I'm a bit spoilt with my home workstation and it is decidedly slower hardware, but this was a little ridiculous. I can forgive some of it because I chose to encrypt the home partition, but I really have no feel on how much that makes a difference. I'm sure EXT3 is something to blame here too - if anything demonstrates that the Linux project is no true meritocracy it is that this steaming pile is still the main filesystem of choice when so many more advanced and reliable filesystems have existed for years!
Updates broke it
What finally broke the camel's back was turning it on one morning and having no X any more because the update manager prodded me to install a different Linux and I wasn't paying attention. I am 'partly to blame' because I am using the proprietary nvidia driver (the other one just didn't work, and I need OpenCL/CUDA or something down the line too) from livna or something or other - but I haven't had quite such problems doing similar things in the past that were so difficult to resolve. After mucking about for an hour or two I gave up and just installed Fedora 11 (the newer ones are just fucked up too much to be slavagable within my patience band). That ended up taking the whole day (made a few mistakes along the way), but it was definitely worth it.

Now I don't know how much CentOS differs from RHL, but this doesn't leave a good impression of that either. The whole point of using old software with limited packages is for stability and reliability and it was on those two particular points that I had the most negative experience. Probably the worst I've had with any OS since automated package management existed (~10 years).

I've moved to Fedora 11 and have had no issues since. Faster, more stable, more packages, blah blah blah.

X, Java, Netbeans

Well, while i'm dissing on free software projects ... I don't know what they're doing wrong but OpenJDK has some major performance issues that simply make Java (and anything that uses it) look really bad ( in all fairness I am using Fedora 11, so it is certainly quite an old release ... ). I am doing some stuff in netbeans (6.8) and although usable for the most part, had a decidedly lurcherous gait which only got worse over time till it was barely usable. I resorted to using emacs for editing (it's still a much better basic editor), jumping back to netbeans only to look up methods (JavaDocs as useful as they are are a bit unwieldy to navigate, particularly in a web browser). I suspect it has more to do with something basic like the interaction with X than anything else - and we all know what a mess of The X Windows System that f.d.o are making so it probably isn't entirely `their fault'.

So I finally got sick of that and after a bit of searching on the net and trying "-Dsun.java2d.pmoffscreen=false" to no big effect, the only thing seemed to be to try the Sun JDK. *Cough* Oracle JDK. Apart from a different way of selecting fonts that initially made it look a bit crap, and a generally lighter appearance in the text you'd think I just upgraded the computer to see the difference.

It's like night and day. It might use scads more memory than a C app but it feels just as snappy and responsive (at least in comparison to how it was, hard to guage). The thing is, having such a poor user experience from the OpenJDK just continues to give Java a bad name when it just isn't warranted, and hasn't been for a long time now. I was originally just going to implement a GUI in Java (or maybe just a prototype) but I might try a few tests of the algorithms to see how it compares to the C code - it spends most of it's time in FFTW anyway at present. It's a real pity that it doesn't support a primitive complex type, but that isn't the end of the world. I'm using the Shared Scientific Toolkit at the moment, although mostly just for the arrays and fft ops (that's all the code really needs).

CMake

Oh god what is this pain in my head ... yet another messed up build system. One that provides all the craptascialness of Ant for your C++ projects too! Jesus, who comes up with this shit? I had some issues building SST - it turned out I just needed to install the static FFTW library, but along the way I had my first experience of CMake. About the only thing going for it is that it doesn't use XML. What I don't understand is why these things come along and break the whole point of make files? During the build something failed - so I worked out how to manually run the command and the command ran ok. Fine then, just run make and let it continue ... oh no, that would be too fucking simple wouldnt it? It uses some fucked up meta-system for tracking build dependencies, so it just re-builds the whole directory again, again failing on the final link. Then I ran a different make target which built ok ... but wasn't quite what I needed. No problem, try the original build target ... 'target up to date' ... huh?

THIS IS TOTAL SNOT!

The one and only point for any make system to exist in the first place is to guarantee your builds are consistent without having to recompile everything every time. For everything else you may as well just use shell scripts - which are conveniently embedded inside a Makefile. I understand CMake does some other stuff, and also provides a `shell script' environment that supports broken operating systems, and that idea has some merit - should you wish to interact with such a broken system at least - but if it can't get the basics right what use is it?

Ant is another nightmare all of its own - not only does it not do any dependency checking whatsoever (one of the most critical features of any build system), simple human readable shell scripting is replaced not only by a disastrous and unparsable XML scripting language but also by dynamically loaded Java modules! I can understand wanting to use your favourite language for everything, but Java is not a scripting language and sometimes there is a right tool for the job.

completely broken ...

... simply worthless.

... CMake ... Ant ...

I consider any tool where you must occasionally `make clean' to get a reliable build to be completely broken and simply worthless. CMake seems to get around this absurdity by abusing 'ccache' - another painful bit of kit that shouldn't need to exist (the limited use-cases for which ccache provides any service can mostly be done in other much simpler ways - assuming you have a reliable dependency mechanism in the first place). And Ant gets around this by the fact the java compiler is quite fast anyway, and already does the dependency checking - but only for the Java sources, and any real project has to do more than just compile objects and link them together. One often has to 'clean and rebuild' in all the GUI IDEs i've used, but there should be no reason to ever need this unless you're manipulating files outside of it.

Idiot. Is this you?

What I find disappointing (vexatious, alarming, and upsetting too) is that people refuse to learn a basic reliable, flexible tool, and then come up with their own which doesn't even solve the original problem. `I can't use an editor to control the tabs in my file' is really an idiotic and puerile argument (if you do think that, then yes i am in fact calling you an idiot. Idiot.) I suspect if they understood the original problem they wouldn't have bothered to inflict all this crap upon themselves or the rest of us in the first place and wouldn't the world would be a better place for that?

I understand some people think make is a bit arcane .. but it isn't. XML is the definition of arcane - lets design a format which makes it easy to write parsers, for developers. You know that tiny bit of code that gets written once and forgotten about because nobody fucking cares once it works. It's not like they even got that bit right - the parsers are large and complex and the code you write using them ends up being large and complex too (and it's all slow). But the real winner is that this then inflicts all the nitty-gritty which makes it 'easy to parse' onto the user for whom it is decidedly not easy to parse, or write, or even design. Now that's arcane.

But I digress.

The auto*tools are a big bit of nasty, but at least it's only one (perhaps broken) system to learn, not 'n' (definitely broken) systems where 'n' is monotonically increasing. And there are plenty of application projects for which it shouldn't be needed (but gets used anyway, sigh).

Woke up too early

Shit, I was supposed to have some bricks delivered this morning - I was up way too late and got little sleep worrying about making sure I tell them to put it in the driveway to avoid 3 hours of back breaking work moving them. I suppose i should go get some groceries, or I might just avoid the shops which turn into a nightmare of panic buying just before Easter since many shops are shut - GOOD HEAVENS - for 2 whole days in a row. How ever will we all survive for so long without being able to buy more shit!

Tagged linux, rants.
Tuesday, 30 March 2010, 16:19

Bye bye CELL

Well, I guess that's really the last nail in the coffin for CELL.

Sony's just announced that the next firmware `upgrade' for the PS3 will drop Linux support (and it's so important, that's all it will do). This is very, very disappointing. They blame it on crackers or 'security', but it's obvious it is just a cost cutting exercise. Sony have been hurting financially for a while now, and the razor gang is out with their daggers looking for savings.

After the `ps3 slim' dropping support (due supposedly to lack of resources to write the hypervisor drivers), and then IBM dropping CELL for HPC ... I guess the writing was on the wall. I'm glad I gave up development on CELL BE some time ago and got hold of a beagleboard instead - overall it's been a more satisfying experience if only because things are simpler. The whole CELL thing was just a costly mistake for all by the looks of it - being a bit ahead of it's time lead to a few limitations that people couldn't cope with.

Even though I rarely use it anymore, the whole thing plainly stinks - this is not a device I rent, I bought it. And for them to come into my home and remove functionality (advertised on the box no less) from a device that I paid for in full (well over-paid) should simply be illegal, if it isn't already.

I can't even log onto the Sony blog to fruitlessly whine about it because they've changed the login system to some horrid mess that takes ages to load and only shows blank pages (I bet it works on ie6 though, if the comments in the page are anything to go by). Well if they don't want me as a customer it isn't really my loss is it?

Time to remove CELL BE from the subtitle of this page at least; not that it has had much point in being there for quite some time.

Tagged ps3, rants.
Tuesday, 30 March 2010, 12:33

Damn numbers

Hmm, that was frustrating.

Have been trying to write a `kernel' boot header - one that sets the MMU up for the kernel to execute at another address (0xC0000000) and then jumps to it. Been very tired from sleeping poorly and a bit brain-dead after work so I haven't been really switched on, but it's been dragging on so much I was about to give up (well not really, but it felt like I should).

Apart from a few little bugs, i was using the wrong TEXCB/AP flags for the level 2 page entry for devices ... but I don't know why it's wrong. It seems to check out in the manual, but for whatever reason it just crashes the code (FWIW I was using 0xb2 - 'non sharable device, rw everyone' rather than '0x16' 'sharable device, rw supervisor only). Blah. One little number change and now it works. $@%!$#

I plan to use the two translation table mode, which means the system memory will start at 0x80000000 - so it may make sense to just identity map the kernel at that address. But for now the memory map will have the kernel at 0xc0000000, and i'll start shared libraries or something else at 0x80000000.

So here it is ... in hindsight I may have done things in the wrong order, but this way makes things easy. I set aside some memory in the BSS section for the page tables and let the linker manage allocating space for them, also for the I/O devices - although this means a couple of physical pages are lost at present.

There is a few little `tricks' that I use so the code is position independent, although there are possibly better ways to do it. The init code has to be position independent because the linker script is set up so that all the code starts from the same virtual address - it could be done otherwise, but then I would need an ELF loader to relocate the image - which is somewhat more work.

 _start:
        adr     r12,_start              @ this will be physical load address
        mov     sp,r12
        push    { r0 - r3 }

First I just setup r12 and the stack to point to our load address - which is 0x80008000 as set by the linker script. This gives the code a fixed location from which to calculate physical and virtual addresses. The incoming arguments are saved too - although nothing uses them yet (das u-boot can pass in arguments or information about modules or filesystems it preloaded into memory).

        ldr     r1,bss_offset
        ldr     r2,bss_offset+4
        add     r1,r1,r12
        add     r2,r2,r12
        mov     r0,#0
1:      str     r0,[r1],#4
        cmp     r1,r2
        blo     1b

Clear the BSS - the code reads a relative offset that the linker creates, that indicates where the BSS starts and stops, and then uses r12 to map that to the physical address. The ldr r1,bss_offset is assembled into a pc-relative instruction so will work no-matter where it's loaded.Then there is a loop which uses a table to initialise the page tables. I first need to find the space within the BSS where it is stored, and then iterate through the entries. Each range is defined by a virtual target address, a start offset relative to _start, a virtual end address, and the `small page' flags for the pages.

        ldr     r11,ttb_offset
        add     r11,r12                 @ physical address of kernel_ttb
        add     r10,r11,#16384          @ same for kernel_pages

        adr     r9,ttb_map
        mov     r8,#ttb_size
1:      ldm     r9!, { r4, r5, r6, r7 } @ virtual dest, start offset, virtual end, flags
        add     r5,r12                  @ physical address

2:      mov     r3,r4,lsr #20
        ldr     r2,[r11, r3, lsl #2]
        cmp     r2,#0

If the l2 page isn't set yet, then just allocate one and update the l1 entry.

        moveq   r2,r10
        addeq   r10,#1024
        orreq   r2,#1
        streq   r2,[r11, r3, lsl #2]

Form and store the l2 page table entry.

        bic     r2,#0xff                        @ r2 = physical address of l2 page
        mov     r1,r4,lsr #12
        and     r1,#0xff
        orr     r0,r5,r7
        str     r0,[r2, r1, lsl #2]

And then loop for all the pages and all the entries in the table. Here I compare for equality for the end address - I do this so I could map the last page of memory if I wanted to. But currently I don't use this.

        add     r4,#4096
        add     r5,#4096
        cmp     r4,r6
        bne     2b

        subs    r8,#1
        bne     1b

That's really the meat of it - the table has the smarts in it, and uses the linker to create the interesting values required.Then it just turns on the MMU - this could probably be simplified as I can just enforce the state I want (i.e. don't bother preserving bits). Putting 1 in CP15_TTBCR means that two page tables are used, the TTBR1 table is used for any address with the top bit set (i.e. >= 0x80000000).

        mrc     15, 0, r0, CP15_SCTLR
        bic     r0,#SCTLR_ICACHE
        bic     r0,#SCTLR_AFE | SCTLR_TRE | SCTLR_DCACHE | SCTLR_MMUEN
        mcr     p15, 0, r0, CP15_SCTLR

        mov     r0,#0
        mov     r1,#1

        mcr     p15, 0, r0, CP15_TLBIALL
        mcr     p15, 0, r1, CP15_TTBCR          @ Top 2G uses TTBR1   
        mcr     p15, 0, r11, CP15_TTBR0
        mcr     p15, 0, r11, CP15_TTBR1
        mcr     p15, 0, r0, CP15_TLBIALL
        sub     r0,#1
        mcr     p15, 0, r0, CP15_DACR

        pop     { r0 - r3 }

        mrc     15, 0, r8, CP15_SCTLR
        orr     r8,#SCTLR_MMUEN
        mcr     p15, 0, r8, CP15_SCTLR

This last instruction turns the MMU on (and will probably eventually turn on the caches/etc). The input arguments are restored before turning on the MMU since the stack memory will no longer be valid or mapped (actually I should probably map the same 32K to the system stack wherever I decide to put that). The CPU now flushes the pipeline and starts executing instructions from the current pc - but with the MMU on. Because of this the code has to ensure this instruction is still mapped to the same address otherwise it's a one-way trip to la-la land.In this case the ldr pc,=vstart will force the assembler to generate a constant load from the constant pool (via a pc-relative load). The linker will set this constant up to point to the virtual address properly.

        ldr     pc, =vstart

Now come the relative offsets used to locate the BSS range, as well as the page table memory from within BSS.

bss_offset:
        .word   __bss_start__ - _start
        .word   __bss_end__ - _start
ttb_offset:
        .word   kernel_ttb - _start

And then the important stuff - the page table mapping descriptions. Rather than store the 'virtual end' address it could probably store the length of the address range, but so long as they are aligned properly it doesn't really make much difference. Note that even with the relative addresses any range in memory can be accessed using the simple arithmetic that the linker supports.

ttb_map:
        @ this page, so mmu can be enabled
        .word   LOADADDR, 0, LOADADDR + start_sizeof, CODE
        @ kernel text at virt address
        .word   __executable_start, 0, __data_start__, CODE
        @ kernel data
        .word   __data_start__, __data_start__-_start, __bss_end__,DATA
        @ system stack, 32K, 4K from end of memory
        .word   0 - 32768 - 4096, 0x8000000 - LOADADDR, 0-4096, DATA
        @ i/o of gpio, for debug too (LEDs!)
        .word   GPIO5, 0x49056000 - LOADADDR, GPIO5+4096, NDEV
        @ do serial port too, for debug stuff
        .word   UART3, 0x49020000 - LOADADDR, UART3+4096, NDEV

        .set    ttb_size, (. - ttb_map) / 16
        .ltorg

The .ltorg ensures the constant pool is stored at this point, so we can guarantee they are within the one page which needs to be identity mapped immediately after turning on the MMU.

vstart:
        ldr     sp,=-4096                       @ init stack
@       bl      __libc_init_array               @ static intialisers
        mov     r8,#(0xf<<20)                   @ enable NEON coprocessor access (still off though)
        mcr     p15, 0, r8, c1, c0, 2
        b       main

And this is the 'virtual address' entry point. This could just occur immediately after the setup code, but separating it makes it more obvious it's separated. About the only necessary setup is the (system) stack pointer. I was going to place this at the end of the virtual memory but having it one page back protects from stack underflow as well.

And finally there is the size of this code, and the BSS which stores the bare minimum so I can set it up and see it works (i.e. the UART or blink the LEDs).

        .set    start_sizeof, ((. - _start)+4095) & 0xfffff000

        .bss
        .balign         16384
        .global kernel_ttb, kernel_pages, UART3
kernel_ttb:
        .skip   16384
kernel_pages:
        .skip   1024*32
GPIO5:  .skip   4096
UART3:  .skip   4096

And ... it's done. Phew.

Unfortunately this means all my 'library code' that uses fixed physical addresses wont work any more, including the debug printing stuff. But that's something to worry about later.

One goal I had was that code isn't just setting up the page table to be thrown away later - this is sufficient to remain the kernel page table forever. Either for a supervisor level kernel process/threads, or for in this case as the `system page table' which is used for any address above 0x80000000. It still needs a little tweaking - the page table should be write-through cache-able for instance - but now it works I can worry about the details. Well now hopefully I can move on to more interesting things.

Interpolating arbitrary values

For work I have been playing with a few things of some interest. I thought I needed a function that could interpolate a set of values spread across an arbitrary 2d plane into a grid of values. I came across this interesting implementation of Thin Plate Splines which seemed to do the job. Unfortunately it turned out that I needed to interpolate more values than is practical with this algorithm (it does it, it just takes too long), and I can probably just force the values to be in a grid anyway so I can use much simpler methods. But still, this is an interesting algorithm to have in the toolkit and it produces pleasant looking results. Interestingly I found the C++ 'ludecomposition' code too messy to convert to C (i'm using different data structures) and just used the Java one it references as a starting point instead. It was much more C-like and translated in a very straightforward manner.

So I wrote a basic bicubic interpolater - the code uses bilinear at the moment although in an inconsistent way which doesn't really work since values can be missing. I was hoping bicubic would be a more natural fit for what it is doing, and worry about the missing values later. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to help much - the input data is just too noisy/inconsistent so I guess there is more to fix first (sorry this doesn't make much sense, I can't really say what it's trying to do).

Walls, dirt

I have some photo's of the progress on the retaining walll but i'm too lazy to put them up today. I got some ag-pipe on the weekend, so I'm just about ready to back-fill at least some of the wall (i don't think I have enough gravel to do the whole lot, but i'll see), although I'm not sure where to run it - and an outlet mid-way along the wall i've already laid will be a bastard! I was going to have it coming out the ends but now i'm not so sure. I need to decide so I can get the right fittings too (which for some reason are rather expensive for what they are).

Boral are having a sale on bricks and whatnot this week so I went and ordered another pile of retaining wall blocks (40% off makes it worth it, even if I don't need them for a while). I wasn't really sure how many I needed to start with, and I used a lot more than I thought originally (just the main wall uses most of them). I have a better plan on what I want to end up with now, so hopefully I got it right ... I guess I can always put them around trees or something if I have too many, or create a lower wall if I don't have enough.

Since I wont need to use them for a while i'm going to try to get them delivered into the driveway - so I don't have to move them off the verge by hand. So today I also moved the rest of the roadbase off of the drive-way to a pile out the back. Unfortunately I overloaded my cheap wheelbarrow and it turned over and I bent the handle (well it was only $60), but it's still usable. If I get stuck into finishing off the walls around the paving area it will get used up pretty fast anyway - of the 3 tons I probably have under 1 left. I'll get the bricks before easter, so it could be a very long long weekend if I get stuck into it ...

Tagged beagle, biographical, hacking.
Thursday, 25 March 2010, 12:45

Well said.

The Haiku mailing list is the strangest list I ever did subscribe to.

This post from Justin is completely super-fantastalistic. Very good read, if completely off-topic.

Still, this thread was basically the last straw for me at the moment on the Haiku list (but not enough on it's own) ... I guess I may return one day though

Update 1/4/2010. I've edited this post to change the tone a bit - I shouldn't have posted intoxicated as usual, or at the insane hour of the morning I did either, IIRC.

Read an enjoy.

from Justin x

reply-to haiku@freelists.orgto haiku@freelists.orgdate 22 March 2010 02:32subject [haiku] Re: The Holy Biblemailing list haiku.freelists.org Filter messages from this mailing list

This whole discussion is irritating... when followers of these faiths ignore the fact that they have mutually exclusive religions and the claims of the Christian bible for instance specifically demand the death of false prophets etc (not to mention killing gay people, atheists, witches, anyone who tries to convert you, your own children if they are unruly, rape victims (or just forcing them to marry their rapists), etc and don't try your "Jesus changed that" crap because I can point out to you a litany of verses where he specifically states that he did NOT come to change the old laws but to ensure their fulfillment until the end of time... EVERY JOT AND TITTLE etc... and how he numerous times references the validity of those old laws INCLUDING THEIR PUNISHMENTS OF DEATH etc. So don't even try that ignorant and wrong excuse).

Islam is the same way in it's treatment of Kuffar etc... death to apostates (as Sharia law demands that in a Muslim country under Sharia law if you say that you are no longer a Muslim the punishment is to be killed. How enlightened and civilized!), conversion or death for non-Muslims etc... not to mention that Islam specifically denies the divinity of Christ, who for Christians IS God etc... so that COMPLETELY denies a shared belief in the same God... as they're just two absurd variations on an older myth... just like Mormons in the US today are an even more recent absurd fallacious re-invention of older mythology... exactly as what Judaism was to the pagan polytheistic pre-monotheistic god of Moses... what Christian was to Judaism... what Islam was to Christianity... what Mormonism is to Christianity... just newer and newer absurd twists on an already absurd mythology invented by painfully ignorant barbarians who knew less about the natural world than small children know today.

Not to mention that when it comes down to it any one of the followers of any of these faiths INHERENTLY denies the validity of the others... but is too stupid to actually comprehend that the very reasons they deny all those other religions are the exact same reasons that apply to their own stupid fairytale. They just can't put two and two together because they're brainwashed, compartmentalized, idiots who utterly lack the ability to apply logic, reason, critical assessment etc to their own beliefs even when they do use them to dismiss other beliefs.

And to top that off, again, you have people like this who smile and act like it's some happy thing that you believe in the same stupid fairytale in spite of the fact that in reality you DENY the validity of their belief and their different interpretation on a completely fabricated mythology.

So when I see grown adults behaving like idiots who believe in imaginary gods invented centuries or millennia ago by ignorant bronze age tribesmen etc... and then ignoring what the very holy scriptures they're tittering about actually say etc... and end up just patting each other on the back because their mutually shared delusion stems from the same older absurd mythology... and that they have in common that ignorant and irrational belief in the supernatural etc...

I honestly didn't expect to run across so many idiots on a mailing list for a not well known, in-development, operating system.

And for the record I actually hate Satanists... I made the earlier post just to illustrate the principle of people talking about a pretty stupid topic on a mailing list that other people might find offensive for its stupidity and implications. The reality is that you can't even legally reprint the Satanic Bible because it's still a copyrighted work, having only been written in 1969 etc... but I'd wager that probably nobody in this drooling bunch of idiots actually knows much of anything about the actual Satanic Bible... or the fact that true Satanists who are actual members of the Church of Satan DON'T ACTUALLY BELIEVE IN THE SUPERNATURAL AT ALL. They don't believe in a literal being called Satan and merely refer to him as a symbol of rebellion, self importance, etc... but pretty much not a single religious person I have met knows any of that because they actually do believe in make believe mythological beings and invisible all seeing men etc... and they spend so much time lying to each other about the boogieman that they never bother to actually educate themselves not only about the actual REAL history of their own religions and what their own scriptures actually say and command them to do etc... but certainly not anything that might ever, in any way, pose a threat to their delicate bubble of profound closed minded IDIOCY.

And I say all this as a person who was a Christian and youth minister for over 20 years.

I hate you people for being so damn stupid and for publicly blabbering about it like it's something to be proud of... and for having the false impression that you have some right to be exempt from being ridiculed as the idiots you actually are. That people like me need to sit and watch you publicly make asses of yourselves and seek to get together to try to bring your idiot cult and its literature to a new OS to try to share and spread your profound retardedness and brainwashing to future generations.

Like try this on for size you morons...

We know for a FACT that the Earth was not created 6,000 years ago... much less the whole universe. We now FOR A FACT that humanity did not suddenly appear 6,000 years ago in a magic garden in Mesopotamia. And because we know FOR A FACT that claim is false... we know that Adam and Eve weren't there strolling around and talking to a talking serpent either. Nor were there magic fruit trees that they ate from BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T EXIST. And because we know that, we know that they didn't eat that fruit and commit the original sin because THEY WEREN'T THERE. Thus there was nothing for the made up God to be mad about.. nothing for him to create himself as his son to forgive us from because it never happened because they were never there.

Can your tiny minds follow that train of logic?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_human_evolution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mitochondrial_DNA_haplogroup

By the very same logic and facts, we know that Noah's Ark NEVER HAPPENED. Not only is it laughably absurd from a physical and logistical standpoint... but that much water has never in the history of this planet existed here on Earth. And had it actually rained that much (not to mention the laughably stupid claim that the bible actually makes about the heavens, the firmament, actually being a mechanical dome over head to hold the literal ocean above us up from falling on us... in which god opened up mechanical floodgates to let all the water pour down to flood the Earth and then made it all evaporate... but I digress...) had it actually rained that much and then evaporated in that span of time it would have saturated the entire atmosphere up into the stratosphere to over 100% and blocked out the sun completely and frozen the entire Earth wiping out life as we know it... and this all supposedly happened in the last 6,000 years... you know when the Egyptians had a kingdom etc... and these other civilizations failed to notice a world wide flood and subsequent world encompassing life obliterating ice age etc... IT'S LAUGHABLE at how absolutely detached from reality you people are that believe this tripe... and these weren't figurative stories either... as we know from a wealth of contemporary archaeological evidence that the people of those times LITERALLY BELIEVED these things because they were IGNORANT and knew essentially nothing about the natural world so they made up answers as best they could to describe the world around them and took it as fact... such as the fact that up until a few centuries before Christ they all still believed that the Earth was a circular flat disk. They LITERALLY believed it because the earth looked flat to them. All the older Old Testament books in the bible are written from that perspective and contain references to the Earth being flat etc.

But I digress...

When people are faced with reality and facts like this which threaten their stupidity bubble, they jump to make Ad Hominem personal attacks... to argue style over substance... to ignore the burden of proof for their ridiculous claims... to use special pleading to try to claim exemptions for their own idiotic beliefs that they don't allow to be applied to anything else... they erroneously and without any evidence presuppose the validity of their wrongheaded mythology and then use that unsupported presupposition to then fallaciously dismiss facts and actual solid real world evidence that disproves their claims.

They hem and haw, they try to claim Pascal's Wager... they intentionally (or simply out of ignorance or stupidity) confuse general deism with faith in a specific dogma such as Christianity etc... kind of like you idiots are doing giggling about how you share the same God etc... completely failing to recognize the very mutually exclusive and specific claims made by your various faiths etc... (and such fundamental schisms also exist WITHIN the faiths... Sunni and Shia... Catholic and Protestant... and people still MURDER EACH OTHER TODAY over these stupid and worthless disagreements over IMAGINARY SHIT.)

I could go on and on.

You people are IDIOTS and I resent you for bringing your idiocy to this list.

I would expect that people who are interested in an operating system such as this would be a little more educated than average... a little more information savvy etc... that people would be capable of pulling their own heads out of their own asses and seeing the absurdity and utter lack of knowledge they have about the world and their own beliefs as a part of that very real world etc.

THINK.

PLEASE.

Good day.

- Hide quoted text -On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 11:20 AM, Mattia Tristo wrote:

Very nice, i think we belive in the same God.

Good work to you and cheers

Mattia Tristo 2010/3/18 Nicholas Otley

Hi Mattia,

I can't help you on the Bible, but I'm planning on developing The Holy Qur'an and Nahj al-Balaghah for Haiku (Arabic and English).

Take care,

Nik On 18 March 2010 18:27, Mattia Tristo wrote:

Here in the italian mailing list we are discussing about developing the Holy Bible for Beos/Zeta/Haiku, there is someone who want to develop it in English too?

Hope don't wasting your time, let me say best regards to you

Mattia Tristo
Tagged humour, rants.
Monday, 22 March 2010, 00:20

Google Summer of Code for BeagleBoard

Here's some good news - BeagleBoard.org has been accepted for the Google Summer of Code programme. At the request of the administrator Jason Kridner i've also signed up as a possible mentor.

There is a gsoc group, a page of project ideas, and there's also there's the list of existing project ideas.

I'm not really sure which projects I would like to mentor given the opportunity, but there are a few that piqued my interest:

But there's a ton of other interesting projects in there.

Tagged gsoc.
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