Life is a repeating journey...

I can't believe how life repeats itself. Because I seemed to have lost my knack to do the things I used to do well. It's all because I have been chasing goals that are too far out of reach.

What stress does is it brings out the worst in you. I really don't like that, no matter how much EI I have, I cannot control my ourbursts. I vow never to let stress hurt me again. I hate to feel helpless and not be able to enjoy life simply because I am too drained to find a positive side of things.

Wines featured in Sideways

Byron 1992 Sparkling
Sanford Vin Gris
Kalyra Chardonnay
Kalyra Cab Franc
Fidder Head Sauvignon Blanc
Whitcraft 2001 Pinot Noir
Sea Smoke Botella Pinot Noir
Kistler Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir
Latour Pommard Ier Cru
Hitching Post Bien Nacido Pinot Noir
Hitching Post Highliner Pinot Noir
Andrew Murray Syrah
'61 Cheval Blanc

Oliver Twist

My attachment to my English schooling tells me this will be an enjoyable movie that will bring back fond memories. It's simply not a happy children movie, but it is something that's very special to me, just as HGTG is a classic for me.

Kernel Hackers' Guide to git

Git-Howto

Paradigm shift

This morning I read a passage about paradigm shift. Not so much the explanation of what it is, but the reason for understanding the importance of it.

This is very interesting the fact that when one looks at an image he will see it based on his interpretion, and his interpretion of the image is derived heavily from his past experience.

Philosophical questions...

I have a tonne of these questions, how can I permeate those to friends and people who care? It's a balance of time between the imminent tasks at hand, which everyone is busy dealing with, and those philosophical questions that changes the way you think and approach issues that will benefit you.

Team basics

Definition from Wisdom of Teams:

A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.

Trust in a sentence...

"...Trust is hard to earn, easy to lose and nearly impossible to win back."

What people do not realize is the capacity of people to improve and correct.

The world is often accustomed to the fact that people's character is set in stone. Often this is true, there are a lot of cases where people may revert back to their old self if he is pushed/shoved into a corner. Few people has what it takes to admit mistakes and demand for change, since such actions are often disruptive.

Characters do change. Ones willingness to change is variable. It may take extraordinary effort/circumstances to make this happen. There are just numerous ways to consider one's will/capacity to push for change and embrace it. Some people can identify what a person's character is with a short five minute conversation, and infer the person's willingness to change. Some people wait out a period of time to see if character improvement is noticed. And of course, to a large degree, your family, who means most to you, are the ones you will have to continue to forgive and embrace in perpetuality.

Working approach

1. Can we break up hierarchical patterns by assigning work tasks based on skills rather than position? Can we assign leadership roles to someone other than the CEO?
2. What specific rules would help us work better together, and "equalize" our individual, real work contributions to group goals?
3. Can we reconfigure our group into subteams more appropriate to the specific issues, opportunities, or problems identified?
4. How can we most effectively foster teams down the line?

Complementary Skills

1. Do we have important skills that are not best captured by our formal roles and responsibilities?
2. Can we better utilize the basic skills and experience of our group by working together beyond as well as within our formal, functional responsibilities?
3. Could some of us build skills in other areas, and thereby help strengthen the overall capabilities of the group?
4. Can we modify our membership to include others down the line to enhance our collective ability to achieve particular goals?

Identifying Team Performance Opportunities

1. Can we convert the company mission into a more group specific performance purpose for our group, including specific performance goals necessary to accomplish that group purpose.
2. Which of our performance challenges are best accomplished by individual assignments and responsibility? Which require a team effort and a set of collective work-products? Can we test the water by trying a team approach on one or two of these?
3. How can we ensure that we each subordinate our individual priorities to the group's purpose and goals?
4. How can we measure our mutual progress toward our group's purpose and goals as well as monitor the effectiveness of those teams among us that are needed?

Applied Cryptography

How PGP works decribes cryptography better than any I have seen. Simple and straight forward.

Never felt so sad...

I have never saw a movie that I connect so well. I don't know what I have done wrong in my past lives, but it seems like I have to pay it all back this time around... Maybe there are more people who are worst off than I do, but at this moment I am brought to my knees. Where is my family when I need them? I know they are around, but I can't seem to grab them with my hands. They feel so distant. Maybe like Ben says, I have to let go of it all, myself included.

Handling stress

Taken from uOttawa Health Services

Four ways of handling stress:

• Be aware of your interpretation of stressful situations. since stress is directly related to your thoughts, try thinking in a more positive manner.
• Try relaxation methods such as meditation. This can be helpful in reducing anxiety and managing stress. By turning on the relaxed state, you are turning off the stressed state. This is because you can't be releaxed and stressed at the same time.
• Get physical! Techniquues such as breathing exercises, stretching, and walking all help in preventing stress and lower the physical signs of stress.
• have some fun! Go out and do something you trule enjoy. Whether it is a hobby or vacationing, you need to experience tings that give you genuine pleasure.

Having a creative mind is essential... when you can only think of one thing at a time, you lose the positive perspective at the time you are thinking about the negative.

Anatomy of famous people

All the well known people I know about are: people that love what they do, good communicators, unselfish and most of all, good tempered... which I am not. How can I fix that?

What team leaders do and do not do

Credits again go to the authors of Wisdom of Teams

1. Keep the purpose, goals, and approach relevant and meaningful.
2. Build commitment and confidence.
3. Strengthen the mix and level of skills.
4. Maage relationships with outsiders, including removing obstacles.
5. Create opportunities for others.
6. Do real work.

Best time to get beer

Just noted, the Beer store closes at 10pm Monday to Thursday, 11pm Friday and Saturday and 5pm on Sunday.

Thousand Island, Boldt castle cruise.

If you want to head out for the Boldt castle cruise, go early, its a five hour ride. The earlier ride begins at 10:30am and the next ride is 3pm. Could still do the 3pm mid summer when the day is longer.

Best time to get wine

Just noted, LCBO closes at 10pm Monday to Saturday and 5pm on Sunday.

Other Wine stores within Loblaws and Independent normally closes at 6pm.

Common approaches to building team performance

Of course this is extracted from Wisdom of Teams. Its here for my recollection. All credits goes to the authors of the book.

1. Establish urgency and direction. The more urgent and meaningful the rationale, the more likely it is that a real team will emerge.
2. Select members based on skills and skill potential, not personalities. Three categories of skills are relevant: 1) technical and function, 2) problem-solving, and 3) interpersonal. The key issue for potential teams is striking the needed skill levels versus developing the skill levels after the team gets started.
3. Pay particular attention to first meetings and actions. First impressions are very important. Leaders communicate their seriousness largely by how much time they devoted to the team. First meetings is the best moment to communicate key themes and directions.
4. Set some clear rules of behaviour. Rules test a group's credibility. The rules must be enforced. Teh most critical early rultes pertain to attendance, ("no interruptions to take phone calls"), discussion ("no sacred cows"), confidentiality ("the only things to leave thsi room are what we agree will leave thsi room"), analytic approach (" facts are friendly"), end-product orientation ("everyone gets assignments and does them"), constructive confrontation ("no figner pointing"), and contributions ("everyone does real work").
5. Set and seize upon a few immediate performance-oriented tasks and goals. Whether quantitiatively or qualitatively assessable, the performanace goals must include a clear "stretch" component. Significantly, the events generated by such stretch goals do not have to be successes. Teu wise team recognizes the value of performance-oriented events and takes advantage of them regardless of how they turn out.
6. Challenge the group regularly with fresh facts and information. New information causes a potential team to redefine and enrich its understanding of the performance challenge, thereby helping the team shape a common purpose, set clearer goals, and improvie on its common approach.
7. Spend lots of time together. Creative insights as well as personal bonding require impromptu and casual interactions just as much as analyzing spreadsheets, interviewing customers, competitors, or fellow employees, and constantly debating issues.
8. Exploit the power of positive feedback, recognition, and reward. Even the strongest egos respond to positive feedback - when it is real.

Most potential teams can become real teams, but not without taking risks involving conflict, trust , interdependence, and hard work.

Linux RT approaches

Linux RT approaches. An amazing survey of the current state of art for RT Linux by IBM's Paul McKenney.

Curry dish

First thing I have to remind myself is warming up the pot with oil needs only a small amount of heat, oil gets hot really fast. Something to keep me from burning myself.

Ingredients for curry is stir-fried onions, carrots, potatoes, and a choice of meat, and other favourite veggies.

Diving schools in Ottawa

Kanata diving supply offers cheaper courses and is quite obviously, located in Kanata.

Burton's dive service is the other alternative located in Vanier/downtown Ottawa.

DRTX initiative

Common objective for real time executive.

With the sophistication of microcontroller and the advance of modern communication stack and bus technology the environment a microcontroller is used now is ever more complex. The increasingly complex environment is fuelling the need for a context switching executive to handle background tasks.

In most embedded control environment, time-critical functions are likely to be shifted to hardware or interrupt driven routines, leaving the executive to do non-realtime tasks, nonetheless the response time is still the emphasis, the trade-off between response time and throughput is carefully considered.

The consideration of plugging in a real time executive to existing loop based task handling is taken into account.

Resource monitoring and instrumentation of the RTX is a key component of the design. Intregrating these functionalities to existing open source tool will be preferred over non-standard tools.

The inclusion of a standard IP stack, USB bus will form part of the DRTX framework.

OLS 2005 - day 3

A late start for today since the topics aren't truely relevant to NMX.

But Ian Pratt's talk on Xen is the most spectacular our of them all.

Bumped into Marcelo today and introduce myself to him. He was chatting with Andrew Morton at the time.

OLS 2005 - day 2

Today is an extremely productive day. I got to meet pretty much all the ppc embedded people. They are a great bunch. However I missed the CE forum's embedded BOF, it happened at the same time as the ppc BOF, but it was well worth the time.

Matt Porter's talk on RapidIO is excellent as well.

Rusty Russell's talk on nfsim is cool, he is truely another great figure.

Greg K-H is also an amazing driver person.

Murphy's embedded system seems to be a good idea. Should check out his paper when I have the time.

Profiling Java and pretty much anything else in Linux is done using OProfile now.

OLS 2005 - day 1

The spotlight of the first day is J. Corbet's Road map for the 2.6 kernel. It has interesting git talk and new features for the kernel. Very Informative.

The CELinux forum is holding an embedded BOF tomorrow sounds very interesting. Will also be meeting up with the ppc group tomorrow. XIP, and Power management will be excellent topics to be explored tomorrow.

Timesys is not doing particularly well as the real-time module is not making any sales and the notable exit of Jason M.

The bluetooth stack is a humongous beast to be honest. Intel's ACPI spec is another beast. Those two topics really make me feel like a small tiny potato.

Noted from today's display booth is that CELinux fixed the ARM compiler in thumb mode among other things. C++ is nowhere in sight for embedded computing.

Windows XP chinese file/directory names support

This one has me looking at the problem for hours. Waste of life to be honest. I truly believe why so many people curse Microsoft, until someone convince me otherwise.

As of today this is my conclusion...

• Asian fonts support is needed to view chinese characters in MSN Messenger and ICQ.
  
• NJStar viewer does not properly display chinese characters unless the Asian fonts support is unchecked.
• What's wierd is unchecking Asian fonts support does not make reading chinese chars in MSN Messenger go away. I found no documentation on the web that explains this behaviour, which to me seems very user unfriendly.
  

XCODE II video processor

XCODE II video processor.

Brian's web portal

Brian's web portal. His nifty picture collection augmented with great story telling.

Fuel consumption guide.

Fuel comsumption guide. Official document from the government of Canada.

Bruce Eckel's electronic books

Bruce is still the man for computer language tutorials. His collection now covers C++, Java and Python. This link will get you to his books page.

Embedded Linux

Craig Hollabaugh's Embedded Linux has evolved to a website
full of useful links and a EWiki. Haven't have time to check things out on the web site. In any case the link for downloading programs written in the book is still available. Will check it out when I have time.

Embedded Linux: Hardware, Software, and Interfacing
Craig Hollabaugh, Ph.D.
ISBN 0-672-32226-9

Numerical Recipes in C

Numerical Recipes in C. The neat little book of algorithms.

More on Ottawa for OLS

Places for beer

• Heart & Crown
• D'Arcy Mcgee
• Alexander's Lower Deck
• Earl of Sussex
• Mother McGintey's

Events

Museums

Ext2/3 access solutions for Windows

This is an up-to-date perspective on ext2/3 access solutions. Of course, there will inevitably other development that will pop up as I am writing, since this is still very much a very active topic.

Explore2fs. This is more popular with it's more user friendly documentation and FAQs.

LTOOLS. Very good documentation on Windows raw disk access issues.

More updates to come...

Plan for Ambrose

Indoor golf
Indoor go-kart
Pub/Dinner @ Market
Ice-cream

Scuba diving courses in Ottawa

Burton's dive service

TCPSAT announcement

TCPSAT announcement. This is what remains of the TCPSAT group. It is no longer active.

Freestyle Soccer

Freestyle Soccer