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...