devinjh

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming...

2009-11-11T23:28:03Z

Took the day off from work today so I could finally install the moulding I bought when I had the floor redone. Rented a mitre saw from Home Depot. Here's something that many of you in New Jersey don't often consider: if you rent a tool from Home Depot and you do not own a car, how do you get it home? Here's a constructive suggestion from personal experience: don't take the subway.

Anyway, that's done. Also picked up the appliance extension cord I need for the oven. Working on some Linux driver work tonight.

"How Tuners Work" makes front page of Geektonic

2009-11-10T16:34:01Z

An article I wrote called "How Tuners Work" made the the front page of GeekTonic:

(Click to enlarge)

And here's the original article I wrote:

How Tuners Work…

Kind of a shame the spelled "KernelLabs" wrong though...

Halloween

2009-11-01T08:40:26Z

Victoria and I dressed up as zombie prom queen/king:

Here is the full album:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2026848&id=1199470342&l=752881998b

Don't worry, you don't need to be on Facebook to review. I've switched to using Facebook for my photos because the photo uploader in Livejournal is such a piece of crap, even after all these years. You hear that LiveJournal? If you're going to provide a "Scrapbook" feature, how about making it easy to upload photos in bulk?

I made the frontpage of hackaday.com!

2009-10-27T18:13:07Z

It's not everyday that I find my article being referenced on the front page of hackaday.com!

(click the image above to see the screenshot [and click it again to maximize])

Here's the post:

http://hackaday.com/2009/10/27/digital-tuner-reverse-engineering/

And here's the original article I wrote:

http://www.kernellabs.com/blog/?p=1003

Cell phone radiation

2009-10-27T16:23:47Z

I thought this little photo tour was interesting primarily because we had a very similar setup where I used to work at the Lucent Global Product Compliance Lab (GPCL):

Inside a Cellphone Radiation Testing Lab

If you ever wondered how they tested exposure to cell phones, this is how they do it...

The Duct Tape Programmer

2009-10-16T20:56:20Z

I love Joel on Software. If you're into software development methodology, check out the following:

The Duct Tape Programmer

I especially like this paragraph:

Here is why I like duct tape programmers. Sometimes, you’re on a team, and you’re busy banging out the code, and somebody comes up to your desk, coffee mug in hand, and starts rattling on about how if you use multi-threaded COM apartments, your app will be 34% sparklier, and it’s not even that hard, because he’s written a bunch of templates, and all you have to do is multiply-inherit from 17 of his templates, each taking an average of 4 arguments, and you barely even have to write the body of the function. It’s just a gigantic list of multiple-inheritance from different classes and hey, presto, multi-apartment threaded COM. And your eyes are swimming, and you have no friggin’ idea what this frigtard is talking about, but he just won’t go away, and even if he does go away, he’s just going back into his office to write more of his clever classes constructed entirely from multiple inheritance from templates, without a single implementation body at all, and it’s going to crash like crazy and you’re going to get paged at night to come in and try to figure it out because he’ll be at some goddamn “Design Patterns” meetup.

And the duct-tape programmer is not afraid to say, “multiple inheritance sucks. Stop it. Just stop.”

I like how this man thinks...

What planet does Greg-KH live on?

2009-10-15T16:41:22Z

The following article came up in my Google reader feed about Linux desktop:

Linux-Windows gap to remain for five years
http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,62058636,00.htm

This article had a link to an article from August about the Linux Driver Project:

http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,62056924,00.htm

The article says the following

Back in 2007, Kroah-Hartman requested for help finding more hardware for which to write device drivers. Some reports online suggested that this was because businesses were holding back from opening their drivers up to the community.

Today, this "problem" has been "solved quite thoroughly", he said.

"All of the major hardware manufacturers told me that there is no problem that needs to be solved in relation to device support on Linux.

"Everything they ship worked just fine with Linux back then, and continues to do so today," he said.

Solved quite thoroughly? Are you frigging kidding me? Sure, you're likely to be able to to install Linux without it crashing and it will find your hard drive controller and video card, but suggesting that hardware support is "solved quite thoroughly" is kind of ridiculous. Being someone who spends his evenings working on LinuxTV drivers, I can cite a whole host of examples: A large percentage of devices are not supported at all. Often if they do get supported, it's months (sometimes years) after the product was released for Windows. Almost every card has only a subset of the functionality working. Cards that "work" often just "work barely well enough" to be able to claim they work - riddled with bugs and edge cases.

NDAs to be used for GPL'd drivers continue to be a problem. Fear among chipset vendors of "disclosing trade secrets" and "competitive interests" is still a problem. Getting vendors to provide sample hardware and information about their board layout is still a problem.

Video cards? TV tuners cards? Printers? Scanners? Hell, I've got a laptop with Intel audio (among the most common) and I have to roll the dice everytime I upgrade as to whether the headphone jack is going to work.

Things are certainly better in terms of the Enterprise market, but the desktop market is a mess. Progress has been made and the situation continues to improve slowly, but let's not think that we're anywhere near "thoroughly solved"

I'm not sure if he's delusional or just trying to paint a rosy picture on a bad situation in an attempt to combat people's claims that Linux isn't ready for the mainstream.

Pumpkin

2009-10-12T00:20:51Z

Tonight Victoria and I carved the pumpkin that we picked up at the farmer's market yesterday. We were going for "looks like a kitty!"

Spent the afternoon at Subtle Tea, me doing some LinuxTV driver work while she worked on applications for her internship. Otherwise a fairly quiet afternoon.

How Dangerous Could a Hacked Robot Possibly Be?

2009-10-08T16:25:24Z

Slashdot has an article this morning that was interesting:

How Dangerous Could a Hacked Robot Possibly Be?

I especially like the comments, such as this one:

Fortunately, my insurance company, Old glory, can already protect you TODAY from the danger of robots. Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel. And when they grab you with their claws, you can't break free... because robots are made of metal, and they are strong.

On the upside, I own a copy of "How To Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion", so I am well prepared.

http://www.amazon.com/How-Survive-Robot-Uprising-Defending/dp/1582345929/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255019014&sr=8-1

R.I.P. Ol' Entertainer

2009-10-02T00:59:27Z

Goodbye Old Entertainment Center. I remember fondly that hot summer day that I brought you home from Target. And there now you sit, as disassembled as the day I got you - ready to go out with the trash.

I'll miss you!

Sunday Night

2009-09-21T03:10:24Z

Spent the weekend in Philly. On Saturday afternoon Victoria, Michelle, Nicole, and I worked on our own various projects at Bonte. Then we went out and saw Eric's new house and had a nice dinner. Today we played some Scrabble in Washington Square Park and I replaced her medicine cabinet (I broke the shelf a few months ago).

I'm not feeling very productive lately. After I got home tonight I wrote out a list of all the crap I need to get done before my trip to Portland this week. And then I proceeded to spend the next three hours watching episodes from season five of Grey's Anatomy on NetFlix streaming. It's frustrating.

Correlation versus Causation

2009-09-17T18:26:45Z

From: http://xkcd.com/552/

I love xkcd. They're coming out with dead tree edition called "xkcd: volume 0", and I'm thinking about dropping the $18.00.

Confirmed: NOT brain-damaged

2009-09-14T07:20:13Z

Had a nice quiet weekend here in the City. On Saturday Victoria and I saw 9 at the movies. We went down to MooShoes later that afternoon.

On Saturday night she practiced giving me the memory test she is learning to give veterans at her new internship with the VA hospital. There were parts that were surprisingly difficult, like being told a random sequence of eight numbers or letters and being asked to sort them in your head and recite them back in alphabetical/numerical order. It was quite a bit longer than the typical test you see on shows like ER, where they tell you to remember three words and then a couple of minutes later ask what they were.

Today I broke down and finally bought a television. And then I realized that I didn't have the right mounting hardware because my walls have aluminum studs. I'll have to pickup the parts I need and get it mounted this week.

It's 3am and I'm not sleeping again (I went to sleep at 11 and woke up at 2:30 and couldn't fall asleep). Probably not a good thing.

For you "Enders Game" Fans...

2009-09-11T18:30:26Z

Labor Day in Philadelphia

2009-09-07T19:23:02Z

Had a nice weekend. Spent Saturday afternoon at the beach with Lauren/Greg/Amelia and then hung out with them as well as Suzy/Isaac. On Sunday morning I tore apart Mom's dishwasher, saw Cyndi, and spent the afternoon with Jen/Jon/Jayden. Dinner on Sunday night with Victoria's Aunt and Grandmother.

This afternoon, in a coffeehouse in Philly, getting caught up on email while Victoria does internship applications. It's amazing how much email accumulates in my inbox over three days.

Still investigating support for multiple em28xx devices on the same USB bus. Looks like it might be harder than I originally expected. Also hoping to spend some cycles this week getting back to the PCTV 340e support, which was on hold while I did the em28xx VBI support.

No Parking Zone

2009-09-03T03:50:07Z

Should my friends or family want to come visit me, I've provided these convenient directions:

Proceed West on 35th Street
Blow through the red light at 5th Avenue, taking the bumper off of a cab
Cause a towncar to swerve out of the way onto the sidewalk
Pull up to the front of the building. Don't worry about the poles supporting the awning or the two concrete planters.

Visual Studio 2008 and dumbness

2009-08-27T18:15:24Z

I recently started a project to move a rather large win32 codebase from Visual Studio 2003 to Visual Studio 2008. This codebase included a number of projects as well as third party components, some of which are cross-platform open source components that use nmake instead of Visual C++ project files.

Figuring that I wanted to be sure I was running the latest patches/fixes, etc, I installed Service Pack 1 before I went to build any of the components.

Things were going great. I am generally pleased with some of the usability improvements in the product (in particular the ability to view the contents of STL containers in the Visual Studio Debugger).

So I spent a few weeks, and ported over all the code, and have been testing it in my development environment. Last night though, I installed it onto a clean Windows 2008 install, and when I tried to run one of the executables, I got the following error:

C:\myprogram>myprogram
The system cannot execute the specified program.

Looking at the Event Log, I saw the following:

Component identity found in manifest does not match the
identity of the component requested

Syntax error in manifest or policy file "C:\myprogram\
Microsoft.VC90.DebugCRT.MANIFEST" on line 4.

Off to Google... It turns out that Microsoft provided a new version of the CRT with Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (no surprise there). However, they rigged up the linker so that it only uses the new CRT if you add a specific "#define _BIND_TO_CURRENT_VCLIBS_VERSION" to *every* project you build. There is no way to set it globally in the Visual Studio compiler so that all projects use the CRT that ships with SP1. And to add insult to injury, the SP1 installer *overwrote* the version of the CRT that came with the RTM version, so in order to revert to the original CRT I have to reinstall VS2008 onto a clean workstation to recover the files.

It turns up I'm not the only one who has complained about this.

https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=361682

To take a much simpler example, it means that if you do a clean install of Visual Studio 2008, then install SP1, and then create a hello world program that dynamically links against the CRT, that program will not run on any computer other than the one that Visual Studio is installed on. Oh, and you won't get any warnings during compilation. How dumb is that?

So now I get to choose. Do I:

Modify the project files for *every* project I am responsible for, including all the third-party libraries and other dependencies. In cases where the library doesn't use a MSVC project and instead uses nmake, dig through the source to figure out the appropriate place to put the #define. This also means recompiling *EVERYTHING* from source.
Ship with the RTM version of the CRT, and run the risk of bugs that have already been fixed effecting my product.

I can appreciate Microsoft wanting to be able to allow developers to ship with the RTM version of the CRT even though they have the Service Pack installed. But not allowing this to be globally configurable in the compiler and requiring you to edit your source code? What the hell were they thinking?

New building

2009-08-27T17:11:26Z

I haven't been up on the rooftop desk of my building in about eight weeks. A couple of nights ago, I went up there after work with a salad I picked up on my way home. And to my somewhat surprise, a fifty-story building had appeared since I was last there:

The last time I was up on the roof, they had just finished the foundation and put up five or six floors.

This pic kind of looks like a cloud dragon is attacking the building.

And this picture is just here to give you some relative scale (since it's hard to tell from the other pics how tall the building actually is). I took the other pictures point the camera almost straight up. Bear in mind the building is only one block away from mine.

Busy busy busy....

2009-08-25T21:04:48Z

It turns up I ended up with a pretty full week. This morning I met with an architect for some possible renovations to my apartment (so I will have to work late tonight to make up the time). I've got the board meeting for my building tomorrow night after work (which is expected to run 3 hours). On Thursday night I'm going out to Queens to get Indian food with Michael and Steven. And somewhere in there I was hoping to grab a beer with Doug.

On top of all the above, I've got to finish the em28xx VBI support this week.

In other words, I suspect I will be burning some of the midnight oil this week....

Weekend roundup

2009-08-25T06:56:14Z

Spent the weekend in Philadelphia. On Saturday Victoria and I went and visited a caterer. We also did a cake tasting at The Night Kitchen Bakery and decided on the style for the cake etc. In the afternoon, we visited one of the possible locations for the wedding (at the gazebo outside the Philadelphia Art Museum). Later that evening we went to a club to celebrate her friends Nicole, Alix, and Jamie's birthday.

On Sunday, we packed up the Toyota, drove to New York, and moved Amy into college. I was thoroughly impressed with how organized the Fashion Institute of Technology was in terms of moving people in, in particular given the logistics surrounding unloading hundreds of cars in midtown Manhattan.

Spent most of Sunday evening working on em28xx VBI support, as well as tonight.

My insomnia is back. As an experiment, I started taking Melatonin last week to see if it would help. I didn't really have any trouble sleeping for the last few days. I forgot to take it tonight, and here I am awake at 2:53 am. Coincidence? Causation?

Back from Vacation...

2009-08-17T17:58:51Z

I got back from vacation yesterday. Victoria, her sister, sister's boyfriend, grandmother, and I spent the last five days on Dataw Island, South Carolina (about an hour from Savannah, GA). It rained alot, but we still had lots of fun. For me it was just nice to get away for a few days.

No laptop, limited Internet access. In other words, for those of you who follow the blog to read about my progress on LinuxTV, there essentially was none. But I got back in the groove last night and am hoping to have more to write about this week.

I'm looking at the list of crap people are asking for, and it seems pretty clear I need an apprentice or something. Alot of this stuff is pretty straightforward but too time consuming to keep on top of by myself. Stuff like fixing em28xx board profiles and writing firmware extract scripts. None of this is rocket science but I just don't have the cycles to keep up. If I had someone to help with the small stuff, it would make it easier for me to focus on the larger projects that require more advanced debugging and analysis.

Unfortunately, it seems like there are too many users and not many developers willing to help support the project.

Asbury Park Casino

2009-08-11T14:49:59Z

I was getting my coffee this morning on the way to work and happened to notice a picture of the Casino on the front page of USA Today.

Here is the online version of the article.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-08-10-asbury-park_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip

Small world...

Another weekend...

2009-08-10T02:35:18Z

Victoria came to New York this weekend. Things were pretty quiet. Had some pretty good Indian food on Saturday night over on 28th street. Today we drove to New Jersey and Victoria visited her aunt while I visited mine. The train back to New York seemed to take *forever*. Got home a little after 9pm.

On Tuesday night I am flying to South Carolina with Victoria and her grandmother. Her sister and sister's boyfriend are already there. Should be nice to get away for a few days.

Various things still moving forward with LinuxTV work. Spent Friday night analyzing how VBI works on my cx88 card, so I can determine what is required for making VBI work under em28xx.

My fiance knows me so well

2009-08-05T14:11:28Z

My fiance sent me the following image along with the message, "this is you this is you!!!".

From: http://xkcd.com/619/

Tuesday evening

2009-08-05T03:56:26Z

Today was pretty uneventful at work. When I got home I worked some more on the PCTV 340e i2c issue, as well as more on em28xx VBI support.

Spent the rest of the evening putting together the new dresser which arrived unassembled from Target.com. It's pretty much done except for attaching the back, which requires sixty nails and I don't want to disturb my neighbors at midnight with the banging.

Have to be at the allergist at 8:30am, so I'm going to be early. TTFN.