Sybreon Ones Nought

According to a friend of mine, I am a minor failure in life. That is why I like this friend of mine. She does not mince her words when speaking her mind. I guess whether or not I am a failure depends on the point of view. I would say that in certain aspects, my life has been a failure but in other aspects, it has been a success. But I guess that from my friend’s arithmetic, I end up with a slight negative balance, which makes me only a minor failure.

Now, part of me thinks that I should just ignore what my friend thinks. Another part of me feels that I should work at the problem and fix it. However, there is only one problem – the problem itself is impossible to characterise accurately. If it was something that was well defined, I would have fixed it ages ago. The trouble is that ill-formed problems are the very bane of logical minded problem-solvers like me. Maybe I need some help.

If only all problems in this world were quantifiable. Maybe some things are destined to remain enigmas.

I got to dare my new boss for a KFC yesterday. The incident went more or less like this. A colleague of mine was saying that he had switched most of the applications to 64-bit and my boss was saying that the applications should run faster now. The applications are web-based so it ran on a 64-bit LAMP stack. If only the world of computing was so simple. I quickly interjected and told my boss that I saw things differently. I mentioned to him about 64-bit apps running slower than 32-bit apps for one reason, memory.

He did not agree with me and so I dared him to a KFC challenge. A KFC challenge is the standard way we resolve technical disagreements in my group. My reputation as a microprocessor architect was on the line and I had to defend it. He dithered and did not acquiescence for some reason and went off to his room to look for evidence to debunk me. I shall skip the technical details but my colleague was there to witness the entire episode. I think that he found it most interesting. In the end, my boss ended up being a snaky lawyer. His only defence was that I did not say things correctly and that my claim was not worded accurately, though he did agree with the gist of my claim.

So, I guess he is not going to treat me to a KFC meal…yet.

My colleagues and I went to Teluk Gong for dinner tonight. We left immediately after work and drove there. It is located near Klang and quite famous for seafood. The reason for the treat is because someone in my team had recently gotten a promotion. I would like to take this opportunity to introduce some of my new colleagues.

Firstly, there is our big sister. If you can imagine having an elder sister at work, she will probably fit the bill. Incidentally, she is the exact same age as my elder sister. We are quite close. Then, there is the only other man, who is currently an expectant dad. His baby is due in a few weeks time. He is quite the opposite of our big sister and is quite gentle of character. Next, there is another lady, the little girl of our group who behaves in a sweet innocent manner. She likes the colour pink and has that as her default colour. Then, there is a liberal Malay lady who is the product of our religious school system. In fact, I think that she is quite spiritual in her own way, but not overtly religious about it. Finally, there is a quiet Malay lady who is getting married next week. I got an invite and plan to go there with my DSLR to get a few photos. And then, there is my boss and he is a really interesting person. He is the kind of boss who understands what needs to be done to get things working. To resolve technical disputes, we usually bet on lunch.

While my previous group of colleagues were really nice and weird people, this new group is just down-right crazy and we love to eat. The most surprising thing is that my new team really knows where to eat. We have been to restaurants that are so well hidden that I would not have ever found them on my own. According to my colleagues, everyone puts on weight when they first join this group, just like the Nooglers.

PS: It is impossible to lose weight in Malaysia!

Since I am in the mood for gloating, I thought that I would share a small achievement that I have managed to accomplish recently. It is nothing very great but since it is something that I had only managed to achieve through some effort, I have a personal sense of accomplishment of it. The achievement is something that is so obscure that most of you would probably not be able to appreciate it as much as I do.

I have made the top 1% of users at serverfault.com site several weeks ago. The site is sort of like an experts exchange site where people can come to ask questions and other people can help answer the questions. Serverfault is dedicated to the business of systems administration. There are almost 20,000 users on the site at the moment and the numbers increase all the time. In fact, the question volume has shot up considerably since it first started.

Users are awarded points through a democratic voting system. If I said something good, it would get up-voted and if I said something dumb, it would get down-voted. If I answered the question accurately and the question is accepted by the person who asked it, it would also get awarded bonus points. These points finally add up into a final reputation value and users are then ranked by rep. It is a long-tail distribution though. The top performer has an order of magnitude more rep than I do but those are rare.

Oh, I thought that I would add a flair to my side-bar to gloat.

PS: If you have not heard of Serverfault and you are in the business of systems/network administration, you may want to check it out. It also has sister sites – stackoverflow.com and superuser.com – for programming and software issues.

I just feel like sharing the excitement.

I was just contacted by one of my technology recipients who informed me that there are now more than 1000 units of my AEMB processor in the wild. They have already shipped more than 1000 units of a software-defined radio product that is running my core processor. To me, this is quite an achievement for the company and I have already congratulated them on it. More importantly, it is a super achievement for my little processor.

When I first architected and designed the processor, I did it without any expectations beyond self-education and self-satisfaction. I was interested in mastering the design of useful microprocessors and I had to know that I could actually do this thing by myself. While I did design certain elements that would make it attractive as a commercial processor into it, I had little commercial design for it. However, life has a way of throwing things my way.

I was further told by my technology recipient that they had presented the product to a major technology company that has also been impressed by my processor core design. I wonder if they know that the new version of the AEMB is actually a multi-threaded processor. Hopefully, my processor core will slowly find its way into more and more useful products in this world.

GO AEMB!

PS: The term technology recipient is something that I have recently come across at work. Thought that it was a suitable use here.

I failed to mention this but I had recently appropriated another 32″ LCD TV for the home. It is a Panasonic TH-32C12K screen which is only HD-Ready but has a double-layered screen. I found it for cheap at a local Carrefour for only RM1399 (£250). It even has an SD-Card slot which can be used to view photographs. Anyway, one interesting thing that caught my eye about this television is that it uses GPL software!

I was just browsing through the menus last weekend when I came across a menu entry to display the license entry. Clicking on it displayed both the GPLv2 and LGPLv2 license. Interesting. It is good that Panasonic is a manufacturer that clearly advertises the use of GPL code. It even lists the website to download the source-code. Nice. However, the website where the code is made available is not very well done and I have a feeling that the code is probably not nicely organised either. Still a better attempt when compared to most other houses who co-opt open source code and try to wriggle their way out of their responsibilities just because nobody else knows about it.

Anyway, I thought that this was something worth mentioning.

I had never given this HTPC software a try before but I decided to do it yesterday night. Moovida is another interesting project but it never quite got the traction of many other HTPC software. The Linux platform is still heavily dominated by MythTV although I think that it is a little dated by now. I decided to give Moovida a spin on my new LCD TV and pulled the packages from the experimental Debian repository.

It was the first time that I had pulled anything in from experimental and I had to learn how to do it. At first, I merely did a apt-get -t experimental install moovida but it kept complaining about dependency issues. Then, I looked around and found out that experimental does not have a complete set of packages and I needed to add in unstable packages too. After doing that, I got Moovida to install easily. Then, it was merely a process of configuration and playing around with it.

I immediately tested out its online streaming capabilities. I managed to pull in music from various online services and also from my own local iTunes server. One thing that I noticed immediately was that Moovida automagically pulls in album covers and all from the Internet. So, the playlist had nice little pictures attached to them.

Then, I decided to test out video streaming and visited TED instead. I managed to watch the latest TED video on development around the world. On my 512k ADSL connection, it was mostly watchable. It had a discernible lag about once a minute when it was busy buffering but it was otherwise enjoyable. Again, Moovida would pull in thumbnails from the Internet when browsing for videos where available. I guess that it is time to upgrade my line to 1Mbps.

So far so good.

Then, I faced some problems. I have yet to figure out how to configure the local media. While it could pick up my daap music files, it had trouble connecting to my upnp media server. So, it was not able to pick out local videos and images that I shared. There are some error messages on the console so I think that this is merely a configuration problem. I might try mounting them as NFS/CIFS and see if that will work, tonight.

All in all, I think that Moovida is an excellent media player application, even if it lacks the powerful PVR capabilities of MythTV or Freevo. However, the VIA platform that I had it running on was a little slow. Even at 800×600, there was some jerkiness in the TED video. I guess that a combination of live streaming and playback is a little too taxing for the little bugger. I will probably migrate it over to an old AMD laptop of mine to see if that helps matters.

Anyhow, this is just a little thing because I fully intend to purchase a PS3 soon. Once that is done, the PS3 will probably play the role of a HTPC instead. But temporarily, I will have Moovida to play around with. Then again, Moovida/XBMC might still have a role to play at home simply because they can support more video formats and various nifty online streaming capabilities.