Club Silencio

Sunday afternoon I was a bit bored so I hacked up a simple puzzle game: glightoff. Source code can be checked out from gnome cvs. It’s really simple, but not so easy to solve!
Yesterday I even added svg graphics to it: they look like were drawn by a five years old child, but keep in mind they only take me ten minutes and it was the first time I fired up inkscape. By the way, inkscape is really wonderful.

In the other news I spent a nice and relaxing summer, but now it’s time to get back into the swing of things

Thesis
Thesis work has been a bit slow… in part it is due to the fact that I’ve been distracted by other things and in part it is due to the fact that I have a bit too much on my plate: not only this whole kind of work is new to me, but also the platform on which I have to work is experimental and little documented, it’s modelled in SystemC, which I have to learn about and SystemC in turns is based on C++, with which I’m not that familiar either… Lack of people showing me how to get started and able to answer my questions doesn’t help.

GNOME
Managed to get a bit of work done, some patches here and there. I’m helping out with the stable branch of gedit: not much stuff, but I managed to screw up anyway, committing a little patch that broke the string freeze. I reverted it as soon as menthos made me notice.
Since I’m not a native english speaker, I’d like to underline how much I appreciate the amazing work done by the team of translators in GNOME.

Long time since last post… lots of stuff happened.
Among other things (some of which sad, like having a car accident in which a friend of mine got injured) Gnome 2.6 and Fedora Core 2 have been released: congratulations to everyone involved!

Thesis

I finally started my thesis work: it’s about StepNP, an architecture platform aimed network processing systems… it involves NPUs (Network Processing Units), MP-SoC (Multi Processor System on Chip), NoC (Network on Chip) and other buzz words and strange acronyms I still have to learn about :-)
It’s modelled in SystemC, a system level description language that leverages c/c++, making it easier to concurrently design hardware and software (the so called co-design). Nice thing: it’s open source!.

UART

Finished the UART and presented it to the teacher: went well. A UART is a simple piece of hardware, but I must admit that seeing it run and work fine on a *real* FPGA talking to a *real* microprocessor was great. I mean, describing the behaviour (mainly a couple of finite state machines) in verilog wasn’t that hard, but dealing with the fact that it’s hardware and not software requires to take into account lots of things (clock timing, latches, etc): seeing the right signal displayed on the oscilloscope felt really good!

Patches

Managed to get other patches included in some gnome projects :) (jhbuild, gnome-system-monitor).
I even submit my first GTK+ patch into bugzilla, waiting for review…

Evolution

Sent a couple of simple patches to Evolution… they said me that they’re mostly OK, but to get them in I have to sign the copyright assignment.
I have no problemem doing that and I understand it’s a general policy, but it’s a bit annonying, especially considering the fact that mine were just a couple of simple “boring-sunday-afternoon” patches and that I don’t plan (lack of time and skill) to become a regular evolution contributor.
I wonder how many contributors are put off by this hurdle… not the copyright assignment per se, but the fact that you have print it down and send it to the US by regular mail.

Would a click-through agreement when submitting a patch in bugzilla hold any legal value?

Anyway Evo 1.5 is shaping up really nice, it’s a still a bit raugh and unstable but running cvs HEAD you can really feel the improvement day by day… You almost can hear the noise of bugs being squished ;-)
Thanks to Ximian and to all the Evo hackers!

Flu

Felt like crap the whole day: as usual I get ill during a week-end. Didn’t manage to get anything done school-wise, I spent the day between IRC and TV… At some point I got bored enough to prepare a couple of patches and file them in bugzilla.
I think I also have a simple Evolution patch, but I have still to see if it works properly.

Gnome 2.6

In the past week the first pieces of Gnome 2.6 have started to get into Fedora Rawhide. Since during the transition many things are still broken (e.g. I don’t have items in the Applications menu), I took the chance to switch again to a Gnome cvs HEAD installation made with jhbuild.
During the 2.3 series I run cvs HEAD all the time, but during 2.5 I limited myself to try cvs HEAD only of some apps I’m interested in. This for two reasons:

• I didn’t manage to get Fedora GDM to log into my GNOMECVS session by default: it always tell me to use SwitchDesktop and that crap, but it only sees the standard Fedora Gnome.
• Spatial Nautilus. It’s not that I don’t like it or that I’m against it: if so many people I trust think it’s a good idea it’s probably true… on the other hand it gets in my way of doing things. Probably I just have to get used to it.

Anyway as a whole it seems that Gnome 2.6 is shaping up really nice and clean.</ul>

UART

Started to work seriously at the “Electronics of Digital Systems” assignment (design and implement on a test FPGA board an UART in Verilog). Until yesterday I didn’t do much more than find out what a UART is.
We split the thing in 4 parts:

• Transmitter
• Receiver
• BaudClock Generator
• Bus Control

I think I have pretty clear idea of how to implement each component, but I didn’t imagine that was such a pain passing from the “alogorithm” (eg “oh ok, the txmit is a state machine that does this and that”) to a working (where working means “it passes all the test benches”) module.
Extra grief was caused by the crappy Xilinx tools.
We started from the BaudClock Generator: it’s a relly simple component that given the system clock and the selected baudrate outputs a clock which is 16x the baudrate; for example, this clock is used in the receiver to do triple sampling on the incoming bits.
Basically it’s nothing more than counting up to N and switch, counting up to N and switch, etc.
It passes the behavioural simulation just fine, but when we mapped it, all we got as output is wire connected to ground. Wonderful.

Gedit

Yesterday paolo committed a big patch, which among other things introduces the new close confirmation dialog. I like it, but during the UI-review clarkbw and others made good points about some potential usability problems.

In the time since the last update I’ve submitted some misc patches to MLView and gedit, mostly simple ui improvements, but today I submitted a patch for a gedit bug that was marked a Maj in bugzilla, waiting for the review…
I got the chance to talk a bit with the maintainers of these two project (respectively sdodji and paolo) so I decided to certify them here on Advogato: both as Masters since they are major contributors to Gnome.

Also nice to see a burst of activity (or better hack-tivity) on glade-devel wrt Glade-3, things have been quiet for a while and I didn’t get the chance to work on it lately… I hope that some new contributors get involved!

I’ve now installed Fedora Core on my new laptop. It seems to work mostly fine, even if I still have to investigate some minor annoyances:

• sound doesn’t work (I think I have to use ALSA)
• the irritating GDM “beep” at login is _very_ loud.
• I have to learn stuff about acpi/suspend/special keys etc.

The thing that annoys me most, though, is that the touchpad is always active and while typing I often move the cursor by mistake. Under Windows you can turn the touchpad on/off with a special key, but that doesn’t work in linux.

I finally got my new notebook: it’s an ASUS M3425CH and so far I’m quite happy with it; not only it’s powerful and light, but it is also quite nice to look at (quite a surprise, since the online pictures did not reveal it).

Of course it came with WindowsXP installed and unfortunately I cannot wipe it away yet since for the “Electronics of Digital Systems” course we have to use Xilinx, and the “free as in beer” WebPack runs only on Windows; for this project we are stuck with Xilinx, but I wonder if there are any open source Verilog/VHDL tools that are mature enough…

On the bright side I got the chance to try Mozilla Firebird and Thunderbird and the first impression is really great, especially the mail client is tons better than the last time I tried a mozilla mail client!

More on the linux installation later.