Redhatter’s Web Blog

Well, presently I’m reading through the semester’s lecture slides to familiarise myself with the content I’m going to be examined on shortly.

And I’m noticing there are some bad habits that lecturers seem to be keen on repeating… again, and again.  Here’s some of my pet hates, as a student.  These relate to the presentation of the material we’re given, the actual format they’re provided in is another matter.

Many of these were provided in PDF, which is good.  My first niggle however, is when they do their “print to PDF”… in black-and-white… but don’t adapt their slides to suit this monochrome medium.

The above image is from a real presentation.  Those studying “Professional Studies II” (EEB781) at QUT might recognise it.  It was shown to us in colour during the lecture… but now when we review our notes, we only have it in shades of grey.  Thankfully we’re not being examined on that chart!  Then there’s this little gem…

This is a small section of a slide… Must I say, that black looks great on dark grey.  Mind you, the same criticism could be levelled at consumer electronics designers, who think it’s great to microprint 2mm high light-grey text on a dark grey panel!  But I digress…  Colour doesn’t necessarily improve things either… as shown by this example:

If it isn’t masking much needed information by discarding the colour information… the other trap they fall into, is scaling bitmap images up in size, and/or deforming their aspect ratios.  I’ve got loads of examples of this, dating back over 5 years of studies… Here’s a brilliant example of the former.

Uh huh… you honestly are going to tell me you can read every word of that?  Well yes, if you look closely, you can make things out… but why should we?  That slide is so blurred and pixellated, it’s hard to see what is being said.

Here’s the lesson… Vector graphics are your friend.  You can scale a vector to any size you like, and it won’t pixellate.  SVG is great for this… EPS isn’t too bad too.  Or WMF.  They all allow for graphics that can be scaled to any size.

Some things of course, are inherently bitmaps, such as photographs and scanned images.  If you must use a bitmap… make sure it’s a decent resolution to begin with. Making a bitmap smaller (by resampling) is fine… but don’t try to make it bigger… it’ll look like utter shite.

And of course, if you do try to resize a bitmap (or any graphic really, vector or bitmap)… at least preserve the aspect ratio.  Nothing looks worse than a stretched and distorted photo…

If you look closely, you can see the top-left photo has been stretched (made bigger!) horizontally slightly (not too bad, but still).  The worst is the bottom-right photo, which has been compressed vertically.  It’d be okay had the image been compressed horizontally in proportion… but instead, it looks squashed.

Just about every presentation package I have used, provides the means to scale images while preserving their aspect ratio.  Some do it by default… some require you to hold down Shift or Control whilst dragging it out.  In either case… it’s trivial to do.  If something doesn’t fit the hole in your slide… consider cropping the bits that aren’t needed so that it matches the aspect ratio of the hole.  But don’t squash it!

Anyway… that’s enough ranting from me… about time I got back to my studies.

… is not a pretty tale at this point.

At the moment, I’m a bit pissed off. Some inconsiderate bastards in my neighbourhood are playing crap music at top volume (Yes… I’m talking about YOU, at the Settlement Road/Kaloma Road intersection!) — so loud in fact, that wearing earmuffs with a 80dB attenuation rating, does not stop the noise. However, this isn’t what I’m really annoyed about.

I’ve switched all the radios off, and the mobile phone… in this state of mind it’s better I don’t go talking on air, as I’m likely to say something I’ll probably regret. Likewise the phone. I’ve just tweaked my blog’s config, so now this won’t appear on planet.gentoo.org or anywhere else stupid enough to syndicate the entire blog.

Worth noting, that save a few isolated examples, my presence doesn’t seem to be wanted at all. A couple of the senior devs (and former devs) in the Gentoo/MIPS team for instance — regard me as an incompetent idiot (I have IRC logs and email archives of this), I’m only tollerated because they need the numbers.

My big beef at this present time, is where my future is headded. I’m almost through my education. I’ve been at it now, non-stop, since 1991… 7 years of primary school, 5 years of high school, a year of straight IT at Griffith, and now, 5 years of IT/EE at QUT. Well almost… it will be 5 years at the end of the year.

I’ve managed to organise some work experience with a mob out at Laidley. This is great news — it means I might have some chance of graduating this year. However, it’s a long commute from Brisbane to Laidley… and I’ve just been given a direct order by my father that I’m to be home by 7:00PM! Wonderful… it was going to be a struggle accumulating the hours up as it is.

The work experience issue is a big problem on my mind. Where as most students I’d imagine, at this stage of education, would be filling in job applications for graduate positions… this isn’t an option for me. Without the industrial experience, I don’t graduate!

This is a point I can’t seem to get through to people. If I were to apply to a graduate position, they’ll expect someone who has done the 60 days experience as required by the Institution of Engineers. Someone who already has this experience will instantly get preference over someone like myself who hasn’t been successful obtaining this experience.

Now… 60 days in this case, is 60 8-hour days. So with the above kerfew in place, that pushes that well past 80 days. And I’ll be studying during this period too, so I won’t be able to travel out to Laidley every working day to get the experience.

Why did I go to an outfit that’s so far from home? Well, I had little choice. Outside of Campbell Scientific, and Powerlink, nobody else has been willing to talk to me. I’ve sent off numerous job applications, if they contact me at all, it’s an impersonal letter saying your offer was declined. No explaination why. And the job sites are pretty much barren with respect to job ads.

I realise the vast majority of job vacancies aren’t advertised… but what’s 70% of nothing? By my maths… nothing. It seems you have to know people… and in there lies a problem.

I feel like someone’s smashed both my legs, then told me to go take a hike. Yeah, very funny! If I was suicidal 6 months ago… you can imagine what my mental state is at the present time. Here’s hoping this is temporary turbulance, and things will settle. There is the possibility of getting paid work with this company in the future (presently it’s unpaid)… in which case, it’s “See ya later Brisbane… I’m moving out!”… yeah, I’m sick of this rat race and I want some peace and quiet!

I’ll be glad when this year’s over… then I can see where I’m at. Hopefully I’ll be done with uni… and it’ll be off to find work. Exactly where I do not know — my ideas of what to do have shifted quite a bit since I started. The engineering studies have been a valuable — I’ll see how it is after I’ve done some industrial experience. At the very least, I can say, I have tried.

All else fails… I might talk to the TAFE or something, see if I can fast track an electrical tradesmanship… as that’s most closely aligned to what I know, and there seems to be a lot of demand in that field at this time.

Time will tell… but for now, I just had to get the above behemoth off my chest.

Hi all…

Lately I’ve been busy with university stuff. In particular, my final year project, which is investigating Controller Area Networks, in the context of the Atmel AT91SAM7X256 MCU.  These microcontrollers are a low-cost system-on-chip based around the ARM7TMDI core.  This particular one includes 64KB RAM, 256KB flash, RS-232, device-side USB 2.0, 10/100Mbps ethernet, and of course, a CAN interface.

When I first started looking into this project, I was thinking about using Linux and SocketCAN… well, needless to say the moment I saw the specs on the exact board I was using (the AT91SAM7X-EK), I soon realised Linux was simply out of the question.  That doesn’t mean however, that one is stuck to using proprietary kernels and toolchains.  The following, are some notes on how to code for these things… and where I’m at.

Kernel

You don’t have to use a kernel of course, you can code bare-iron, but I decided to go with a multitasking kernel to make my life easier — I can code each thread to do something basic, and let the kernel manage the IPC and task switching for me, hooking them together.  There are a few options out there, but so far the option I’m liking the most, is the FreeRTOS kernel.  This kernel is free software under the GNU GPL, and supports many platforms, including ARM7.

Toolchain

There are a few compiler toolchains you can use for this board.  The DVD that comes with the board, includes a version of IAR Embedded Workbench, which isn’t too bad, but unless you pay for a license, your code size is limited to 32KB.  The GNU toolchain however, is very mature for the ARM7 platform… and getting a toolchain up and running isn’t too difficult.

FreeRTOS can be built using IAR, and indeed to get me started, that’s what I did.  Once I was comfortable with the system though, I turned my attention to getting a GNU toolchain running on my laptop.  The toolchain needs to be built, targetting the arm-elf platform, using the newlib C library.  Thumb mode, multilib, and interworking support need to be included in this toolchain to build FreeRTOS.  There are numerous prebuilt toolchains, and guides on how to do them from source… but I wound up going my own way…

In my devspace, you’ll find a compressed Makefile.  Download this into an empty directory, decompress it, then rename it to Makefile.  Gentoo users, may find it helpful to symlink their distfiles directory (/usr/portage/distfiles for most people) to ’src’ — the Makefile uses the same toolchain sources as Gentoo.  Edit Makefile to point to your local Gentoo mirror (I use these mirrors because they’ve got all the sources in one place), then run make.  With luck, it’ll build everything and install it for you.  It runs as a user, then uses sudo to copy the files to /usr/local where they are to be installed.

At the end, you’ll be left with a full arm-elf toolchain, based on GCC 4.2.3, binutils 2.18 and newlib 1.15.0.

Building the FreeRTOS kernel

FreeRTOS comes with numerous demos which can be used as starting points for your own projects.  The best one for the AT91SAM7X using GCC, is the lwIP_Rowley_ARM7 demo.  This demo does three things:

1. Runs a webserver displaying some task statistics
2. Flashes the onboard LEDs to indicate it’s working
3. Emulates a CDC-ACM device, writing characters to it at 115200 baud 8N1.

To start, go into the Demos/lwIP_Rowley_ARM7 directory, and rename ‘makefile’ to ‘Makefile’.  To set the IP configuration, edit EMAC/SAM7_EMAC.h and change the IP address settings as appropriate (line 69 onwards).  Save this, then type make.  It should go ahead and build an rtosdemo.bin file, which is your executable to be flashed.

Flashing the project

This is where my usage of free software came unstuck.  There are a few projects that theoretically allow you to flash these devices.  The kit comes with a SAM-ICE J-Tag, which is equivalent to the J-Link device developed by Segger.  These, to my knowledge, do not work using J-Tag tools available under Linux.  You could use one of the Wiggler-style J-Tag cables, but I don’t have one of those at my disposal.

The AT91SAM7X has a trick up its sleeve though.  If you power the board up for a few seconds with the ERASE jumper enabled, power it down, then power it back up with the ERASE jumper removed, it’ll revert back to using SAM-BA firmware.  SAM-BA allows for the board to be flashed either via the DBGU serial port, or, via a CDC-ACM USB device.  Tools such as Sam_I_Am, then connect to the /dev/ttyACM0 device created.  For this to work, a small patch needs to be applied to the cdc-acm driver in the Linux kernel (This same patch also adds support for the FreeRTOS CDC device created by the above demo).

For me, this has been the most promising, but hasn’t quite gotten things going… I’m able to flash the device, but for some reason, it sees it as an AT91SAM7S256… and the thing won’t boot.  If anyone has some pointers as to what could be going wrong, I’m all ears.

At the moment, I’m using the SAM-BA flashing utility available from Atmel’s website free of charge.  This is a Windows NT utility requiring administrator privileges, which is suboptimal, but so be it, it works, I just boot my desktop PC into Windows 2000, and access the output binary via SMB.  This works, and isn’t too painful.  It may also work in a VM, I haven’t tried yet.

I’ll keep tinkering with the Linux utilities, because I feel it’s almost there… I’ve thrown this post up so that others who may be looking for this information, have somewhere to work from.  Apart from the little issues I’ve had, I’ve found this board quite enjoyable to work with.  I can use mostly my own tools to work with the files, and the C compiler is both stable (unlike the GNU toolchain for Altera Nios II) and fully ANSI C compliant (unlike the Z-World compiler used on Rabbit Semiconductor devices) — a nice change indeed.

People who know me, will know I’m quite a keen supporter of open source projects. I’m not nearly as fanatical about it as others, such as Richard Stallman, but I try to support open source as much as I can.

However, I suppose I’m a much bigger supporter, of open standards, than open source. I don’t mind if a project implementing a standard is proprietary commercial software — if the underlying standards it is built on, are open, that makes it possible for an open source implementation to be created. This gives users a choice — they may choose for various reasons to go for a commercial solution, or they may choose open source, it’s entirely up to them.

Now I realise that many of you will be reading this on planet.gentoo.org, and thus I’m likely preaching to the converted. I’m mainly aiming this at organisations that are completely blind to the issues faced. I’m hoping some of those might see this post.

Some might ask, what’s wrong with closed standards? There are a number of issues regarding closed standards.

• Vendor lock-in: it locks people in to buying from particular vendors, for better or worse.
• Inflexibility: If you don’t know how it works, how can you modify it to make it do what you want?
• Control: Who controls what you do with the application? Or the data produced?

If you’re using some closed system, and you run into technical difficulties, the only people who can help, are the makers of that product. You can’t easily switch to another product, and you’re completely at that vendor’s mercy. Some charge extortionate rates to fix even trivial problems, if they help at all. Now granted, there are some good players out there, and if you strike one, great… but if things change for the worse, you’re stuffed.

The ability to understand how a system works is particularly important. Not just with troubleshooting… but also with experiments. Users of a system may have ideas that you as a company have not even considered. Now if it’s open, they can either modify themselves, or hire someone to modify, the system to suit their needs.

Experimentation in one’s spare time is a great way to learn too — university can’t teach you everything. But if the system is closed, how can they experiment? The ability to learn about a system is greatly stifled, when you can’t play with the deep internals at the protocol level.

Control over what you can do with the data produced by a system is a hassle. Remember that you, as the vendor, do not own the data produced by someone using your product. As far as the user is concerned, it’s their data. If I put an audio or video clip of my own work up on my site (which I have done on occasions), it’s not companies like Fraunhofer, or Microsoft, or Apple that own the content, it’s me. And I want the right to be able to share that clip under my terms.

The only reason why the Internet is popular today, is because of open standards. You would likely not be reading this, had it not been due to open protocols such as IEEE802.11b, OpenVPN, Ethernet, TCP/IP and HTTP, and open formats such as HTML. Look at what happened to Compuserve… The Microsoft Network… AOL… Ring a bell? They were all closed networks, that died out because the open wild of the Internet was more appealing to their users.

It isn’t just an issue in the information technology realm. Allow me to look at the problem in another context. Amateur radio, would not exist today as a hobby, if it were not for open communications standards.

If you look past the obvious social and competitive aspects of amateur radio, you see there’s another aspect, the experimentation side. As defined by the ACMA LCD (I’m sure it’s similar in other countries) …

6. Use of an amateur station

The licensee:

1. must use an amateur station solely for the purpose of:
   1. self training in radiocommunications; or
   2. intercommunications; or
   3. technical investigations into radiocommunications; or
   4. transmitting news and information services related to the operation of amateur stations, as a means of facilitating intercommunication

The two points I’ve highlighted in bold above, are rather important. Put in layman’s terms… if you’re not in the hobby to talk to people, it’s mainly there for experimenting with the technology.

There’s another restriction here too … we’re not allowed to use cryptography, or any kind of secret code, it must be public domain. (e.g. I could, for instance, theoretically use UTF-8 on CW, encoding ones as a dash, zeros as a dot, and using RS-232-like encapsulation. Morse users would get confused however.)

Now suppose FM, for example, were a closed standard — that is, you had to pay some company royalty fees to use them. (Yes, I know that almost did happen way back in the 1930s, but anyway.) How well do you think that’d sit with radio amateurs, who typically like to build homebrew equipment? I don’t think it’d be liked much at all. In fact, if it were secret, it may very well be illegal in some countries. Thankfully this isn’t the case, and even emerging standards like D-Star, are fully open.

Now… back to the IT situation. We can see that a system where the protocols and standards used are fully open, can work. I have to ask why IT thinks it’s special, and insists on closed standards?

Looking at the educational environment … it’s here more than any other place, where we need open standards. How can students be expected to learn about something, if they can’t conduct their own experiments? Experimenting in one’s own time is a good way to gain a better understanding of the topic of study. It’s people graduating from these universities, that will be carrying the industry forward, and I really do think the present industry, should assist by being as open as possible.

Why is it, that universities like inflicting this poor choice of closed systems on its students? Yes, I’m looking at you, Queensland University of Technology, with your extensive use of Microsoft Office, Windows Media codecs (for recorded lectures), Cisco VPNs, Microsoft .NET framework, and numerous proprietary apps/standards.

QUT have a number of labs for each faculty, but also central labs. The central labs have OpenOffice installed, however the labs for Faculty of Engineering, and Faculty of IT, do not. So sure, I can work on some assignment on my personal laptop (running Gentoo Linux of course) — but if I have to email it to the lecturer, I have to either convert it to a PDF (my preferred method), or some have the gaull to ask for it in Microsoft Office formats.

If I comment that I don’t have the money to purchase Microsoft Office, the comment usually is something along the lines of, “Ohh, well you’ll just have to use the computers here.” Yeah well… how about I email my stuff in OpenDocument (ISO26300) format, and see how YOU like walking out of your cozy little office, into the library, and using a computer other than your own to view some file you’re expected to read. Exactly, you don’t like it … why should we be expected to put up with it?!

If that isn’t bad enough, they’ve now dropped using Java apparently for a teaching language. They instead use Scheme for the first years, then go throw them in the deep end with .NET. Way to go for consistency! Probably worth noting that they know nothing about Mono, and expect everyone to use VisualStudio.NET.

I really do think this is highly hypocritical of the university, and it’s an attitude that really disgusts me. Sadly I know they’re not the only ones doing this — some are even worse in this regard. (Then again, some are really open source friendly.) I have good reasons for using the software I do. I at least give you, the choice of using anything that opens OpenDocument formats — which is quite a lot — just sad that your office suite of choice isn’t among them by default. That’s not my fault, and you shouldn’t blame me for that.

I’ve complained directly to them about this before … so I’m now taking this complaint onto the world stage. Don’t like it? Tough.

I try to practice what I preach. One site I maintain, the Asperger Services Australia site, does make use of open standards. Sure Microsoft Office is used internally to write the documents that get uploaded (I’m working on that, give me time), they are converted to PDF. PDF of course is another open standard, ISO32000.

Any multimedia on the site, uses the XIPH foundation codecs Theora and Vorbis. Sure, I get the odd question from a Windows or Mac user about how to play the files, but thanks to the Cortado player applet, and ITheora, I’m able to make the video play for 99% of users out-of-the-box, and cater for the other 1% by allowing them to download the file and play it any number of players that support Theora and Vorbis.

This is handled automatically in most cases, the user isn’t even aware of the underlying architecture. However, if curious, the underlying architecture is open and present for them to look at.

I think it somewhat ridiculous, when looking at science fiction shows such as Star Trek, depicting (fictional) alien craft, produced by completely different lifeforms, are somehow 100% compatible at every layer of the OSI stack. We haven’t even got this today, and every computer on this planet was built by the same species!

I really do think this closed-standards war is hurting more than it’s helping. It’s about time we cut the nonsense, and actually started working together. Protocols and formats, used by systems really should be open for anyone to implement. I don’t mind closed implementations of those standards, that’s fine, but the standards themselves should be open.

Anyway… that’s enough of my ranting… glad to get that out of my system.

Well, 2007 is slowly drawing to a close. As I write this, I’m lying on my bed, winding down for the evening, I can’t help but think back over this year.

For me, 2007 was great academically. I hit some quite high scores at uni, and even this semester, managed to score a 7 in an engineering subject. 7s for me are very rare, and usually only occur with IT subjects — the subject this time around was on communications between embedded systems — specifically, it centred around an Allen Bradley SLC5/03 PLC, and a Rabbit Semiconductor RCM4000-series 8-bit microcontroller.

Amongst other things at uni, this year really drained me. Gentoo took a major back seat, along with many projects I’ve been working on, and my entire focus was on getting through the semester. My stress levels this year got to dangerously high levels, to the point I was at the brink of suicide. The only thing that stopped me, is that for better or worse, I’m needed, and there are things I need to do before I disappear off the scene.

Now that the university year is over for now (except for the mugs doing a summer semester), I’m able to relax somewhat. I was away from home for the last 5 days, sporadically jumping online via a dialup link to check on things. I worked on stuff that pleased me for once.

I did some testing for Gentoo whilst I was at it. My laptop wouldn’t dial out to the internet for some reason, but I soon discovered, the Lemote Fulong I took with me, worked fine. By disabling the getty on ttyS0 (I normally have it for when I use the box headless) and plugging a 56Kbps PSTN modem in, and using KPPP via X-over-SSH (xorg-server 1.4 segfaults, there’s some patches I need to forward-port), I had an internet link up first go. Hence, net-dialup/ppp got a bump. Sadly I had to USE-mask atm, because that needed net-dialup/linux-atm, which isn’t yet stable. If I find a way to test this, I’ll do so, and mark it stable too.

Looking around though, I see I’m not the only one feeling the pressure. Gentoo 2007.1 has been delayed this year quite significantly, with most of the people involved having other issues to contend with. In the developer community as a whole, everyone seems to be on edge. In fact, everyone seems to be on edge. No idea what the cause is, it’s just something I’ve noticed.

Now… 2007 as I say is almost over. Presently, boxing day will be over for me in less than 2 hours. My hopes for 2008…

• I hope linux.conf.au goes well for all involved. Mark Kowarsky has done a lot of work to organise Gentoo’s presence at this event. Sadly, I won’t be involved (lack of funds and time prevent me from attending) but I’ll try to help out from a distance.
• I hope that over this new year period, people get a chance to unwind and relax a bit. Some de-stressing is badly needed IMHO, and should help ensure everyone is ready for the new year.
• I hope that university for me, will now start to taper off a bit as I enter my final year. This year sees a reduction from 48 credit points a semester, to 36, which should leave me more time to dedicate to each subject, and therefore less stress & anxiety.

For the next few days, I’ll be uncontactable, as I’ll be out of mobile range camping at Gibraltar Ranges National Park (northern NSW, half way between Glen Innes and Grafton on the Gwydir Highway). It’s a nice spot, away from technology. See, as much as I like computers, I also like to run away from them for a little while.

Those who are travelling long distances, I wish you all a safe journey. Take it easy on the roads, there’s no point in rushing to a funeral. Here in Queensland, our christmas/new year road toll is already one death higher than it ought to be, and while I really do hope it doesn’t increase, my gut feeling is that it probably will. Take it easy though, and the chances of you becomming another statistic are greatly reduced.

I may not get a chance before the new year to make another post. So whatever you’re doing…

I wish you all, a happy 2008.

Hi all… Two issues to raise here:

binutils-config and the missing ldscripts/elf64btsmip.xr reference

It seems this problem seems to be happening to quite a few people. If you follow the Gentoo/MIPS handbook to-the-letter with the present version of binutils-config, you wind up with this:

moosehead linux-2.6.22.6-20070902 # make vmlinux.32 modules CROSS_COMPILE=mips64-unknown-linux-gnu-
CHK include/linux/version.h
CHK include/linux/utsrelease.h
Checking missing-syscalls for N32
CALL scripts/checksyscalls.sh
Checking missing-syscalls for O32
CALL scripts/checksyscalls.sh
CALL scripts/checksyscalls.sh
CHK include/linux/compile.h
LD init/mounts.o
mips64-unknown-linux-gnu-ld: cannot open linker script file ldscripts/elf64btsmip.xr: No such file or directory

The fix… update to binutils-config-1.9-r4 or newer, then run binutils-config –mips && . /etc/profile before trying your kernel build again. For further details, see bug #171486. Gentoo 2007.1 (next release) will fix this issue.

Heads Up

As some of you may know, I’m nearing the end of my double degree (Bachelor of IT/Bachelor of Electronic Engineering), and part of that involves getting 60 days industrial experience. I’ve applied to a number of companies — some of these positions will take me to rural locations where I may not have a permanent internet connection (or even reliable dialup).

Thus, during this upcoming summer break (between mid November through to late February), I may wind up going on a temporary hiatus from Gentoo. None of this is definite at this stage, nobody that I’ve contacted has gotten in touch to line up an interview however I figure I may as well post this here now so that the me disappearing doesn’t come out-of-the-blue.

The plan if I do wind up temporarily moving: I’ll try and get 2007.1 pushed out the door before I leave. This will focus on newer stages for MIPS1 and MIPS4 little-endian targets. I’ll set up both Lemote boxes here so that other Gentoo devs can gain access to them whilst I’m away. If I can get any internet service at all, I’ll be around to answer queries, and maybe do some limited work via SSH, but testing X or audio apps are out of the question.

As I say, none of this is definite, and I may wind up getting my experience somewhere here in Brisbane (ideal case). That said… given my stress levels lately, they say a change is as good as a holiday… maybe a few months living in a country town is just what I need.

Hi All… figured I’d thank you for the support, and better explain my emotional ramblings (as I lie here trying to wind down and sleep, battling a 15″ CRT that wants to emulate a disco light).

A little about my personal life. I certainly realise I’ve had it a lot easier than some, but I’ve had some rough moments.

This includes witnessing a marriage breakup of my parents back in the early 90’s. (Being the ham in the sandwitch is no fun at all.) Bullying both verbally and physically over my years at school, not just from individuals, but from entire classes. Even some sexual abuse (from a female student, more on that later).

So it’s little wonder that I am sometimes a bit on the fragile side. Am I looking at blaming others for my problems? Well no. I’ve moved on for the most part.

This includes the one case of sexual abuse. Without going into details, it was back in 1992, and involved a year 7 female student at my primary school. I’m not planning on hunting her down though. If I do happen to come into contact, I only wish to know two things:

• Has she committed the same act on others?
• (most important) Has she gotten help for her psychological condition?

What I’ve heard… this kind of abuse starts when the abuser themselves, is abused in some manner. I’m willing to forgive (not forget) the act if the guilty party is willing to, or has, undergone some rehabilitation & councelling on the matter.

As for the bullying… the worst of it occurred in 1995. I don’t exaggerate when I say I had a good 20 or so students from the year 6 class ganging up on me. I don’t recall every incident, but I do recall getting surrounded and screamed at.

It didn’t help that I didn’t get along at all with my teacher at the time. The problem solved itself however… the main ring leader wound up switching to BBC and the group kinda collapsed. The teacher also wound up switching schools if I recall, not sure of the exact reasons.

So yeah, I carry a bit of baggage around with me. I don’t let it stop me with what I’m doing now… and it has very little to do with my outburst a few days ago — which was brought on by more recent issues.

Right now… I’ve been trying to wrap my head around some telecommunications topics for an exam I have on Tuesday. (I’m repeating the subject from last year — so I really want to pass this time.)

Progress has been slow however, since I haven’t completely grasped all the concepts. My apathy/laziness and a sub-optimal teaching method (for me, not everyone learns the same way) are likely to blame there.

Needless to say, I’ll be looking forward to the upcomming Christmas/New Year break. I’ll like it even better if I can put these engineering skills of mine to some constructive use.

Well… now that I’ve redirected most of the major viewers to a safer feed, I can now drop a few bombshells and let off some steam without making Linux distributions look bad.

The last 12 months have been a bit of a roller coaster ride for me. Specifically, it has been events at university, and the stress brought on by these events that have lead to me getting burned out. No longer have I any interest in persuing a career in IT or electrical engineering, or continuing with life in general.

Early last year, I was looking forward to finishing my degree, and ideally working with some embedded systems, as that was what I seemed to enjoy. The idea of getting useful software onto an embedded computer (with limited memory, storage and CPU power), then stuffing that computer inside some package appealed to me.

In a way, it kinda still does… but not to the same extent. See, my big problem is that I’m not able to play the social game, and have no desire to. While some are not happy unless they’re chattering away with the big boys in the posh end of town — I’m more comfortable sitting back in a quiet space working on whatever projects interest me at that moment in time.

I do have quite a few technical abilities, and some social qualities that are considered highly valuable by many employers — however, what they get is a package deal, and it’s some of my personal traits that could make it a deal breaker at the interview. Put simply, interviews do not suit me or people like me. Which is a shame, since it’s people like this, that gave us many of the advances we have today including AC power generation and modern computers.

My situation at the moment is this. Make no mistake right now, I am in a suicidal state mentally. I however, don’t want to put undue stress on those that I’m working with within the university… thus I won’t be enacting on any plans until next year. If things don’t go well this year, I may well be a corpse around March next year.

Essentially, my problem revolves around the fact that I see no worthwhile future at this moment in time. If I can’t gain employment, then I’ve got no means to support myself — I’ll wind up on the streets. I’d rather jump now whilst I have some dignity, then wait until I sink to the bottom of society.

I’m in talks with various medical people at the moment… so far this has largely been a waste of time and money. I’ve been following the advice given, but so far haven’t had any real resolution to the issues that I face. My biggest problem, is that not being a socialite, more or less means that my skills are not in an easily accessible form. Thus, people conclude that I have nothing to offer them.

They see me as an ordinary person who should understand the unwritten rules of social behaviour. I mention that I have AS, the usual retort is, “You look fine to me…” Yes, I do look fine. I have good vision (slightly myopic, but acceptable), good hearing, etc. I have both arms and legs fully intact and operational. I have no mobility problems and my mental abilities are fine. But this does not mean that I react the same way as everybody else. It’s this total lack of understanding for people like myself that has me on the brink of suicide.

And no, pills aren’t the answer here … not unless you want to try and medicate 6.1 billion people who have the lack-of-understanding disease. Indeed, it’s not just AS, it’s other conditions too: being of a particular ethnicity, various forms of disabilities (mental, physical and social/communicative), demographics… you name it.

It’s something that really gets up my nose about society today. The bigger we get, the less we care. If this is how the world is going, then count me out — this is not a world in which I wish to participate.

Hi All…

Here at uni (Room S825, S-Block, QUT Gardens Point) someone started a drawing of some penguins getting alarmed at a Windows Vista logo on one of the whiteboards. Over time, this little cartoon has evolved, and thus I figured I better get a shot of it before it disappears. It symbolises the battles between various operating systems — mainly the OS zealots. Of course, things aren’t really quite like this, there is quite a bit of co-operation between the various platforms, with a few notable exceptions.
Anyway… here it is… enjoy. As always, click the image for an enlarged version.