Market Analysis

A market survey and analysis presentation from Frost and Sullivan on “WiMax” and “Wireless Sensor Network” were conducted in my company this morning. A hugely disappointment, nothing special and nothing new, the presentation was mainly for top management peoples without any technical knowledge. It seems that the presenter thought that the target audiences are all marketing peoples. It must be a joke! He said that he doesn’t know the operators in Malaysia which offers cellular service.

Well, the conclusion for his presentation:
WiMax – 802.16d (fixed) will be died and look for research in 802.11e (mobile and fixed)
WSN – ZigBee will be in leading position compared to the other standards.

ZigBee Protocol is similar to the one used by WiFi, known as CDMA/CA. Find out more from this web-site. Interesting stuff.....

Weekly Update

I had been robbed by a Chinese guy at SS2 this Monday. I lost my RM300++ and my handphone while my gf had her handphone “taken” by the guy as well. He came with his Wira and a knife. Without thinking twice, I just fulfilled his unexpected request. We had made a police report and gave our statement. Luckily, both of us were safe but what concerns me is the safety of our country. We can use all the excuses but it seems that Klang Valley is not safe. It’s hurt and terrible!

Studied the Real Time Linux used in the current market. I managed to incorporate the patches of RTAI (a community effort for open source developer) for my host system running 2.4 kernel. Just simply run the test suite but the system crashed if running LXRT processes. For those who like to try it out, get the patches, tools and test samples from this web-site.

This week was really busy. Migrated the BSPs for two different processor architectures from older version of Tornado to the current version in my company. Then, resume my works on Linux PCI. Today, I succeeded to add the PCI-to-Local DMA transfer in my IO call with interrupt driven mechanism. The size of DMA transfer is limited to only 128K bytes from my host system’s RAM to the local device.

That's all! Enjoy the weekend

Collaborative Citizen Journalism

How does this concept work? The advent of Blogging.. Anyone who would like to contribute can access the following web-sites:

OhMyNews - http://english.ohmynews.com/
WikiNews - http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page

Can we trust the news? How can a person make a judgment based on his/her limited knowledge and nowadays too much information access? No answer …..

Newstrust - http://www.newstrust.net/

Earliest Sign in Time 2006

Alright, I had signed in as early as 8:05:26 AM today. After fetching my gf to her school, I had started my “sleepy” journey to my office. Apply multitasking concept on my journey, reading the report, typing the SMS….. All my colleagues (in the same lab) kept asking me, “Tak boleh tidur keh”, “Mimpi awal”. Based on my previous record, the earliest sign in time was registered on 6 March 2003. Guess? as early as 7:37:00 AM!

Have a look on head-butted Zidance. :)

PCI & World Cup

Writing the PCI driver for two different FPGA boards embedded with PCI bridge chip for my current assignment. Doorbell Interrupt, Mailbox Registers, I2O FIFO, DMA…..blah, blah, blah. Based on my previous experience, I was able to complete the “template” driver for Linux platform within two days. But care must be taken to provide the mechanism for accessing the unique features which is not common across all the PCI bridge chips. Both of the PCI bridges come with different features. These are the tricky parts. A glance on our testbed for E1 testing:

After all, the finalists for this year World Cup are France and Italy. How come these two teams entering the final? Italy beat Australia with a late late penalty. It will not given by Graham Poll (English Referee). Again, they beat German with a late late goal with a beautiful curling shoot from a defender. It’s a bit of luck. France, almost knock up in early group stage, beat the World Champion, Brazil.

It was pity that German could not enter the final, anti-climax. I actually don’t favor German because of the way they play the game. I still remember that I had to sacrifice my sleep just to watch them converting the penalty in 1990. Anyway, under the guidance of Juergen Klinsmann, German starts playing attractive football with a lot of pace and attacking minded. Much, much entertaining compared to last time. Hmm…there was a debate on the first choice goalkeeper during the start of the tournament. Oliver Kahn or Jens Lehmann? At the end, the long term No 2 became the No 1 and long term No 1 became No 2. Could this happen in our country? It was strange and unacceptable from Kahn’s point of view. Lehmann did say that he didn’t know the reason why he had edged out Kahn. My personal view is that Klinsmann would like to challenge the mentality of his squad and intend to reform the German football. I heard today that Lehmann is willing to offer his starting place to Kahn. Just wonder whether Lehmann will do the same if German enters the final.

Registered my second level of German course yesterday. Borrow three books (stufe 1) from the library after librarian persuaded me to do so.