Bandung Trip

Arrived at LCCT from Bandung 6 hours ago.

Again, this was an opportunity for me to travel to our neighboring country. This trip was purposely to study the wireless solution in one of the leading company in Bandung, Indonesia. I have heard the prestigious Institute Technology Bandung before but hardly have any knowledge on the standard of Wireless technologies there. After visiting that company, I have been a little bit worry about Malaysia. Country like Indonesia, their government is putting faith on their own local company for providing their own solution, although they are not developing from the scratch. But credit to them since they are working hard to get the things done. Here, peoples are depending too much on foreigners’ technologies and seems reluctant to give opportunities to local peoples. I am sorry to say that the Indon guys are much better than us in terms of their work rate. I have had the time to talk to one of fresh graduate from ITB and he said that those who graduate from IBT are encouraged to go oversea for their study. I can say that his technical skill is much better than any fresh graduate from our local university. Sigh of worry! I can’t imagine but I think that I have to believe that Indonesia will soon overshadow Malaysia in technology if we do nothing.

I had arrived at the Bandung airport on Sunday morning. Stayed in Jayakarta Hotel and it is quite near to the city center. Bandung is famous for its textile industry. My colleagues and I had spent our time in Rumah Mode and Cihampelas Street (famous for its Jean) looking for some clothes and etc. It is a paradise for those shopping kaki since there are a lot of factory outlets there. During this short stay, I had found out quite a number of foods which are synonym to Chinese foods, such as CapCay, Siomay (Siu-mai in Cantonese) , Mie Dago (like watan mee here) and etc. Some of the interesting snacks are Durian with ice cream, Batagor (fish ball mixed with Taufu), Siomay ( ), Mie Baso (noodle served with beef meat ball) ….But if you are talking about hygiene, than you probably won’t dare enough to taste these! Anyway, try to understand what the peoples are saying is difficult, especially when the terms can be interpreted as different meaning, such as:

lumayan – jauh
bisa – biasa
ceker – kaki
pak – cik
….

Here the Photos

A View on Hill Site

Jayakarta Hotel

Rumah Mode - A Famous Factory Outlet in Bandung

Durian mixed with Ice Cream

Batagor - A Famous Snack there

They are selling rifles openly


Taking picture at Bandung airport

Too much assumption.....

Worked on the protocol stacks integration, combining both two signaling stacks, NBAP (Node-B Application Part) and ALCAP, with the user plane protocol, FP (Framing Protocol). The FP is resided in peripheral card with PowerPC core while the signaling stacks are both running in main card with Intel Pentium core. Both of these two cards use different operating systems, one is RTOS and another one is traditional UNIX-based OS. The channel cards are not ready and this coz the implementation work based on too much assumptions. It’s really difficult…

Welcome the New Comer

My sister gave birth to a baby last Saturday. Probably will pay a visit within one or two weeks time. Guess whether is a girl or a boy?

Last Week Activities

Technical talk about Inter-Vehicular Communication (IVC) was held in UNITEN last Wednesday. We have invited Dr. Daniel Wong, one of the guest editors from IEEE Wireless Communication Magazine for special issue on “Inter-Vehicular Communications” and his student, Miss Bhawani. There are many similarities between the ad-hoc networks and vehicular-to-vehicular communication. However, there are different problems faced in VANET, such as rapid changing of topology. The speakers addressed two important research issues, security and routing algorithm. More on IVC can be found here.

Last week, I have been assigned a temporary task regarding WiMax solution. This solution consists of three main boards: processor board, modem board and RF board, connected via passive PCI backplane. I am asked to reengineer back the processor board. This board comes along with Intel IXP425 network processor running Timesys Linux. Since the tools are not ready for the time being, I worked most of time identifying the mechanism for re-loading the binary. The board contains a 16M Bytes boot flash that is used to store the bootloader, kernel image and root file system. The bootloader, Redboot was successfully built using the available tar package. However, the linux image is not built for the time being due to the unavailability of Timesys SDK. The JFFS2 root file system was built using the buildroot by choosing the uClibc library which is smaller than the libc. I found out that this tool is really helpful and you can add any new modules to your root file system pretty easy. Anyway, you have to add all the necessary device nodes by yourself. The Abatron BDI2000 will be used to download the bootloader. Subsequently, the redboot contains the command to transfer the image and root file system via TFTP. There are 5 MTD partitions in the flash and thus the root file system is mapped to root=/dev/mtdblock/2. To ease the development phase, mounting the file system is done via NFS.

Name FLASH addr Mem addr Length Entry point
RedBoot 0x50000000 0x50000000 0x00020000 0x00000000
zImage 0x50040000 0x01600000 0x00120000 0x01600000
RfsLinux 0x50160000 0x50160000 0x00E60000 0x00000000
RedBoot config 0x50FC0000 0x50FC0000 0x00001000 0x00000000
FIS directory 0x50FE0000 0x50FE0000 0x00020000 0x00000000