When You are Tired and Out of Idea

IEEE ICIT 2007 in Shenzhen - Best Paper

I had made my first technical presentation outside Malaysia. The presented paper was “Distributed PCI Processing Mechanism utilizing PCI Backplane for 3G Node-B”. It is all about Base Transceiver Station architecture and describes our communication mechanism for exchanging the user and signaling traffics between several different data acquisition boards. Surprisingly, this paper has been selected as the Best Conference Paper in Shenzhen. This IEEE conference was sponsored by IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. When I first saw the term “Integration Technology”, I had no idea that it was going to do with Robotics. This 3-day conference presented 16 plenary talks with titles mainly surrounding Market Survey in China and Taiwan, Robotics, Image Processing and Artificial Intelligence. It is interesting to find out how peoples integrating their daily life with robots. Anyway, the conference papers look more diverse and the research scopes include RF design, WSN, Grid Computing and etc. Majority of the paper contributors are from China mainland.

At Presentation Hall

Award Ceremony

Session Chair, Hadi from Pakistan, and CHUK PhD Researcher

Prof. Paolo Dario, Keynote Speaker

Terrible Experience

I am now in Shenzhen to attend an IEEE conference. I considered myself having a nightmare on Tuesday. This was my first experience traveling with Shenzhen Airline and my very first experience traveling oversea with Airline other than MAS and AirAsia. The flight was scheduled as early as 7.55 a.m. and I had arrived at the airport around 5.30 a.m. I had a bad experience missing the flight to Kuching before. That’s why I always very careful and usually arrive at the airport 2 hours before that. When all the passengers entered the flight and it just one or two seconds before the flight departure, the pilot made an announcement that “the flight encounters some technical problems”. We were asked to stay in the flight for more than 1 hour before they asked us to return to the Departure Hall. We had wait there for more than 3 hours and no announcement been made. Quite a number of peoples started to loss their patient and decided to ask the Shenzhen Airline official to come. Only then the official came and transferred us to the hotel and he said that he can’t promise us the flight exact departure time. He claimed that one component was damaged and the spare part was not available in Malaysia. So, have to wait for the flight coming from Shenzhen bringing that component. During the arrangement to the hotel, the priority was given to those who holding the China passports. The local Malaysians were transferred to a hotel in Salak Tinggi, called Empress Hotel. Hear about this before? Alright, I was treated as 2nd Class citizen in my country because I don’t see those who holding the China passports. Perhaps, I am too sensitive in this. Then, we were informed that the flight was scheduled on next day 2.00 a.m. The flight finally departure at 3.00 a.m. So, 1 hour delay again!

I will be back on this Sunday. Hope that this time the flight will departure in time.

Picture taken at my desk in the Pavilion Century Tower Hotel....

Two Asian Player Scored in EPL

I was excited with ManU games last Saturday. We are closed to the EPL champion again. There are 8 games to go. I believe that it’s hard to repeat the treble once again since we have had a lot of injuries recently. But I am glad to see the Asian players making marks in the EPL. Two of them scored on last weekend matches. I am particular pleased with Ji-Sung Park with his two goal contribution against Bolton. I believe that if he can improve on his finishing, he will be one of the secret weapons for ManU.

By the way, if you don’t hear about Bolton, it is actually a club from Manchester area, same with Manchester City, Wigan, Oldham, Stockport, Bury, Macclesfield, Rochdale, ah… and FC United.

One Single Bit Make the Difference

Thanks God. I managed to solve the problem on DMA. I need to explicitly trigger the Bus Master enable bit in the PCI Configuration Register since the BIOS does not set it automatically likes my PC.

Weekly Update

Hardly have time to write my blog these days. Busy taking time to solve the DMA problem in the peripheral board slotted in the cPCI chassis. The DMA engine in the PCI bridge works well in the normal PC environment using PCI converter but just refuses to work in cPCI chassis. Test with another peripheral board with different PCI bridge also facing the same problem.

Just have a small test (prufung) last week for my German class. I think that I was not doing well. In the test, I even not understand the questions, such as gegenteil – asking for opposite word, 5 satze – 5 sentence, but I thought that this is 5 questions. It is really tough this time because my teacher, Frau Koh speaks in German most of time in the class. I sometimes could not understand what she said at all.

Wind River - Microsoft of Embedded System

The latest press released from Wind River cited that it has acquired the Hard Real Time OS from FSMLabs, known as RTLinux. So, it can now offer Soft & Hard RTOS for Linux customers. Linux is actually run as separate process in RTCore for RTLinux.

http://www.windriver.com/news/press/pr.html?ID=4261