Trip to South Korea 大韓民國 and not North Korea 朝鮮民主主義人民共和國

I had again traveled to South Korea or Republic of Korea after the last visit two years ago. I still remember that I started this blog after coming back from that trip. A “three days two nights” trip was always too short and it likes going back to my hometown on weekend. My advice to those who would like to travel to Daejeon: Not to take any transit flight unless you have plenty of time to spend during the transit.

KLIA -> Shanghai Pudong -> Cheongju

We had only two hours for the arrival and departure procedures at Pudong airport before catching the flight to Cheongju. Luckily, I am able to speak Mandarin and immediately asked the official to let my colleagues use the special counter to avoid the crowd. Huh…. then, we also need to fill up the Immigration forms and Customs declaration forms. We should fill them in-flight but the flight attendant said that we are exempted. A mistake! My colleague lost her luggage at Cheongju Airport because the MAS official informed her that her luggage will transfer directly. Another mistake!

At Daejeon, I stayed in the Spapia Hotel, a 4-start hotel which was the accommodation for the Korean national football team during the match against Italy. See the picture. About 2.30 p.m., I met Poh Kit and then we traveled to Seoul. The KTX train which can operate at speed of ~300km/h took us approximately 1 hour time to reach Seoul. See the map for the distance between Daejeon and Seoul. My colleague used to say to me that “Daejeon is north of Seoul” because he turned the map upside down. Thanks to Poh Kit, I managed to spend sometime around Insa-dong (仁寺洞) and Deoksugung (德壽宮) Palace. Yes, Seoul is easy to travel around since there are 8 subway lines. The next day, I had my usual task to complete with a short visit to ETRI for meeting and discussion. Then, my colleagues and I travel from Daejeon to Seoul and stayed in the Itaewon (梨泰院洞). For those who are Muslim, you can find a number of Muslim restaurants there. But to my surprise, the price of a Kebab costs me around 10,000 Won, approximately RM38, more expensive than the Korean dish I had before. We spent 2 hours time at Namdaemun (南大門) market and I bought two umbrellas for my girlfriend. Wie viel kostet Sie? 10,000 Won per umbrella!

Here, some of my observations during my short stay in Daejeon and Seoul:

• Restaurants offer free plain water with no additional charge. I use to drink more than 10 cups of plain water in the Muslim restaurant.
• There are helpful peoples in Seoul. A middle-age man helps me to get a taxi after quite a number of them refuse to fetch us to Itaewon. Reason? I don’t know since they kept waving the hands!
• Cost of living is too high for Malaysian to live there unless you earn there.
• Daejeon is not so happening compared to Seoul.
• Raw crab is one of favorite dishes in Korea. I saw an advertisement promoting a sauce for raw crab and teaching you the method of eating the fresh crab.
• Snooker is one of the favorite sports for women in Korea. You can watch the games in ESPN channel.
• In Itaewon, you can see American soldiers and a lot of Korean police officials. There is an US military base nearby.
• Toothbrush and toothpaste are not provided free in the hotels.
• The security check in Incheon Airport is the strictest. Don’t bring any liquor more than 100ml per container. My colleagues said that he can bring out his peanut butter from KLIA and even Shanghai Pudong, but not Incheon Airport. He lost his peanut butter and canned drinks.
• [Extra] Rotiboy can be found in Seoul
  

Daejeon - A Clear Sky on Arrival Day

Deoksugung Palace

Deoksugung Palace

Namdaemun

Subway - PK

Mosque at Itaewon

Police Station at Itaewon

Signature of Player in Spapia Hotel: Hwang Sun-Hong

He scored the goal againts Poland. First match First goal in WC2002 for South Korea

Cheonggyecheon stream (淸溪川), Seoul

Cheonggyecheon stream

Namdaemun Market, Seoul

The Shopkeeper selling Ginseng who knows to speak a little Malay. You can find my business card in his shop.

Google Lunar X Prize

The Google Lunar X PRIZE will be awarded to "the team that can soft land a craft on the Moon that roams for at least 500 meters and transmits a Mooncast back to Earth. The Grand Prize is $20M until December 31, 2012; thereafter it will drop to $15M until December 31, 2014, at which point the competition will be terminated unless extended by Google and the X PRIZE Foundation."

Thinking of joining this competition?

Xenomai

Do you ever think of making your Linux system a real-time or deterministic system? I have done some works before with RTLinux and RTAI. But if you are looking to migrate your current real-time system such as vxWorks, pSOS, uITRON, to Linux, then you should consider Xenomai. It offers quite a number of OS skin. I have patched and tested the Xenomai on my AT91 board featuring ARM920T processor. I even tested a vxWorks application on it. But yes, you have to tolerate some latency delay compared to RTAI.

Tribute to our Baby-Faced Assassin

I went to see the fireworks at PutraJaya on Merdeka eve with my girlfriend and few of her friends. Travel as early as 7 p.m. to PutraJaya and reached there about 9.30 p.m. I though that the fireworks would start at around 10 p.m. but it was delayed till 12 midnight. The fireworks performance took around 25 minutes but it was pity that we couldn’t hear the music. It was a terrible traffic when trying to get out from PutraJaya and we stuck in the traffic for almost 2 hours. This was first time I experienced such a scenario in PutraJaya. As you know, there is not much traffic whenever I travel to PutraJaya for my badminton games.



Last week, one of my favorite players in ManU announced his retirement after battling so long against his knee injury. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer….. A moment of happiness keeps flashing back when he put the ball in the net at last minute of the European Cup final against Bayern. Good luck, Solskjaer!

Activities

A number of activities associated with my company happened at past two weeks. First, I had engaged to a parent company program and asked to join the morning tea break with our parent company CEO and also the Vice President of Human Resource. This program was conducted on 3^rd of August at Menara TM. I was able to hear it myself the expectation of our parent CEO regarding our company. I think that it’s a big challenge ahead for our company. Then, I was also asked to join the program related to “Effective Personal Productivity”. Perhaps, I am not too productivity in the eyes of our management. I have just read the first lesson of the program and it keep emphasizing on attitude changing and proper time investment. I think that this course is particular good for those peoples who are not doing his/her post mortem every year. It just a program that systematically drawing up what actually you have done and whether you are doing your high payoff activities or not. The founder of this course is a Salesman called Paul J. Meyer.

I also resume my German class A2.2 at Goethe Institute starting end of July. I always believe that learning German is not only the language itself but also learning the culture and thinking of German peoples. But this time, my teacher is again from Austria, and not German. So it’s hard to say whether I really learn the German culture. Anyway, Austria is a German speaking country and if you look at the history, Austria is heavily linked with German. Let introduce myself in German….

“Hier stelle ich mich vor. Ich heiße Yeoh. Ich kommt aus Penang, aber ich wohne jetzt in PJ. Ich bin neunundzwanzig Jahre alt. Ich bin Ingenieur von Beruf. Ich arbeite bei die Firma für Forschung und Entwicklung. Ich freue mich, weil ich eine schön Freundin habe.”

By the way, I watched the movie "Adolf Hitler" with my gf last night. When Reichstag was on fire, Hitler used this excuse to suppress his major opponent, German Communist Party and claimed that it was “for the Protection of the people and the State”. He regained his supreme political power and managed to push his political agenda later on. It remembers me about the May 13 incident which shapes the political situation in our country. Who is actually responsible for this incident?

PHP & CGI

Move on to write a PHP script for accessing the IO in my board. I have previously done the same thing using the CGI script. I still don’t see any major different between these two scripts since I just did a really simple thing. Both of them can be incorporated into the tiny web-server, thttp. Yes, PHP has rich set of features but comes with heavy price. It consumes 4M of memory space compared to 66K of memory space by CGIC library. Need to further strip down the library size.

Asian Cup Quarter Final in Bukit Jalil

Went to Bukit Jalil Stadium to watch the match between Iran versus South Korea yesterday. The original ticket price is RM30 but I bought two for RM40 from a guy who claimed the he get the tickets from Astro. My girlfriend seems a little bit nervous when we entered the Korean camp due to a “big” turn out of Red Korean supporters and all sorts of noise created by them. It’s hard to feel such an environment during the matches involving Malaysia throughout this competition. Estimated 40,000 fans on match 1, then 20,000 fans on match 2 and then dramatically decreased to 2,000 fans. Malaysia Boleh! Yesterday, I saw different attitudes coming from both Iran and South Korea supporters. They kept on cheering their players, shouting their player names, even though they made mistakes or wasted a golden scoring opportunities. There is nothing wrong to give your players encouragement but why we Malaysians always boo our own players whenever they made mistakes. Perhaps, we are not so keen or so patriotic. No, easy, they lack fighting spirits!

A Korean supporter sat beside us offered us the yellow colour Kiwi fruit. He found out that we are Malaysian. He managed to speak one two simple sentences in English, “Malaysia plays very poor. However, they play very good last time, same as Korea. Such as, Soh Chin Aun”. Again, same old story, how long should we keep on memorize those golden days? Are we not competitive enough now compared to those old generation? I don’t think that the problem solely comes from the players and the coaches. Our government should take the blame with its inconsistent policies, not for the peoples, but policies to serve their own interests so that they keep on winning the next election.

Regarding the match, both teams are very cautious at the beginning. South Korea missing several key players from European leagues plays a counter attacking game with only one striker up front. Iran with its more senior and experienced player deployed a short passing game and attacked from right flank and from the middle. However, shoot on target in the game was really low although both set of players fought for almost every ball. A disappointed match! 120 minutes without any goals. If either team would score, probably we would have a change to see a more attacking and entertaining match. Iran coach brought in the substituted goalkeeper at last minute for penalty. I had a feeling that they will lose because I still remember that England brought in Carragher and he was eventually the one who missed the penalty. So, South Korea to the semifinal on Wednesday and we will see their supporters roaring out “Taehan Minguk” again. Felt sorry for Iranians that some of them have to travel back after more that one week stay in Kuala Lumpur.

Malaysia, Boleh, Semua Boleh, Apa pun Boleh!

Did you hear any bloggers in this world ever been caught by police official under OSA? Yes, Malaysia has one ….. If we are the first to do this, then we probably can be proud of this! “Malaysia Boleh!”

Then, I heard the news that T.M.P. resigned from his post, but how about our FAM president?

Who should we blame?

“What a shameful display,” said the visibly upset Tengku Abdullah, according to the official Bernama news agency.

“I apologise to all the spectators and want to shake their hands. I am truly disappointed with their inept display.”

“The coach has the power to choose the players and he should know better.

“Only the coach and players will be able to say what happened that night. I was also a spectator,” said Tengku Abdullah.

So, who should we blame? Who appoint the coach? Who select the players? Who.....

I expect FAM to sack the coach, reform the team by temporary dumping the senior players and selecting youth players, prohibiting the foreign players from playing in local league, forcing the players to take the fitness test, changing rules again and again for local competition, at last…. still going nowhere…..

Whipping Boys

Sometimes, it just hard to believe, but you have to accept this. Originally, I planned to go to the National Stadium in Bukit Jalil, but ended up at Mamak stall near my home. Watching our national team played in Asian Cup Final, not upon merit, but as one of the co-hosts. Before the match, I had a strong feeling that we were going to do well in this match after Vietnam and Indonesia defeat their opponents and Thailand draw with mighty Iraq. I was wrong again!

Vietnam vs UAE 2 -1
Indonesia vs Bahrain 2-1
Thailand vs Iraq 1-1
Malaysia vs China 1-5

Before the start of the match, the Malay fellow who sits beside me said, “Selagi bapa dan anak Pahang tu menerajui FAM, bolasepak kita tak ke mana”, “MyTeam yang pilih anak kampung main lagi bagus”. Then, after China scored the 2^nd goal, he said, “itulah, ada pemain Cina kat Penang yang bagus, tapi tak pilih”. I considered it as a racist comment. After the 4^th goal, another Malay fellow said, “Itulah, semua Melayu kat padang, jurulatih itu pilih pemain tengok bulu”. Again, a racist comment…. Suddenly, Indra Putra scored a spectacular goal outside the penalty box. “Macam dah menang perlawanan”. Our coach actually brought in Nanthakumar as central defender after we conceded 4^th goal.

Agghhh, I could not hide my frustration that our players play very poor, especially our defense. We do not have enough quality to do well. Our central defenders are too short and physically very weak compared to our opponents. China is not tactically gifted team compared to Japan or South Korea, but they can trash us five goals. I wonder how are we going to survive from the remaining matches…..

What our coach said...

“This was not a good start for us. We tried to match the Chinese team, but there were times when the Chinese were able to keep possession and when they did we tended to lose our discipline in terms of keeping our shape.”

“The game plan tonight was to try and stop the crosses but as the game went on and China continued to move the ball, then we lost our shape and that is why there was room on the flanks.”

“With the quality players China have, we tried to have a positive approach and to match them not individually but as a team. As they progressed though, when one individual lost his concentration it impacted on the team.

“There were occasions in both halves when we attacked and we played more as a team. There was more urgency in the second period. Unfortunately though there were lapses of concentration.”

By the way, do you know our coach name?

Penang Bridge

Recently, travel back to Penang with my girlfriend. It was my first trip back after Chinese New Year. Entering the Penang Bridge, and all of sudden, wonder why I need to pay RM5.60. My mum said that if I don’t have Touch N Go card purchased near the bridge, I may pay RM7.00. I found out that the bridge is now under construction. I think that it is probably for expanding the bridge from tow lanes to three lanes. So, pay more after that??? I thought that as Penangities, we should pay less whenever we travel back to our hometown. Just curious for those who stay in Butterworth and work in Penang. I believe that paying RM7.00 is too much and how can you afford that everyday.... even in KL, I don't pay that much.

SMS Spoofing

There is a series of stories related to SMS Scam in Screeshots. If you would like to find out yourself whether you are unnecessary charged by our Telco, you should check your bill. I have not asked for a printed bill from Celcom, have to do so….

Read these two stories:

http://star-techcentral.com/tech/story.asp?file=/2007/6/14/technology/17966950&sec=technology

http://star-techcentral.com/tech/story.asp?file=/2007/6/14/technology/17966950&sec=technology

"Our parent company is worth RM3bil and we have a reputation to keep. Do you think we really need the extra cash from spoofing?"
- If you can earn more easily, why not?

Serial Peripheral Interface

I was asked to solve the interfacing E1 chip via SPI. First, try out with the parallel port in my PC, then, followed by the configurable processor. Both are running Linux. SPI uses only 4 I/O pins, thus, making it a perfect choice if you don’t want to waste your address mapping. The only setback is that it is a serial communication. Using the customized processor in FPGA, one single bit data transfer consumes 67.2 us. A read from or write to a register for 8-bit data takes about 1.68ms. Luckily, this is simply used for initial configuration and random monitoring purposes.

Waveform captured from the logic analyzer…… Look like glitches occur in the SDO line

Niibe Yutaka & Debian

Had an opportunity to met Debian developer, Mr. Niibe Yutaka yesterday. This was the workshop organized by IEEE Computer Society, but more like a technical talk. Frankly, I was quite disappointed with the presentation. Perhaps, developer is not good in presentation but or maybe I expect for more technical insights. Basically, the talk focuses on advocating the “Free” software, the policies of Japanese government regarding Open Source and also the KuroBox/Pro. Some introduction to this little NAS box:

CPU: ARM9
Flash: NOR – for u-boot storage NAND – for linux kernel, rootfs
GPIO: 2 pin
Ethernet & USB Port

and yes Nibbe ported the debian GNU/Linux inside the box, showed us a simple demonstration on stepper motor and used the USB VGA adapter for X-Windows (sluggish). He even put the emacs on to the box. As I know, emacs is usually not included in embedded system, too big. Sound like a good education tool!

Anyone has try out debian distribution. I just Ubuntu is one of many derivative from Debian

Salary RM 1,345,815 per week

How much you earn nowsaday? Can you imagine that you are going to earn ₤ 200,000 per week? Approximately RM 1,345,815. Crazy!!!!

Send your kids to football schools in England and hoping them to become a super star in EPL.

The news in BBC about Top English Club players’ wages reaching ₤ 1bn:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6705251.stm

But where the money comes from for our beloved Chelsea? Mainly from Russian….

Anniversary Dinner

Have had a dinner in Deutsch Haus at Changkat Bukit Bintang with my girlfriend for our 1 year anniversary on Friday night. At first, we plan to go to Coliseum Café but chose to try something new. I ordered a BBQ plat “Wurst” while my gf preferred Chicken Breast Roaster. I enjoy the sausage but still think of the "Curry Wurst" which I had before in Berlin. It costs cheaper and tastes good whenever you feel hungry at night. My gf said that she was only impressed with the mushroom soup (ah, not from Campbell one). We also have our love heart "jelly cake" the next day. My gf said that, "You will not easily get fat even you eat a lot". After you see it, you probably will think differently.....

Car Accident

Had a bad accident last Saturday at around 1.30 p.m. in SS2 PJ. Luckily, both my girlfriend and I were safe and no one was hurt. A car coming from opposite way banged the front and back doors on the left hand-side of my car. I was turning into the small road on my right hand side at that time. After the traffic police’s inspection, I was free from any offences. The driver who banged my car has to pay the summons. Now, my car was in the workshop waiting for repair. However, I had to go to UniAsia office to fill in the claim form by myself. According to workshop agent, this is to avoid any irresponsible agent filling the claim forms without the notice of their clients. If you ever buy the insurance from UniAsia, you probably have to do the same.

My third major car accident.... not enough sleep while driving is always dangerous

A Picture is worth A Thousand Words

Tax Returns

Today is the final day for those taxpayers to submit their BE forms, including me. But once you know that you are paying for the government and getting back nothing, you will be sad for that. You just can’t believe that how smart enough our BN government spent our money in Ijok buy-election. Yes, they win but with all our taxpayers’ money. You can’t imagine that a small area with little development before is like suddenly winning “once-in-a-lifetime” lottery. So, you all have to pray for your assemblyman suddenly getting heart-attack. Sorry for saying that. It’s much easy than you winning the lottery, I think. If you ever went there last week, you could see incredible development in such a pace. Then, you really believe in “Malaysia Boleh” slogan. When you know that you have to pay tax to the government, and your money will go to Ijok, which I personally think that it’s unnecessary. Then, you will echo the same sentiment, “I am sad for Malaysia”.

The Republic of Apartments

I have had short discussion with my Korean friend before on this. Just read it why Koreans prefer apartment rather than landed properties.

http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200704/200704240024.html

Free Speech is Enhanced by Civility?

Do you think that it's time for us to have code of conduct? Then our Ministry of Energy, Water and Communications plans to ask Bloggers using local hosted web-site to register. Censorship on Bloggers?

Weekend Activities

Attended the IEEE ComSoc/VT Strategic Planning meeting on Saturday. Learn a new group decision making technique known as Quality Function Deployment (QFD). It is indeed a useful way of making group decision. We had invited Prof. Lawrence Wong from NUS as facilitator and he did a good job for sharing his knowledge and experience in running the society. I had learned one or two things during the meeting. At night, I had attended one of ex-housemate weeding dinner with my girlfriend.

Then, went to Machap Baru on Sunday. It was hectic schedule and I had to wake up as early as 5 morning. My friend asked me to become one of the moderators for the workshop discussion session since I had experience in election campaign ten years ago. The major event was the Peoples Forum in Machap Flat at night. Several speakers went on the stage to share their views, include press freedom, election monitoring, SOS issue and etc. I hate to say that BN will have no problem winning the seat based on the feedback during door-to-door visit.

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

Happy Chinese New Year

Happy Chinese New Year to Everyone! I am in Penang now, my hometown. May you and your family have a prosperous year!

Network Management System on Network Equipment

Normally, network equipments require network management system for controlling and monitoring purposes. SNMP is one of the common tools used in commercial equipments for such purpose. For uClinux, a SNMP agent resided in the network device is available, known as net-snmp. Putting the net-snmp in uClinux is easy, but to extend the SNMP agent, a lot of works need to be done. First, have to clearly understand your system, what to monitor and what to configure. Then, come out with MIB. Then, write the code and integrate to the agent. That’s the work need to be done! Web controlling is a must for almost all network equipments nowadays. We start our normal ADSL modem in house with a web configuration page. So, putting the web server is necessary and uClinux supports HTTP server with single process and single thread. No fork is allowed since no-MMU in most of the embedded system. Then, we need Boa or thttpd. Both of them work pretty well. But need more knowledge on how to integrate the CGI. More works to be done.

Huh……

Porting uClinux to MicroBlaze

It is fun to have an opportunity to work with reconfigurable system and uClinux (you-see-linux). I had successfully ported uClinux to the Xilinx MicroBlaze development board which features Virtex-4 FPGA. Spent almost two days to map the Flash Memory due to my first impression that the Atmel Flash is compatible with Intel one. But actually it is compatible to Intel competitor, AMD! MicroBlaze is a 32-bits RISC soft processor and uClinux is Linux version for Microcontroller without MMU (see the penguin). Reconfigurable system means that you can incorporate any peripherals as you wish. These peripherals can talk to you processor via OPB, FSL or LMB. It provides a flexibility platform to the hardware designer and software designer to complete an application-specific system. I have worked with uClinux in Arcturus board before but this one is much challenging. Thanks to Dr. John Williams. It makes me a good start with such detailed information. Throughout the porting process, I have learned some new concepts, such as XIP, bFLT and flatfsd. Storing data in persistent stage using flatfsd is something news for me. It’s great to use this especially for storing the initial setting for your peripherals during startup, such as mounting the NFS for development. Ah.., a simple web server is up....

Startup Script:

Linux version 2.4.32-uc0 (root@yeow) (gcc version 3.4.1 ( Xilinx EDK 8.1 Build EDK_I.17 090206 )) #107 Fri Feb 2 14:47:37 MYT 2007
On node 0 totalpages: 16384
zone(0): 16384 pages.
zone(1): 0 pages.
zone(2): 0 pages.
CPU: MICROBLAZE
Kernel command line: ¸
Console: xmbserial on UARTLite
Calibrating delay loop... 49.66 BogoMIPS
Memory: 64MB = 64MB total
Memory: 60792KB available (1239K code, 2790K data, 52K init)
Dentry cache hash table entries: 8192 (order: 4, 65536 bytes)
Inode cache hash table entries: 4096 (order: 3, 32768 bytes)
Mount cache hash table entries: 512 (order: 0, 4096 bytes)
Buffer cache hash table entries: 4096 (order: 2, 16384 bytes)
Page-cache hash table entries: 16384 (order: 4, 65536 bytes)
POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX
Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.4
Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039
Initializing RT netlink socket
Microblaze UARTlite serial driver version 1.00
ttyS0 at 0x40600000 (irq = 3) is a Microblaze UARTlite
ttyS1 at 0x40620000 (irq = 4) is a Microblaze UARTlite
Starting kswapd
xgpio #0 at 0x40000000 mapped to 0x40000000
xgpio #1 at 0x40020000 mapped to 0x40020000
xgpio #2 at 0x40040000 mapped to 0x40040000
xgpio #3 at 0x40060000 mapped to 0x40060000
Xilinx GPIO registered
RAMDISK driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 4096K size 1024 blocksize
eth0: using fifo mode.
eth0: Xilinx EMAC #0 at 0x40C00000 mapped to 0x40C00000, irq=0
eth0: id 2.0l; block id 11, type 1
uclinux[mtd]: RAM probe address=0x241700b4 size=0x280000
uclinux[mtd]: root filesystem index=0
MicroBlaze auto-config flash probe(0x22000000,4194304,2): 400000 at 22000000
Amd/Fujitsu Extended Query Table v1.0 at 0x0041
Flash: JEDEC Device ID is 0xC8. Assuming broken CFI table.
Flash: Swapping erase regions for broken CFI table.
number of CFI chips: 1
cfi_cmdset_0002: Disabling fast programming due to code brokenness.
Creating 8 MTD partitions on "Flash":
0x00000000-0x00004000 : "Bootloader"
0x00004000-0x00008000 : "Bootargs"
0x00008000-0x0000c000 : "MAC"
0x00010000-0x00020000 : "Config"
0x0000c000-0x00010000 : "Spare"
0x00100000-0x00400000 : "Image"
0x00400000-0x00400000 : "JFFS2"
mtd: partition "JFFS2" is out of reach -- disabled
0x00000000-0x00400000 : "Flash"
MicroBlaze auto-config ram probe(0x241700b4,2621440,4): 280000 at 241700b4
Creating 1 MTD partitions on "RAM":
0x00000000-0x00280000 : "Romfs"
NET4: Linux TCP/IP 1.0 for NET4.0
IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP
IP: routing cache hash table of 512 buckets, 4Kbytes
TCP: Hash tables configured (established 4096 bind 8192)
NET4: Unix domain sockets 1.0/SMP for Linux NET4.0.
VFS: Mounted root (romfs filesystem) readonly.
Freeing init memory: 52K
Mounting proc:
Mounting var:
Populating /var:
Running local start scripts.
Mounting /etc/config:
Populating /etc/config:
Clock: old time 1970/01/01 - 00:00:06
Clock: new time 1970/01/01 - 00:35:27
flatfsd: Created 4 configuration files (234 bytes)
Setting hostname: uclinux-auto
Setting up interface lo:
Setting up interface eth0:
Starting portmap:
Starting thttpd:
Mounting the NFS system
Welcome to
____ _ _
_ _ / ___ (_)_ __ _ _ _ _
'_ \ < \/ >
_ ___ _ > <
__,_\_______ _\__,_/_/\_>
_)
on Microblaze.
Developer: Chun Yeow, Yeoh on Jan 2007

uclinux-auto login:

Malaysia Football, Going No Where?

If you have ever had an opportunity to watch Malaysia play, don’t expect too much. This is my only advice to those who love the game. I considered myself a fanatic fan for local football during my early days, but no more now! I went to stadium to watch Penang play in City Stadium and almost all the matches involving Malaysia in Klang Valley. However, I feel sick each time watching them play in the stadium. Yesterday, it was a match between Malaysia versus Singapore in Asean Cup competition. I had managed to catch a few minutes of the match after coming out from the barber shop. My colleagues actually invited me to the stadium but I’m in no mood to go there. You won’t believe that after football turning professional for almost 10 years here. (The first professional league in Asia, but Japan does it much better than us in such a short time frame) Our national players still could not apply the basic skills, such as passing, holding and shooting the ball properly. Terrible!!! Our striker even balloons the ball without any pressure from the opponents. And until today, we still use the technique “hit-and-run”, too many long ball and too direct. This technique is not suitable for Asian team since we could not physically match the European players. Asian teams, such as Korea and Japan, have starting to look for new technique but Malaysia is far away behind. I promise myself if Malaysia enters the World Cup Final I will go to watch them no matter where. But it will not materialize if this is same team I watched yesterday! Look at the world ranking, where is Malaysia?

38 Iran
47 Japan
51 Korea Republic
111 Singapore
117 Hong Kong
126 Lebanon
135 Kazakhstan
137 Thailand
139 Kyrgyzstan
141 Yamen
144 Bangladesh
145 Sri Lanka
151 Laos
152 Malaysia

We are below Laos!!!! This year, we are going to hold the Asian Cup and again we qualify because we are the host nation, not based on merit. Is this going to be the same for World Cup Final? Lack of professional management in local league, majority of players with no attitude and desire, bias in selection of team players….. Malaysia football is going nowhere!

PIC & Technical Talks

I have written a simple NE2000-clone driver for the PIC16 micro-controller. The driver provides two mechanisms: Polling and Interrupt based packet reception. Polling is based on the observation on the two pointers in the receive buffer ring. Interrupt is based on the triggering interrupt signal coming from the Ethernet controller. This task is similar to what I have done for my master thesis. I actually transferred most of code from AVR Atmel micro-controller to PIC micro-controller. I found out that the PIC16 uses the 8-level deep hardware stack, thus overflow can be occurred after more than 8 nested function calls. At the same time, all RAM location required by a function are statically linked to a specific address at link time and RAM is reused for functions not active at the same time. So, no recursive calls are allowed. Quite different with the Atmel microcontroller which I have used before.


We had successfully organized two IEEE ComSoc Technical Talks at MCMC (12th Jan) and TMRND (17th Jan). The talk in MCMC was all about Cyberspace Security and MCMC will held a series of technical talks in this year. Dr Jeffrey Bannister spoke about the Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) and 3G IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), FMC and IMS will move current telecommunication system towards to a full IP based system. Peoples in Telco site have to start understand the network characteristic of IP instead of just 64 kbps time slot. I agree that the IMS is hard to deploy mainly due to difficulty of finding a business model which could benefit the content developer and also the network operator. Who should bear the cost if a content developer has developed a fantastic application and would like to put its application on the network operator site? The network operator argues that the content developer must pay for the service offered by him. However, the developer thinks that the operator is doing nothing and simply gains from the application that he/she develops. It is hard to push the IMS if there is no suitable content for the end user. A big pipe or high bandwidth is simply useless. This is the same story to 3G.

IL Divo Live in KL

A fascinating night in KLCC Plenary for “IL Divo Live in KL” with my partner. My dear had introduced this operatic pop vocal group to me last year. Thanks to my dear. I have their first and second album songs ripped in my notebook. The quartet decided to kick start their world tour 2007 in KL. I can’t remember how many songs had been performed yesterday. The entire concert took around 1 hour 45 minutes accompanied by a live band and small orchestra. They performed the song in Spanish, Italian, English and France with their powerful vocal. Songs such as “Hero” and “Unbreak My Heart” are performed not in English. Maybe that’s true that “Love is the same, no matter in which language”. But actually I can’t differentiate the songs in Spanish and Italian. My girlfriend was almost “out-of-control” at the end of the concert. Luckily, we sat in upstairs and were no-way near the stage. Otherwise, I think that she will even slap me if I ever ask her to stay calm

Submarine Cable

We had encountered severe internet congestion last two weeks due to earthquake in Taiwan. But my company also faced the problem on unnecessary packet transmission from the Internet Messaging Service (IMS). Statement below from Jame Seng clarifies my understanding on submarine cable. I first thought that the cable is laid under the seabed.

“Submarine cables are not under the seabed. It is just laid across the sea. It is only when it crosses major shipping lines and fishing zones (mostly near the coast) that it is lay (5 to 10m below) under the seabed. Therefore, it is not unusual for submarine cable to be cut, mostly due to deep-sea fishing”

Some pictures regarding the submarine cable route.....

5 things that you didn't know about me

Just saw that Sooth tagged me. Let's go straight to the point.

1. I am a right-handed guy but I do wear my watch on my right as well.
2. My grandma had to accompany me to the school for the opening week in kindergarten and also standard one. She had to stay until my class and brought me home. Why? My mum said that she can’t resist herself to see me cry in the class.
3. I won a badminton tournament without wining a single game. It was a team event in my company and I was field for the single and double against all the opponents. I lost all my matches but my teammates won the championship trophy for me. Not bad heh ;) After the tournament, my team manager said to me that I was “umpan” to other teams and he was correct! Thinking about Kwan Yoke Meng. Do you remember him? 1992 Thomas Cup?
4. The only subject which I failed in my primary school was Music. But I joined the school band in my secondary and played Euphonium (a kind of musical instruments similar to Tuba – small size Tuba). Eventually, I became the leader for the Euphonium group :)
5. I had never stayed away from home until the age of 18. The first outing was KL trip with my friends.

If we would like to have a deadlock, then I will tag Sooth back, but I choose to tag Sooth’s sister.

Travel to China

I was doing the most traveling hours in my life last week, starting from 16th Dec to 24th Dec and traveling based on the following routes:

KLIA --> [air: 4 hours] Guangzhou --> [air: 1 hours 15 min] Wuhan --> [air: 1 hours 45 min] Kunming --> [highway: 2 hours] Shilin --> [highway: 2 hours] Kuming --> [railway: 8 hours] Dali --> [highway: 4 hours] Lijiang --> [highway: 4 hours] Dali --> [railway: 8 hours] Kunming --> [air: 4 hours] KLIA

This trip was considered as part of my “fulfillment” to my dear. I was excited to meet her in Wuhan which she studied. I was having my first bowl of beef noodle in the winter season in a Muslim restaurant near my girl friend’s hostel. Spent two days in Wuhan and tasted a number of delicious foods, such as “Tang Pao”. Headed to Kunming and we went to Shilin, the “stone forest”. I was amazed with the beauty of the shapes and structure of the stones. Then, we headed to Dali and Lijiang in Yunnan Province and stayed in the old towns. I was not too impressed with these two old towns since they were purposely developed for the tourists. Huh…. I had to spend almost all my time doing window shopping in these two old cities. Lijiang old town is considered as the world's relic by the World Cultural Heritage Commission of the UNESCO. It is occupied by the Naxi ethnic minority. However, you will be surprised that you can even find the pubs and bars in this old town. You were experience the same staying in Dali old town which is indeed occupied by Bai ethnic minority. Back to Kunming, spent one-day time in the ethnic village and hanging around in the downtown before heading back to Malaysia.

My thoughts on China after the visit:
- A fast developed country better than what I have had in my mind
- A huge market to penetrate (when I saw the crowd in Carrefour)
- Not too difficult to find Muslim restaurants in Wuhan and Yunnan Province
- Prepare yourself to bargain all the time
- Prepare to do a lot of walking so better to travel to China when you are young
- Ask properly before you accept any offers otherwise you will be frustrated with the hidden cost and protection fares
- Bring your pen because it is hard to borrow from the peoples there
- Chinese there will always said that we are Chinese migrants but they forget that their government said that all the Chinese abroad are none of their business

Photos taken during the trip…

At the Wuhan Airport

With My Girlfriend

Lijian Old Town

Dali Old Town

"Tang Pao" at Hundred Years Old Restaurant in Wuhan

Hawker Stalls at Wuhan

Shilin

Dali Old Town

Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

Just recently installed the Open SuSe on my system. Now, peoples are working against it. Show your support and sign this petition!

http://techp.org/petition/show/1

Open Source Beer

Attention! We are moving into a whole new world, called “Open Source” world. Someone might think about other products. I am thinking of Linux of Char Keow Teoy. Anyone want to share his/her recipe?

Open Source Beer: http://www.voresoel.dk/main.php?id=70
with their Creative Commons License

You are free:
to Share -- to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
to Remix -- to make derivative works

Under the following conditions:
Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.

"Free software" is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of "free" as in "free speech", not as in "free beer".

KL Revisit

First time in my life that I can visit the Tourist hotspots during my office hours. Last Friday, there were guests from Korea and I was asked to bring them to visit KL. First, I brought them to KL Tower. For your information, KL tower is the property of Telekom Malaysia and all the staffs enjoy the discount. ^__^ But for foreigners, they have to pay RM20 for entrance. Upon the request from them, I also brought them to the national museum. It was my second visit this year. During my last visit, I still remember that there was Cheng Ho’s exhibition in the main hall but this time was “Ramadan Special”. At night, we had dinner at Fatty Crab restaurant. Then, we headed towards Petaling Street, the so called “China Town” in KL which I strongly disagree. They surprised to find out that there are more foreigners than Chinese there. The last destination was Bintang Walk. We ended up having coffee in Coffee Bean.

Field Testing

We have conducted the field testing on the Flat Plane Antenna, using Spectrum Analyzer and Packet Generator in the area of PutraJaya and UPM. The operating frequency is 5.2GHz and 5.8GHz. My colleague and I were asked to setup the antenna for receiving site and collecting the measurement in dBm with 5.2GHz and 5.8GHz center frequency. This antenna is a bidirectional type. When we moved the holder of the antenna away from the transmission site, the signal was lost. Anyway, I was not too aware of the antenna gain and loss of transmission line. According to my colleague who is in charge of the testing, the 10dB transmission loss will happen in every 1km distance. We made the measurement in 3 different spots, which estimation distance around 500m, 700m and 1km.

Tired, I had to drive the "Rusa" all the day......

Antenna for Testing

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

Twin Tower at Night and My Recent Photos

These photos were taken at KLCC Twin Tower last Wednesday. There were 6 trainers from Korea coming to our premise to conduct the training. They eagerly want to have a look on our Twin Tower – a mega project by our desperate Dr. M. So, we spent around 1 hour time there and had a cup of coffee at Coffee Bean.....

UMTS LTE

Recently, our local mobile operators are busy of launching the 3G services and also the HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access). 3G offers the data rate of 384 kpbs while HSDPA offers a 2 Mbps. However, the current research on UMTS Long Term Evaluation are looking for more high speed data rate and can be considered as 4G after all. One of the major different of UMTS-LTE compared to the current 3G is the radio interface technology. UMTS-LTE applies OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access) and not CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access). If this is really the case and our mobile operators is going to shift to the new technologies maybe in 20 years time, then we all need to buy a new handphone again. Anyway, I am more concern about the research opportunities...

Attractive Peoples = Non-Productive

A light moment on the weekend....... what do you think :-)

Weekly Update - Working on BTS

Spent almost the entire week on the new arrival BTS system. Study the technical specification. Figure out the mechanism of message exchanging between the channel card and main controller. Try to understand the software resided in the channel card and main controller. Manage to dig out the information on how the information elements in the signaling message are applied to actual configuration of the modulator/demudalotor and encoder/decoder. This week, start to plug the visionICE emulator on the 8260 board and have to figure out the HRCW and correct memory mapping for SDRAM, EEPROM and Flash. After manipulating OR and BR registers, manage to inspect the original dumped image in the flash. Then, bring out the board with my own downloadable image. So, this will ensure the re-loading of the new firmware and software for future enhancement. Still need to figure out the correct flash algorithm since the part number of the flash memory used in the board is not available in the visionICE.

Watched the match between England vs Macedonia and I was not convinced with their performance under the new coach. Again, they failed to impress with too many long ball to Peter Crouch. If you have ever watched the England vs Crotia match on Thursday, you will then laugh at the disgraceful moment by Robinson. You won’t believe that he can let a back-pass to defeat him. Gary Neville scored his first international goal not for his country but for Croatia. He should be proud of that ;-) Hope that he will not do the same to ManU. But I am quite sure that Van dar Saar is not Robinson. See the EPL league table and you will find out why.....