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