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    Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
    cartesiandaemon 12:39a
    Sara and the Book: Part II
     There are genii locorum scattered all across Cambridge. Two thousand years ago the spirit of the forest covered all England, but as the trees were slowly cleared it fractured into thousands of wavering local essences. Many of the most active lingered in Cambridge, as the shrinking island of forest spirit huddled alone in the fens, and when fleeing scholars from Oxford passed through the place they settled their to study and befriend them.

    Some became invaluable allies in the study of theology and science, and vast stone seats of learning were erected round them. Others were simpler, quick, hot spots of raw emotion where markets would form and lovers would couple incautiously behind the stalls. Some were dangerous, and the hastily erected buildings served to contain them as much as to house them. One haunted some of the land north of the river, and building projects chased it north and south for centuries, and finally it was hemmed in, but as a binding structure was erected round it, it rose slowly above it, until it was eventually entrapped in a concrete tower hundreds of feet high.

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    talismancer
         		12:05a
    Frank
     "Guys, this is Frank"

    You suddenly realise that there's someone there, and your brain fills in the details that he has actually always been there. A very nondescript man, you look at him and should you wonder what details you could give that were distinctive from the rest of London, you would draw a blank. He was a general person, nothing spectacular, in any way shape or form.

    "Be nice t'make your acquaintance. I'm a general skills man, I can cover virtually any angle you need me to, except violence."
    mistress_helly
         		12:16a
    Day 10

    (Okay, so technically it's after midnight, but blah! LJ was broken earlier!)

    Had a phone interview today for a job, passed it, have proper interview on Thursday Woot!

    Ias and I went to a nature reserve today, it was a lovely walk and we found a castle! Also, THE NORTH was marked on the map :D

    Just got back from supper at Wolhaus which was made all the more sparkly by the presence of the lovely Weevil :D

    Probably talked far too much weapon/war wank for the rest of the people present, but these things are hard to judge :P

    Tomorrow: Prep for interview! Woop.

    Startling revelation for the day:
    Social capability is not just about spotting the signs, it's about caring enough to act on the things you notice.

    Doop. I'm a bad person :D
    barberio
         		12:15a
    I just remembered I need to write a speech for an Oxford Students Society next week. And that they will all be a decade younger than me. This is going to need the phrase "Ask your parents about it."
    Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
    wotanut
         		10:29p
    10/30
     Zzzzzzzz......

    Tuesdays are my worst day of the week. whilst aI have a shot amount of time in the office I do a full 8 hour day at college which stretches well into the evening.
    I'm surprised I manage to take so much in considering how tired I seem to be following  college, but it seems to be sticking. I have a minor grasp of Standard deviation, Frequency distribution and am being reminded how to understand corralations. on the non mathematical side, We have been looking at negotation and the importance of personal networking, all very interesting. Next week we start looking at Management development.

    I'm hoping I'm going to be able to remember it all for my exams in June. The maths won't be too bad as it's an open bok exam, so as long as I make comprehensive notes that I can refer t quickly I should be okay.

    In other news I am 1/3 of the way through NaBloPoMo, and I hope I am not boring the world with my short witterings.
    ciciaye
         		9:39p
    Another Lolcat
    ( Under here )
    ciciaye
         		9:38p
    Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
    rysmiel
         		1:38p
    fade to grey
     A very happy birthday to [info]redbird, with big hugs and best wishes.

    $programmer is out getting vaccinated, as one of his kids has a medical condition such that the family are in a high-priority category; $curator has had to leave because of a crisis at her other job; $bosses are home and the note suggests that at least one of them is ill; $former_grandboss wishes to try installing $complex_annotation_program at his site and running it himself rather than waiting the three months or so it would take us to run all his data through it.

    I think I have found a paper on which to give my seminar, which is for the good as I am seriously limited in ability to do anything else productive today.

    Also, still feeling a bit shaken by the magnitude of the paradigm-shift in DNA sequencing technology that was made clear by the colloquium last week, which is at the "If you ran this currently available handy desktop box for a year it would generate the same amount of data as the entire contents of GenBank at the start of 2008" level. There will need to be a comparable shift in data-handling capacities, but I'm not going to be able to do that with the team and hardware I have now.
    Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
    dmwcarol
         		5:51p
    mjg59
         		9:57a
    The ACPI Embedded Controller
     Of course, the event model I described before is far too simple to be worthy of a place in the ACPI spec. At the most basic level, there's more possible events than there are GPEs to attach them to, so there's a need for some further complexity. This manifests itself in the form of the ACPI embedded controller (EC).

    The EC is typically a small microprocessor sitting on your motherboard, often implemented in the same hardware as the keyboard controller. It shares a lot in common with the keyboard controller - on PCs it'll usually appear in system io space, with one register for writing a command or reading a status, and a second register for passing data back and forth[1]. There's 256 registers available, so a typical interaction might be to write the READ command (0x80) to the command register, write the EC register address to the data register and then read back from the data register to get the EC register contents.

    The embedded controller will often be responsible for tracking information about the hardware, such as the temperature. Attempting to read the temperature through ACPI will execute an ACPI method - in the case of the temperature being monitored by the embedded controller, this method will attempt to read from an EC register. The EC driver then performs the read and returns the result, which gets converted into decidegrees kelvin and passed back to whatever made the temperature query.

    But, as mentioned above, the EC also generates events. These may be in response to a user initiated event like a hotkey press, or may be triggered by some change in hardware state like a thermal trip point being passed. The embedded controller will then raise a GPE.

    Unlike normal GPEs, the EC GPE is not handled by looking for a _Lxx or _Exx method. Instead, the ACPI tables provide information about the GPE that the EC is using. This may be in the form of a _GPE definition in the EC object in the main ACPI tables, or alternatively may be provided in an ECDT (Embedded Controller Descriptor Table), an optional table that provides all the EC information. In either case, the OS knows which GPE will be triggered by the EC. It then installs a handler that will be called whenever the EC raises that GPE.

    Things get a touch confusing at this point. The first thing this handler does is read the command byte, which functions as a status byte on reads. It then checks whether the SCI_EVT bit is set. This informs the system that the GPE was in response to a hardware event, and so the EC handler writes a query command to the EC command register and then reads back a value between 0 and 255 from the data register. This is then mapped to a _Qxx method, with xx representing the number of the EC event read from the data register. Like the _Lxx and _Exx methods, the _Qxx method is then executed.

    The problem with all of this is that the EC isn't that fast. When a byte is written to it, it's necessary to read back the status byte and check whether the IBF bit is set. This is set when the OS writes a byte to the data register, and cleared once the EC has processed it. The straightforward way to deal with this is to poll the status byte until the bit is cleared, and then write the next byte, but polling is slow and wastes CPU time. The EC can instead be set to interrupt mode, where it'll fire a GPE when the IBF bit clears.

    The EC has one additional function. The ACPI spec allows for an i2c bus to be implemented through the EC, with EC registers mapping to i2c registers. The observant among you will realise that this means that there's an indexed access protocol being implemented on top of indexed access hardware, which is more layers of indirection than seem sane. For additional humour, this is usually only used to add support for ACPI smart batteries. ACPI batteries are generally abstracted behind a set of ACPI methods that provide information. Smart batteries instead speak i2c directly to the OS[2] for no real benefit. Linux handles these devices fine, and while the chances are you probably don't have one, the chances are also that if you do you haven't noticed.

    The final quirk of ACPI events is that there's yet another means of delivering events. The term "fixed feature" is used to describe an ACPI device that isn't described in the ACPI tables. A power button may be implemented as a fixed feature device rather than a normal ("control method") device. This is indicated by a flag in the fixed feature block. Hitting a fixed feature power button will generate an ACPI interrupt, but no GPE. Instead the OS has to read the fixed feature block and note that the power button flag is set there. It then notifies userspace appropriately. Sleep buttons can also be implemented this way, but other devices will be in the normal ACPI tables and will generate either GPEs or EC events.

    [1] On my laptop, these are ports 0x62 and 0x66 - compare to the keyboard controller's use of ports 0x60 and 0x64

    [2] As directly as indirection via the EC can be...
    endis_ni
         		12:52p
    More Sesame Street goodies.

    I've just realised- he's like a gateway drug for Hammer Horrors or that sparkly stalker-boy. Dammit, Count!




    Glee!

    Current Mood: bouncy
    athenegenia
         		12:51p
    Day 1
     Press ups:
    10/12/7/7/>9 (managed 10)

    Sit ups:
    9/9/96/6/>8 (managed 10)

    Squats:
    8/8/5/5/>7 (managed 10)

    Weight: No gain (not great, but better than gaining)

    (Also, am back in Durham and had an awesome interactive last night :D )



    Current Mood: discontent
    arwen_lune
         		1:17p
    Wii games - Lego Star Wars and Wii Fit Plus
     I both got these last week after the weekend (which was annoying as I was bored on the weekend and busy during the week!).
    I played Lego Star Wars when visiting the House of Geeks and Games and rather liked it. It's funny and level-based without being dramatic about failing/dying. It's a lot of fun on the wii as you can hack and slash using your remote. I've played parts with both housemates and that was fun too :-) (even if they did both started out accidentally killing me a few times...). I wish we could play this with 3 people (would have to buy a 3rd controller set though) though it would probably be quite hard to keep track of the characters visually.

    Wii Fit Plus I bought because I'd gotten bored with the original games on Wii Fit and felt I needed a boost to start using it again. Plus has a whole bunch of new games (some of which are a ton of fun - snowball fight! ). It has a function to recommend you routines and to make your own. It has an easy multiplayer mode (which was very much lacking in the original). The emphasis on weight sadly hasn't gone. If you like wii fit then this is worth the 20 euro just for the new games. If you are ambivalent about wii fit, then this is probably not going to sway you.
    corsetmakers
    [ puppylove104104 ]
         		12:59p
    Help with threads
      Well, hello everyone *waves*, I'm pretty new to this community lurking wise, first time posting.

    I was wondering what kind of thread you use and where do you get it. I live in country that is practically illiterate when it comes to true sewing notions, especially threads. There's mostly cheap polyester crap, a few heavy duty cottons (in, like, a five color range, cause they're only used for jeans) and two stores (yep, in the whole country) that sell Gutterman's silk thread for its weight in gold (on second thought, I'm not sure gold costs that much). So I'm desperate.
    On top of the no-stock issue, there's no one to ask which thread is used where. I've read somewhere that the thread should match the fiber content of the fabric, and that there are different weights, but that's all I know.

    So - what do you use, and which online/mail order place do you get it from (If you get it by mail order/online)?
    Oh, and I'm not talking about flossing thread, I'm talking the regular get-two-fabrics-together thread. If you do top-stitching with another thread, I would love to know it, also.

    *EDIT: Meh, I'm illiterate. Edited all the typos.*


    dmwcarol
         		12:03p
    barberio
         		11:58a
    Macbook update - Insurance are requiring that I use their people, to make any repairs or declare it a write-off. Which will mean a slow turn around on getting a repaired mac book, it will be quicker if they declare it a write-off and I have to buy a new one.
    talismancer
         		7:59a
    Updating
     It’s odd really, I recall having problems finding things to blog about last year, but excepting day 2 of this year, I’ve had no problems getting some sort of cohesive update up and working, even if it is fairly short. Even better, I’ve got a few ideas jotted onto my desktop for future updates, to give me a few days backlog. OK, so I’ve also been “cheating” with posting early morning posts rather than the previous day, but I’m still being (fairly) consistent, possibly more so then even I expected.

    There are a few subjects I’m deliberately avoiding while I can. Work is one, and relationships are another (lack of there in right now). I’m also determined to go this year without having any single day with just HelloQuizzy memes, unlike last year.

    So, roll on with real updates I think!
    corsetmakers
    [ _delicateterror ]
         		2:14a
    Coutil
     I am looking for a good place to buy coutil. I called a local store and they no longer carry it and contacted Farthingales who do not have the right colour (cream) in the weight I want. I have a sample of the semi-stiff coutil and it seems way too thin.

    I have emailed the following companies asking for samples and have yet to hear back from them.
    http://www.corsetmaking.com
    www.lostcoasthistpatterns.com/cocofa10cowi.html

    I have ordered samples from the following but worry a little about shipping costs:
    www.whaleys-bradford.ltd.uk

    So far, www.richardthethread.com has the best prices as far as I can tell. Has anyone used their coutil? I emailed them for swatches as well.

    Is there anywhere else I should be looking? I checked the memories for fabric here. That is where I got the Whaley's site address from.
    I'm in Canada so places in the USA would probably be best.


    Thank-you!
    Monday, November 9th, 2009
    mjg59
         		10:06p
    ACPI general purpose events
     ACPI is a confusing place. It's often thought of as a suspend/resume thing, though if you're unlucky you've learned that it's also involved in boot-time configuration because it's screwed up your interrupts again. But ACPI's also heavily involved in the runtime management of the system, and it's necessary for there to be a mechanism for the hardware to alert the OS of events.

    ACPI handles this case by providing a set of general purpose events (GPEs). The implementation of these is fairly straightforward - an ACPI table points at a defined system resource (typically an area of system io space, though in principle it could be something like mmio instead), and when the hardware fires an ACPI interrupt the kernel looks at this region to see which GPEs are flagged. Then things get more interesting.

    The majority of GPEs are implemented in the ACPI tables via methods with names like _Lxx or _Exx. The xx is the number of the GPE in hex, while the leading _L or _E indicates whether the GPE is level- or edge-triggered. If an ACPI interrupt is fired and GPE 0x1D is flagged as being the source of the interrupt, the ACPI interpreter will then look for an _L1D or _E1D method. Upon finding one, it'll execute it. What this method does is entirely up to the firmware - on most HP laptops, GPE 0x1D is hooked up to the lid switch[1] and so executing it will send a notification to the OS that the lid switch has changed state. The OS will then evaluate the state of the lid switch (generally by making another ACPI query) and send the event up to userspace.

    How does the lid end up triggering GPE 0x1D? Things get pretty hardware specific at this point. Intel motherboard chipsets have a set of general purpose io (GPIO) lines that can, for the most part[2], be used by the system vendor for anything they want. For a lid switch, one of these lines is hooked to the switch and the BIOS configures the GPIO as an input. Pressing the switch will cause the GPIO line to become active. The GPIO lines are mapped to GPEs in a 1:1 manner, though with an offset of 16 - ie, GPIO 0xd will map to GPE 0x1d. If GPIO 0xd becomes active, GPE 0x1d will be flagged and an ACPI interrupt sent. The ACPI code will then do something to quash the interrupts, such as inverting the polarity of the GPIO[3], as well as send the notification to the OS.

    Why are the GPIOs offset by 16 relative to the GPEs? The lower 16 GPEs (again, talking about Intel hardware) have pre-defined purposes[4]. These range from things like "Critically low battery" to "PCIe hotplug event" down to "This device triggered a wakeup". And the latter is what I'm most interested in here.

    Various pieces of modern hardware can be placed into power saving states when not in use. The problem with this is that the user experience of having to turn on hardware before you can use it is not a good one, so in order to make this the default behaviour we need the hardware to tell us that something happened that requires us to wake the hardware up.

    There's something of a chicken and egg problem here, but thankfully most of the relevant modern hardware has out of band mechanisms to tell us about things going on. The PCI spec defines something called Power Management Events (PME), which are driven by an additional current that's supplied to the hardware even when it's otherwise turned off. On plug-in PCI Express cards, firing a PME generates an interrupt on the root bridge and a native driver can interpret that, but for legacy PCI devices and integrated chipset devices the notification has to come via ACPI.

    The example I've been working on is USB. It's a good choice for various reasons - firstly, there's already support for detecting when the USB controller is idle. Secondly, modern USB host controllers have support for generating PMEs on device insertion, removal or (and this is important) remote wakeup. In other words, as long as the USB bus is idle we can power down the entire USB controller. If the OS tries to access a USB device, we'll power it back up. If the user unplugs or plugs a device, we'll power it back up. If a previously idle device suddenly responds to some external input, we'll power it back up. And it's all nicely invisible to the user.

    How does this work? The controller retains a small amount of power even when nominally pwoered down. This is used to keep the detection circuitry alive. When it receives a wakeup event, it asserts the PME line. The chipset detects this and fires a GPE. The OS runs this GPE and receives a device notification on the ACPI representation of the USB controller, telling us to power it back up. We do so and process whatever woke us - if the bus then goes idle again, we can power down once more.

    The astonishing thing is that this all works. The only problem we have is that it relies on the machine vendor to have provided the ACPI methods that are associated with the GPEs. If they haven't, we can't enable this functionality - even though the hardware is capable of generating the GPEs, we have no method to execute to let us know which device has to be woken up. The GPE is never answered, we never acknowledge the PME and the hardware keeps on screaming for attention without getting any. And, more to the point, it never gets powered up and your mouse doesn't work.

    There's a pretty gross hack to deal with this. In general, we know what the GPE to device mappings are - they're pretty static across Intel chipsets, and while AMD ones can be programmed differently by the BIOS we can read that information back and set up a mapping ourselves. This trick also comes in handy when some vendors (like, say, Dell) manage to implement one of the GPE events wrongly. Everything looks like it should work, but the method never sends a notification because it's buggy. In that case we can unregister the existing method and implement our own instead.

    This code isn't upstream yet, but patches have been posted to the linux-acpi mailing list and with luck it'll be there in the 2.6.33 timeframe. My tests suggest about 0.2W saving per machine, which isn't going to save all that many polar bears but seems worth it anyway.

    [1] _L1D = lid. Sigh.

    [2] There's a few that are reserved for specific purposes

    [3] So where before it had to be high to be active, it now has to be low to be active - this means that it'll now trigger on the switch being opened rather than closed, so you'll get another event when you open the lid again.

    [4] You can find a list in the documentation for the appropriate ICH chip - the relevant section is "GPE0_STS" under the LPC interface chapter.

    shevek
         		5:51p
    Tonight, I will be visiting "a disorderly house injurious to the public welfare and morals". It sounds like fun.
    barberio
         		11:20p
    Potted review - "Fantastic Mr. Fox" is a Wes Anderson movie. If you like Wes Anderson movies you will like this one and should go see it. More under the cut.

    ( Read more... )
    herecosyouare
         		10:29p
    Sososososo busy...
     Jobs done so far;

    Start made on Zeit-squick.
    Invitations sent; if you didn't recieve one I was unsure about whether the NPC in question would have invited you and need to check! If you know you are NPC-ing then there will be briefs on or before Saturday.
    Finally submitted some work that someone's been after for weeks ^_^;
    Make-up practice is happening... latex takes so long to dry!!

    Jobs still to do tonight;

    Music planning for five weeks
    Something in Nano

    And for later?

    More Science!
    Lammies (can has submissions, pls?)
    R.E.planning
    Topic books need a going over
    Career Related Learning pilot needs instigating

    I know, this is one of those posts that's more for me to look back at on Friday and go "Whoot! I finished stuff!"

    In other news, I now have a truely amazing outfit that I need an excuse for... Casp found a skirt that matches my Chinese shrug yesterday... Felicity could pull it off, only it does lace all the way up the sides... next time there's a Lords party, perhaps? I don't think even she'd wear it to the pub...

    Very much looking forward to Saturday! Come join us!

    Current Mood: crazy
    loopymushroom
         		10:31p
    Heritage.
     So, today is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. We've got a piece of it in our sitting room, and somewhere there's a photo of Mum, Dad and me in a buggy next to the rubble. I'm glad I was alive for it, even if I was only a few weeks old and don't remember.

    I really wish I could be in Berlin with my dad today. It's such a huge deal for him. He grew up in West Berlin. His family were from the east, but they fled over the border just before the wall was completed. They took what they could over, bit by bit - blankets, keepsakes, pictures, clothes. Their house, their furniture, anything suspicious they had to leave behind for fear of getting caught. My uncle was about two or so, and got smuggled across at the bottom of a shopping bag full of groceries. I just find that so amazing. To me, it's a piece of history, something one reads about in books in school, sees on documentaries. But to my uncle, it's something that happened to *him*. To my dad, walled-off Berlin was his home, where he grew up, had friends, went to university. Twenty years ago today that wall came down, and families and friends were reunited after 40 years, and the Stasi regime of spies and friends and relatives informing on each other went to hell. I don't know any of them, but I'm so fucking proud of the people who made that happen. Today is a special day.

    And while it may be history to me, it was part of my father's life, and of all my German family. History is made up of people's lives and deeds. I'm glad to have been alive while that little bit of history was being made.

    Current Mood: thoughtful
    wotanut
         		9:35p
    9/30
     Iwas struggling on day 2, and [info]talismancer kindly made some suggestions of what to write baout should I struggle again, well, I'm struggling again so I'm going to write about the sky.

    I love the autumn sky, I have the forturne to live in a Very Pretty town, we have a fantastic backdrop of Hills, which on a crisp autumn morning looks like it is a painted backdrop, however most autumn days peopel have stolen the hills and disgused thier deed with clouds...





    shevek
         		2:06p
    I would describe my week but I'm not allowed to and you wouldn't believe me anyway. I'm now sitting on top of the world looking out over San francisco from a rooftop by buena vista park and contemplating the next trip. First, we must go trawl Haight for 1980s cocktail dresses.
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