Everything Else

yo man, genautomata is really moving up to 500Mbyte on the swap


the uptime says 10 days compiling gcc with ada-core, native compiling on an machine that has the less performances and ram than the worst router that a chinese has sold ever, and trust me it's really a crap, it has few ram, low throughput, and the rooutfs is attached to an usb harddrive through an USB-v1 controller, with two partitions, one is for the swap (/dev/sda1), the other is for ext3(/dev/sda2)

but but
go go Atheros7@400Mhz






(it's a test to see how stable is the hardware when under heavy load, job product, I have designed the hw around the SoC, and I want to be sure, there are a lot of probes attached while the sw is running )



what about you ? What is the craziest thing you have ever done ?

I don't know for certain whether the statute of limitations has run out.

I ran out the NAAFI naked and did a lap of the camp (about a mile) in Bosnia during the winter of 95 (well 90 something). Actually I still had my trainers on, otherwise it would have breached Health and Safety!

Glitterred the Treasurer of the Frisco Hell's Angels once ... looked very electric as he rode up Fell Street.

Created a poverty pocket in the heart of Beverly Hills and oversaw the arrest of the entire Supreme Court but let's see, computer wise... Oh! I left digger running on my dual-Xeon but unbeknownst to me the splash screen had a memory leak and this was back in the days when Linux would just reboot when it ran out of memory and swap, crazy!

uc-foneras, atheros5/mips32, from the left to the right, { FON2100A(hack SPI), FON2200, FON2202(USB)}

vishnu wrote: memory leak and this was back in the days when Linux would just reboot when it ran out of memory and swap crazy!

I wanted to be sure about that

To have married wrong women.. In comparison, doing rm -r from the root dir is pure fun...

Convinced the campus that all the printers would require a nickel per page.

I have been fighting for 5 days, trying to implement a crazy "malloc" solution
It works (do not trust my words, it does not) but … it's a crap … because it's not memory-segmentation-proof, and it's too big footprint

oh, and to fix the hot jam I have also designed a crazier solution which needs a special piece of hardware(1) in order to work

Malloc is a taboo in avionics, it's banned by DO178A from Level A to Level D (4), I have found an Interesting article with the thesis "Why? You'd better avoid malloc()/free() APIs in military/aerospace embedded code"


(1) TLB, a sort of "virtual memory approach" but inventional: translate "VAS(2)" into "CAS(3)", then return a VAS pointer to the malloc's caller. it's possible, but it requires a bit of black magic in the middle, a TLB, and a "bitmap" (perhaps it's possible to implement it reusing the PowerPC's TLB … I have to check)
(2) CAS, Computer Address Space (aka Physical Address Space)
(3) VAS, Virtual Address Space

• PROs: no memory fragmentation
• CONs: the CAS size is 16 Mbyte (customer request), I have to strongly limit the number of services (= number of malloc calls) in order to avoid to saturate the whole 4Gbyte physical space, also this solution requires a special implementation to be made in FPGA, so you have an hybrid MPU + fpga on the pcb, with a lot of troubles about "bus error, and bad alignment"

(4) DO178A

• Level-A , Failure condition is Catastrophic , Failure may cause a crash. Error or loss of critical function required to safely fly and land aircraft
• Level-B , Failure condition is Hazardous , Failure has a large negative impact on safety or performance, or reduces the ability of the crew to operate the aircraft due to physical distress or a higher workload, or causes serious or fatal injuries among the passengers. (Safety-significant)
• Level-C , Failure condition is Major , Failure is significant, but has a lesser impact than a Hazardous failure (for example, leads to passenger discomfort rather than injuries) or significantly increases crew workload (safety related)
• Level-D , Failure condition is Minor , Failure is noticeable, but has a lesser impact than a Major failure (for example, causing passenger inconvenience or a routine flight plan change)
• Level-E , Failure condition is No Effect , Failure has no impact on safety, aircraft operation, or crew workload.

I am assigned with Level-E

Things I have done that are pretty crazy:

Towed my friends truck with my roommates truck using a ratchet tow strap 35 miles from his girlfriends house to his house. He was in the truck and had to brake and steer with no engine power ( His engine seized, so I zip tied the clutch in since the transmission couldn't shift )

In high school I procured the domain password for the Windows Server 2003-based school network server, and managed to setup a covert tunnel where me and my friends could LAN party Quake across the school network while the freshman-juniors did their standardized tests.

Pranked my old boss at work by swapping his Mac Mini with an Amiga 1200 equipped with a 68060 CPU, token ring network card, Aweb, a telnet client and promised him we'd return it if he lasted for an entire day on the system ( we allowed him to remote to a server, hence the telnet client ). He obtained a whole new appreciation for his computer after that, lawl. He had to call his wife at home and walk her through setting up telnetd on his home PC.

Also, know someone who pranked a friend in the 1990s by making his Linux box swap off the tape drive.

I've not really done many crazy computer bits to be honest.

Away from that, I've towed a motorbike with another motorbike before. Only a few miles, but I'm glad it wasn't any further. There's something very disconcerting about leaning round a bend and feeling the back end of your bike being pulled around in a different direction by another bike.

I've also driven across town during rush hour on my bike with no clutch (the cable snapped when I was driving to work). Changing gears wasn't so bad (albeit rather jerky to go down the box). But stopping did become a bit of a pain when you basically have to brake until the bike stalls, then start the bike such that the starter motor is both turning the engine over and moving the whole bike forwards simultaneously. It was easier than phoning for a breakdown service though!

I did once try to fix the loose charging port on a friend's mobile phone whilst very drunk and armed with only a spanner. That didn't go so well...

TeamBlackFox wrote: Towed my friends truck with my roommates truck using a ratchet tow strap 35 miles from his girlfriends house to his house.

If we're going to go automotive ... four guys, three bikes in a Ford van. Leaving Ontario at about 6:00 p.m. on a Sunday, it went onto five (from six) just as we came out of the tunnel into the parking lot. Shit, we gotta get home. Pulled the pushrods for that cylinder, headed north. Made it over the grapevine, don't touch the brakes, we need every bit of momentum we can get. Yay ! We're home !

Well, not exactly. 300 miles to go. Went okay tho except ... we forgot about the Altamont Pass.

By the time we got there, still had at least four cylinders. I think, sounded like that many anyhow. So about ten miles away, put yer foot into it, Ed. We need more momentum

Pass is about six lanes in each direction, we started out about 65 in the right lane, doin' okay. About halfway up down to maybe 30, I'm wondering why no one is passing us ? it's late but not THAT late ... crawl back, take a look through the back windows.

Oh ! there ARE cars back there ! All herded up, scared to death to pass us, cuz they can't see that far ahead. We looked like a crop duster, or an aerobatic plane on full smoke. You never saw such a huge cloud. You couldn't even see the cars, just their headlights gleaming faintly through the smog

Got to the bridge, didn't dare stop, threw a buck out the window (this was a long time ago), made it past San Quentin where we belonged, got to the shop, backed it into the parking place and turned the key. I've never heard an engine stop that quick.

Came by a few days later, the shop owner was in the van with the engine cover off, a 4x4 in one hole, a 16 pound sledge in both hands, trying to beat the pistons/ crank out the bottom of the engine Gosh Rich, what happened ? no, was running okay when we got back ....


I dragged a full rack PDP-8 back from LA in a VW Rabbit once, too, but at least that was less environmentally damaging Hard on the shorts tho, the tule fog was so bad you couldn't see twenty feet ahead. So I found a KW running about seventy and stuck my nose ten feet off his butt for a hundred miles or so.

Years later, my sister is watching a NASCAR race with her boyfriend and he made the mistake of explaining drafting. Oh really ? She enlightened him on the finer points of using the Mansfield Bar to regulate your position, how far back you can drift before losing the draft, how to keep your engine from burning up and other technicalities Nice thing about my sister is, she's not a sniveller. "Can't see where we're going so we'll tuck in behind this truck for 100 miles ? Cool."

Or the time I dropped a tranny (another Ford van, this one was an eight) over by North Richmond and didn't want to leave it (there wouldn't have been anything left, I didn't even want to get out of the van to tell the truth), so had a friend come over. Too obvious to use a rope, that's illegal, so he just pushed me. Chevy van pushes Ford. He had to back off every once in a while to get some air into the radiator but it worked okay. Over the bridge without stopping at the toll gate again (we've got practice), could we stay in the right lane at least ? Hell no. Jerry insists on passing everybody. I'm driving in the rear view mirror from the front, which is kinda weird, but I didn't want to get left behind by my push truck. Made it okay. Again.

Don't nobody tell the Assist, she thinks I'm safe and sane ....

I didn't actually do this, but, it's pretty crazy:

ARTHUR:
So we’re actually going to land in a minute?

CAPTAIN:
Well not, not, not so much land in fact, I think as far as I can remember we’re programmed to, er crash on it.

ARTHUR and FORD:
”Crash”?

CAPTAIN:
Yes. It’s all part of the plan. … I think. There was terribly good reason for it which I can’t… quite… remember at the moment.

FORD:
[Yells in exasperation] You’re a load of useless, bloody loonies!!

CAPTAIN:
Ah, yes, that was it, that was reason it was. Ha. Pass me the loofah will you?

[The ship crash lands]

With a junker PC - trying to swap IDE devices with the system running. It immediately kills the power when it senses the change caused by unplugging/plugging in the molex.

at Lucca Comics (an italian event about comics), I tried to touch em Yuriko-Tiger 's bon bon. She threaten a slap, but the science readily provided a valid motivation: wanted to know what the frog is the meaning of a rabbit bon-bon when there are no rabbit ears but elf ears!

Yuriko was embarrassed because she was dressing the wrong ears, and she explained that she had a big problem in japan, her flight was delayed by eight hours, so she didn't sleep enough. Fanny girl (and she is italian).

Slap avoided!

And I ended the conversation with " call me maybe "
She reacted laughing - " sure, man, a phone call From Japan ? even if you were rich and handsome, how much does it cost? " -
and her laughing becomes a ROFL, but once again the science was readily able to provide a good motivation!!!
" sure, girl, with the promise to teach you all the secrets about data roaming abroad – how to avoid excess charges! "

she was shocked, again

Good plan! Unfortunately I got caught by GagaFriend which was at my shoulder, dressed like Lamu, and then, when I met her, I got a kick! Her motivation: " don't bother cosplay girls, don't ask their phone number, and don't look at thier bon bon !!! "

ohhhh my leg, still it hurts!

(I felt like Ataru Moroboshi )





My girl friend was dressed like Lamu (I didn't know because I reached Lucca alone, my girlfriend was already there)
while there was an other girl dressed like Lady Gaga in "Paparazzi"

Crazy World, it was deceiving

ivelegacy wrote: My girl friend was dressed like Lamu...

Pic or I say it never happened!

vishnu wrote: Pic or I say it never happened!

… and do you really think I have taken a pic? with Yuriko?
I stay there with absolutely no digital camera on hand
so no digital proof to feed her jealousy: it's for my good
(my leg still hurts )

here she is...

next step: I am planning to have my personal stand in order to promote a revolutionary drink: rutto-cola (burp cola)

But if you do an image search for "yuriko tiger" there's not a single pic of her wearing anything even remotely approaching tiger stipes...