There was once a businessman who was sitting by the beach in a small Brazilian village. As he sat, he saw a Brazilian fisherman rowing a small boat towards the shore having caught quite few big fish. The businessman was impressed and asked the fisherman, “How long does it take you to catch so many fish?”

The fisherman replied, “Oh, just a short while.”

“Then why don’t you stay longer at sea and catch even more?” The businessman was astonished.

“This is enough to feed my whole family,” the fisherman said.

The businessman then asked, “So, what do you do for the rest of the day?”

The fisherman replied, “Well, I usually wake up early in the morning, go out to sea and catch a few fish, then go back and play with my kids. In the afternoon, I take a nap with my wife, and evening comes, I join my buddies in the village for a drink — we play guitar, sing and dance throughout the night.”

The businessman offered a suggestion to the fisherman. “I am a PhD in business management. I could help you to become a more successful person. From now on, you should spend more time at sea and try to catch as many fish as possible. When you have saved enough money, you could buy a bigger boat and catch even more fish. Soon you will be able to afford to buy more boats, set up your own company, your own production plant for canned food and distribution network. By then, you will have moved out of this village and to Sao Paulo, where you can set up HQ to manage your other branches.”

The fisherman continues, “And after that?”

The businessman laughs heartily, “After that, you can live like a king in your own house, and when the time is right, you can go public and float your shares in the Stock Exchange, and you will be rich.”

The fisherman asks, “And after that?”

The businessman says, “After that, you can finally retire, you can move to a house by the fishing village, wake up early in the morning, catch a few fish, then return home to play with your kids, have a nice afternoon nap with your wife, and when evening comes, you can join your buddies for a drink, play the guitar, sing and dance throughout the night!”

The fisherman smiled.

Source.

I turn on my newly purchased phone and register for Motoblur.  I then begin to add my facebook account.  I see my facebook friends now being imported into my contacts list.  All of a sudden, the process halts.  I chill for a few hours and inspect my contacts list again — no luck, the import only half worked.  So, I decide just to delete my facebook entry in Motoblur and start over.

No such luck.  I go Menu -> Social Networking and see Facebook listed under “Motoblur Accounts”.  It has a green checkmark.  I go to my contacts (blue button)->menu->manage accounts and DON’T see facebook listed there.  I go back to the Social Networking app and try to add or adjust my facebook account settings but all it tells me is that you can only register one facebook account with Motoblur.  Great  So now, a part of Motoblur thinks facebook is installed and a part of it doesn’t.

I think that by doing a soft reset of the phone that the problem will go away.  Nope.  I do a hard reset.  Nope.  I clear the internal phone memory and then do said resets.  Still no.  I then do the remote wipe from the Motoblur website and STILL, no luck.  FYI, the remote wipe does not wipe the internal phone storage and thus, any music files, etc you store on the phone that are accessibly through the “Files” button are still available for prying eyes — quite the misadvertisement in my opinion.

So, I eventually conclude that the only way to fix this problem is to delete my Motoblur account and start over from scratch.   The short story is that this worked and now Motoblur is working smoothly.  Here’s how I deleted my Motoblur account (after several experiements).

1. Call AT&T customer service and tell them that you want your Motoblur account deleted and that they need to call Motorola, in a 3-way call (yes, I did this and it worked), to verify your identity.
2. Tell the ATT operator to call 800 734 5870.
3. Once on the 3-way call, politely ask the Motorola agent that you want your Motoblur account deleted and that you have an agent from ATT on the line to verify your identity.
4. Ask when you expect the account to be inactive.
5. Politely thank both agents.
6. Hang up.

That’s it.  Well, kind of…

I was told that my account would be deleted within 24 hours yet over 30 hours later, I could still login to Motoblur via the web.  I called around a few times to get this fixed and finally arrived at this solution:

1. Call Motorola 800 734 5870
2. Ask for “Level 2″ support and tell them you have an Atrix.
3. Tell them your account was not deleted and that you want it deleted immediately.  Tell them you already had your identity verified by ATT with Motorola (there should be a log of this on Motorola’s side).

I did a soft reset (factory reset) and then resubscribed to Motoblur and this fixed all my issues.  Facebook and Google now live in harmony in my contacts list on my Atrix.

Hopefully Motorola fixes this buggy Motoblur software soon.

The class allows you to send and receive data.  What you fill in for the data is up to you.  Currently, the class performs simple energy detection (sends a 100 sample burst with constant envelope) and works when you hook the RX up to the TX on the Basic RX/TX boards (make sure you have proper attenuation as to not break the daughterboards).  But, with some simple modification, you can have it do more sophisticated processing.

The class creates two queues and three threads.

One queue is the TX queue and the other the RX queue. The TX queue is a vector of pointers to complex float vectors (variable length) and are waveforms to be transmitted. The RX queue is a vector of pointers to complex float vectors (const size) and are the data blocks received from the radio.

The three threads are the TX thread, the RX thread, and the processing thread.

The TX thread wakes up every 100ms and looks at the TX queue and sends any waveforms that are present.  The RX thread runs continuously and receives datablocks from the radio. The processing thread checks the RX queue and processes any blocks that are present on it.  Having an RX queue, RX thread, and processing thread allows the software to continually receive data without dropping packets and leaves the choice up to the software as to which packets to process.  For example, if the processing thread runs slower than the samples coming in (slower than real time), it may choose to intelligently process the remaining blocks instead of dropping data on the floor.  This would allow the processing thread to “catch up.”

The TX thread can be modified as to send the waveforms out immediately instead of on a queue for servicing.

I hope all this makes sense.

The code can be downloaded here.  I used this to compile:

g++ main.cpp SimpleTransceiver.cpp -lboost_thread -luhd -I/opt/uhd/include -L/opt/uhd/lib

Bugs, questions, comments welcomed.

Enjoy!

Anyways, I’m developing using Visual Studio 10 (not my choice).  I have a project which involves the use of CUDA and Boost. The newest version of CUDA (at the time of this writing) won’t work out of the box with the  vs100 compiler that comes with Visual Studio 10.  CUDA can use nothing newer than the vs90 compiler.  So, I  install visual studio 9 and 10 and select v90 as my compiler for my Visual Studio 10 project.

Yesterday, I needed the Boost C++ libraries and began to install them.

The Boost installation is pretty good.  Its fairly automated which is nice.  You essentially call bootstrap and then bjam; they take care of all the configuring and building of the .libs.  However,  Boost’s scripts see that I have Visual Studio 10 installed and compile everything with the vs100 compiler.  This breaks my project in  Visual   Studio (I get all linking errors related to Boost) as I’m in  Visual Studio 10, but using the v90 compiler because of CUDA.

So, I figured out how to override Boost’s configuration to compile with the vn90 compiler instead of the vc100 compiler.  Here is how I fixed the problem.

 cd to BOOST_ROOT
 boostrap
 "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\bin\vcvars64.bat"    // This invokes the vc90 environment variable set.
 bjam --toolset=msvc-9.0 --build-type=complete architecture=x86 address-model=64  // Makes Boost!

If you don’t run the 3rd line (vsvars64.bat), you will see tons of “cl” errors when running  bjam.  Essentially, Boost tries to call the vc90 compiler (cl.exe), but because the environment is hosed, it cant find it and bombs.

Abstract

A hard drive connected to an Ultra ATA-66 card operates a bit differently then a drive not connected to the card. What we are going to do is retrieve the Input/Output ports that your card uses to exchange information between the card and computer. We then will  then use those to tell linux where to go to talkto your card when we install linux. After that we will adjust lilo.conf to also point linux to the correct place upon booting from the hard drive. Sound confusing? It’s really not.

Read First

Please read everything before you start installing anything. Make sure you make a boot disk too if possible. It will make your life much easier for the booting part below. Also, these instructions worked for me and may not work for you or may mess your system up. Whatever you do, is what you do. I am not responsible in any way for what negative effects result from following these instructions.

Why Red Hat?

I was using it when the problem first occurred. Since then I have switched to Mandrake and am now an official tester. This HOWTO has worked for many other linux distribution other than Red Hat including Mandrake. Your results may vary.

Installing Red Hat 7.0 with a Promise ULTRA ATA-66 controller.

1. Put your Red Hat 7.0 disc 1 in your CD-ROM drive and boot your computer. Your computer should boot to the CD, if it doesn’t.. make it.
2. After loading, there will be a screen with some text on it. At the prompt, type linux rescue and hit enter.
3. Now, all this text will start scrolling on your screen. Eventually you will be left at a text screen with a blue background and a red box asking you what language you want to run in. At this time, press ALT-F2. You will be left at a black screen with a prompt in the left hand corner of the screen.
4. Type cat /proc/pci
5. Some stuff will scroll up on the screen again. Look for your controller in all this mess. You can press SHIFT-PgUp or SHIFT-PgDown to scroll through that slop if some of it scrolled up to far to see.
6. When you have found your card, you will notice that your information is indented. You will see something similar to the following:
   I/O at 0x1410 [0x1411].
   I/O at 0x1404 [0x1405].
   I/O at 0x1408 [0x1409].
   I/O at 0x1400 [0x1401].
7. That’s your ticket. Write down the vertical column of number WITHOUT the brackets on the them. In this example you would write down 0×1410, 0×1404, 0x.1408, 0×1400.
8. Now, reboot your system leaving the CD in the drive again for the computer to boot to.
9. When at the first prompt type:
   linux ide2=0x1410,0x1404 ide3=0x1408,0x1400
   Be sure enter the numbers that your wrote down just previously. You should be smart enough to know how to substitute this.
10. Your on your way to installing now.

Proper Booting

These instructions will hopefully enable you to boot into Red Hat.

1. Take out the CD and put the boot diskette you made during your instillation in the floppy drive.
2. Boot your computer and when at the prompt type linux rescue.
3. We are now going to need to mount the drives you just installed linux on. Do this by typing the following
   mkdir /mnt/root
   mount /dev/hdxx  /mnt/root //where xx is the drive you of your / partition.
4. Type vi /mnt/root/etc/lilo.conf //this will boot the text editor vi
5. Find the section where instructions are to boot to your linux drive. Under that section add the following line: append " ide2=0x1410,0x1404 ide3=0x1408,0x1400" (no quotes) where the number 0xXXXX correspond the number your wrote down and typed in earlier. Notice there is a space right after the first quotation mark. This is intentional.
6. Save that file.
7. Type: chroot /mnt/root
8. Type lilo and the prompt. If you get errors, correct them by editing lilo.conf.
9. Reboot.

Installing with Mandrake 8.0

Many people have been having trouble getting Mandrake 8.0 to boot after installing. This is a particular strange error due to the fact that when installing, all the hard drives are correctly identified and the install works fine. However, when booting, the system results in a kernel panic. In fact, I was told that it was anaccident that these cards even worked with Mandrake 7.2. With some work, they can be configured correctly to work during booting. In reality, the cards are supported with the kernel that comes with Mandrake 8.0. What happens though, is that the system maps the drives incorrectly. For example, my drive in Mandrake 7.2 is hdh5. This is also where Mandrake 8.0 maps it, but it is incorrect and not in sync with the kernel. Mandrake actually puts it at hdf5. This had to be found by trial-an-error. Here is how to start this process.

1. Edit your lilo.conf and find which drive your root file system was on.. Ex.. I thought mine was on hdh5, but it really was on hdf5. You will know when you mapped the drive correctly because you will get past the line that says something like ‘Press I for Interactive Setup’ and they you will usually get stopped with a swap file error. Only proceed, once you have achieved this.
2. Open your /etc/fstab into an editor and wherever it says hdXX, put it what it should be. For example. Mine said hdh5; I edited it to say hdf5.
3. Save and reboot.

Bibliography

http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~b6506063/hpt366/ (No longer maintained)

http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/Ultra-DMA-5.html

Why you ask?

Simply put, Im having too much fun.  I love my job exactly the way it is.  I love the people.  I love the challenge.  I love the creative freedom.  I love that I can see a concert at the student center or go look at snowboards on Allen street all while on my lunch break.

Life has been really good.  Recently, Ive had the opportunity to see some pretty amazing stuff and participate in a military exercise out in the middle of no where in Arizona. I know Im on an amazing journey when I get back from lunch and my colleagues joke that while I was gone, I missed the IED going off right up the road from your test site.  I would have never guessed while sitting my calculus class  Id be in a situation like this 8 years later.

Im loving life right now and I want to take it all in right now for only God knows what tomorrow will bring.

BLOG: Yo man.. what’s shakin’?

ME: Oh, not to much.. keeping busy and gearing up for snowboarding season to start.  What about you?

BLOG:  Ya know.. keepin’ it cool…. a little bit of this and a little bit of that…. servin’ pages like its my job.

ME: That’s cool blog, you’re the best.

Picture of my reading room….

Rules have their uses; in recurring situations, we don’t have to figure out what to do from scratch. But because rules are based on previous experience, they also maintain the status quo. The very qualities that make rules useful day-to-day can render them harmful when a relationship problem needs to be resolved. Rules simplify life by limiting options to an acceptable few. But when we get stuck in solving a problem, we need more options, not fewer. The assumed rules we carry into a situation prevent us from exploring potentially helpful options and limit our flexibility. They discourage change—even helpful, necessary change.

This was taken from my front porch sometime after dinner.  I had to bust out  some wide-angle lens action to fit it in the whole shot.  I realized later that I goofed when taking it; I shot it using P mode and forgot to change the ISO from 1600.  Whoops.