tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11888313983850257532011-04-22T02:17:41.356+01:00In which I recount tales of adventures and deeds from the arcane milieu that is software engineering. Behold!Jonnersnoreply@blogger.comBlogger121100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1188831398385025753.post-40061955930765436992008-07-15T22:20:00.004+01:002008-07-15T23:02:31.509+01:00

I've spent a productive couple of hours tonight tuning my DRAM settings. I'd already done a gross adjustment the other night, knocking the Active Precharge setting down from 15 to 12 and kicking the clock rate up from 266MHz to 533MHz, and that was nice and stable. This evening, it was time to have a play with the other settings: RAS-to-CAS Delay, CAS Latency, and RAS Precharge. The SPD timings

Jonnersnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1188831398385025753.post-71780957176559466542008-07-14T22:11:00.005+01:002008-07-14T22:18:42.321+01:00

As promised, some pics of the FN41 (I think) Shuttle machine that I built a few years ago. Was this the first Shuttle box I built? Can't remember, to be honest - it might have been the second, actually. Yeah, I remember - I built a lovely little turbo-nutter XPC games box, which the missus thought was much nicer than her mini-tower, so I put an office-type box together for her to play Solitaire,

Jonnersnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1188831398385025753.post-21261212800729109502008-07-13T21:13:00.004+01:002008-07-14T10:13:47.855+01:00

Last night I finished playing with the CPU overclock settings. I'd discovered that the SATA controller didn't like overclock rates in excess of 321MHz, because the 324MHz setting I'd tried previously made the BIOS forget about the HDD - but just for the hell of it, I tried both 323MHz and 322MHz in case there was a blurry boundary. But there wasn't - 321MHz is the absolute limit that the mobo

Jonnersnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1188831398385025753.post-56063593196929149752008-07-11T09:43:00.003+01:002008-07-14T10:12:28.124+01:00

Well, I did some digging on the interweb last night and this morning, and made an interesting discovery. Much to my surprise, even though the Phoenix BIOS in the SD32G2 will let me tweak the FSB up to 350MHz, it turns out that the ICH7 'SouthBridge' that handles - amongst other things - the SATA drive controller, doesn't like an FSB of more than 321MHz. Several other people have reported the same

Jonnersnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1188831398385025753.post-20938098253520001162008-07-09T08:35:00.012+01:002008-07-11T09:43:26.252+01:00

Taking a brief respite from the Linux/iTouch project (mainly because I simply haven't had time to focus on it over the last couple of weeks) I decided to see if I could goose my mainbox a little to coax a bit of extra 'oomph' out of it.It's a Shuttle box - one of the four I have, because I love these SFF barebones boxes with their dinky little chassis and tiny hi-spec mobo all prepped and waiting

Jonnersnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1188831398385025753.post-41743705692341868182008-06-21T21:48:00.009+01:002008-08-05T15:50:07.863+01:00

Returning to the iTouch-on-Ubuntu toolchain project, we pick up at the point where it's time to get the Apple-specific bits of the toolchain integrated into our blossoming development environment, and that means Xcode. I'm no expert in this, but it looks like it's the super-duper coding toolset that Apple say is what you need to write iTouch code on a Mac - and who am I to argue? What we're going

Jonnersnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1188831398385025753.post-52483282564257231782008-06-18T21:42:00.006+01:002008-06-22T21:51:08.876+01:00

So, having got ODCCTOOLS built, as well as LLVM, we can now proceed to get the filesystem structure from the iTouch. Essentially, what we're doing here is creating a duplicate of what the iTouch directory and file structure looks like in our development environment.Execute the following series of commands in Ubuntu - they create a place to drop the iTouch filesystem into, and connect to the

Jonnersnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1188831398385025753.post-55594815913826514222008-06-18T17:47:00.005+01:002008-06-18T22:11:15.962+01:00

Gravity, eh? Yeah, thanks Sir Isaac. Thanks a bunch.I think it was Howard Hughes - or was it Groucho Marx? or maybe Oscar Wilde? - anyway, one of those blokes told a friend once that when they bought a new suit, the first thing they did was take it home and throw it against a wall a few times. To sort of knock the 'new' out of it so it wouldn't be so upsetting when a glass of wine eventually got

Jonnersnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1188831398385025753.post-38723127041526681752008-06-17T09:10:00.001+01:002008-06-17T09:39:07.401+01:00

We've now got an Ubuntu install ready to play with in a VM, and now it's time to get on with the job of creating the iTouch toolchain. At this point, we join this page, and are now broadly following the instructions therein. But there are some variations to it that are specific to Ubuntu, which is why I wrote all this text in the first place – a few of the steps in the instructions won’t work

Jonnersnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1188831398385025753.post-59980948112456701852008-06-16T08:47:00.009+01:002008-06-16T19:47:45.662+01:00

Having got our VM prepared, we're now going to install Ubuntu into it. As soon as you hit the 'Start...' button in VBox, you might see a wizard pop up to help you through the process. If it does, leave the Media Type selection as 'CD/DVD-ROM Device', and change the Media Source option to 'Image File' - which should have the Ubuntu ISO image already waiting. As soon as you click through and

Jonnersnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1188831398385025753.post-50714292119873189892008-06-15T10:15:00.000+01:002008-06-15T10:15:00.213+01:00

The best place, logically, to develop code for an Apple iPhone or iTouch is on an Apple computer. However, you may be in a similar position to me - i.e. having never previously had the desire or opportunity to play extensively with an iMac or other such machine, and being instead a battle-hardened expert in some other domain - perhaps Windows, or Unix, Linux, AIX, MVS, PrimOS, VM/VSE, etc. This,

Jonnersnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1188831398385025753.post-63539289825666187842008-06-14T11:12:00.010+01:002008-06-14T14:26:20.412+01:00

I turned 40 this year, and my missus gave me a 16GB iPod Touch for my birthday. Which, as you'd expect, has fundamentally Changed My Life.I've never really been 'into' the whole iPod concept, because for as long as I've been listening to MP3s I've had my 60GB Creative Zen player, which has a hard disk big enough (just!) to hold my entire music collection. What's the point of having a player with

Jonnersnoreply@blogger.com0