Matt's Blog

Lancaster Students Web Site

2007-06-12T01:54:00.000+01:00

I have a new web site set up that I've done in my spare time. It is aimed at students in Lancaster and will hopefully soon contain a lot more content than it does at the moment on pubs, clubs, and eveyrthing else related to students :) The site can be found at http://www.lancs-students.co.uk. There is also a forum on the site for students to chat about coursework, the societies, night life etc.

Jakeman Motorsport

2007-05-16T18:08:00.000+01:00

So I've done a bit of work on Jakeman Motorsport recently, it's getting there now I think. There's a few more pics. All the results are now up and we're working on blurbs for the rallies as well. Working on some info on the team and the cars now but it's starting to look a bit better...

The rally car is ready to go... finally

2007-04-30T14:43:00.000+01:00

So after deciding to change the gearbox last weekend to put the new, fancy one in (close ratio, 4.8 crownwheel and pinion and a limited slip diff) which went fine. We decided to change the pads and put a new set of mintex on. Nice and simple... right? No, the pads went in fine on one side but on the other we couldn't fit the pads into the caliper.

After much deliberating and measuring to try and diagnose the problem we finally noticed that the hub on the side the pads had gone into had the wrong offset on it. Both sides had 1.9 discs on which have a different offset to the 1.6. The disc offset was screwing up the side that had the proper 1.6 hub on it.

We managed to get hold of another hub in the week and after spending Saturday making some tools to let us change the bearings easier we got it fitted on Sunday. We can now change the bearings a lot easier which is handy so a productive weekend all in all.

Took the pug otu for a test drive after we had put it all back together and the new gearbox seems lots better, should give us a lot better traction due to the LSD and also quite a bit better acceleration. Brint it on.....

Ways to tell you're getting older

2007-04-19T16:55:00.000+01:00

Here's the first in my set of quotes I seem to come up with every now and then about getting older :)

1.
You're definately getting older if you are driving home from work, see a garden center and think to yourself 'ooo, a garden centre, I'll stop and have a look round'..

How sad am I now...

More to come no doubt

Buffer Overflow

2007-04-11T00:48:00.000+01:00

Ok, a nice little post to remind myself not to be such a tard.

char *toPm = (char *)malloc(strlen(cd.nick) + strlen(message) + 6) ;

Looks fine, is fine, toPm was for the folliwing operation :

sprintf(toPm, "%s : %s\r\n", cd.nick, message) ;

Now I counted up, checked everything counted again and came to 6 extras both times, space before the ':', the ':' itself, a space after, the \r, the \n and null. everything seems fine. No, getting segfualts every now and then. Quite annoying, gdb to the rescue, getting errors in adding text to a wxTextCtrl. Still can't fidn the problem. More digging ensued. Finally realised that there were two spaces before the damn ':'. That would screw it up. Changed to +7 in the malloc and all seems well. One moral to this story really.

USE SNPRINTF().........................

Should have learnt years ago, nm onwards and upwards.....

Linux Kernel on Gumstix and i386

2007-03-20T11:41:00.000Z

Had a few problems getting the Gumstix kernel to compile on an i386 based machine. I imported the entire Gumstix kernel tree into a subversion repository first then checked it out on my laptop. Then I removed the .config file from the subversion repository as this would obviously be set up for an ARM architecture, and replaced it with another .config from a Linux 2.6.20 kernel I had previously compiled on that machine. I thought this would be enough to compile the gumstix kernel on i386 as it changed the processor types etc, but alas it didn't work.

I got a load of errors when running make on the new kernel config such as :

include/asm/system.h:189:5: warning: "__LINUS_ARM_ARCH__" is not defined
include/asm/glue.h:110:2: error: #error Unknown data abort handler type

Obviously a problem with it trying to compile some of the arm asm stuff when I was trying to compile for i386. After a bit of digging I found that include/asm was a symlink to asm-arm so I have deleted this symlink from the svn repository and replaced it locally with a symlink to arm-i386. The kernel is currently compiling so hopefully this has done the trick, time will tel.....

Byte Order

2007-03-19T17:44:00.000Z

For a while now I've been running some code I wrote in the FreeBSD kernel that has been returning stupid values for the sizes of packets when I print out the payload length field from the ip6_hdr struct as any ipv6 packet leaves the system. Every time I was getting stupid values such as 4096 for a 16 Byte payload, I had a quick think about it at the time and couldn't figure it out. Of course, it is ridiculously stupid now I've thought about it again, and also ridiculously obvious.

NETWORK BYTE ORDER AND HOST BYTE ORDER ARE DIFFERENT.

Hopefully putting this post on here should stop me making the same stupidly obvious mistake in the future, the ntohs() and htons() functions are there for a damn good reason, use them, I am now getting the correct output values on the original FreeBSD code and on my new Linux code. F'ing idiot.....

Birthday

2007-03-16T10:32:00.000Z

Another year older, not much wiser though I fear.

Got to finish off a draft of this paper with Matt F then it's off to the pub around four o'clock for a nice long drinking session with a load of mates, see you in a bit Jimbo, put your foot down...

MIPv6 and Gumstix

2007-03-15T12:39:00.000Z

I've been trying to compile MIPv6 today for use on the gumstix. I compiled MIPv6 support into the 2.6.20 kernel that the latest version of the gumstix buildroot uses and that all worked fine.

I then tried to download the latest user space tool and cross compile that using the command :

./configure --build=i686-pc-linux-uclibc --host=arm-linux --target=arm-linux CPPFLAGS="-i/home/r0ute/phd/gumstix/br/gumstix-buildroot/
build_arm_nofpu/linux-2.6.20gum/include"

this chucks out the error :

checking for C compiler default output file name... configure: error: C compiler cannot create executables
See `config.log' for more details.

So I checked config.log to find out that the arm gcc compiler doesn't recognise the CPPFLAGS option, I then tried without that and it says the Linux headers don't have MIPv6 support enabled, I think I might have to somehow point it to the headers for the gumstix, either that or the user space tool I am using is only compatible with the patches that they supply themselves and not ther version of MIPv6 shipped with the kernel, the error in config.log from what I can tell is here :

conftest.c:61: error: 'RTPROT_MIP' undeclared (first use in this function)

Will have to come back to this when I have more time however, this paper is needing to be done, as well as the NP++ implementation.

Been a while

2007-03-13T12:04:00.000Z

Been a while since I last posted anything but decided to post a bit more hopefully, mostly with bits about my work to help me out in the future.

IPv6 and Gumstix
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This took me a while to sort out but I have finally worked out how to get IPv6 working on Gumstix, as usual, it is not actually that difficult, just a pain in the ass having to do it all from basically no documentation, and of course me making stupid mistakes. Anyway, the steps needed to do it can be found here :

Gumstix and IPv6

On to writing the actual NP++ code inside the Linux kernel now, hopefully won't be too hard to port over from FreeBSD.

Rally Site

2006-01-17T12:59:00.000Z

So i've been working on a new site for the rallying I do, showing results, along with various other things related to Jakeman Motorsport. The site is at Jakeman Motorsport. It is still under construction and some of the links don't work yet but hopefully within the next week or so it will get more up to date.

Park Hall Rally

2005-12-30T15:56:00.000Z

The Park Hall rally went well at the weekend, it was a very slippy couple of days but very good fun! Our first event with the in car camera so hopefully we will be able to get some clips posted somewhere soon. Results wise we did well, 16th overall and 3rd in class, our best result yet, we must be doing something right. For a full list of results see the ANWCC results page. Not long til Jimbo moves in now, good job cos i need the cash!

Christmas do tomorrow \o/

2005-12-19T17:17:00.000Z

Well it's the departments christmas do tomorrow, another chance ot get dressed up and drink stupid amounts! 11:00am start, bowling, meal and on to the pubs, should be a good laugh! Cars going in for a new clutch and cam belt tomorrow as well, more money gone, bring on the new year when i will be getting more rent when fat Jimbo moves in!

Wiki up and running

2005-12-15T13:57:00.000Z

The wiki is now up and running after a few stupid mistakes from me initially setting it up, another useless piece of web space for me to fill up with rubbish :) Anyway its at http://wiki.mjakeman.co.uk/ for anyone thats interested!

Wiki

2005-12-14T19:28:00.000Z

Well, I'm finally working on putting a wiki up to hold all my work along with various other things. Hopefully it will soon be up at http://wiki.mjakeman.co.uk/ although i'm still waiting for my web hosts to update a dns entry before i can get it up and running. I have now upgraded from an MPhil to a PhD as of last week so that's the 1st year all sorted now, on to bigger and better things hopefully with my research!

Teaching

2005-11-18T22:46:00.000Z

So I have to come up with a 3 hour lecture to give on Friday, my first lecturing experience, I'm sure it will prove interesting. The subject is routing technologies and protocols, not exactly my forte but I'm sure I will come up with something, always a good experience to learn new things I suppose!

Weeton Weekend

2005-09-14T14:09:00.000+01:00

Went to Weeton for a rally at the weekend, we were having problems from the start with a vibration coming whenever we did a hard right hander, we managed to get through to the sixth stage by going easy on the right handers but over the jump and as we landed the drive shaft snapped and that was the end of the day for us. On to the next event at 3 sisters in October!

Weekends Motorsport

2005-07-26T17:17:00.000+01:00

Well an interesting weekend, competed in the promenade stages in New Brighton on Saturday and managed to do quite badly. Half way around the 1st stage I slammed on the brakes for a corner and absolutely nothing happened so I had to take some evasive action to avoid some rather sever curbs but lost a lot of time due to this and on the subsequent stages despite the brakes getting better due to a lack of confidence that the car would stop. The next day proved to be slightly better however, competing in the trophy sprint, my first time driving in a sprint, I managed to get second in class as well as a good days racing.

PGNET 2005

2005-06-30T14:38:00.000+01:00

Well I did my first presentation on Tuesday, it was a good experience a few questions were asked about my work that got me thinking which is good. I was glad there weren't too many people in my session which helped the nerves a bit! The paper i presented can be found on my publications page.

Grad Beer Festival

2005-06-16T00:49:00.000+01:00

Well the graduate bar beer festival starts tomorrow so its going to be a pretty heavy weekend, cant wait. House survey is in the process of being done, hooray, see what happens there, hopefully all will go well and I will have a house soon! Well the 50 odd beers plus the ciders should keep me busy for the next few days so see how the weekend goes, lots of beer and lots of BBQ food, good stuff!

Keswick Beer Festival

2005-06-06T16:34:00.000+01:00

Went to the Keswick Beer Festival once again on Friday night, there were nearly 200 beers and ciders to try, some old favourites along with some weird and wonderful choices (such as the green bitter!). All this accompanied by some good live music and a fantastic atmosphere, I would highly recommend that anyone that likes their beer checks it out next year but get your tickets early they sell out fast!

Proflex Rally

2005-05-29T22:06:00.000+01:00

Well the proflex rally at the weekend turned out to be even better than anticipated. Although I knew before hand Alister McRae was going to be competing it was a surprise when Colin McRae turned up in his own helicopter on the friday night for scrutineering along with their father Jimmy. The rally went fairly well for me and my dad lying fourth in class at one point but dropping back slightly towards the end. Watching Colin, Alister and Jimmy drive was fantastic, Jimmy and Colin were taking turns driving the course car, a 2.4 litre mk2 Ford Escort, the car had tremendous power and was fantastic to watch. Alister was in car number 2, a 2 liter mk2 Ford Escort again with tremendous power, he lost a cylinder on the first stage but carried on after fixing the problem going out of the rally after stage 7 with engine trouble. I will be posintg some photos of the event soon.

PGNET Paper

2005-05-17T14:32:00.000+01:00

Well, my first paper has been accepted for publication :) I got the email today from the PGNET people telling me that it has been accepted for the 2005 conference in Liverpool. Got my mortage application form sent off yesterday as well, so hopefully that will bring back good news, more waiting....

Hi

2005-05-13T15:47:00.000+01:00

Well everyone seems to have a blog nowadays so here's mine, see a description of who I am and what I do at www.mjakeman.co.uk!