Stephen's Weblog

I’ve been working on a number of different projects lately, unfortunately none of them public yet.. And some new interesting directions are opening up to me, which is forcing me to rethink a few things.

In the meantime though I’ve put together a photo album of some pictures I took while the power was out here, I hope you find it interesting :) Ice Storm / Power Outage photo album (picasaweb)

Of course I know you’re just waiting for news on dstunnel, or some other project; Probably we’ll get some actual progress this month, whether it be sooner or later I’m not sure of yet.

And, my life continues to be uninteresting to the casual observer. Ah well, price I pay for not talking about things. I’m in the process of rescheduling the current tasks and deciding how much I want to make public – In a few days I’ll post some more information about when things should be done, pending the power not going out again ;)

(Not that I entirely blame the power outage; but it really didn’t help and threw a lot of things off schedule, that I now have to figure out how to rearrange.)

Also: happy new year! it’s 2008 now, which is a generally uninteresting number (factors to 2*2*2*251; is 11111011000 in binary, 7D8 hex, 3730 octal, I’m sure there are some interesting series it’s in though) I do hope this coming year is sufficiently interesting; and I expect to get a lot done.

I’m out of town, away from home for a week and a half; spending some time with family.
I have some plans to get things done, but don’t actually expect to get anything done :) Will pull things back together and (try to) put together a schedule once I get back… I would like to get the optimization contest going sooner than later, though, so that’s my first priority. After that, I have some crazy ds ideas I want to play with. But my priorities might shift by then, we’ll see. In the meantime I’m trying to enjoy myself and be lazy over the holidays, I might be around before, but will be back for sure in january.

Well, coming in on the “exciting” side of the news this week, is due to an ice storm, my residence’s power has been out since monday evening this week (presently I’ve been 85 hours without power at home)
Needless to say this isn’t really good for productivity, and I’ve got almost nothing done… I’ll be updating this post when I do finally get power back, with the duration that it was out for.

Update! Power is back, after 6.4 days without power (roughly 154 hours)

This past week has been far less stressful, though I haven’t got nearly as much as I would have liked done. Competition site is going to be done for next weekend now, so study up on ARM asm :)

I have a large handful of other projects that have occupied this weekend, but they’re not ones I really want to disclose at this time; maybe later.

That’s all for now, will post again when something interesting happens.

So, this week has entirely not gone how I would have liked; Not to say I haven’t got much done – I’ve completed a fair number of important things, but unfortunately the optimization contest site is still in the dark, and will be until I can scrape together the time to finish it. Which means, pretty soon, but I don’t know exactly when. It’s times like these that make me question whether my priorities are set the best they can be…

So… I’ve decided it’s a good idea to update the blog about once a week. Perhaps writing about things more often will make my life more clear. maybe. Not really sure where this is going to go yet.

Anyway, there are a lot of things I can’t talk about yet, but some that I can… Most notably, a DS ASM optimization contest website I’m working on… I’m currently planning to have the first contest start next weekend… I’m not going to say too much about it yet, but I hope some people find it interesting…

Well, that’s it for now. Maybe I’ll find more to talk about next time.

Hello all, I’m now going to disclose some information about a relatively secret set of projects that I have planned… This was actually the final goal in mind for the apprentice project, but I think this approach will be more useful. I’m looking for several programmers to be involved with these projects, for several reasons: first, is magnitude- this collection is much larger than anything I’ve ever attempted before. Second, is steering; I have a reasonably well thought out plan for how to proceed, but being able to debate it with other people will likely increase the plan’s effectiveness. Additionally, having more people involved means that things might go faster and bugs or security exploits might be found and resolved more quickly.
Basicly the idea of this set of projects is to build up all the required parts to build a proper operating system, and ultimately tie them together. I realize this is a lofty goal, but I think it is achievable, even if not entirely reasonable. And, if it does fail, there will still be a lot of useful code modules that could be used to improve other operating systems.
I do not require perfect programmers (if such a thing exists…) for this task, in fact all of these projects will be built alongside a rather extensive set of unit tests designed to verify correctness in a great many cases, and to expose security problems long before they become a problem.
The first of these projects is….. a new TCP/IP stack, possibly to be called sgIP 1.0; though the name is still up in the air, really. If you are interested in working on this project, please contact me… I’m still working on making time for these things, so it will be a week or 2 before the project gets off the ground, but let me know regardless.

So, things aren’t exactly moving along as fast as I’d like… Here’s the status of a few things that are near the front of my queue:
* Apprentice Exam, round 2 – I’ve just been lazy putting this together… it’s about half done, I will finish the other half and post it sometime. Not sure when exactly, yet.
* Spartan-3E logic analyzer – Hardware side on this is done now (not completely tested) – Software side is started, but not usable yet. Once it gets to be usable, I’ll continue work on Wii RE’ing.

There are a handful of other things I’m doing too, but they’re not quite as interesting or important… I’ll update when more gets done.

So, the first round is basicly over… I’ve actually taken a few entries after I said it was closed, so there are 4 “finalists” now. It’s still not technically too late, though when I get the second round out, it will be too late.

Right now, I’m busy preparing the second round in what little spare time I have; When I do get it done, it’ll be a multi-page PDF file (probably 15 to 20 pages) covering a wide array of subjects. The deadline for submission will probably be about a month after I release it.  Anyone of course will be welcome to take the “exam”, and I’ll release the answers after all the finalists turn their solutions in.

I haven’t sent out the emails regarding how well people have done in the first round yet, it’s something I’ll get to before I release the second round, but I make no guarantees as to exactly when. Not that I’ve forgotten or anything :)

One more thing: I invite you to Nominate your favorite NDS/GBA homebrew for the 2006 NDS Homebrewcast homebrew awards (forum.gbadev.org), which is being put on by an aspiring podcast called (unsurprisingly) the NDS Homebrewcast (homebrewcast.com).

That’s all for today, I’ll post more updates when things happen, of course.