PVOID NdisAllocateMemoryWithTagPriority(
  __in  NDIS_HANDLE NdisHandle,
  __in  UINT Length,
  __in  ULONG Tag,
  __in  EX_POOL_PRIORITY Priority
);

Read the documentation:

Tag [in]
    A string, delimited by single quotation marks, with up to four characters, usually specified in reversed order. 
    The NDIS-supplied default tag for this call is 'maDN', but the caller can override this default by supplying an explicit value.

That's right. Pass that string as a ULONG please. I just don't have the words.

[1]Think kmalloc, but harder to type.

I'm not going to bother explaining what that was about, I'm sure everyone knows by now. Instead, I'm going to complain about a little experiment I did more than three years ago. Hopefully all the buzz around World IPv6 day and the IANA pool exhaustion has encouraged a few more people to offer their blog over modern IPv6, in addition to crusty old IPv4.

The results are, ... well, results. Three years ago there was one blog in Planet Grep which was reachable on the IPv6 internet. This blog is still there (though with a different IP) and there's all of four more. That's 5 out of 69, or 7.24%.
Just for fun I reran the test on the current list of blogs on Planet Grep. 7 of 97 sites, or 7.21% have an IPv6 address.
Not exactly great that. On the bright side: at least the sites which advertise quad-A records are indeed reachable on those addresses, and the one site which had an IPv6 address back in 2008 still has one.

Come on guys (and girls obviously), we can do better than this.

Why? Well, two reasons really, the first is that a really interesting project and the second is the bad influence of a few friends.

If you have a problem, if no one else can help, ...
Well, you should probably call the A-Team, but you've got a software problem you should call me. The A-Team doesn't know anything about software.

While adding support for my board I ran into the following error message:

	make: *** No rule to make target `ts7800_config'.  Stop.

     line=`egrep -i "^[[:space:]]*${2}[[:space:]]" boards.cfg` || {
                echo "make: *** No rule to make target \`$2_config'.  Stop." >&2
		exit 1  

Now to get U-boot to actually start...

So, anyway, it wasn't a dark and stormy night but a bright and sunny afternoon a few weeks ago when I ordered a USB charging cable for my cell phone. They're unreasonably expensive in Belgium but I found a great deal on DealExtreme. A Genuine© Immitation™ Nokia®-Like one even.

Today the cable arrived but when I plugged in my phone it refused to charge.
Linux complained too:

[959307.552135] hub 5-0:1.0: over-current change on port 2

Clearly something was wrong with the cable. Two minutes with a multimeter and a working cable for comparison showed that somehow the ground and +5V connections were inverted.
15 minutes with a soldering iron fixed that. All in all I got a great deal: a charging cable, half an hour of entertainment and that lovely feeling of having fixed something for less than a quarter of the price of a genuine Nokia cable.

Beware of geeks with soldering irons.

${Work} has decreed that passwords must be changed regularly and today it was my turn. Fine, despite the usual silliness in reducing the key space (by enforcing certain sets of characters to be present) and a ridiculous maximum length of 8 characters, I can deal with that. pwsafe generates and remembers the password for me. After a while I even manage to remember it myself.

Clearly that's not a good rant. This, however, is worth complaining about:

  dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1k count=10 | md5sum

]]> http://www.sigsegv.be/blog/Lies_Damned_Lies_and_.html The build system at work needed a bit of a cleanup. It's a fairly standard autoconf/automake deal which has been extended by people who don't understand those tools. This is understandable. There are after all very few people who truly do. I certainly don't.

Still, seeing HOST be confused with TARGET does indicate there's a problem.

While I don't know much about autotools I do know a thing or two about plain old make. I spent some time setting up a non-recursive build system, borrowing heavily from the Linux kernel build system bag of tricks.
After a little work I got the first few applications building with the new system. Before committing it I wanted some performance numbers. Sure, the new system is (at least in my opinion) much cleaner, simpler, and powerful, but a faster build is something every developer cares about.

Measuring build times can be a little tricky as they could vary significantly due to caching, other processes running on the system, ...
The mathematical tools to deal with this exist, but who wants to spend hours refreshing statistics courses? Fortunately there's a very simple tool to do exactly the kind of statistical calculations benchmarks call for: ministat. All you need to do is hand it two files with the results to compare.
It's a FreeBSD tool, getting it to work on Linux is a (trivial) exercise left for the reader.

Here's the output of 11 test runs of both the old (autotools, recursive make) and the new (plain make, non-recursive) system when running 6 jobs simultaneously.

x old-system.txt
+ new-system.txt
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|+                                                                          x  |
|+                                                                          x  |
|+                                                                          x  |
|++                                                                         x  |
|++                                                                         x  |
|++                                                                         xx |
|++                                                                         xxx|
|A|                                                                         A| |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
    N           Min           Max        Median           Avg        Stddev
x  11        662.44        673.03        663.69     665.20545      3.224591
+  11        324.47        329.55        326.46     326.61364     1.8295151
Difference at 95.0% confidence
  -338.592 +/- 2.3318
  -50.9003% +/- 0.350539%
  (Student's t, pooled s = 2.62156)

The results surprised me a little: because there's so little variation in the results, but mostly because the build time with the new system is so much better. There's little variance in these results so simply comparing the first measurements would have told us the same thing. On the other hand, now we know.

I believe I'll have little trouble convincing my coworkers that the new system is better.

It's got 4 connections marked 'In', 4 marked 'out, two sets of TX/RX, two grounds and one marked 24V. There's also one marked 'K', no idea what that one does. On the inside I found a Morotola G18 GSM module, a Rabbit 2000 microprocessor and tucked away at the top a MAX-232 chip.

It looks like the device has two serial ports so I assume it's basically a serial modem. Getting it to work should be a simple matter of issuing the correct AT commands. Fortunately the Morotola module documentation is easy to find. After soldering together a DB-9 connector and hooking it up at 9600 baud, 8N1 it produces a prompt of sorts:

OK
    

Expected setting or rule
ERROR
    

Inserting a SIM card doesn't help, but it does complain about a bad PIN code. After a few more attempts I give up that approach and start looking for the PUK code to unlock my SIM again.

After some more negotiation with Google the Wayback machine turns up an old copy of the www.neoconnex.com website. It looks like the company disappeared soon after October 2005.
The manual on the website reveals the device can't be used as a modem but can send SMS based on its inputs, or set the outputs when it receives an SMS. These actions can be configured according to rules set through a program called 'Tele-M@te Commander'.
That explains the error message when entering AT commands.

The Wayback Machine doesn't have the program so I'm completely stuck. Copies of 'Tele-M@te Commander' or an ISP for a Rabbit 2000 micro controller can be exchanged for beer.

It still doesn't work, but I did find a bug in the PHY driver which got patched yesterday. I was slightly useful!