So, for a subject at uni (Digital System Design), we have to learn and use vhdl. Not the best language ever invented (who the hell bases a language on Ada anyway…. ew), but I suppose it gets the job done.

We learnt using modelsim and quartus on the uni computers, and from the very start I thought they were terrible, terrible programs. Modelsim seems to freeze regulary during simple tasks, highlighting leaves much to be desired, compiling is extremly awkward and half the time was spent trying procedures in a slightly different order to get things compiled/running.

The other night while at home I decided to give the GHDL suite a go, and god am I glad I did. Being able to debug in several steps was a great improvement, and gtkwave is a great waveform viewer, or at least it is for all the assignments we get for this subject. No longer do I have to use uni computers, or use the expensive ugly beast that is modelsim.

I sort of enjoyed working in vhdl for a little bit there…

I now have a google profile!! Hooray?

Now everyone can google my name and find me….

I’m not so into this blog thing… Wonder if anyone ever even reads this stuff.

Easter has come and gone, with a mild amount of chocolate digested. The birth of zombie jesus was remembered by some, for others, easter just brought an overwhelming amount of advertising about rabbits with eggs came into their lives.

Anyway, latest and greatest is a dead hard drive(s), having lots of fun getting that going again. ddrescue to the…. rescue. Hopefully haven’t lost anything; recovered all of my boot drive, but another drive isn’t as lucky it seems, though its only stopped working after I fixed the other one!

In other news; uni is always looming, hardly get any time free. Engineering mechanics is quite hard, and not the best taught subject around… Not sure how well that will come out in the end; calculus 2 is making alot more sense the second time around, probably a good thing, though it is a trudge, and I would much rather to be back in linear algebra. Engineering computation is quite easy, but I’m still getting a bit out of it, my C programming skills are less of a hodge podge, a few syntaxy things are now a heck of a lot clearer.

Wish I had some pictures or something, this page is so bland…. (ok, added some, yay relevance)

Ok, well, the new linux install failed, couldn’t get it to boot from grub no matter what I did. Shall leave THAT problem for another day.

In other news, I’ve finally replaced my iphone. It has been replaced by the lowly nokia 7210, and (to be delivered shortly) a sansa fuze.

The Nokia 7210 SuperNova is quite a nice phone, and for only $159 (from AllPhones), its quite the bargain. Only a Series 40 phone, but thats all I need. Only thing I miss is wifi, I liked sshing in to my comp from random places :P Would now cost a fortune over gprs. I’ve already mistakenly clocked up $13.86 in GPRS charges, it seems that its $1.32 per something - more than a minute, and can’t be more than per 10KB….. Trying to figure out how to disable it permanently on the phone, and even get it barred on the carrier side. So far have found no relevant menu options :(

With any luck, I’ll be able to get rockbox going on the fuze, but thats still to be delivered (and investigated).

Instead of burning a cd just to use it again in the same computer, I shall attempt to install linux from linux. This looks like an easy enough guide.