Mattise Progress (and blog updates)

Well, it's been a while since I talked about Mattise here, and although I'm not sure exactly how many people follow its development I think it helps me as much as it helps everyone else to know exactly what's going on...

The current working copy of Mattise (ie, Mattise 3.0) has the following features:

• Powerful bitmap-based page allocator
• Simple kernel heap allocator (possibly changed to dlmalloc in the future)
• Paging support, with reference counting for mappings
• ELF binary support (loading modules, which are basically object files, and linked binaries)
• Rudimentary VFS (currently just performs replacement based on a prefix/device binding, soon will replace the old device manager)
• Device manager (soon to be replaced with VFS)
• ATA driver (hard drive I/O)
• Console driver (/dev/tty basically, though no terminal compatibility at all yet)
• FAT32 support (no other FATs though)
• Tiny bash-like shell
• Functional newlib port
  
• Runs NASM, binutils

The last point is what I'm most proud of.

Also, to avoid making multiple entries within the space of such a short amount of time, I'm going to mention some new things that I'll be bringing into this blog:

• More personal stuff (photos, anecdotes, etc...)
• Updates on projects
• Informational articles
• (Rarely) A discussion about some concept (eg, "Gaming: Pick up and Play or The Epic?")

Enjoy!

Thailand/Laos Trip: Foot Photos!

In my not-so-recent-anymore Thailand/Laos trip, I had a thing where I took photos of my feet at different places. It's about time I actually put these up somewhere, so here they are!

This is outside a temple, if I remember correctly:

This isn't really a foot shot per se, but it looks cool.

This here is at the Plain of Jars (Site 1) in Laos.

This is at a bus station in Thailand, just before a long and tedious 12 hour bus trip. I dunno why we sat around waiting, because it would've been smarter to use up all of our energy and then get on the bus and sleep away the hours...

This is in Chiang Mai International Airport (who knows, you might stand on this exact spot one day...) waiting for our flight (in the checkin area though).

Next overseas trip I do I'll make it a goal to get a shot of my feet in all situations I'm in, so I can continue this idea.

By the way, I did actually remove those shoes during the trip - they just happened to be more comfortable than my pluggers every single day.

A final foot shot...

None of those are my feet, but it goes to show what motorbiking in rural areas can do to your feet.

Seagate's External Hard Drives

I recently purchased a Seagate FreeAgent Desktop (500 GB) to store my music, disk images, and video editing scratch data. It was fast enough (even over USB) to suit my needs, and I was extremely happy with it - and it even looks stylish in comparison to some of the "bricks" you can get these days. I was a very happy customer.

Until Wednesday.

Turns out I've now experienced something a lot of other FreeAgent Desktop owners have experienced - the drive simply doesn't get recognized anymore. This of course causes no end of frustration as I have a couple of hours of video I can't ever get back (that's *extremely* important), several disk images for different operating systems (multiple Linux distributions), and my entire music library stored on a now unaccessible drive.

Every troubleshooter I've done points to internal failure, and at the moment I'm pretty sure the internal controller is fried or something. I've seen many people put up pictures showing how to pull apart the case and get the hard drive, but it's completely useless to me because I don't have another enclosure (and I need it for my laptop).

I highly suggest not getting a FreeAgent Desktop if you're looking for an external hard drive solution, but instead I would point you to a FreeAgent Pro, which doesn't seem to suffer from this problem.

EDIT: To update with what's going on, it turns out I need to send my faulty drive to Seagate and they'll ship out a replacement to me. Of course, I need to pay to send the drive to them. Data recovery isn't included in any of this, so I'll have to pay extra to get my critical data off the stupid thing. Obviously the warranty is totally useless to me because it doesn't cover any data on the drive, so I may as well crack the case and shove the drive itself into another computer (or buy an enclosure).

I'll say it now, I used to have faith in Seagate as a brand, but right now I'm drawing a line in the sand and saying that I will never be buying another Seagate device again. Sorry, Seagate, try harder next time.