The only pleasure I get from moving house is stumbling across books I had forgotton I owned

I have to agree with John Burnside on that statement, after having recently moved house again rediscovering our book collection has been a salve for an otherwise exhausting undertaking. I returned to Cambridge four years ago, initially on my own and then subsequently the family moved down to be with me.

We rented a house but, with two growing teenagers, the accommodation was becoming a little crowded. Melodie and I decided the relocation was permanent and started looking for our own property, eventually finding something to our liking in Cottenham village.

Melodie took the opportunity to have the house cleaned and decorated while empty because of overlapping time with our rental property. This meant we had to be a little careful while moving in as there was still wet paint in places.

Moving weekend was made bearable by Steve, Jonathan and Jo lending a hand especially on the trips to Yorkshire to retrieve, amongst other things, the aforementioned book collection. We were also fortunate to have Andy and Jane doing many other important jobs around the place while the rest of us were messing about in vans.

The seemingly obligatory trip to IKEA to acquire furniture was made much more fun by trying to park a luton van which was only possible because Steve and Jonathan helped me. Though it turns out IKEA ship mattresses rolled up so tight they can be moved in an estate car so taking the van was unnecessary.

Having moved in it seems like every weekend is filled with a never ending "todo" list of jobs. From clearing gutters to building a desk in the study. Eight weeks on and the list seems to be slowly shrinking meaning I can even do some lower priority things like the server rack which was actually a fun project.

The holidays this year afforded me some time to finish the boys bedrooms. They both got loft beds with a substantial area underneath. This allows them both to have double beds along with a desk and plenty of storage. Completing the rooms required the construction of some flat pack furniture which rather than simply do myself I supervised the boys doing it themselves.

Teaching them by letting them get on with it was a surprisingly effective and both of them got the hang of the construction method pretty quickly. There was only a couple of errors from which they learned immediately and did not repeat (draw bottoms having a finished side and front becomes back when you are constructing upside down)

The house is starting to feel like home and soon all the problems will fade from memory while the good will remain. Certainly our first holiday season has been comfortable here and I look forward to many more re-reading our books.

I said it was wired like a Christmas tree

I have recently acquired a 27U high 19 inch rack in which I hope to consolidate all the computing systems in my home that do not interact well with humans.

My main issue is that modern systems are just plain noisy, often with multiple small fans whining away. I have worked to reduce this noise by using quieter components as replacements but in the end it is simply better to be able to put these systems in a box out of the way.

The rack was generously given to me by Andy Simpkins and aside from being a little dirty having been stored for some time was in excellent condition. While the proverbs "never look a gift horse in the mouth" and "beggars cannot be choosers" are very firmly at the front of my mind there were a few minor obstacles to overcome to make it fit in its new role with a very small budget.

The new home for the rack was to be a space under the stairs where, after careful measurement, I determined it would just fit. After an hour or two attempting to manoeuvre a very heavy chunk of steel into place I determined it was simply not possible while it was assembled. So I ended up disassembling and rebuilding the whole rack in a confined space.

The rack is 800mm wide IMRAK 1400 rather than the more common 600mm width which means it employs "cable reducing channels" to allow the mounting of standard width rack units. Most racks these days come with four posts in the corners to allow for longer kit to be supported front and back. This particular rack was not fitted with the rear posts and a brief call to the supplier indicated that any spares from them would be eyewateringly expensive (almost twice the cost of purchasing a new rack from a different supplier) so I had to get creative.

Shelves that did not require the rear rails were relatively straightforward and I bought two 500mm deep cantilever type from Orion (I have no affiliation with them beyond being a satisfied customer).

I took a trip to the local hardware store and purchased some angle brackets and 16mm steel square tube. From this I made support rails which means the racked kit has support to its rear rather than relying solely on being supported by its rack ears.

The next problem was the huge hole in the bottom of the rack where I was hoping to put the UPS and power switching. This hole is intended for use with raised flooring where cables enter from below, when not required it is filled in with a "bottom gland plate". Once again the correct spares for the unit were not within my budget.

Around a year ago I built several systems for open source projects from parts generously donated by Mythic Beasts (yes I did recycle servers used to build a fort). I still had some leftover casework from one of those servers so ten minutes with an angle grinder and a drill and I made myself a suitable plate.

The final problem I faced is that it is pretty dark under the stairs and while putting kit in the rack I could not see what I was doing. After some brief Googling I decided that all real rack lighting solutions were pretty expensive and not terribly effective.

At this point I was interrupted by my youngest son trying to assemble the Christmas tree and the traditional "none of the lights work" so we went off to the local supermarket to buy some bulbs. Instead we bought a 240 LED string for £10 (15usd) in the vague hope that next year they will not be broken.

I immediately had a light bulb moment and thought how a large number of efficient LED bulbs at a low price would be ideal for lighting a rack. So my rack is indeed both wired like and as a Christmas tree!

Now I just have to finish putting all the systems in there and I will be able to call the project a success.

HTTP to screen

I recently presented a talk at the Debian miniconf in Cambridge. This was a new talk explaining what goes on in a web browser to get a web page on screen.

The presentation was filmed and my slides are also available. I think it went over pretty well despite the venues lighting adding a strobe ambiance to part of proceedings.

I thought the conference was a great success overall and enjoyed participating. I should like to thank Cosworth for allowing me time to attend and for providing some sponsorship.

I am not a number I am a free man

Once more the NetSurf developers tried to escape from a mysterious village by writing web browser code.

The sixth developer workshop was an opportunity for us to gather together in person to contribute to NetSurf.

We were hosted by Codethink in their Manchester offices which provided a comfortable and pleasant space to work in.

Four developers managed to attend in person from around the UK: Michael Drake, Daniel Silverstone, Dave Higton and Vincent Sanders.

The main focus of the weekends activities was to work on improving our JavaScript implementation. At the previous workshop we had laid the groundwork for a shift to the Duktape JavaScript engine and since then put several hundred hours of time into completing this transition.

During this weekend Daniel built upon this previous work and managed to get DOM events working. This was a major missing piece of implementation which will mean NetSurf will be capable of interpreting JavaScript based web content in a more complete fashion. This work revealed several issues with our DOM library which were also resolved.

We were also able to merge several improvements provided by the Duktape upstream maintainer Sami Vaarala which addressed performance problems with regular expressions which were causing reports of "hangs" on slow processors.

The responsiveness of Sami and the Ducktape project has been a pleasant surprise making our switch to the library look like an increasingly worthwhile effort.

Overall some good solid progress was made on JavaScript support. Around half of the DOM interfaces in the specifications have now been implemented leaving around fifteen hundred methods and properties remaining. There is an aim to have this under the thousand mark before the new year which should result in a generally useful implementation of the basic interfaces.

Once the DOM interfaces have been addressed our focus will move onto the dynamic layout engine necessary to allow rendering of the changing content.

The 3.4 release is proposed to occur sometime early in the new year and depends on getting the JavaScript work to a suitable stable state.

Dave joined us for the first time, he was principally concerned with dealing with bugs and the bug tracker. It was agreeable to have a new face at the meeting and some enthusiasm for the RISC OS port which has been lacking an active maintainer for some time.

The turnout for this workshop was the same as the previous one and the issues raised then are still true. We still have a very small active core team who can commit only limited time which is making progress very slow and are lacking significant maintenance for several frontends.

Overall we managed to pack 16 hours of work into the weekend and addressed several significant problems.

It takes courage to sit on a jury. How many of us want to decide the fate of another person's life or freedom?

I think Regina Brett has a point although having now experienced being a juror in a British crown court I have a much better understanding of both the process and effectiveness of the jury system.

The actual process of becoming a juror on a case is something I had not been aware of previously. You simply receive a letter telling you to be at the court on a specific date and that you are required to be available for at least ten days, possibly more. The only qualification to receive the letter is to be on the electoral roll and it is an invitation with few options to refuse without serious repercussions.

When you arrive at the court you are directed to the Jury lounge (practical hint: take a book) where you notice there are over forty people, which would seem odd until you realise there are three courtrooms and they each need a jury, even then there are an excess of people which is because of the selection process.

The process of jury selection is fairly simple, an usher for a court comes and calls fourteen names which forms the jury in waiting. The group is taken up to the court waiting room (this room gets terribly familiar over the forthcoming weeks) and then twelve names are called.

As each person is called they enter the jury box in order which persists for the entire trial (practical hint:remember your juror number). Before each person is sworn or affirmed there is the possibility they will be found unsuitable and will be replaced by one of the previously unselected jurors. Any unselected jurors are then sent back to the jury lounge and become available for forming another jury in waiting.

Anyone unselected at the end of the process has to remain available to return to the court to form a jury in waiting when a previous trial ends until they have exhausted their duty. There were a few of these unfortunate people who were kept in a state of limbo for several days and I am relieved this did not happen to me.

Being a juror, from a purely practical perspective, felt like working an office job for ten days. Duties consisting of attending a series of meetings with strange rules and the typically understated British approach to mentioning the result of breaking them.

I participated in two cases, both of which were (almost by definition) unpleasant happenings, these were a case of Grievous bodily harm and an offence under section 7 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003.

Both cases were challenging in their own ways the first because of the way the case was presented and the second because of its subject matter. One of the most important rules is "Do not discuss anything with anyone as it might be perjury" so going along with that I will not be discussing any details. Because I cannot be specific this post has become a little impersonal, you will have to forgive me as I found I had to remove a great deal of more content which was not appropriate.

An important thing to note is that the trials bore no resemblance to TV courtroom drama. The trials proceed in a professional manner with very little theatrics. The prosecution barrister commences outlining the case against the accused, calling witnesses and reading into evidence uncontested material. The defence then gets to present their case, again calling witnesses and placing documents into evidence.

One of the striking things about this process is that if the barristers do not call a witness or present evidence that would seem to be pertinent, the jury must not draw inference from that omission, which is especially bizarre when a central witness referred to by almost everyone involved with the case is not called.

Once the case is presented the jury is sequestered in a room and must come to a unanimous decision on each of the charges. This was, for me, the most challenging part of the whole process. Twelve people with unique views on the information presented have to attempt to discuss the evidence and not simply go with their first impressions based on their preconceptions.

The jury is allowed to ask for some evidence to be repeated and if deliberations take some time the jury may be instructed that a majority of 10 to 2 may be accepted. I imagine at some point the jury will run out of time to make a decision and something else will happen but I did not experience this.

Overall the experience was enlightening if not enjoyable, I understand the process a lot more and am happy to have discharged my duty and am equally glad the responsibility will not come around again for at least a few years.

Raspberries are not the only fruit

I have worked with ARM based systems for longer than I care to admit to myself. From the Acorn Archimedes 305 in 1987 through to modern 64bit systems I have seen many many changes in the ARM community. One big change has been the rise of the inexpensive single board computer (SBC).

Arguably the Raspberry Pi (RPi) was responsible for starting this trend. Before RPi there were small development boards available, I was even involved in producing some of them, none of these really became a big thing and were principally vehicles for silicon vendors to showcase their SoC in an accessible way. When I say accessible I mean for silicon vendors who were previously used to charging many thousands of pounds for their development boards now only charging hundreds.

In my opinion the RPi was a complete disruption to the SBC market. In early 2012 a complete ARM computer system could now be purchased for $35 (£25) which was substantially cheaper than the best contemporary competitor the Beaglebone $89 (£60)

To be clear, the reason the RPi succeeded (millions sold, household name) was not on price alone but also the large amount of good supporting software and how easy it was made for teachers and makers to use.

There were several areas that the RPi managed to change perceived issues into opportunities for using what was already available or third parties to provide. There were also several issues raised about the original RPi:

• no case
• no integrated storage
• not having an x86 processor
• being a slow processor
• limited peripheral support
• no real time clock
• not supplying keyboards, mice
• not providing displays. 

Some of these have been addressed since release as the foundation now sells cases, hardware revisions with much more powerful processors, pre-configured storage, cameras and displays. The important thing to note here though is the RPi has made the bare SBC a much more widely accepted product where all the non critical parts are considered "extras" and a lot is forgiven because of the price.

With that acceptance there have been many, many new SBC coming to market with better peripherals and increasingly competitive pricing. These are technically not clones as none of them use the Broadcom processor of the RPi but they often share many features and possibly even a compatible expansion header.

The Banana Pi was one of these copycats which I acquired for a similar price as an RPi in 2014. The main processor of this system was a 1Ghz dual core Allwinner A20 processor (a considerable advance on the 700MHz single core of the original RPi) coupled to a gigabyte of memory. Additionally the board benefited from having SATA and gigabit Ethernet MAC which made for a much more versatile system. Various third parties filled in the missing peripherals including my own attempt at a case.

I acquired a cubietruck for the NetSurf project to use as a build node in their CI system this is again based on the A20 but with more memory and somewhat better peripheral support but at a substantial cost over the Banana Pi.

The most recent addition to this form factor is the introduction by Xunlong Software of the Orange Pi PC. This little board is the same footprint as the RPi2 B+ design but with differing connector placement. The processor is a quad core 1.6GHz Allwinner H3 with a gigabyte of memory and has has Ethernet and USB but no SATA.

The big news about this board though is the price, at $15 (£10) it resets the price expectations just as the RPi did before it. I was initially sceptical of the quality of the product (or if it would arrive at all) but I have acquired five of these boards and every one of them came well packaged, boxed and in a static bag, just like the RPi does, and they all worked.

I created a case design based on my RPi slimline case so they would be protected when piled up with all the other boards. The use of a DC barrel jack instead of micro USB for power is better in that the connector is more robust and intended for higher current draws but does mean additional leads are needed. There are, however, two flies in the ointment, neither are showstoppers but make the board a little more difficult to use.

One is a simple necessity of a substantial heatsink on the H3 processor. Initially I used a small 20 x 20mm copper heatsink (around 800mm square surface area) but this was insufficient under full load. I did not want to have to use a fan so I milled some slots into copper round bar, then cut off sections and faced them on a lathe. The completed design had more than 2200 square mm surface area and cost around $2.5 (£1.5) in material (and a couple of hours in the workshop but that was fun and I made something)

The second issue and arguably much more serious is that of software. Let me be honest, it is dreadful, I mean very bad indeed. The images provided from the Orange Pi website are some of the worst examples of "do something quick" I have experienced.

Fortunately a user on the forums named loboris decided to create scripts that generate a Debian (and Ubuntu and Fedora) distribution images that can be installed from SD card. He relies on a somewhat patched 3.4 kernel full of Allwinner vendor changes and the inevitable binary blobs for the Marli GPU but the result does work.

I have had a few units acting as distcc compiler slaves for two weeks now at 100% CPU loading and they are still running. The processor does not get overly warm with the heatsink installed and Debian behaves just fine. The main caveat being that it is definitely not going to work if you try and update the kernel through packaging.

The state of software support and Xunlong Software relying on a forum user to complete their product does tarnish an otherwise impressive and possibly market changing SBC.

Perhaps I expect too much for fifteen bucks? I guess when the cost of the case, heatsink, cables and memory storage card is similar to the rest of the computer there is simply no margin left for anything else.

In conclusion hopefully this brief overview has provided some insight into what is available in this market and that the Raspberry Pi  is indeed not the only option.

I finish with an image is of my ARM build farm consisting of every SBC I mention here (including a couple of RPi)

NetSurf developers and the Order of the Phoenix

Once more the NetSurf developers gathered to battle the forces of darkness, or as they are more commonly known web specifications.

The fifth developer weekend was an opportunity for us to gather in a pleasant setting and work together in person. We were graciously hosted, once again, by Codethink in their Manchester offices.

Four developers managed to attend in person from around the UK: Michael Drake, John-Mark Bell, Daniel Silverstone and Vincent Sanders.

The main focus of the weekends activities was to address two areas that have become overwhelmingly important: JavaScript and Layout.

Although the browser obviously already has both these features they are somewhat incomplete and incapable of supporting the features of the modern web.

JavaScript

The discussion started with JavaScript and its implementation. We had previously looked at the feasibility of changing our JavaScript engine from Spidermonkey to DukTape. We had decided this was a change we wanted to make when DukTape was mature enough to support the necessary features.

The main reasons for the change are that Spidermonkey is a poor fit to NetSurf as it is relatively large and does not provide a stable API guarantee. The lack of a stable API requires extensive engineering to update to new releases. Additionally support for compiling on minority platforms is very challenging meaning that most platforms are stuck using version 1.7 or 1.85 (current release is version 31 with 38 due).

We started the move to Duktape by creating a development branch, integrating the Duktape library  and open coding a minimal implementation of the core classes as a proof of concept. This work was mostly undertaken by Daniel with input from myself and John-Mark. This resulted in a build that was substantially smaller than using Spidermonkey with all the existing functionality our tests cover.

The next phase of this work is to take the prototype implementation and turn it into something that can be reliably used and covers the entire JavaScript DOM interface. This is no small job as there are at least 200 classes and 1500 methods and properties to implement.

Layout

The layout library design discussion was an extensive and very involved. The layout engine is a browsers most important component. It takes all the information processed by the CSS and DOM libraries, applies a vast number of involved rules and produces a list of operations that can be rendered.

This reimplementation of our rendering engine has been in planning for many years. The existing engine stems from the browsers earliest days more than a decade ago and has many shortcomings in architecture and implementation we hope to address.

The work has finally started on libnslayout with Michael taking the lead and defining the initial API and starting the laborious work of building the test harness, a feature the previous implementation lacked!

The second war begins

For a war you need people and it is a little unfortunate that this was our lowest ever turnout for the event. This is true of the project overall with declining numbers of commits and interest outside our core group. If anyone is interested we are always happy to have new contributors and there are opportunities to contribute in many areas from image assets, through translations, to C programming.

We discussed some ways to encourage new developers and try and get committed developers especially for the minority platform frontends. The RISC OS frontend for example has needed a maintainer since the previous one stepped down. There was some initial response from its community, culminating in a total of two patches, when we announced the port was under threat of not being releasable in future. Unfortunately nothing further came from this and it appears our oldest frontend may soon become part of our history.

We also covered some issues from the bug tracker mostly to see if there were any patterns that we needed to address before the forthcoming 3.4 release.

There was discussion about recent improvements to the CI system which generate distribution packages from the development branch and how this could be extended to benefit more users. This also included authorisation to acquire storage and other miscellaneous items necessary to keep the project infrastructure running.

We managed over 20 hours of work in the two days and addressed our current major shortcomings. Now it just requires a great deal of programming to complete the projects started here.

To a child, often the box a toy came in is more appealing than the toy itself.

I think Allen Klein might not have been referring to me when he said that but I do seem to like creating boxes for my toys.

My Lenovo laptop has an Ultrabay, these are a way to easily swap optical and hard drives drives. They allow me to carry around additional storage and, providing I remembered to pack the drive, access optical media.

Over time I have acquired several additional hard drives housed in Ultrabay caddies. Generally I only need to access one at a time but increasingly I want to have more than one available.

Lenovo used to sell docking stations with multiple Ultrabays but since Series 3 was introduced this is no longer the case as the docks have been reduced to port replicators.

One solution is to buy a SATA to USB convertor which lets you use the drive externally. However once you have more than one drive this becomes somewhat untidy, not to mention all those unhoused drives on your desk become something of a hazard.

Recently after another close call I decided what I needed was a proper external enclosure to house all my drives. After some extensive googling I found nothing suitable ready to buy. Most normal people would give up at this point, I appear to be an abnormal person so I got the CAD package out.

A few hours of design and a load of laser cutting later I came up with a four bay enclosure that now houses all my Ultrabay caddies.

The design was slightly evolved to accommodate the features of some older caddies and allow a pencil to be used to eject the drives (I put a square hole in the back)

The completed unit uses about £10 of plastic and takes 30 minutes to lasercut.

The only issue with the enclosure as manufactured is that Makespace ran out of black plastic stock and I had to use transparent to finish so it is not in classic black as lenovo intended.

As usual all the design files are publicly available from my design repo.