Moved to www.khasim.in

Hello everyone,

It is interesting to know that readers are looking for updates and are willing to read my blogs :)

I have moved my blog to wordpress and have linked it with http://www.khasim.in/

Please follow up here.

Thanks

Regards,
Khasim

An yearly update

Multiple thoughts keep me away from blogging :

1. I always think before writing, will this benefit any one? what does one get by reading this material? am I giving some thing back, etc
2. Is wordpress better than blogspot, I also got my own domain www.khasim.in nothing started yet.
3. Should I just use twitter or facebook and avoid blogging?

But when ever I see the analytics for this blog page, I get another set of confidence that there is some one who is interested in reading.

Anyways, I have finally decided that I am going to continue blogging and using the same page for some more time :)

Where am I today ?
As per my last post I am involved in arowboat.org - a community portal for TI Android. Trying my best to get Android on all ARM based devices Sitara(tm) from Texas Instruments. Android has become my favorite subject now, every day a new issue to solve, a new component to integrate, a new framework to optimize. I am just loving it !!!

My passion is always open source and community and through Android I am getting closer to products which was difficult when I was doing just Linux drivers. Today getting a complete device up is just few hours away. By getting Android on Beagleboard.org, Craneboard and many community platforms meets both my hobbies open platforms and open software.

My next plans:

I have lots in mind, no time to execute them all. One thing I realized with the failure of my hawk efforts - if you cannot give time then don't enter or go near it. I don't want to repeat the mistake again. There fore I am just focusing on what I can do or what I can handle.

I want to give best of Android through arowboat.org, but always get caught in some work on the other, trying my best to get apps, demos, devices. Hope it gets done and helps community.

Will continue on Android for now - no open hardware plans for me yet.... :(

Upcoming blogs
I will start writing more of my thoughts on arowboat.org and Android. I will not focus on technical aspects here that is good to go on arowboat.org.

Last seven months ...

It has been seven months since my last post - can't believe.

Last seven months have been very exciting, learning a lot ... (just trying to gather where I spent these seven months).

When I was posting my previous blog, I was in reading a magazine and was waiting for my turn to demonstrate Hawkboard ... lot of things have progressed on hawkboard since then. We were able to manufacture hawkboards, with software coming along, hosted site, created logo, multiple events, presentations. It was really good to get Farnell, IDA and Special Computing to distribute hawkboards world wide. I am personally happy with the way Hawkboard is moving in the community. Very good experts in community have started using hawkboard and my work has totally reduced since then. Not able to spend any good time on cleaning up the software, lot of things are pending from my side on migrating to new kernel, getting hawkboard patches upstream, getting hawkboard in u-boot mainline, etc. I have very good demos from Koen Kooi, Roger Monk and many folks from community, have to spend some time to make videos, etc.. - When will I do these ..... ?

Following hawkboard, I started looking into Sitara (tm texas instruments) family of processors http://www.ti.com/sitara . Looks like the ARM portfolio is stretched from MCUs to High End Applications processors. While my year 2009 ended with few presentations at FOSS.in and ARM Symposium, the 2010 started on an easy front, with very little coding :( , limited community interactions and tutorials, etc. Hope I will pick up on these.

Since last month the excitement is high... I have started moderating http://arowboat.org - the Android portal for OMAP3, Mentor graphics team has done really good job, I was able to get my OMAP3 machines running Android in no time... looks like I will continue doing Android for some more time. I have no idea of Android apps, very poor in Java :) or :( - thought I would start spending time this weekend on Android SDK. Hope no one disturbs....

Am I missing some thing - yeah my all time favorite beagle - I should have tried and planned for ESC http://esc-chicago.techinsightsevents.com/ti_beagleboard where Beagle XM is getting launched. The efforts from Gerald Coley is really amazing, he has considered lot of community view points like Camera connector, Ethernet, USB HUB and many more. I plan to work on Android for Beagle XM next week. In two weeks I should have Beagle XM running Android with SGX drivers integrated. BTW, you will soon get SGX drivers on arowboat.org.

What else... ? watch me more live on mailing lists for arowboat.org and hawkboard.org and beagleboard.org

Looking forward to re-initiate Beagle clinics and be prepared for hawk tawks.....!!!

Product of the Year so far .... ?

While I was waiting in the lobby I happened to open this magazine called Product Design & Development. Interestingly on page 24 I read this survey or question

"What has been the 2009 Product of the Year so far ? "

One says it is a signal generator and other says it is Cube from Nissan but actually the first person named Mr. Andrew Weiman says a lot different. I am not sure if I will be violating the copyright, but can't stop printing this on my blog. The lines are "The product of the year isn't a product at all - it's the community". The answer really made me go further down in the article, it says that most innovative business entities this year were using product as platform to create community.

The definition of community from Andrew is really good, "Community is about engaging customer, its about listening, getting buy-in and responding to needs". Its all about giving community access to develop their own product using parent brand as platform - new products or applications that meet new unmet needs.

The second and third paragraphs highlights the communities built around google applications and the iphone applications, also mentions about the Linux and wikipedia leveraging the community efforts.

Last line gives "2009 is the year of the community and the most innovative companies are leading the way", I see the author is from is bresslergroup, not sure if they have tried beagleboard in there desings, at least they should look at the http://hawkboard.wordpress.com/
:)

I truely agree with the answer, this year there were multiple projects driven by / of and for the community and community has performed beyond the expectations. Good to know that in magazines targetted towards Product Design are having open communits analysts.

Something about the status of my work, last couple of weeks were quite busy with lot of travels, amazing amazing and really amazing part was meeting Koen Kooi, Jason Kridner and Gerald Coley.

This month started with "dspisopen" my presentation to give all an insight on how easy it is to use DSP from Linux for non-multimedia applications or for just running a c file on DSP through ARM. Lot of thinking process is going on in the mind, hope I will have some good and simple way of using DSP from ARM. We know there are tons of DSP algorithms which are open, if there is a means to support usage of these in Linux then it would be a really great experience.

We presented hawkboard.org to multiple people to get there first opinion, I am sure we are still making towards early adopters program/launch by end of October.

Gerald brought a good point of starting a initiative on beagleboard called "beagle biscuits", meant to be intesting and cool demos on beagle.

Above all I got hold of Jason's Always innovating touch book, I still have a pending request to allow me to carry it back home to do some cool stuff with the same - hope this gets approved :)

Hawkboard has come along well, all peripherals are working fine, I was able to pull QT and run it on the board, finally we should be starting early adopter program will start as soon as I have kernel patches in davinci GIT tree and hopefully port the u-boot latest on hawkboard and get similar support on the denx tree. I have tried to clarify lot of questions from community about the intiative on http://hawkboard.wordpress.com. Also got a google groups mailing list exclusively for hawkboard users.

I am out of hawkboards for kernel development now, should start looking at this from next week on wards. Also almost all tasks from my previous blog posts are still pending... hope I will get time to quickly work on the same.

Thanks for reading the blog, any suggestions are welcome on khasim at beagleboard dot org, please feel free to get more hawkboard updates from hawkboard.org

Keep watching http://hawkboard.wordpress.com/

Khasim

my work status - OMAPL hawkboard and OMAP3 beagleboard

Again took long time to return .... :)

My friends say I need to correct my attitude on blogging as they are frustrated with my inconsistent blogging, few say talk technical and few want this to be generic.

I am more cautious of blogging, I don't want to say some thing that is misunderstood or irrelevant. It takes significant time to think and write.

So, coming to next question from community - what am I doing these days. Some time back a community member asked about not posting patches on OMAP mailing lists, not present on beagle IRC, not on doing any updates to code.google.com/p/beagleboard wiki inspite of many requests, ...

Just thought of highlighting my acitivities - might look like a status report to my boss he he he he

- As part of a small team (as usual) started a initiative called hawkboard to address the growing need of industrial, instrumentation and Floating point DSP application with an Open Platform. More info about this project can be found at http://hawkboard.org. This is taking 70% of time, man it is so difficult to make a hardware, get designing, handling customs, shipping, huh... I will never indulge in making a board again :) .. I can now understand or feel the pain Gerald Coley might have been through while coming up with beagle board :).

- Looking at porting OpenCV libraries on C674x Floating point DSP, no major break through yet.

- Was very much looking forward to start a portal called dspisopen.com to address and bridge the gap between and Open Linux and bit Closed DSP world, nothing progressed after buying the domain :(

- Started a initiative called beagleclinic in India, I am very happy about this initiative as there is very good responce from local beagle community, it is supposed to be held last saturday of every month, but not this month as I was at Pune for beagle, DM355, OMAPL trainings. Also there is long weekend being celebrated in India.

- With the help of TI, Embinux we were able to conduct a workshop for Android on BeagleBoard, very very positive reponse, initially I thought it would not cross 30 numbers but it happened to gather 300 members from various parts of India. Good event, we got mixed reponse about the content, obiviously when the audience is mixed it is difficult to meet everyones expectations. Embinux team did a good job here, we also have listed down the mistakes that we should be correcting in our next workshop

- We were able to get memory hole issue fixed for OMAP3 with help of Russell (RMK), good patch, but to get to the root cause it took us a while.

- Working on OMAPL 138 to get some good features on board, we got netconsole support in u-boot thanks to Anant gole and Sekhar Nori for digging out the patch we missed in u-boot, we have to get this on OMAP3 u-boot, really cool feature to have for remote software upgrades.

- We were able to work out a deal to get IDA systems as official distributor to sell beagle boards in India, the cost for beagleboard should come down a bit now as we will looking towards manufacturing beagleboards in India. Thanks to Gerald C, CircuitCo and IDA systems for helping the India community.

- Conducted trainings at multiple IEEE hosted trainings and workshops on beagleboard. Good one was at IIT kharagpur the team was very promising, hope to see some good contributions soon.

Past is always Past, what next ..... in priority

- I have cool XDS 100 V2 to test at my desk, will have to do this ASAP

- Get hawk flying... the current issue is the cost is bit high, working on getting in reduced in all possible ways. Mainly by irritating the stake holder ha ha ha ha

- Still some blocking items like SATA, NAND and USB OTG have to be tested while typing this blog, I am waiting for board to be made available by the hardware teams... :). Yet to find good tests to validate Composite In and VGA (Got some help on timings from Frank W).

- Submit patches to get support for hawkboard in Davinci GIT tree, hope Kevin approves all my patches :)

- Getting more good demos for launch, don't know what.. and think about the launch date. We don't have a disty signed yet...

- I think most of us know that OMAP DSP Link will move to some thing called Syslink .. I have been assigned to work on getting this to community to get initial feedback on source, just waiting for a correct version to get this to community.... I understand community way is to ”Release early, release often” ... but we should have some thing good to release early and then we will release often :)

- Will focus on DSP components, Gagan and team has built simple examples to show the usage of DSP in a multi core platform like OMAP.

- Have to get some thing working out of OpenCV on Floating point DSP. Not sure when and how I will be able to start this activity

- Want to conduct beagle clinics in different Cities in India mainly Chennai, Hyderabad and Pune as there are many requests from these regions.

- I have to cleanup code.google.com/p/beagleboard wiki, it is the ugliest site I have ever seen because it is maintained by me :(... I should do this, I should have worked on MMC u-boot compilation error reported by Dirk Behme, didn't get any chance to look at this. Hope we have resolved this now ... :)

- I prefer to host a GIT tree for beagle with latest kernel where all peripherals have been tested to work and have some performance numbers against each of the drivers and a test plan. Mainly the USB, PM, DSS2 and V4L. Some good place for 3D SGX tutorials and DSP...

- Leopard is on list, but not sure if I will get some time out of OMAP3 and OMAPL 138 tasks..

- I would love to conduct a Open Source Symposium in Bangalore in India, highlighting the Open source offering and community efforts on OMAP, DM, OMAP L, etc. Hope I will be able to get some sponsorships and mainly some free time to do the same. Any one want to sponsor this event, please get in touch with me ..... ha ha ha ha ...

So, it is going to lot of fun with OMAP L, but Nov will be more fun with OMAP3 Beagle ...

Let me see how much of these could be accomplished in a minimal time..

hawk hasn't arrived yet, let me try to post some thing on http://hawkboard.wordpress.com

Good Luck, happy Dassera (Indian Festival).

dspisopen.com

dspisopen.com - a initiative to bridge the gap between open "Linux" community and DSP programming.

I have no good knowledge of DSP, except using it. For last 5 years I have been associated with DSP as a blackbox, going a step deep into it was never easy. I think this is same feeling a Linux developer will have with DSPs.

On the other hand, when I look at the DSP users, they are pretty much comfortable with there world of DSP algorithms, executing them on simulators and costly platforms/products. They feel getting into any high level operating system like Linux and running a simple algorithm is never an easy task and leads to unncessary complications and delay in execution.

Though we are moving towards highend, low power processors like ARM Cortex A8 / A9, the requirement for DSP is not getting deteriorated. The reason is simple, we need more realtime data processing technology. The DSP applications are not limited to Multimedia but get more deeper in lot of non-multimedia applications like medical, security, image processing, speech, industrial data processing, video analytics, etc. "Not getting the DSP terms for these".

There are lot of applications or domains where DSP is being used and Linux is entering every DSP domain as a generic operating system to handle user experience side of it and Linux is not limited to multimedia application space. The DSP usage requirement in Linux is getting bigger and there is a role to be played by every DSP programmer and Linux developer in colloboaratively defining standard protocols to meet the exponentially growing demad of Linux and DSP in there respective worlds.

dspisopen.com will try to address these gaps by bringing both worlds together in a much open and efficient, effective way.

Kindly help me in populating the dspisopen.com site ....

Thanks.

Khasim
khasim@beagleboard.org

Show me the Code - Open Source

"Talk is cheap - Show me the Code" - FOSS.in/2008. I derived my headline from FOSS.in.

It has been a very long time I wrote some thing. What was I doing all these days.....?

I was requesting every one to show me their code :)

Here are my thoughts on Open Source -

- What is Open Source?
Show your source

- What is Source?
Effort !!! after putting enormous energy, time and patience one will come up with few lines of code that addresses or solves a problem.

- Are Efforts paid?
Yes, some times Efforts are paid or brought by some one. Some times they are Free.

- When I combine the above ...
Its all about Sharing My Effort...!

- Why do I need to Share some thing that I learnt or developed?
To make it evolve.

While talking to a professor at a college, I told "Students have learnt selfishness for 25 years and on a single day we cannot teach them Sharing"

Our life starts at home, when parent tell their kid not to share there homework to get ranked high at school, Teachers never advice to work collaboratively on a problem as we are ranked based on our answers, College doesn't teach us working together in examination halls. In our entire life we are told to deal with problems on an individual basis, we are asked to hide our efforts to get better name in society. After spending our life on these principles for 25 years, one day HR at an organization asks us "ARE YOU A TEAM PLAYER ?" --

Common on, how can I be a team player, I always solved problems on my own, never learnt using efforts of others, or sharing my own efforts. How can you expect me to be a team player?

Open Source,
- is not giving your lines of code to some one when you don't need any more,
- is not publishing 1000s of lines on a single day and asking others to work on the same
- is not about disclosing your source for free
- is not about teaching or building expertize on your work

It is all about solving problems collaboratively. If you forget collaborating, then the opened source of yours is of no use.

Openess enables Innovation, Innovation solves problems and Gives credit for what you are called "an engineer..."

Enjoy Open Source Solutions at http://beagleboard.org/ ...!