The Curious Engineer

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Adrian Chadd's Ramblings

adrianchadd.blogspot.com

AmigaRetro computingNetworkingLinux / UnixElectronics

’10’15’20’25
Posts
317 from 14 Apr 2008 to 29 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (8 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
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2026 4

  1. Code Challenge Interviews are Dead, or "Why the fuck were companies doing these in the first place?"
  2. Why just switcharoo'ing RAM on a RPI isn't guaranteed to work, or "wait, you have to do WHAT to get DDR to work?"
  3. The great 2024/2025/2026 tech firings, and what happens to all that clue
  4. Being accused of taking down a Data Centre, or "what happens when adrian is the only one who isn't oversubscribed on power?"

2025 5

  1. Installing a 32k DS1386 into an SGI Indy that expects an 8k DS1386
  2. Blinking the SGI Indy Power Light
  3. Reverse Engineering the SGI Indy Monitor Detection, or "thank god someone added SGI indy / indigo 2 support to MAME"
  4. A tale of an SGI Indy, a Sony power supply, and how to keep the fan spinning
  5. Installing FreeBSD-15 directly on an SSD, or "wait this 2007 era AMD K8 1RU server doesn't boot from USB flash?"

2024 4

  1. Getting a Gotek working on a PCW9512
  2. Fixing a dead Amstrad PCW9512+, Part 2
  3. fixing a dead Amstrad PCW9512+
  4. On "repairing this commodore 1551 drive" and "don't plug in the head cable backwards"

2023 3

  1. Reinstalling AmigaOS 3.1.4 on my Amiga 2000 or "oh crap it didn't boot"
  2. resistance is not futile, or "why does my amiga 1000 keyboard not work?"
  3. I got lucky with an Acorn Electron

2022 11

  1. Who's the /BOSS on the Amiga 2000 ?
  2. damnit i slipped and (mostly) built an amiga 500
  3. Installing a kickstart ROM adapter in my Amiga 1000, or "Nothing works, and nothing makes sense"
  4. Fixing a third commodore plus/4, or "god damnit adrian stop it"
  5. Getting new simgen backdrops on my amiga 500
  6. It took me WAY too long to get this gotek to work...
  7. Amiga 1200 - Kickstart 3.1.4 upgrade, but not upgrading to AmigaOS 3.1
  8. At least cross compiling for the Amiga 500 is easier than the 16 bit DOS mode PC stuff
  9. Getting stuff onto the Amiga 500, or "holy crap please include bootstrapping serial file transfer utilities in your OS"
  10. Hacking up an Amiga 500 for 1MB chip RAM and 512k slow RAM
  11. Figuring out how Amiga 500 RAM expansion projects work

2021 2

  1. When off is not off, or "why is my amplifier pulling 30mA when it's off?"
  2. On calibrating up a ubitx, or "why the hell is this so complicated"

2020 6

  1. Repairing and bootstrapping an IBM PC/AT 5170, Part 3
  2. Repairing and bootstrapping an IBM 5170 PC/AT, part 2
  3. Repairing and bootstrapping an IBM 5170 PC/AT, part 1
  4. RFI from crappy electronics, or "how's this sold in the US?"
  5. Fixing up ath_rate_sample to actually work well with 11n
  6. I'm back into the grind of FreeBSD's wireless stack and 802.11ac

2019 3

  1. HF phasing noise eliminators, or "wow ok this mostly works"
  2. Fixing up KA9Q-unix, or "neck deep in 30 year old codebases.."
  3. wow, it's been a while

2018 3

  1. Aligning a TS-430S, or "wait, how am I supposed to check FM again?"
  2. Restoring a TS-430S, or "dry joints and stray RF: a tutorial"
  3. Not merging stuff from FreeBSD-HEAD into production branches, or "hey FreeBSD-HEAD should just be production"

2017 7

  1. More TS-440S hijinx, or "ok, what if you wanna homebrew a digital hookup?"
  2. FreeBSD and APRS, or "hm what happens when none of this is well documented.."
  3. Fixing up TS-440s rigs
  4. gqrx, direct sampling configuration, shortwave/AM reception, etc
  5. gqrx on freebsd
  6. Bringing up 802.11ac on FreeBSD
  7. (finally) investigating how to get dynamic WDS (DWDS) working in FreeBSD!

2016 7

  1. FreeBSD on a tiny system; what's missing
  2. Musings on bringing up services on freebsd-wifi MIPS devices, or "why cross compiling is important"
  3. Debugging TDMA on the AR9380
  4. Updating the broadcom driver part #2
  5. Updating the broadcom softmac driver (bwn), or "damnit, I said I'd never do this!"
  6. Why's my laptop running so hot? Or Firefox, pandora, and 1 million syscalls a second.
  7. On being able to reflash your own devices, or "wow, millions of devices are potentially vulnerable."

2015 15

  1. Fixing up the QCA9558 performance on FreeBSD, or "why attention to detail matters when you're a kernel developer."
  2. Fixing up the RTL8188SU/RTL8192SU 802.11bgn driver (rsu)
  3. As requested: progress of AR9170
  4. Porting a wifi driver from openbsd - AR9170
  5. FreeBSD now has NUMA? Why'd it take so long?
  6. The importance of mentoring, or "how I got involved in FreeBSD"..
  7. RTL-SDR on FreeBSD, or "hey, cool, I live near an airport, I wonder if ADSB works.."
  8. freebsd-wifi-build, or "wait, you can run freebsd on atheros MIPS access points? where do I get that?"
  9. Intel DDIO, LLC cache, buffer alignment, prefetching, shared locks and packet rates.
  10. Using the arswitch ethernet switch on FreeBSD
  11. Cache Line Aliasing #2, or "What happens when you page align everything"
  12. cache line aliasing effects, or "why is freebsd slower than linux?"
  13. FreeBSD on the POWER8: it's alive!
  14. TDMA (somewhat) working on AR9380 chips
  15. On profiling HTTP, or "god damnit people, why are all the open source tools slow?"

2014 12

  1. ... mmm emulators.
  2. More RSS UDP tests - this time on a Dell R720
  3. UDP RSS update: ixbge(4) turned out to have issues..
  4. Receive side scaling: testing UDP throughput
  5. Receive Side Scaling: figuring out how to handle IP fragments
  6. Application awareness of receive side scaling (RSS) on FreeBSD
  7. Hacking on Receive Side Scaling (RSS) on FreeBSD
  8. Why oh why must people think backdoors == NSA? Silly people.
  9. Meraki Sparky boards, and constant resetting
  10. Adding chipset powersave support to FreeBSD's Atheros driver
  11. Porting over the AR8327 support
  12. Hacking on Mindwave for fun and .. fun

2013 21

  1. Experimenting with zero-copy network IO in FreeBSD-HEAD
  2. Doing arduino development on FreeBSD-HEAD
  3. So, FreeBSD on the AR9344? What happened?
  4. The gymnastics required to just do a "HALT" for MIPS..
  5. Finding low hanging fruit with PMC, or "O(wtf)" ?
  6. This blog post is mostly so i dont
  7. Profiling on superscalar architectures, or "no, instruction counts don't necessarily matter nowdays.."
  8. Why, oh why am I seeing RST frames from FreeBSD when I have a high connection rate?
  9. Hacking on the Intel 10GE driver (ixgbe) for fun and .. not-crashing
  10. Doing traffic with the Carambola 2..
  11. Making the AR9330 SoC wifi, or "how it feels doing things right.."
  12. Working on Bluetooth Coexistence
  13. So long, and thanks for all the fish!
  14. The fitbit, or "making me aware of all the exercise I'm not doing"
  15. Trying to implement A-MSDU support, or "what happens when things aren't done in the right order."
  16. A FAQ about today's FSF release
  17. Slashdotted!
  18. Today's Journey: Making AP mode power-save work better
  19. Hey, look, it's lots of atheros NICs in one laptop
  20. AR9380 support on FreeBSD; why it's taken so long..
  21. Why PCI latency timers matter..

2012 16

  1. Be careful of adding debugging, as microseconds count..
  2. Getting TDMA working on 802.11n chipsets
  3. Making the AR5210 NIC work in the office..
  4. Power save, CABQ, multicast frames, EAPOL frames and sequence numbers (or why does my Macbook Pro keep disassociating?)
  5. Lessons learnt from fiddling with the rate control code..
  6. Filtered frames support, or how not to spam the air with useless transmission attempts
  7. Reading rate control information from userland..
  8. Don't let anyone tell you that FreeBSD doesn't "do" 802.11n:
  9. A tale of two sequence numbers, or "when QoS seqno and CCMP PN don't match up"..
  10. FreeBSD, Netflix, CDN
  11. Fixing BAR handling and handle corner cases of things..
  12. FreeBSD/arm -
  13. And the winner of the most committing committer to src/sys over the last 12 months is ..
  14. The initial introduction into "it's the NIC, stupid!"
  15. Concurrency in the TX path and when it all falls down..
  16. .. and the price of packaging up software? Billions.

2011 35

  1. FreeBSD on the TP-Link TL-WR1043nd!
  2. FreeBSD 802.11n update: 27 November 2011.
  3. FreeBSD is now doing (even more) 802.11n..
  4. Sitting in a hotel, getting stuck beacons..
  5. I know this is old..
  6. FreeBSD vendor summit - November 2011; Sunnyvale, California
  7. Wireless update - 802.11n development
  8. Wireless update - DFS wrapup
  9. FreeBSD: DFS update
  10. Unintentional side-effects - IPv4/IPv6 load balancing..
  11. Lusca update: IPv6 server work is now working
  12. Lusca development update - IPv6 is almost working
  13. Implementing 11n TX aggregation, why it's not so easy..
  14. Uninformed programmers, or "stop assuming virtual memory is awesome."
  15. AR9287 update
  16. AR9287 support is now in -HEAD
  17. The count of Monte Cristo
  18. AR9160 11n performance - finally!
  19. FreeBSD-HEAD on the PB92 + AR9280
  20. AR913x support in -HEAD, or TP-Link WR-1043nd
  21. Oh god, so much wireless hardware..
  22. 11n TX and RX experiments..
  23. (More) wireless hackery
  24. More wireless hackery
  25. AR9280 TX errors - why it's important to care about how your hardware works..
  26. This is for Emily..
  27. The end is nigh..
  28. Week 1 - stuff seen randomly about
  29. Space Invaders!
  30. Sleepless in New York..
  31. AR9280/AR9285 support now working
  32. AR9220 support; why AR9280 is broken
  33. LUSCA ipv6 - almost there (again!)
  34. Lusca and IPv6 - almost there
  35. What am I going to do now?

2010 37

  1. 802.11n update - WPA works
  2. Saturday night @ ucc: 11n hackery
  3. A productive night at the computer club ..
  4. Now that exams are over ..
  5. FreeBSD 802.11n: aiee
  6. bsdbox - take #1
  7. Antenna Diversity: Ubiquiti SR-2
  8. FreeBSD/MIPS: AR9132 and AR9100 wireless support
  9. LUSCA and IPv6
  10. FreeBSD/MIPS: AR9132 porting
  11. Satellite instead of NBN? Hello latency..
  12. Authority-by-being-employed-by-Google, rather than by-reproducable-data
  13. More IPv6 hackery..
  14. FreeBSD/MIPS on AR71xx / Routerstation Pro: NIC alignment/size bug fixed!
  15. Cacheboy: Firefox Release 3.6.4
  16. HTTP parser/management changes
  17. Unit testing using ATF
  18. The best news is sometimes no news..
  19. Modifying the HTTP header parser in Lusca
  20. State of the Cygwin/Windows port!
  21. Hunting down method_t bugs..
  22. Today's fun bug: invalid swap metadata
  23. Lusca update: important bug fixes, portability work
  24. Lusca and HTTP parsing..
  25. Lusca Logging, revisited
  26. Improving the access logging code
  27. Currently reading: "The Science of Programming" by David Gries
  28. Some more Lusca Profiling..
  29. Why are some Squid/Lusca ACL types slower than others? And which ones?
  30. Open Source Economy?
  31. Lusca: more reorganisation, new features
  32. ibook hackery, or "why apple probably did the magnetic connector stuff."
  33. Lusca: more reorganisation
  34. FreeBSD-current on the RouterStation Pro
  35. PS3 hacked! Or, "I'd pay extra for a totally open PS3."
  36. Hardware hackery: Adding IO to an Amstrad CPC
  37. The Origin Of Nerd Phrases, or Robert Heinlein

2009 82

  1. The ACMA blacklist, and can it be distributed securely?
  2. On filtering proxy/anonymizing servers..
  3. Filtering via BGP, and why this doesn't always quite work out..
  4. How does a proxy interfere with throughput?
  5. People who don't understand an arms race aren't doomed to repeat it...`
  6. Why would more than 10,000 URLs be a problem?
  7. .. summary from Retro Night, take #2
  8. More issues with Lighttpd
  9. Cacheboy Update / October/November 2009
  10. Cacheboy downtime - hardware failures
  11. Just few lusca related updates all of
  12. Lusca updates - September 2009
  13. My current wishlist
  14. New project - sugar labs!
  15. Cacheboy presentation at AUSNOG
  16. Cacheboy status update
  17. Canada node online and pushing bits!
  18. Cacheboy is on WAIX!
  19. BGP aware DNS
  20. Squid-3 isn't a rewrite!
  21. Updates - or why I've not been doing very much
  22. Preparation for next release; IPv6 checklist
  23. Updates - rebuild logic, peering and COSS work
  24. Caching Windows Updates
  25. VLC 1.0 released
  26. Storage rebuilding / logging project - proposal
  27. Current Downtime/issues
  28. New mirror node - italy
  29. Lusca in Production, #2
  30. Lusca-head pushing >100mbit in production..
  31. Lusca-head in production with tproxy!
  32. And the GeoIP summary..
  33. A quick snapshot of Cacheboy destinations..
  34. Seeking a few more US / Canada hosts
  35. Another day, another firefox release done..
  36. Migrating to Lighttpd on the backend, and why aren't my files being cached..
  37. New mirrors - mirror2.uk and mirror3.uk
  38. More profiling results
  39. LUSCA_HEAD (as of today) is in production
  40. More brain-damage code..
  41. More traffic!
  42. mirror1.jp.cacheboy.net - mozilla!
  43. Mozilla 3.0.9 release..
  44. Changing tack - more modularisation?
  45. Fixing the disk code, part 4
  46. Fixing the disk code, part 3
  47. Lusca and Cacheboy improvements in the pipeline..
  48. Fixing the disk code, part 2
  49. Fixing the disk APIs (or, reading Squid-1.2 code)
  50. Lusca snapshot released
  51. lusca release - rev 13894
  52. Documentation pass - disk IO
  53. Mirroring a new project - Cyberduck!
  54. Mozilla 3.0.8 release!
  55. Async IO changes to Lusca
  56. shortcomings in the async io code
  57. New Lusca-head features to date
  58. Googletalk: "Getting C++ threads to work right"
  59. Another open cdn project - mirrorbrain
  60. Example CDN stats!
  61. wiki.cacheboy.net
  62. More "Content Delivery" done open
  63. Filesystem Specifications, or EXT4 "Losing Data"
  64. Breaking 200mbit..
  65. GeoIP backend, or "reinventing the wheel"
  66. Downtime!
  67. minimising traffic to the backends..
  68. Cacheboy Outage
  69. Cacheboy is pushing bits..
  70. Cacheboy CDN is online!
  71. Lusca and BGP, take 2.
  72. Lusca and BGP
  73. Lusca development, and changes to string handling
  74. Where the CPU is going
  75. Eliminating copies, or "god this code is horrible"
  76. Eliminating copies, or "god this code is horrible"
  77. Tidying up the http reply handling code..
  78. Refcounted string buffers!
  79. More profiling!
  80. FreeBSD TPROXY works!
  81. TPROXY support
  82. next steps..

2008 44

  1. Cacheboy-HEAD updates
  2. Reverting IPv6 for now; moving forward with structural changes
  3. Working on NNRP proxies, or writing threaded C code..
  4. Updates!
  5. Serving IPv6 from Cacheboy-1.6.PRE2
  6. Cacheboy IPv6 update
  7. IPv6 ACL code, sort of!
  8. Cacheboy-1.5: IPv6 DNS servers
  9. Upcoming Cacheboy-1.5.PRE3 development release
  10. Standalone HTTP header parser!
  11. IPv6 core merged into cacheboy trunk
  12. Merging sockaddr_rework into Cacheboy trunk
  13. Cacheboy IPv6 (phase 1): More Updates!
  14. IPv6 tcp proxy success
  15. Cacheboy IPv6 (phase 1): Updates!
  16. Benchmarking is available!
  17. Commercial work updates!
  18. Surviving polymix-4..
  19. Threading Squid - initial observations
  20. Commercial projects and such..
  21. Watching things evolve..
  22. Cacheboy: shuffling around the DNS code
  23. The Squid Callback Data Type
  24. libevent httperf!
  25. Initial Profiling!
  26. First milestone - code reuse!
  27. Why memory allocation is a pain in the ass..
  28. Cacheboy-1.3 (.1) released; short-term future
  29. Current CPU usage
  30. Updates - comm code, etc
  31. Async IO related hackery
  32. More reorganisation..
  33. cacheboy 1.0 released
  34. FreeBSD port update
  35. Revalidating objects in Polygraph
  36. Cacheboy PRE6 is out
  37. Error page update, phase 2
  38. Errors shouldn't be ugly
  39. Where is my CPU time going? (or how to divine useful information from oprofile)
  40. Solaris Event Ports for Network IO
  41. Knowing what your allocator is doing..
  42. "Dial before you Dig"
  43. Development thus far
  44. Experiences with Google Code