FYI: BeagleBoard IRC channel

The entire IRC logs are questions and answers. Most of the questions are troubleshooting. Occasionally, nobody is able to help the person or answer the question. Rarely is the case when a troubleshooting problem is not solved. Most unanswered questions are request for information (ex. Has such-and-such been made?) or a request for experience-oriented help (ex. Has anybody worked with the angstrom demo and tried such –and-such). There are still a lot of unanswered questions, but most of these questions are left unresponsive. Sometimes, when a person’s question has no response they ask again later, and get an answer, which leads me to believe that nobody on the channel saw the question when it was first posted. This is where the bulk of the unanswered questions come from.

10/17/08 - 10/18/08

[18:15:39] BThompson pointed out that the difference between a mini-A USB and a mini-B USB, is that the mini-A has angled edges on the bottom, whereas the mini-B has a square edge on the bottom. Also, mini-B is able to work in "client mode". Mini-A would cause the client mode to fail.

[02:52:17] Nathanm mentioned that some monitors are picky about frequencies, and may be responsible for an error message "mode not supported". [15:25:53] According to mru, X-loader is responsible for loading U-boot and the "ROM loader loads X-loader into sram. X-loader can then set up dram and load U-boot there." [15:28:23] Contrary to what the IRC log says, IVA stands for Interaction Value Analysis. It is a mathmatical model of orginizational behavior. For more information see http://code.google.com/p/beagleboard/wiki/BeagleRelatedTerminology?ts=1224532762&updated=BeagleRelatedTerminology. Additionally, IVA can also stand for the imaging and video accelerator block that includes the C64x+ DSP in the OMAP35x applications processors.

10/15/08 - 10/17/08

[17:35:10] A Segmentation Fault (SegFault) is an error that can occur durring the operation of computer software. It occurs when a program attempts to access a memory location in a non-permissible way, or when it is not allowed to be accessed. [07:40:53] Kulve explained on October 16th, that ES3.0 is an engineering sample usually of the CPU. It is basically a version number of the chip.

[14:14:30] Duke Nukem is the name of a game series. This series includes Duke Nukem, Duke Nukem II, and Duke Nukem 3D. The first two Duke Nukem's were platform-games. The first Duke Nukem was a sidescroller for the GameBoy Color. Duke Nukem 3D, is a first person shooter computer game and is the third game of the series.

10/14/08

[16:55:28] VLC is a portable multimedia player, encoder, & streamer that supports a audio/video codecs and file formats. It was the first player to support playback of encrypted DVD's on Linux. VLC includes a large number of free encoding/decoding libraries.
[16:58:04] MMC is a type of removable flash storage device. MMC can also be Microsoft Management Console, a component of Windows 2000 and Windows NT that allows system administrators to configure and monitor the system.


[16:58:04]MLC (stands for Multi-Level Cell) is a memory element capable of storing more than one bit of information. MLC NAND flash uses multiple levels per cell, allowing more bits to be stored. This differs from SLC NAND (Single-Level Cell), which uses only one level per cell. Most MLC NAND stores four states per cell (the four states yield 2 bits of information per cell).

10/13/08

On Monday, I created a Wiki page for terminology commonly used and found within the IRC channel and BeagleBoard set-up. Here is the link: http://code.google.com/p/beagleboard/wiki/BeagleRelatedTerminology

[14:14:38] Until recently, most people on the IRC channel were copying and pasting the user name of whom they were trying to reply to. They found out on October 13th that if type in the first letter of the user name and press tab, it does the job for you. [21:26:05] gcohler provided that TWL4030 was an original part, which was recently upgraded to TWL5030. Therefore most things still have TWL4030. A compatible device to the TWL5030, called the TPS65950, will be offered to customers at all volume levels.

10/12/08

[06:46:48] An Enhanced Host Controller Interface (EHCI) is a high-speed controller standard that only provides USB 2.0 functions. It needs a "companion controller" (OHCI or UHCI) to use USB 1.1 devices. [10:36:49] Kulve recommends the 2007q3 compiler for beginners. [12:08:06] HW is short for "hardware".



SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) is a technique used in achieving data level parallelism, as in a vector processor. [12:34:01] SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions) is a SIMD instruction set extension to the x86 architecture. The x86 archetecture was introduced in Intel's Pentium III series processors in the year 1999. SSE contains 70 new instructions.





[15:16:09] An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application designed to maximize programmer productivity by providing tightly-knit components with similar user interfaces. [21:16:14] Felipec stated that"One advantage of c++ is that the templating system pretty much act as macros, and in that sense the resulting code can be more optimal than C code... but c++ projects usually get insanely abstract".

10/09/08

[05:48:04] "ISDN" is an acroynym for Integrated Services Digital Network or Isolated Digital Network. It is a circuit-switched telephone network system network that, unlike the classic telephone system, integrates speech and data on the same lines.