Alan Perry's Blog

Monday January 02, 2006

Winning A Championship in the Worst Possible Way

I won the California Rally Series Open 4WD Co-driver championship. I beat SoCal-based John Dillon, 1230 to 1092. I had a 200 point lead going into the last rally, the Ramada Express International Rally, so we just had to finish. And that's what we did - just finish.

The title of this blog is a bit of an exaggeration. I can imagine many ways in which it could have come out worse. It was still pretty bad.

I was co-driving for Doug Chernis, who has been my regular ride all season, in his Group N Subaru WRX.

Doug and I have been working together since his first rally last year. We started this season with an overall win at the Seed 9 Rally and a moral win (we won six of eight stages and had no brakes on two of the stages). Then we rolled the car at the Rim of the World Rally in May and missed the Treeline and Gorman rallies while the car was being repaired. We were back for the Prescott Rally in October, but Doug was driving with the throttle pedal connected to his wallet, that is, very slow and cautious.

Leading up to Ramada, Doug was talking about being comfortable in the car again and driving at a competitive pace. Unfortunately, this isn't what happened. He was backing off on the straights and not putting in competitive times. However, he was showing signs of getting more comfortable.

At the start of the second day, Doug seemed to be getting even more comfortable and put in a respectable time on the first stage. Unfortunately, on the second stage, I made a bad mistake in calling a turn and we had an minor off-course excursion that could have been really bad. We were lucky to get away with a puncture. However, that was the end of the rally for us as far as putting in competitive stage times.

The near-off stuck in Doug's head for the rest of the day and he drove so slowly. We were slower than last year by minutes and this was his second rally ever then. The last stages were run after the sun went down. The wind went away with the sun and heavy dust hung over the stage. This made us even slower. The only car slower than us on the last stage suffered a headlight failure and was lead out by a sweep vehicle. We were slower than a car that had to stop after it had struck a deer.

I could understand that Doug had a lot of money invested in the car and didn't want to damage it. However, it is a competition car and he chose to entry it in the rally and cars get damaged in rally. (That is one of the reasons that I sold my rally car and bought a vintage Formula Ford.)

Also, he asked me to make a substantial financial contribution to the team and I think that I was owed a better effort as a result. I could have taken that money and paid for entry fee, notes, hotel and recce vehicle rental for someone else who would have made an effort to the end.

Whine, whine, whine. At least, I won my championship.

( Jan 02 2006, 12:54:00 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [2]

Firewire in Solaris: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

I figured that I would start 2006 by finally writing about Firewire/1394 support in Solaris. Some of you might not even know the current state of Firewire in Solaris, so here it is. The good, the bad and the ugly.

The Good

As of Solaris 10, the following 1394 device classes (along with the corresponding driver) are supported: mass storage devices (scsa1394) and camcorders and other AV/C devices (av1394). Also, Firewire host adapters that follow the 1394 OHCI (hci1394) are supported. All of this is supported on SPARC, x86 and x64 platforms.

Support for 1394-based digital cameras/IIDC devices (through the dcam1394 driver) has been available for SPARC since Solaris 9. Support on the x86 and x64 platforms is now available in Solaris Express (as 8/05) and will be available in an update release of Solaris 10 soon. Also, the software interfaces for the dcam1394 driver are now supported public interfaces.

All of the source code for the Solaris Firewire support is available through OpenSolaris, include the 1394 Software Framework (s1394) and the SBP-2 support (sbp2) modules.

The Bad

While most of the Solaris Firewire support worked fine, there are bugs. If you try and use certain Firewire hard drives or DVD burners or if you try to unload the host adapter driver on some hardware, your system may panic. Fortunately, these problems have been resolved and the fixes are available in Solaris Express.

Also, the dcam1394 driver only supports the camera features described in version 1.04 of the 1394 Trade Association's 1394-based Digital Camera Specification. This means that it does not support one of the most commonly available 1394 Digital Cameras out there, the Apple iSight.

Also, there are some Firewire features and devices that are not fully supported, such as 1394b and pro audio (IEC 61883-6). Also, while the software interfaces for customer written Firewire drivers and applications are available through OpenSolaris, aside from the dcam1394 driver, none of these interfaces are supported public interfaces.

The Ugly

Some of the Solaris Firewire support is really broken. The worst example of this is the av1394 driver. It has a number of odd bugs, but, most embarrassingly, it cannot do isochronous transfers on x86. I did the x86 port, so it is my fault.

Fortunately, most of the issues described above are either being actively worked on or have kind of fix available once I get to them.

If you have interest in the Firewire support in Solaris, let me know. I am always looking for feedback.

( Jan 02 2006, 11:30:00 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [2]