Low Country Software Ramblings

I am glad to discover another blog dealing with embedded systems. Go see Ron Fredericks Embedded Components blog. He has an interesting entry on Community Development for Embedded Devices.  I wonder if the community is simply too fragmented with today’s plethora of embedded devices.
Loosing a bit of high-tech history in Silicon Valley…Brian Fuller writes about loosing the former Shockley Labs headquarters to a Grocery Store. Yes, the transistor Shockley…

EETimes has a bunch of good content this week…

A little blurb about the Toyota Prius Teardown that occured at Embedded Systems Conference. The full details will be in the May 14 issue of Under The Hood.

Multicore is all the rage these days…An article by Dylan McGrath about the use of multicore chips in embedded designs. Another article by Richard Goering about RTOS and tool support for multicore chips.
Did you know, there is an Ada 2005 optimized for real-time embedded apps?  Ada is used in an estimated  1.6% of embedded designs.

A fascinating article about “Whole Skin Locomotion” robots…think of a giant amoeba robot. Not you’re father’s R2D2…

Richard Goering writes about RTOS Security…how can you resist an opening like this: “Why would a manufacturer of kitchen ovens choose a RTOS first deployed in the flight-navigations system of a nuclear bomber?”

The Teutuls of Orange County Choppers fame have built a chopper for Intel, incorporating a mobile computer.  There is a great print ad in EE Times with Sr, Jr & Mikey but I can’t find it online.

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Have you supported a good cause today?
.NET

Scott Guthrie talks about lambda expressions which make their debut in Orcas.  Functional programming, here we come!

Career

Adam Goucher describes 3 types of environment he’s experienced at different companies. The environment can definitely be a factor when looking at an employer.
Community

Larry O’Brien has high praise for Acronis TrueImage.  It just saved his bacon, or at least his computer. His diligence in doing daily backups also helped… I also like the way he partitions his drives: OS, bin (Program Files), data, media, and non-backup volatile. How does he get all his programs installed in their own partition?  Sometimes, they just want to be in C:\Program Files…
Brad Abrams has a fun little video of the Visual Studio “Defy all Challenges”.  You get to actually SEE what some of the big names look like.

Scott Hanselman has set a goal to raise $50,000 for Diabetes research.  This is a disease that affects a large segment of the population.  Diabetes is the 6th leading cause of death in the US.  I made a contribution, as my way of giving back to Scott for the great content he has put out for the last 5 years.  Since I only have about 0.25% of his readership,  I would like to contribute that much to his cause.  That’s $125.  Can 5 generous readers contribute $25?

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Times, they are a changin….

TDD

Jonathan Kohl (a test guru) describes his experience with TDD.  It is quite an interesting read on the intersection of testing and design.

Community

Doug Gaff asks if the Embedded Industry is Dead? Reading about Doug’s start in the embedded world reminded me of my own rant about the death of electronics as a hobby.  Which kids play with soldering irons nowadays?

Chris Sells has been interviewed by  Jimmy of Washington Manor Middle School.  Not your typical tech interview.

Micahel weighs in on automated testing approaches: automate to the hilt vs. automate nothing. The bottom line: both have drawbacks, we must find a happy medium.
Brian Fuller over at EE Times writes about David Knuth, an engineer that went through a period of unemployment during 2003. David wrote about his 10 months of unemployment.  Really worth a read.

A new Techno Podcast: RunAs Radio with Greg Hughes and Richard Campbell. Something else to plop on my iPod. (via Scott Hanselman)

Scott Bellware (who has been prolific this week!) pontificates on the reasons why open source will fail to gain adoption in the Microsoft developer space.

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Back in the saddle after a long week-end.

Community

Scott Bellware has a great piece about Mark Miller and his commitment to customers. I’m a big fan of Mark Miller’s satire, and, like Scott, while not a customer, have always admired Developer Express, even though I use ReSharper, as it fits my style better.
Scott also wades into the Multiple vs. Wide Monitor debate.  After this, I might just campaign for a 30″ wide monitor…

Scott Hanselman (it’s the all Scott edition tonight!) points out that UPSes are turning out to be a necessity with Windows Vista.  I had a UPS for my TiVo, but the dang thing beeps louder than an alarm when power goes out…nothing like getting woken up at 2AM by the dang UPS…do they make them without the dang beeper?

Rob has a great entry on Attracting Software Developers that fit your company.  Boy, if we could only manage to have ANY software developers to attract in Beaufort…Anybody want to move South to the coast?

Design

If you will be designing a framework, Brad Abrams has collected a few papers by Steven Clark about framework usability.

.NET

Adnan Masood has a great post on five easy steps to Log4Net.  As a Log4Net occasional user, this little cheat sheet comes in handy! (Via The Daily Grind)

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If you have (or like) to deal with the low level details of a processor, Randall Hyde has written 2 books which could be of interest to you. Write Great Code Vol. 1 & Vol. 2.

Volume 1 is concerned with a computer’s organization. The table of content contains topics like: Representation of the various types: Numeric, Floating Point, Characters, Binary Arithmetic, CPU Architectures, Memory Organization, etc… Experienced (low level) embedded designers won’t learn anything earth-shattering, but there are still some useful stuff in there. Less experienced designers could find this quite valuable.

Volume 2 deals squarely with “high-level” language translation to assembler structures. Things like constants, variables, array types, control structures, functions are covered. This is probably more details than your typical designer cares for, but it does make for some interesting reading.

Warren Kurisu, Director of VxWorks Product Management at WindRiver has an interesting entry about the impact of Linux might have on VxWorks. The bottom line: each has their place. Pox on whoever thinks one solution fits all (that’s my take).

Interesting Article by Ron Wilson at EDN on various approach to solve the multi-core problem which everyone agrees is looming. If you think multi-threaded programming is a pain, wait ’till you have half a dozen cores…

Commentary by Ed Sperling on what is required for a product to be successful.  It’s all about the standards baby!

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