Picks and Pans

Have you tried to run any applications on a PC with onl 32mb of memory
lately? It's pretty much impossible. It seems all of the application writers
in the world have gotten together and decided that their apps must have a working set of at least 32mb and take at least 64Mb of total memory.

I recently tried to get away with running Linux on a laptop, with the
idea of using some 'other' word processor to look at Microsoft Word
documents. Hah. Near as I can tell this can't be done. And, while there
are some interesting word processors out there for linux, they are generally
pretty large. Here's a sample:

• Sun's StarOffice
  
• Corel's WordPerfect
  
• AbiWord
  

Staroffice is pretty, but also pretty huge. I'd say 128Mb is a
minimum. It does import work docs better than most. WordPerfect is
pretty also and does not include a huge frame work around it. It
won't import some of my word docs, however. AbiWord is the smallest. It actually seemed to have a reasonable footprint but also would not import some of my word documents.

As a wildcard I tried "Wine", the windows emulator. It actually ran
WINWORD.EXE and EXCEL.EXE from my hard disk. A rather amazing feat.
But they both needed about 64MB more memory than I had so my little
machine paged itself within an inch of it's harddisk's life. (I later upgraded to 80mb and wine worked better. I may actually use word under wine if I find it's stable)

During this process I found I was running Netscape 4.72 and decided to
upgrade to 6.0. Again, major bloatware. 32mb was suddenly way too small
a machine for Netscape.

Personally I think it is a C++ conspiracy formed by people who don't
realize that an automatic C++ object declared inside a function will
call about 8 zillion constructors and allocate 12.5mb of memory each
time the function is called, only to dump that 12.5mb of memory back
on the heap when the function is exited...

If you really want to make a full time job out of this, you might check
out http://www.linuxlinks.com/Software/Office/"

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

CPLD's are getting really big there days. So big that people are putting
enture cpu's in them. This motivates people (like me) to try and create
some small devices to do specialized work.

Stage 1, synthesis. Cypress sells
their Warp software pretty cheap ($99) which has a resonable VHDL
compiler and simulator and fitting for (of course) all of their parts.
The simulator is pretty simple but reasonable for small jobs. It
certainly can handle my USB decode project with ease.

Stage 2, schematic capture. If you want to build a small project
using a CPLD you might think, "well jee, I only want to make a small
4x6 inch PC board, with say, 4 layers, so how hard could it be?".
I found that it was not easy to find an inexpensive package to do this.
(if you know of one, please send me email about it).

Most packages seem to be too simple and only offer 2 layers. Other packages
have 'demo modes' which limit the number of pins to say 100 (which is not
very useful for evaluation if you want to route a part with 192 pins). The
packages which allow 4 layers are over $500.

I may have to break down and spend $400 on CircuitMaker.

Send me email if you like this and/or would like to be on our mailing list.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)