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Someone on a mailing list I'm on was asking about small o/s's. Someone else suggested "contiki".
It's a nice small O/S with a user interface. Might be the right thing for a small handheld, who knows. I like the look of it.
Someone else mentioned UniFLEX. That archive is amazing becuase there it's written for the 6809, has FORTRAN, Cobol, Pascal and C. Wow.
And of course, others mentioned MicroC/OS-II. . Certainly a good choice for real-time. I've used it and liked it.
Virutech, Inc. claims to have a product, Hindsight, which is a debugger which can run programs backward.
Apparently it works with Virtutech's Simics product, which is a system level simulator. Batteries not included. And you have to use DML, their modeling language.
Still, for some projects it could be a life saver.
Who would have thought that your cell phone would become the place to store your credit card? It makes perfect sense to me now, but just like cameras in cell phones, I didn't see it coming.
NTT Docomo Inc. in Japan is testing contact-less card support in cell phones. The JR train lines in Japan have used contact-less cards (like those cards you wave in front of the computer room door) for a few years. Apparently now cell phones can emit this protocol. Here's an interesting overview.
And hey,it's a standard. ISO/IEC 18092. 10cm range using 13.56MHz according to an article in EE Times ("Japan Mobile Phones Test Transaction Tech"). Manchester encoding of a 212-kbit/second stream.
Apparently there are chips from a Sony venture, Felica Networks, Inc.
Docomo is calling it "Mobile Wallet".
TI has announced a new ARM7 cpu, the TMS470. It's got built in flash and RAM as well a some interesting interfaces.
While the smallest pin count is high (80 pin LQFP) it will fill a nice space between smaller 16 bit micros. The smallest part has 64K flash and 4kb of ram. This is a little small but workable. A larger 144 pin part has 1MByte of flash and 64kb of ram.
I'm still enamored with the Philips LPC2138, however, because of it's 64 pin package and it's large (512kbyte) flash space for code.
I've always liked Bob Cringely. He used to throw great partied at MacWorld. Plus, he built his own plane (or tried to).
And, he's turned into an interesting technologist.
I think he's onto something with his perspective of "little wireless platforms which run linux". The LinkSys WRT54g he talks about is one such platform.
There is also a version of the WRt54 which uses a different CPU but has two POTS phone connections. It needs to run linux.
This is potentially interesting. A Hybrid CPLD/FPGA which has (it appears) some mask work done at the fab and the rest is reconfigurable as a CPLD.
Could be perfect for medium volume projects.
It's a new age in IDE disks. Volume is up (way up) and quality is down (ahem, not sure how far). I've noticed that disks last about 2 years. In fairness, it's often the power supplies which go first.
After loosing too many IDE hard disks I decided to switch to RAID on my file servers. I thought this would be hard but it turns out to be easy. The first thing I did was buy a new, cheap PCI IDE controller. Then I bought two 80gb hard disks (Maxtor). I made them both masters and plugged them into the PCI dual IDE controller. I learned this trick from a friend who claimed it was easier to install a new HD to upgrade linux than install over an existing install (he was right).
Convincing linux to use two hard disks as a single RAID-1 array was easy. Interestingly I had one disk fail the first night I installed it. It turns out my power supply had a lot of connectors daisy chained with a lot of fans on one leg and the IDE drive did not like this. I cleaned up the disk power distribution and the disk was happy again. At least I got to test the RAID array. It noticed the drive was down, took it out of service and kept working. Bravo.
One thing to note. I've had one sever for about 5 years and in that time two (2) IDE disks have failed and none of the IBM SCSI disks in it have failed. My impression is that SCSI disks are just plain better and more reliable.
So, I'm now completly sold on RAID-1 for file servers. I won't go back to risking my data to a sinlge IDE disk, even with nightly backups.
I managed import old copies of my pre-blog "pick and pans" letter using a simple awk script. I'll place them here for posterity. Or something.