Picks and Pans

I had a nice year long run with a web hosting company (www.aqhost.com)
which ended in disaster. I stopped getting email from them in
December and then they shut me off and deleted my account on
12/31/2005.

They claim they sent me email throughout December but I never got any of it and my qmail SMTP logs don't show any email from them. I get a lot of email and I log all the headers so I know if something didn't arrive.

Anyway, the summarily deleted all my blog info. I had no backup (oops) but fortunately between the Internet wayback machine and Google I have been able to reconstruct most of the entries.

And, now I'm using a different method to archive and submit them which is based on one of my machines :-)

Needless to say I've chosen a new web hosting service with different policies.

In the end I've concluded that their billing system made a mistake (my credit card works fine) and their email never reached me. But they seemed uninterested in helping me or even looking into the problem so I wish them luck and have moved on.

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

Some of my embedded work is on X86 (believe it or not). The "tcc"
compiler is very, very small and very very fast. At 140k it can
fit on small CF file systems. And with the "-run" option it makes C
into a scripting language.

It's an impressive piece of work, capable of compiling the linux kernel.

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

I know it sounds like Buckaroo Bonzai, but I have a soft spot for people on a mission.

The folks at Aradillo Aerospace are building a new type of rocket engine.

It's "throatless". I'm going to say this means that if it can be made to work (where work = not melt down or blow up) it could mean that a normal machine shop could be building rocket engines capable of putting your neighbor into orbit.

Pretty neat stuff. Certainly more fun than helping McDonalds exploit MP3's with fake-fat fries.

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This enterprising young man was able to generate RF signals a VGA card. Thought that was a pretty neat trick and made me think of some other possible uses.

After all, it's just a high speed bit stream.

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

This is not very exiting, but people have been asking me about it. I have a small collection of MPC 8xx (850, 823e, 860) HDLC drivers. Most present a network interface but one I hacked allows userland access to the HDLC frames and modloadable 'filters' in the kernel which can do basic protocol work.

Here's the tar file

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

Digikey and Freescale have created an interesting contest around a new HC12
chip. The chip is interesting as it's an SOC with ethernet, an HC12 16 bit
cpu, ram and flash. It also has SPI and I2C ports.

The contest is interesting in that you submit a proposal. The best 10 proposals are picked and given an eval board. They have 2 months to make their project work. At then end one winner is picked.

The prize is a 4-wheeler, which I don't get at all, but at least it comes with a trailer ("hello ebay!").

Here is the contest page.

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

I was reading an article in Electron Design (04/14/05, pg 46) about DRAM speeds ("DRAM Advances Splinter to meet many system needs"). I was amazed at the new speeds for DRAM. I thought things stopped at about 166Mhz. Apparently not so. There is now DDR, DDR-2 and soon to be DDR-3. The seeds go from a pedestrian 100Mhz up through 1.6GHz. Last time I checked 1.6GHz was RF territory. I guess you need to be an antenna person to design SDRAM layouts.

I was confused, so I made a little table. It scared me.

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I want one of these. Apparently it's from Toyota.

picture of 'walking foot' with person inside

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

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.

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

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.

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

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".

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Does your TV run linux?

Your next one might. It seems Sony is going to deploy about 30 tv's all of which will run Linux.

Certainly my TIVO runs linux.

Is my car next?

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

While talking with some friends about a person looking to 'retrain' as a Linux admin (after 21 years as an IT person), someone made a humorous comment.

I had been ranting about Walmart employees being the largest group of comsumers of free state health care (because they get no health coverage from their employeer).

He suggested the person become a Linux admin for Walmart in China while, at the same time, trying to organize a union.

That seemed to summarize my views perfectly :-)

I personally this it's shameful that the nation's largest employeer is 'taxing' people like me who pay state income tax. It appears I'm personally subsidizing the Walmart corporation.

Here another article about corporations free-loading off the state.

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

I found an interesting article in EE Times about Philips and 90nm fab. It talked about the upcoming LPC3000 familty of ARM cpu's from Philips, with biult in flash and ram. Looks like it has a ARM926F core and 64k of sram.

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

I think I've seen this in the news before, but I liked it so much I thought I'd add it in.

This is a device that detects when a radial saw is about to cut your finger and instantly stops the saw. The demo (on a hot dog) is amazing.

SawStop LLC was formed to make active devices for woodworking equipment.

It would be great to work for a place like that and feel really good about what you are doing, instead of say, helping exploit low paid Chinese workers while helping to polute the Chinese countryside all to create a lower cost product.

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

The Year of the ARM SOC

Seems like everyone and his brother is making an ARM SOC. I'll swear there are 50 different vendors making them. Do we need all of these? I guess so. Intel, Sharp, Fujitsu, Samsung to name a few. It is nice because each one seems a little different.

It's also nice because building a small embedded device which runs linux is now pretty much a commodity. Anyone can string up a cpu with some SDRAM and flash and make something pretty powerful. Amazing.

I'm trying it with a Sharp ARM chip. We'll see how it goes. One thing is for sure - I have great respect for cad operators who can layout a dense board quickly.

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

My vote for the cool SOC of the year (2003) is the Xilinx Virtex II Pro. It's a PPC 405 with a giant fpga. It's also a lot of IP which does all of the normal things like ethernet, serial, etc...

Maybe everyone knows this but looking over the interface docs I was having some major deja-vu from some work I did for IBM a few years back. It sure looks like the guts of the IP all came from IBM. Personally I like this because my impression is that IBM folks up in VT did a really nice job most of the time. (except for those odd PPC DCR registers - oh well, can't ask for everything)

Anyway, I've always been frustrated by this controller or that and always wanted to tweek things in the cpu/peripheral interface. Now it appears I can. We'll see... I plan to try.

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

I've been doing some PIC programming lately. I really love Microchip's parts. Simple, cheap, effective. The 18F series is my current love. The 18F458 has lots of flash, a CAN controller, serial an a little RAM. I wired one up to a Cirrus 8900 ethernet chip and write a simple TCP stack for it. Amazing huh? Other have done this before me, but I was amazed how easy it was to do and how robust the part is.

Now I have a simple ethernet device which does serial, parallel, CAN for very cheap. Can't beat that.

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

"The day the music died..."

What hath venture capital wrought?

dateline 2000: Way too much money chasing to many bad deals. Way too
much money put into marginal or even bad ideas. Insane valuations.
Insane investments.

dateline 2002: many, many, many failed startups. everyone is running
scared. M&A has slowed or stopped. IPO's have gone away. Companies
are running out of money and can't sell anything.

We end up in the "last money in wins" scenario. Greed rules.
Fairness and ethical behavior are left for sissies. Money is put
into companies with terms which would have been denounced as ridiculous
in the "good old days".

If I see another company "refinanced" with a last round liquidation
multiplier of 4x and all of the previous shareholders crammed down
into worthless common, I'll puke. Or go postal. It's hard to say.

Certainly all of the angel investors are going to run for cover
because this strategy leaves them with no return after taking
significant risk.

Hey big company CEO's - where do you think those juicy little start ups
come *from*? They come from angel investors, that's where. And later,
the VC's come in. But in the beginning there are only angels. If you
screw the angel investors by buying companies and giving the original
common shareholders nothing, guess what they will do? They will stop
investing. And guess what will happen to your stream of juicy little
start ups? it will go away.

There, I said it.

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

System-on-chip cpu's are coming like a train. The first one I spent time
with with Motorola's 8xx line, the
860, 850 and 823. These chips had
all the peripherals on the chip on one big melange. Static memory interface
for flash, SDRAM interface for memory, an MMU, serial ports and built in ethernet.

Needless to say it ran linux well, thanks to people like href="http://www.embeddededge.com">Dan Malek. About the same
time two chip SOC sets like the Intel
SA1110/SA1111 came about and
helped in the low-power area. More about ARM and low-power later.
Why can't MOT ever make a low-power cpu?

The 850/823's are great but I wish MOT would allow people to write
microcode for the serial engine inside it. It's certainly running some
sort of microcode and it would be nice to be able to fix bugs and do
custom work with it.

I can't much too many really flattering things about Intel and it'a ARM
work except, "how many times can you EOL the SA1110 before no one will
believe you?". Sure seems like the marketing people keep trying to kill
it when at the last second the sales people say "but hey, we're selling a
*lot* of these". Maybe it's just me :-)

I next ran into the Alchemy (now AMD)
Au1100 line. Nice SOC. Everything but
the kitchen sink and all the ants (bugs) too. Still, they seem to have a nice
road map and do seem to be fixing some of the bugs. Seems that all too
often large companies by IP and slap it into their chips without bothering
to test it in a rational way. Sure it passes someones vectors or testbench
but the tests don't reflect what normal mortals do... I keep finding the
same USB host and function bugs. Some day I'll meet the guy who wrote that
verilog :-)

The AU1100 line is very fast (400Mhz) but also rather power hungry.
And not very incline to sleep. On the other hand the ARM SOC's can't
get past 200Mhz but have many low power features.

I'm looking forward to next year, with even more SOC's and more power
conscious SOC's.

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

"Metricom to close Ricochet"

This is sad. I thought that this idea was strong enough to live in
some metropolitan areas at least. The problem (IMHO) is that VC's
often kill the idea by pushing the "big score/massive expansion"
rather than the "slow but sure wins the race" strategy. I can't tell
you how many CEO's I've talked to recently who have told me about
their board meetings over the past two years. All the same. Yelled
at for not expanding fast enough ("sure, we'll make sure the money is
there") followed by getting yelled at for having no cash ("why did you
spend all the money?").

I think this would be excusable if most of the VC's in the world had
never actually run a company before, but I've seen this behavior out
of almost all of them (not all, thankfully), including the ones who
have had harsh P&L responsibility in the past. hi ho.

Bryan Prohm, a wireless industry analyst for Gartner (market
research and consulting firm) has previously described it as "the only
logical Darwinian outcome."

Who is this guy and what's his rational for making that sort of
statement? I think he missed the point. I doubt he ever used the
technology.

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

Have you used an 802.11 PCMCIA card? I'm using one right now, from my
kitchen table. When the price went below $100/card I jumped and never
looked back. This technology, as a user, is amazing cool. As an engineer
is pretty poor, but since when has technical eligance won?

Sites on the net are reporting 20miles using a yagi ("yah-gee") antenna. This,
with reasonable math behind it. I saw a huge parabolic connected to an
802.11 at a research facility near me. They where getting amazing distance
and 2mb/sec.

I have to believe this will have some noticable effect on the "last
mile" problem. I want want to send voice over it as well as data.
When I mention this all of my qeek friends screem "QOS", a term I am
all too familiar with. I have to believe that like water going around
a dam, voice will find it's way into 802.11 (and blue tooth will disappear).

I had hoped that DSL would provice a $60/month T1 line into my house. That
does not seem to be in the cards. However, a 2mb/sec radio link does seem
to be not only practical, I think it it's something I could set up pretty
quickly right now. Check out Rooftops. I'm intrigued by guerrilla.net

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

Would you wear a computer? I'm not sure I would. Except for maybe my
wrist watch, cell phone, pager, oh, and the keys to my car.

How
about one which had a 600x800 eyepiece? or one that had an audio
earpiece/microphone? Seen anyone with a phone and ear microphone
lately? (they really work well - I tried one).

There are research folks all over the country (and world) working on
wearable computing platforms. Some are pretty innovative. They
include thinks like cameras, microphones, GPS receivers,
accelerometers and IR sensors.

The notion of "context sensative computing" is often connected to
these platforms; For instance, the camera will "recognize" a face and
put info on the screen about the person. Or the GPS notice what
building you are in and guide you to the office you or looking for. Or
the bathroom. Or the nearest printer or coke machine. Seems dumb on
the surface, but I'd like a cell phone which would tell me how to get
out of a building during a fire.

• The PC goes ready-to-wear
  
• MIT's wearable group
  
• ETH's wearable group
  
• CMU's wearable group
  
• CMU's wearable computers
  

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

My accountant told me he had clients break down and cry
in his office this year. On one hand I totally understand. On the other, I'm
not sure I do. Did people actually think that money existed? What if everyone
had tried to sell their CSCO or Redback shares at the height of the
market? The price would have dropped. There would have been no
market for the market makers to manipulate.

Sorry, I just had to say that.

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

I sat in my truck on the morning of April 17th (I live in Mass, we have
ridiculous holidays here and taxes were delayed one day) and wrote checks
to the government. It was depressing but not unexpected.

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

I moved my office recently and actually managed to move my phone lines and
DSL line in 2 weeks. I found this amazing since the building I moved into
had no physical lines to it (they had been cut several years before and
the building was unoccupied).

Verizon (and I can't believe I'm saying this) did a really excellent job,
scheduling the work and getting the lines installed. My DSL provider
is Covad. They also did an excellent job following Verizon and scheduling
their install. There was a problem (the line they grabbed in the CO went
into someone's house instead of my office) but they corrected the mistake
overnight and got the line installed. I was very impressed.

Covad (and UUNet behind them) has been flawless for me for over a
year. I think there may actually be room for one company to provide
DSL after the incombent (in this case Verizon). While Verizon did a
great job on the phone lines and copper, I've heard nothing but bad
things about their DSL service. It's ashame, because they really seem
to be trying to provide good customer service on the phone side.

AT&T, on the other hand, seems to be trying to create new lows in customer
service with their 'local dial tone' service. I switched my business service
and had nothing but trouble. It took me seven (7) trouble tickets to get
my voice mail working. Worse, when I tried to switch back to Verizon it
took Verison 3 weeks to call me back and that was just to schedule an
interview with their "Wecome back" service. hah.

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

This is an amazing product. I love it. If you need to run Linux as your
native OS but also need to run Word and Excell this will do it for you for
only $50. It works great, does not eat a lot of memory and runs fast. I tried
VMWare, another great product but it was huge overkill for the causual Office
user. It was also (imho) too expensive. (aside: vmware is perfect if you
are a developer or q/a person and need to boot several o/s's and need that
level of control - it's a great product but more than I need).

Win4lin installed cleanly (well, ok, I had to patch my kernel but hey,
this is linux) and has been great. I am so happy that I can now boot Win98SE
and run Office. It has changed my computing life. http://www.win4lin.com.
I can't say enough good things about this.

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

I recently ungraded my home machine from Windows NT 4.0 Sp3 to Windoew 2000.
Everyone I talked to said they liked Win2k. I finally took the plunge because
the video editing software I wanted to try did not run on NT.

Well, the upgrade was a little rocky but it did work. First off I needed to
have 600MB free on my C: drive. hah! who has 600mb free on C:? Not me,
that's for sure. Then, after it installed and rebooted in Win2k (insuring
that I'd *never* be able to run WinNT again) I got a blue screen. Bummer
dude. Luckily I've been here before and held back the urge to convert the
drive to NTFS. I went to MS's web site and noticed some tech notes on
DirectCD crashing the Win2k setup. The note stated how to turn off the
services which DirectCD had installed. I was able to boot a DOS (remember dos?)
floppy and simply remove the bad .sys files. (I used to write NT services
so I know what to look for :-) This fixed the problem. I want to thank
my guardian angel for putting that web site entry together...

Anyway, it booted up and the setup worked. I actually like Win2k. It's
a bit of 'fresh and new' UI and seems to work well. All my old apps work
fine (so far). I'm now a 2000's kind-of-guy.

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

A friend warned me when I said I was going to work on a USB controller. He
said it was a huge spec and it would take me months to figure it all out.

I didn't believe him. I went off to write a host controller for the PowerPC
8xx chip. Six month passed. Turns out he was right. Still, it was fun
to learn the entire spec from top to bottom.

Who ever claimed that USB was going to make anyone's life easier was a liar.
There are days when I am amazed it works at all. While I like many things
about it it seems way too complex for the job it need to do. Maybe I'm
just too simplistic.

It's been interesting to track the Linux USB project for the last
year. They have been slowly adding devices while struggling with
controller driver issues and (mostly) software interface issues. The
first generation of USB stack was simple and worked for keyboards and
mice but didn't help more complex devices. This was scrapped for the
2.3.x/2.4.x kernels. The new API is better but has some
synchronization holes in it which are both poorly specified and poorly
understood. But, as with most things linux it will get sorted out and
the problems will get solved.

Most of the linux code is pretty good. The UHCI and OHCI drivers are,
well, while working they still have some bugs and problems.

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

Here's my list:

• That new concept Porsche (it's only about $250k but my wife says no)
  
• A TIVO which connects to ethernet and will download movies from the
  internet.
  
• An 802.11b network in my house for $200
  
• A 1.5mb DSL link to my office for $60/month
  

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

Just musing about DSL. There was an article in the globe today
(12/17) about DSL. I'm finally getting a bigger picture here.

I've had a lot of cognitive dissonance about DSL lately. On one hand
everyone is saying CLECs are in the toilet and on the other hand I keep
hearing about people connecting using DSL.

I think I finally figured it out (for me anyway).

Here's my impressions of the current DSL market

• - the clec market has, in fact, gone into the toilet. too bad.

• - many manufacturer's have been selling exclusively into the clec market.

• - manufacturer's who have been selling to big phone companies are doing ok.

• - Most of the CLECs seem to have been deploying SDSL boxes connected
  to RedBack DSLAMs.

• - The 'phone companies' are catching all the customers falling out of
  the dying clec's tree... There seems to be only room (economics wise)
  for 1-2 dslams in most CO's...
  

Apparent distilation:

• - DSL as delivered by clecs isn't going to be the goldmine we thought it was. It turned out to be too expensive and too hard to differentiate.

• - ADSL will be continue to be delivered in volume buy the traditional phone
  companies. will revive the gasping customers of the failed clecs.

• - It would be interesting to talk to a sales person from Redback and find
  out who they sold to last year and who they will sell to next year.
  

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

I feel like I'm the only person on the planet left without a DVD player.
I just can't figure out what to do. What I really want is a DVD player
which will output some form of HDTV format. Then, I could see a clear
upgrade path and I'd eventually have a player which output video in
a format I actually want to view.

I really want an integrated DVD player with a decoder and an amp.
Other wise you end up with a huge tv/video/stereo monstrosity which no
one can operate. A friend of mine had an existing TV, VCR and Stereo.
He made the mistake of adding a Satellite TV and a DVD player in short
order. He tried to wire them all together and found that his wife could
no longer watch tv.

It's no wonder. Just getting everything powered up is a feat, let
along getting everything in the right 'mode' to pass the audio and
video through the right processors and out of and into the right boxes
is nearly impossible. You end up with 4 remotes and no hope of ever
just pushing one button.

He ended up disconnecting the satellite and DVD and putting them on
another tv. Not exactly high tech.

One simple solution (which I plan to use) is to connect the DVD player
to "input 2" on the TV. That way everything works as it does today.
(and, btw, the fact that the VCR trumpts everything because it's last
in line is a huge blessing which I never plan to remove until the VCR
goes away).

What these devices all need is a common communication bus which they
all live on. That way the TIVO, by far the smarted and easiest to use
device I own could force them all to obey and 'do the right thing'.
(I think it's no coincidence that the TIVO runs linux, btw.)

Back to my anxiety, I want to bye the Sony DVPS360. But I also want 5
channels of sound. But I don't want one of those monster sound
processors with 400 buttons which my 2.5 year old will surely
touch/change/break. (you should have seen what he did to the on/off
switch of this old laptop).

Sony does make a box with an integrated decoder and amp. It's probably
no more than boom-box audio quality, but it is simple (it only has an
volume control on the outside)...

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

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)

Virtual circuits, point-to-point links and distributed phone
switches.

Looking at the phone poles around my house I'm begining to wonder
if running copper pairs back to a central office makes sense anymore.
I'm dreaming of a distributed phone system.

If bandwidth is essentially free, or very cheap, why not dedicate
bandwidth to each house?

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

Listing to the debates in the IETF on multicast address assignment
has me wondering if they have missed the point. I'm having a vision of
a large multinational
ISP decideing to 'sell' a fixed IP address to a content provider (say, CNN),
and the content provider just streamed content out. For the right amount
of money, the ISP could guarantee a fixed amount of bandwidth for the
multicast traffic.

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

Born 3/14/98 12:08pm

7lbs, 7oz

19 1/2"

Not much else going on this month, sorry... See you next
month!

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

Eeeyow. There are rented "bucket trucks" all over the suburb of
Arlington, MA where I live. It appears the RCN, the new phone, cable
& Internet company is serious. They plan to make Arlington the first
town in Mass to have two cable companies. The rumor is that
$19.95/month will get you phone and cable.

They are pulling what looks like shielded fiber cable all over town.
I would love to know what kind of equipment they are going to use.
Will they multiplex the phone and cable over one line or use separate
lines? Will the phone be over a shared media or all point-to-point back
to a CO? They have torn up the street for some serious wiring in front
of their new office.

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

I recently moved (all of one block), so I had to move my cable modem
and ISDN connections. What a fiasco. The cable company disconnected
our cable 2 times in the weeks before the move and then lost the order
completely and did not show up on the install date. The only good
part is that the old cable modem still worked at the old house and
continued to keep my email flowing... (moral: do I really want
to get phone service from my cable company?)

On the advise of a colleague (thanks Chris!) I decided to convert one
of my analogue lines to ISDN rather than opt for a fresh install. I
called "1-800-GET-ISDN" and told them I wanted to keep the old phone #
(it is my fax line). The called back in a week, as promised, and gave
me the "SPIDs" - those ridiculous numbers which look like long phone
numbers with "0000" or "0101" at the end. (imagine if you had to configure
your phone with SPIDs before it work - NO one would have working
dial-tone). Anyway, they checked out the line and gave me the SPIDs
and said that in two weeks my line would magically convert to ISDN.

The morning of the cutover I noticed I'd lost dial tone so I connected
an ISDN TA to the line. No joy - I could not get any D channel
activity (the "D" channel is one of the 3 channels used in ISDN; the
D, B1 and B2. The D channel is for signaling and the "B" (bearer)
channels are for voice & data. If the D channel is not "up", you can't
talk to the phone switch to send and recieve calls.

Around 11am I called to inquire. They said it was scheduled but was
not up yet. Shortly after I noticed I had the D channel working and I
could make and receive calls. OK! Not bad. Worked right away. This
is nice because I used the existing premise wiring without any
changes. All of the other ISDN installs I've had required new wiring
in the house (mostly due to inexperience/paranoia I think).

So, the moral is, converting an existing line to ISDN is faster and
easier.

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

If you live in the Boston area, have you noticed how nice the NYNEX
people have become? Helpful too. I have to wonder if this is a
result of the Bell Atlantic merger or the threat of competition.

I remember back in 1994 I could get a trouble ticket # from the repair
people and a guaranteed one hour call back. Then, in 1995 they would
not even open trouble tickets much less give you the number and you'd
be luck if you could get a 24 hour call back. The NYNEX people all
sounded angry and the service got real bad. (on more than one occasion
I had T1 lines go down for 3-4 days and NYNEX people playing games
with not being able to test lines because no one was at the CO, etc...)

That all seems to be over now. I recently got a trouble ticket number
on a residential line. And, I got a callback. Amazing. I
like the new NYNEX/Bell Atlantic...

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