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.
I regularly talk to companies who have software development problems - late schedules, too many bugs, unhappy customers. I sometimes marvel when people act as if software development was some magic process which was impossible to understand or control.
My experience is that's not magic and is not that hard to control. I'd like to share some thoughts on ways to define and control the software development process in the "embedded space".
I'd also like to talk a little bit about how easy it is to keep engineers and software developers happy. And, conversly, how easy it is to get them off on the wrong foot.
And, it would be fun to share some techniques for bring groups of people together around a vision and product. One technique is call the "the delphi method".
There are also some fun methods using Post-it notes and something as simple as a round table discussion.
I'll write about all of these in some upcoming entries. I'd like to show some ways to get software out in a predictable manner and keep almost everyone happy.
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.
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.
I know it sounds like Buckaroo Bonzai, but I have a soft spot for people on a mission.
The folks at 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.
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.
