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Brad's comments on the world of technology...

Blog Archive: March 2024

World-class wizardry

I want one of these. Apparently it's from Toyota. picture of 'walking foot' with person

Some Tiny O/S's

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,

My cell phone, my wallet, my cell phone...

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

I thought only Superman could make time go backward...

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

TI ARM7 CPU w/flash and ram

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

Hybrid CPLD/FPGA

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

I've always liked Bob

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

Linux Raid and "new age" IDE disks

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