Blog Category: Software
Crowdsourced Zynq FPGA board
On April 11th, 2016 In Software
This is interesting. A crowd sourced FPGA board with a Xilinx Zynq; Basically Xilinx FPGA fabric with a hard ARM A9 CPU.
https://www.crowdsupply.com/krtkl/snickerdoodle
It looks like you'll need to break out board as well to get reasonable connections (USB, HDMI). Seems like a lot can be done with that. I have not
Ubuntu upgrades. wow!
On January 8th, 2009 In Software
I have a couple of machines running Ubuntu. More and more lately.
One machine at home was running Ubuntu 7.04 and mythtv. I was loath to change it
because it was working and I hate having to type "ssh" when I'm watching tv.
But, I finally did it over the holidays. First I upgraded to 7.10, which was a pain.
7.04 is not longer supported and
pcc (portable c compiler) lives again!
On January 8th, 2009 In Software
Two interesting things happened this week
- the "R" programming language was talked about in the mainstream press.
- I discovered that the openbsd folks are working on using a non-gcc C
compiler (pcc). Turns out in the non-linux unix world there is not so
much love for gcc.
This makes some sense. gcc is huge and hard to
My experiment with Mythtv
On October 25th, 2007 In Software
I love my tivo. I've added a big disk to it. But I want to see more
of my "personal media" on the tv (pictures, movies, etc) so I decided
to make a Mythtv box.
I made a nice new pc in a "stereo cabinet like" box. I used a
motherboard with built in HDMI output (very nice) and a 64 bit AMD
cpu. I got all this from Mwave.
Motherboard:
Firefox bookmarks
On March 18th, 2007 In Software
Just a quick note on bookmarks. I use several laptops, a common machine
at home and a workstation at work. This can sometimes get confusing
when I save web bookmarks in various different places.
I recently discovered "foxmarks". I only used Firefox,
and foxmarks is an extension which syncs up my bookmarks everyplace I
install it. It's
Modifying read-only file systems in an embedded system
On March 18th, 2007 In Software
It's often a good idea to make the root file system in a embedded system
read-only. If you do this and only make changes to files in a ram disk
(mounted under /tmp, for example) the device will always come back to
a known state when powered up. This is a nice feature and often
a requirement.
But sometimes you need to make changes which
RCU in the linux kernel; an alternative to reader-writer locks
On December 2nd, 2006 In Software
I ran into something in the announcement of the
2.6.19 kernel
called "sleepable rcu". I found this
wikipedia entry for rcu. It gives some nice background on rcu's.
I don't normally place much credence in wikipedia pages but this
one seems reasonably good. And it explains why RCU's are a better
alternative to multiple-reader-single-writer
HTML from lisp
On November 12th, 2006 In Software
(aside: this is a pretty funny intro to lisp
casting spels in lisp)
Generating HTML from lisp is nothing new. Many people have done it
and there are lots projects on the web using it. There's also a lot
of interesting XML/HTML lisp code floating around. It turns out that
XML and HTML lend themselves rather well to symbolic processing.
I've
A quick Scheme / embedded-system example
On November 1st, 2006 In Software
Usually when I find myself fighting to prove a point it's usually becuase
it's a loosing battle and my ego just won't let go.
But let's assume you actually might be interesting seeing why a simple
lisp like scripting language might be intesting.
I wanted to change the behavior of a display terminal. I wanted it to
have a list of times (hours
Scheme + Bogl + SDL = simple, quick embedded UI
On October 27th, 2006 In Software
I have been struggling with a way to make a simple user userface for an embedded system with a 640x480 LCD
but no keyboard or mouse. The machine only has 64mb of ram and wants to run largely out of ram. This eliminates
things like X windows, TK, etc... And, I wanted to be able to hack up experiments quickly.
I originally tried Java, but it
Warm Start
On October 21st, 2006 In Software
It's important to note up front that I don't know what I am talking
about. At least when it comes to Lisp. There are some things I on
which I can speak authoritatively, but this isn't one of them.
Having said that, I am a obsessed with lisp and things lisp. It began
when I read first saw some adventure source code in
Why is Software Development Still Magic?
On October 17th, 2005 In Software
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
Oh those crazy young people in Europe...
On July 28th, 2005 In Software
Apparently every four years young hackers in Europe get together and make
a sort of tent city. It's called "whathehack"
It looks like fun, at least if you like laptops and beer