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

Brad's Technology Blog

Warm Start

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

Never Say Die... (reviving a Linksys WRT54GS)

A while back I did a project using the Linksys wireless routers. Well, more truthfully an associate did all the work, I just managed the project. Anyway, my associate, being rusty with hardware at that point managed to "brick" one of the units. It was toasted and would not respond to the simple recovery proceedure. (aside: I do this all the

Why I'm not an ISP Anymore

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

Why is Software Development Still Magic?

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

Throatless Rocket Engines

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

Generating RF signals with your VGA card

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

Very small, fast X86 C compile

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

Oh those crazy young people in Europe...

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