Deep-Thought Lab: An Embedded System Diary

Books

2007-08-29T08:36:00.000-07:00

Currently reading:
1. Programming embedded systems : with C and GNU development tools / Michael Barr and Anthony Massa.

2. Building embedded Linux systems / Karim Yaghmour.

3. The art of designing embedded systems / Jack G. Ganssle.

Wishlist:
1. Embedded Linux primer : a practical, real-world approach / Christopher Hallinan

2. Embedded Linux system design and development / P. Raghavan, Amol Lad, Sriram Neelakandan.

3. Designing embedded hardware / John Catsoulis.

4. An embedded software primer / David E. Simon.

5. Debugging Embedded Linux – Christopher Hallinan

6. Linux® Patch Management: Keeping Linux® Systems Up To Date

7. Designing Embedded Hardware by John Catsoulis

8. Understanding the Linux Kernel, 3rd Edition by Daniel P. Bovet

Gmail's special character parsing

2007-04-22T17:51:00.000-07:00

Here's a lesser known behaviour of gmail usernames:

If you've a gmail ID that goes A.B@gmail.com (for example), you can email AB@gmail.com and still receive it. Or vice versa. Give it a shot. I just did this week and to my amusement, the email was succesffully delivered to my A.B inbox. You cannot sign in with the alternate ID but you most definitely can receive mail!

The simplest way of achieving that is by parsing out special characters and leaving only the alphanumerics internally. Any 'To' gmail address would also be then parsed out and matched against this database of alphanumeric IDs. Why? To keep it simple, I'd assume.

Google's wifi hotspot

2007-04-02T08:01:00.000-07:00

http://www.google.com/tisp/

A joke, methinks.

Framebuffer disabling

2007-03-29T23:24:00.000-07:00

You'd need to worry about this if
1. the installation CD kicks in and all you're seeing is horizontal/inclined lines of colour where there should be text/options etc.
2. installation runs fine but when you reboot the newly installed system, you see the behaviour as above.

For the installation, the option to select is
linux video:vga16=off

Towards the end of the installation process, include 'video:vga16=off' in kernel boot parameters. In effect, this'll be saved in LILO/GRUB depending on which one is selected.

For what a framebuffer is required and why it need be disabled in certain cases, I'm never too sure. Mine is a laptop being loaded with Debian. And I have this problem with Woody. So there.

"Begin at the beginning", the King said, gravely,

2007-03-25T23:04:00.000-07:00

“and go till you come to the end; then stop. ” - Lewis Carroll

I dusted off my 128MB RAM, 20GB hardrive laptop today to revamp it. The lappy was bought for the very purpose of writing hobby code, about 2 years ago. Since then, the learning process of installing Linux single-handedly and testing out the various package/module installs, just to get the wireless LAN, the audio, the USB mouse, and the CD writer working, not to mention power management, and some attempts of building kernel had left it battle-weary. Last week, I did what any fearless engineer would do - format the whole danged hard disk to start over! And today, I did just that: I began at the beginning.

I've installation disks for Debian Woody I'd purchased some moons ago. 2.4 kernel. That's so yesterday. The plan therefore, is to create new partitions (and remove Windoze entirely), install 2.4, download new kernel and upgrade to 2.6. I'm toying with the idea of 2 installations of Linux on 2 separate partitions so I can develop on one of them and test on the other.

Once the latest stable Debian is built and installed - and that's going to be a project in itself - I'll setup a development environment with necessary programming/debugging tools on one of the partitions.

Then on will ensue programming endeavors. That's the generic roadmap to this blog. Welcome!