Embedded in Cork » EmbeddedSphere

EmbeddedSphere – Around the Embedded Net #6 – Feb 25 2008

Admin — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 20:05:33 +0000

It’s been a might long time since I last created an EmbeddedSphere post. Here’s some web items that have caught my eye:

A ‘C’ Test: The 0×10 Best Questions for Would-be Embedded Programmers – An excellent example of sane C interview questions. Well worth a read.

Netrino – The tag line for the site is “The Embedded Systems Experts”. Well worth checking out as they kindly make a large number of embedded software articles available for reading.

Embedded Group on LinkedIn – There’s a group for embedded engineers available at LinkedIn. I can’t really comment on how useful it is as I haven’t had a chance to browse through it any detail yet.

Making C behave like C++ – Ah yes, the great C versus C++ debate for embedded systems. Miro Samek has a good article on how to add object based programming concepts to C. The comments on the post are well worth reading as well.

EmbeddedSphere – Around the Embedded Net #5 – April 20th

Admin — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 08:30:04 +0000

The Register reports from the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver on the threat to embedded devices from hacking. However the specific threat to a router requires direct hardware access. More worrying are the threats that are going to emerge as more and more embedded devices acquire IP addresses and are exposed to remote access. EmbeddedSphere #3 contains some more links on the topic.

Doug Gaff, an embedded enginer with Rind River speaks highly of his time at Virginia Techn University. Sadly the University, especially internationally, will be mainly known for the terrible killings that took place there this past week. Doug’s post helpfully points to the positive aspects of the University and town of Blacksburg, in particular it’s contribution to engineering.

Damien Mulley is looking for your old mobile phones. Although not strictly related to embedded software the request is curious enough to make me wonder what he is up to, especially as the phones need to be in working order and you won’t get them back.

Finally Clare Dillon from Microsoft Ireland highlights a free one day introduction to developing software for Windows Mobile. It’s been run by Microsoft in Dublin on May 14th.

EmbeddedSphere – Around the Embedded Net #4 – April 17th

Admin — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 21:30:22 +0000

It’s been a while since the last post. There’s a few in the pipeline but in the mean time here’s another quick dip into the EmbeddedSphere.

Zfone from Phil Zimmerman is continuing to take some massive strides towards acceptance by the IETF according to the VOIPSA. So as VOIPSA asks why doesn’t Skype embrace a protocol like ZRTP to deflect the criticism and suspicion surrounding it’s VoIP encryption?

Doug Gaff gives embedded engineers a scare by asking is the embedded industry dead? Embedded Processors from ExtremeTech is a great introduction to the embedded processor market (although the article is now 5 years old). Making the Pentium processor’s market share equate to practically 0% should come as some comfort to embedded engineers that are worried about the death of their industry

The Embedded Components blog allows active contribution as means of increasing your influence in the embedded market place. The blog seems to have quite a low rate of posting, but it’s still great to keep coming across embedded focused blogs.

China Daily reports that tickets for the 2008 Olympics will have embedded RFID chips in order to prevent counterfeiting. This was also done for the last football world cup.

EmbeddedSphere – Around the Embedded Net #3 – April 4th

Admin — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 09:32:57 +0000

The Register reports on plans to test programmers ability to program securely as a help to software buyers. If like me you assume that embedded devices are hard to attack then this article on embedded security will give you pause for thought. Of course once you add one of those fancy IP addresses to your device you open up a whole world of security pains for your embedded device. Just look for embedded security on Google and examine how many of the top results relate to IP.

We write code for humans, not computers. That may seem a strange statement, but when you consider that machines don’t care about the number of source files you have, the use of nice variable names, comments, white space, new lines, functions etc. then it’s clear that the main audience for the code you write is the human reader. So if you’re going to bother to write code that can be read by a human then it better be easy to understand, preferably first time. Scott Belware uses the term Soluble Code for code that can be understood first time and his short summary on the topic is excellent.
(By the way one possible exception to soluble code may be when writing assembly, but even then clear comments, spacing, multiple files etc. should still be present).

Quickly, pick a number between 1 and 20? So how “Random” was your guess? Turns out humans aren’t great at doing random and 17 is the most random number we come up with between 1 and 20.

EmbeddedSphere – Around the Embedded Net #2

Admin — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 21:34:46 +0000

Jeremy Faller’s neat little C++ logger reminds of a powerful logger that I’ve been using for Windows Smartphone. (Despite the fancy debug tools that come with the likes of Visual Studio for developing on Windows Smartphone the use of a whole IP stack over active sync is just a little too intrusive for real time debugging.)

On the subject of Windows Smartphone, Windows Mobile 6.0 comes with built in support for SD card encryption. WM 6.0 will also support remote and local wipe . Good news for the growing amounts of sensitive data being placed on smartphones.

Wouldn’t it be great to be working in Silicon Valley and be able to go the Embedded Systems Conference? You even get to hear Al Gore give the key note speech!

Jack Ganssle has some comments on comments and I don’t mean blog comments. The approach I adopt when it comes to commenting is to first of all write the function design using Program Design Language and turn the PDL into the comments.

Finally thanks to Damien Mulley for the plug on his excellent (and widely read) blog. Like many other bloggers in Ireland my interest in blogging owes a lot to his tireless (or tiring!) work.

EmbeddedSphere – Around the Embedded Net #1

Admin — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 10:31:59 +0000

While searching for embedded blogs I came across the Low Country Software Ramblings blog asking the question Am I alone?

Thankfully Benoit was able to answer his own question and point to a number of embedded blogs via embeddedgurus.net.

My search continues and hopefully some more embedded web logs can be unearthed in the coming weeks. If you know of any please leave a reply.

Edit. – embeddedgurus.net seems to be inactive. The latest posts on the blogs are all 2006 and the forum is full of spam. However some of the old posts are well worth reading.