Surviving software

TI E2E Community - Re: DM355-270Mhz changing PLL in ublDM355

2009-10-23T18:49:00.000+02:00

TI E2E Community - Re: DM355-270Mhz changing PLL in ublDM355

You'd think there would be an end.

TI E2E Community - DM355-270Mhz changing PLL in ublDM355

2009-10-21T13:40:00.000+02:00

For those of you who wonder about changing a TI DM355 from 216MHz to 270MHz, watch this space.

TI E2E Community - DM355-270Mhz changing PLL in ublDM355

Embedded Linux - startup

2009-10-11T10:45:00.002+02:00

For those of us working with embedded Linux and have not comitted suicide yet here's a tip for reducing start up times from power on to the command prompt (Userland).

It's going to hurt. It will be painful. Write down everything you do as you do it and do one thing at a time. Test after every change. Do not do 20 changes at a time.

One step that may seem obvious is to use and uncompressed kernel thus saving on the uncompression time. This really did not work for me. While it's true you save a few seconds on this you will lose out on the extra time needed to load the kernel from whatever storage you have. In my case the startup time got longer by 3.5 seconds.

It's been a while

2009-09-23T09:00:00.003+03:00

I feel guilty. I haven't shared my knowledge with the wider community out there. These days, I not sure I have anything to contribute. The gap between what I need to know and what I do know seems to get wider each day in spite of what I read. Here's a question. What is the device name for the first serial port on any PC running Linux? 100 quatloos for the winner. Read the question very carefully.

Zune date bug

2009-01-05T08:48:00.001+02:00

Oh dear.

year = ORIGINYEAR; /* = 1980 */

while (days > 365)
{
   if (IsLeapYear(year))
   {
       if (days > 366)
       {
           days -= 366;
           year += 1;
       }
   }
   else
   {
       days -= 365;
       year += 1;
   }
}
If the author had written unit tests, this would have been spotted.

Israeli Linux fan squeezes Windows refund out of Dell • The Register

2008-12-05T10:22:00.000+02:00

Israeli Linux fan squeezes Windows refund out of Dell • The Register: "Israeli Linux fan squeezes Windows refund out of Dell"

Great. Israel rocks!

Microsoft preps IE 8 for the web-challenged • The Register

2008-12-05T10:11:00.000+02:00

Microsoft preps IE 8 for the web-challenged • The Register: "Microsoft preps IE 8 for the web-challenged"

Great. Millions of web sites only function when viewed with IE and no amount of importuning web site owners can change this. No Microsoft, having created the problem will pledge to conform to standards and break it all over again.

Nullable

2008-11-24T20:28:00.002+02:00

I am new to the concept of nullable types in C#. Most C# developers are in the same boat. OK, I can understand the concept. Consider a database column as boolean. It is possible that the field might neither be true or false as it has never been set.

On the other hand, I notice that WPF checkboxes return a bool? in response to the IsChecked method. Hmmm. I find having to cast a bool? to a bool rather troublemsome.

Frustration

2008-11-22T10:19:00.004+02:00

I am chasing a problem. It's Windows Xp Embedded and we have an issue with activation. I will spare you all the gory details and the screams . Currently it's Saturday. I am at work by myself and all I wanted to do was set the correct time and date on the baseboard. The f*****g Phoenix BIOS will not, repeat not allow me to enter any year after 1999. Setting it in a known good OS works until I change the hard disc whereupon the damn thing burbles about a bad CMOS checksum and loads the defaults putting me back where I started.
I thought Y2K problems were long over.

Post post note:
I have discovered that it will let me change the date using the arrow keys.

Windows 7

2008-11-09T10:05:00.000+02:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7

Thanks, but no thanks. I am so not interested in any future versions of Windows. 5.1.2600 works just fine thanks. With luck , I can avoid Windows 6 altogether.

Hate

2008-11-06T10:22:00.004+02:00

Sometimes, most of the time, I love Microsoft. Other times like today, I hate them with a passion I find difficult to cope with. All I wanted was to download Windows Xp Embedded Service Pack 2 (not the rollover kit) and install to overcome a blue screen of death. Yes this is the first time I've done a licensed install of XP Embedded. We paid a small fortune for the privilege.
Do Microsoft ship the toolset with our very expensive MSDN subscription? No they don't.Do they allow an ISO image download from the privileged ece partners website? No, just a very stupid gui that likes to download what it needs very, very slowly.

I get Windows Server Editions in Serbo Croat through the post for no sane reason I can think off but not the damn things I need right now. Sod it.

Post post note
23 hours later and it's still going.

Vista - bye bye

2008-10-29T06:33:00.002+02:00

So Windows 7 is out in the wild? This is going to be the first time , I've skipped an entire generation of Windows for which I shall be eternally grateful. Personally I'm quite happy with my Windows 5.1 thank you. At work, we use XP Embedded a lot which is just a do it yourself version of XP Pro. Yesterday, Microsoft announced that the next generation of Embedded will be based on Windows 7, thus confirming my decision to have nothing to do with 6 in any way shape or form.

Still here

2007-09-05T10:06:00.000+03:00

Yes, I haven't gone away. I currently engaged in a life and death struggle to port myself to Visual Studio 2005, get to grips with .NET 3.0 and custom Windows drivers. It's a wonder I have any hair left.

So there I am, playing with a C# sample of AmCap and starting to learn the IVideoWindow interface. My first attempt at reading the help file got me the oh so useful message:

"This page is not available in your chosen language (US English)"

There followed a list of pages that were available, 4 Chinese, one Japanese, Tagalog and , yes, of course, US English. (I made it up about Tagalog).

It's 2007 and I have to use BSTR!! Argggghhh!

WTF

2006-07-31T08:00:00.000+03:00

I would have submitted this to the Daily WTF but I don't know how. Nor am I going to try that hard to find out. The grammar is appalling.

Inboxer Rebellion (Master/Slave)

2006-07-26T11:00:00.000+03:00

I seemed to have missed this story from 2003. Yes, if you want to supply computer equipment to the County of Los Angeles, please avoid the industry phrase 'master/slave'. Verity Stobs mentions this.

Thanks ATI

2006-07-10T14:22:00.000+03:00

My Radeon graphics card refuses to enable the seconday monitor. Thanks for the error message ATI.

Speechless - this is a bit BritSpeak of course

2006-07-04T13:13:00.000+03:00

I know I really shouldn't be surprised at anything the lusers do - I've
been reading and gaining some perspective for a longtime (nothing I've
had to deal with has been as bad as what most of you lot have and have
had to deal with) - but this just left me speechless. Utterly. I
should have said something, but visitors where present and that would
have been Unprofessional. Anyway, I was really too stunned.....

I suffer at an academic establishment and have the delightful
responsibility of everything from the departmental licence servers to
the mystery as to why the students persist in Feng Shui and keep
rotating all my workstations anti-clockwise by pi/2 radians every week.

But I digress...

Many of my academics are architects, some are even professors. A while
back I had a professor of architecture invite a fellow academic to give
a lecture. So far, so not my business.

At quarter to six (I finish at five. Theoretically.) I get a desperate
phone call from this particular academic pleading for help. "I having
trouble with the projector!" (Not my problems), "My visitor has to give
a lecture in five minutes!" (Still not my problem, and it's Friday, and
I'm thirsty - but this plinks off what's left of my conscience since the
academic isn't the visitor's problem but rather mine).

However, this is followed by a small bleating noise that went: "I'm
standing in the dark here, and I can't even find the light switch".

At which point my critical faculties shutdown completely and I defaulted
to helpf^H^H^Hdoormat mode and went down to sort him out.

Which involved walking into the lecture theatre door, pushing the light
switch shaped light switch situated on he light switch panel next to the
door, turning around and leaving again without a word and finally
buggering off home at last.

It's only when I get home and recover with much 6X and come to the
realisation of what I've just done and the precedent I've just set.

But what really rocks my world is when, a week later, he asks in advance
for support for another lecture and I suggest that this is fine, but can
he please co-ordinate with building services to ensure that he knows the
location of the light switches as they are not my responsibility.

And now he complains to my line manager about *my* attitude (yeah,
fscking -doormat-), and I get a word in my shell-like from the PHB. At
which point I finally loose my rag and point out that

a) I'm a highly (under)paid IT professional. Working light switches is
not in my job description.
b) In what way do I have an 'attitude'? I made a perfectly polite
request to him because he has a clearly demonstrable inability to work a
light switch. He was lucky I didn't suggest he ask for a training course
in light switch usage, or try to find him a manual.
c) In what why is my job to work bloody light switches?
d) He is a -Professor- of -Architecture-. Even given the base level of
knowledge you might expect of a normal human being, you'd have thought
he must have gone to at least one lecture once where they told him Where
You Put The Light Switches?
e) Light switches? Light switches!?
f) He was a student here. In this building. He's spent his -entire-
career in this same fscking building. If he doesn't already know where
the light switches are why the hell does he expect me to know? I've
only been here five years, after all....

And _I'M_ getting the bollocking! He earns at least twice my salary! How
the hell does that get to happen to someone who needs help working
fscking light switches?

But mostly - Why Me? I've been told by staff and students alike that I'm
'intimidating' and I know I have the silent FOAD-stare that I throw back
to really dumb questions down pat. Do lusers -really- equate light
switches with computers? I know they're binary and electric, but that's
far as it goes, surely?

I'm so considering voluntary recovery at the moment..

--
Dave

Variants

2006-05-17T09:14:00.000+03:00

When I first met the VARIANT data type I was a bit overwhelmed. This monster, so important to Visual Basic is alive, well and kicking back hard.

Picture me coding a small test app doing 3D plots of video data. The image came from proprietary libraries via a Safearray holding variants. No sweat I thought. Dum, de dum, de dum and a major crash later I came out of the coding loop and took a long hard look and what the api call was giving back. The dummies that implemented the code ignored the VARTYPE which tells you what the VARIANT holds. The bastards put the value there instead and left the rest of the struct untouched.

An Internet disclaimer

2006-05-07T07:47:00.000+03:00

eLegal Canton brings us a disclaimer for the Internet based on Nelson Rocks preserve text. Here's a sample.

The Internet is covered in slippery slopes with loose, slippery and unpredictable footing. The RIAA can make matters worse. Patent trolls are everywhere. You may fall, be spammed or suffer a DOS attack. There are hidden viruses and worms. You could break your computer. There is wild code, which may be vicious, poisonous or carriers of dread malware. These include viruses and worms. E-mail can be poisonous as well. We don't do anything to protect you from any of this. We do not inspect, supervise or maintain the Internet, blogsphere, ISP’s or other features, natural or otherwise.

More silly patent stuff

2006-04-24T10:46:00.000+03:00

From the Right To Create blog. A valid patent on a compression method that claims to be able to reduce the size of any dataset by at least bit recursively. Laughable.

Right to Create: Write Free Software, Pay $203,000 to Patent Holder

2006-04-24T10:24:00.000+03:00

More silly patent stuff. Right to Create: Write Free Software, Pay $203,000 to Patent Holder. It never ends.

Fined for selling fake spyware from Guardian Unlimited: Technology

2006-04-20T18:10:00.000+03:00

Oh good. Some get-rich Mr Dibbler discovers net send and now gets fined a lot of dollars. What a good feeling.

In Silicon Valley, a Man Without a Patent - New York Times

2006-04-16T21:50:00.000+03:00

Software style patents bring out the worst in me. Go read this article from the NYT and then tell me the USA has it all figured out.

Not a happy camper

2006-04-09T07:59:00.000+03:00

alt.sysadmin.recovery is a place where BOFHs hang out. Here's a portion of a recent post by a very unhappy admin who does not like the support he's getting from a large vendor.

Never, never have I seen anything like this negligent disregard. Your callous unconcern is criminal. Not once in dealing with some of the largest vendors in the world have I been so systematically blown off. The hardest serial killer has more regard for his victims. Even a tick will drop off when it's full. You miserable wretches, you are the case of crabs caught from the company stoop. You are head lice, but for all the height your victims provide you still can't see 2 inches in front of your face. You are the tapeworm that rejoices in slavering at the colon of your host,
caring naught if they live or die. You survive by ripping your victims wide and sucking at their entrails.

I spit at you, you motherfuckers. I hurl my hatred in your pustule-ridden faces. I waive my contempt before your boundless, baseless, overweening pride. Before this is done, you will wish me dead. You will suffer the Clue as I force it down your cock-scarred throat. You will fucking learn. You will yield, you fucking whores. You will earn the moneys I've paid you, so help me, or you will repay every ill-gotten cent. There is no public disclosure clause in your EULA, you dumb bastards. And when you're done fucking me, when I'm done tabulating your sins,(0) the tables will
turn.

Languages

2006-04-05T11:24:00.000+03:00

I've always tried to consider other languages than English when I write software apps. Anyway, I was vaguely amused to see the company expresso machine has decided to switch to Spanish on it's LCD display. Nobody seems that bothered about it. Much better than Visual Studio which , when asked to generate a dialog based MFC app, insists on defaulting to Taiwanese Chinese as the language of choice.

Impact Lab - Interview with Tim Berners-Lee

2006-03-27T11:16:00.000+02:00

An interesting interview with Tim Berner-Lee here.
I'm interested that he thinks the double slash was a mistake. So do I.

Vista 2007. Fire the leadership now!

2006-03-26T14:51:00.000+02:00

I would love to even think I could do this to my bosses.

"You are our leadership. When we succeed, it is directly because of how you lead and manage your teams. When we fail, it is directly because of how you lead and manage your teams. We've had enough of failure and we've had enough of you. Drop off your badge on the way out. Your personal belongings will be dropped off at your house. Now get out of my sight."

Vista runs a bit late... again.

CamelCase - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2006-03-23T10:28:00.000+02:00

There's me , using CamelCase all these years and not realisingIt.

Would the author please stand up?

2006-03-20T17:01:00.000+02:00

int nMakeSpec = 78+(3-(y==0?0:(y==1?(x<2?0:1):(y==2?(x<2?x:2):x))))*5;

What a wonderful line of code. Just great. Magic numbers, conditionals on one line and eye watering brackets.

Online ejaculation pole: shock result revealed | The Register

2006-03-16T08:07:00.000+02:00

Sometimes, as a self confessed geek, I come across something that makes me want to take up another career such as bovine semen collector. Or perhaps not. Here is an El Reg piece on how many strokes it took Linux programmers to achieve explosive climax when indulging in a quick five-knuckle shuffle while perusing a Natalie Portman topless sunbathing snaps website. Onanism measured.

Robots break Asimov’s first law

2006-03-15T11:07:00.000+02:00

Robots break Asimov’s first law. Oh no. Gun toting robots with dodgy software perhaps?

Constructors

2006-03-06T16:09:00.000+02:00

All these years I can still get caught when objects fail to construct as expected. Hours of debugging on that one.

2006-02-28T13:53:00.000+02:00

So there I was, cheerfully building a DirectShow source filter and feeling very brave. On changing the compiler to level 4 so I could see the warnings I came across this little gem.

warning C4995: 'sprintf': name was marked as #pragma deprecated

Well, well, well, well. So sprintf is being phased out is it? Of course it isn't. Microsoft just marked it with a pragma to indicate 'find something else' For those who want to know more, I recommend this overlarge Usenet discussion on the subject (and others).

You can find an explanation from Microsoft here. Buffer overuns and the consequent security problem was caused by oldish C style functions. They suggest using Strsafe.h and some odd looking replacements like 'StringCchPrintf' that takes a length argument. I'll stick with STL and Boost thanks.

Getting dangerous

2006-02-27T16:41:00.000+02:00

Yes, I was getting deep. I stopped and thought quite hard when I got to this bit:

It's not a trivial process and involves editing a system file with a hex editor and modifying a registry key.

I might not go there after all.

Priorities

2006-02-23T08:25:00.000+02:00

We design a complex product with very advanced mechanical, electrical, electronic sub systems with video being a major part. In a recent design review what single buring issue caused the greatest heat and noise?

The case we ship it in.

Opening a trouble ticket.

2006-02-21T10:51:00.000+02:00

I have a problem with a card on my development system. Unable to fix it and google not giving me an answer I reluctantly turn to the company that made it and decided to open a trouble ticket.

Here's what I had to do:

Open an 'account' via the web page
Register my product
Download a set of utilities
Install the utilites
Read up on what they do
Run the trouble ticket wizard
Fill in a number of fields including a 22 digit serial number
Wait till it generates a 700 plus line text file
Go back to the web site and get past the knowledge base
Fill in another form and attach the text file.
Go get a cup of tea and silently smoulder.

At least I got a number.

Style Part 342.

2006-02-12T13:37:00.000+02:00

rc =
Function(
device,
someVariable,
&another
);

Is this common in 'C' these day? I mean having every bit on a seperate line. Seems senseless to me. For those who like to have the starting brace ( { ) on the same line as a conditional, this style originated on systems where the editors only showed one line of code at a time. No need for it now.

Serial

2006-02-08T15:49:00.000+02:00

I spent a day or so building a serial communications test application, the normal thing, a GUI , serial class and some bit banging to emulate a device the hardware team has failed to deliver on time. I scrounged a serial cable (ahh what type though), powered up a PC card I happened to have and ran hyperterminal on my PC and the card. To my utter amazement, it all worked first time. I then added my app which also behaved flawlessly.

I'm going home, to bed, and I going to pull the covers over my head and stay there until morning.

It's Safer Internet day

2006-02-08T09:22:00.000+02:00

I didn't know that either. Don;t spend too much time reading the site. If you're a software engineer, most of this wilkl be familiar.

InSafe Homepage

CDialog and 'How big is that again?"

2006-02-06T10:22:00.000+02:00

It seemed such a simple task. I needed to get a bitmap representing a dialog, then merge that bitmap into a display buffer so that I could see the dialog on a video output. Well, several days later I got stuch on the last, smallest bit. How do you get a rectangle describing the complete outline of a CDialog derived class? This is an area of MFC and windows I have not strayed into before.

Here's the answer which I'm sure you all knew but didn't tell me.

CRect CPatData::GetDialogSize()
{
CRect rc;
GetClientRect(&rc);
MapDialogRect(&rc);
return rc;
}

It's the 'MapDialogRect' that makes all the difference.

Graphics

2006-02-02T11:39:00.000+02:00

In my long career I never had much to do with Windows graphics and video. In the latest 'keep me of the streets' place I have a lot to do. Consider the following. How can I merge a standard Windows dialog onto a video stream? There is a way but it means talking to the SDK much more than I feel comfortable with. A book buying session looms.

#defines

2006-02-01T10:56:00.000+02:00

Deep, deep sigh. I had hoped that the idea of having vast amounts of defines around would gradually be replaced with const. Please. If it's C++ why not.

Small annoyances

2006-01-23T10:25:00.000+02:00

I dislike being told what time to leave work. What is it with management and 1900 hrs? Something magic happen at seven? I like to arrive early between 7 and 7:30 and get a jump on the day and knock off around 5:30 after a 10 hour stint. I can keep that up for ever. Managers seem to have a fixation about leaving time , not how many hours you do or what you do there.

Anyway, minor annoyances with Visual Studio 2003. My PC runs Windows XP with Hebrew added. If I start a new MFC app and am not very careful, I end up with all the boiler plate comments in Taiwanese Chinese. Not very useful at all.

Windows

2006-01-17T19:14:00.000+02:00

It's been a while since I had to delve into the inner workings of the Windows API and MFC. What have I been doing for the last few years I wonder. Well, as the old MSDN (pre .NET) Cds dies the death I don't have MSDN at the tips of my fingers at work. So, I use the Web. Coming into the page for CREATESTRUCT I found an error in the code example. It's just a missing bracket which wouldn't stop any Windows programmer for more than 5 seconds. Being a dutiful soul, I went through the hoops to report it and I got what appears to be a personal response.

This is part and parcel of being a good netizen. Here in Israel, when we go for a walk, I wlays take a plastic bag now to collect garbage on route. We should all work to keep our environment better.

Karma

2006-01-15T13:27:00.000+02:00

It had to happen. My past evil lives have caught up with me again. I now have to update an application written two years ago with an out of date imaging library where the only fully tested source build was on a machine that got stolen about a year before I arrived. Source Control? We've heard of it.

IT stresses 'driving UK to drink'

2006-01-12T10:19:00.000+02:00

According to Autie Beeb, the modern annoyances of automated call centres, mobile phones and crashing computers are driving people to alcohol and cigarettes. Oh yes, any excuse will do. I did spend Boxing Day at the BBC New Centre one year when my brother-in-law lived there. They had their own bar with BBC branded wines. Two sub editors spent the entire day playing backgammon with a very large carafe of red wine at their side. During slow news hours (most of the day) a selection of pornographic films were on show in the viewing room together with film clips that never made the news mainly because the Beeb would be sued.

Doomed

2006-01-10T10:54:00.000+02:00

I'm doomed. Doomed and damned. I must have offended the Computer Gods and Godesses very much indeed. In order to get a protoype ready for a forthcoming show in the USA, I have to pick up an old MFC app and rejigger it. Never mind that the only computer with the original source code was stolen and we only have a copy from about a month before it was finished. That would be bad enough but a 10mm bolt broke in my very special posture chair and I can't find a 50mm x 10mm bolt anywhere.

How many bits is that?

2006-01-10T09:05:00.000+02:00

I have a problem with 'unsigned char'. Really. My imagination immediately thinks of Ascii characters and then I'm lost. It's eight bits altogether in a lump and there's a perfectly good word to describe it. It's 'byte'. So, why does so much C/C++ code end up littered, really covered with odd, strange and contradictory definitions. Here's some samples:

#define M_NULL 0x00000000L
#define M_FALSE 0L

Not to be confused with 'NULL' and FALSE, or false of course. Don't get me started on strings. I could write for hours on that one.

When software meets hardware, life can get interesting. I started as a hardware engineer and life was straight forward then. Bit,byte, word and sodding big word. However, I just read the Wikipedia article for word and got very depressed.
Not as depressed as when I had to finish a board design for an 80 bit lattice filter. I was the 10th and last engineer to take on the job. All the rest either died, committed suicide or went mad. Might explain a lot about me.

Gems and macros

2006-01-09T07:53:00.000+02:00

I came acorss this gem of a macro recently.

#include
#define main(x) *UnUsedPtr; int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, LPTSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow)

Oh, very cute. Make a win32 console app look innocent. So much of what I see these days is plain vanilla 'C' with no attempt at data abstraction or moving into the higher levels of software engineering. This was at the top of a header file with over 3000
#defines following. My boss wants a prototype this week using this header and about a dozen others. I want a training course, 24/7 phone support and some books.
Anyway, macros are evil in several ways. Go read the C++ FAQ

Happy New year and class member variables

2006-01-04T08:02:00.000+02:00

Happy new Year to my readers if any. Please leave a comment some time. Today's post is C++ pure and simple. Should class member variables be named in such a way as to be obvious? The Microsoft way is to start the name with 'm_' . For example:

CChildView *m_pView;

The style that seems to be used in such places as the C++ FAQ appears to be a leading underscore which I dislike intensely. It's so easy to miss. As I working in yet another place to whom the words 'codiing standards', "peer reviews" and "source control" are as mystical as the Kabbalah, this will remain an academic exercise.

Codecs

2005-12-30T08:49:00.000+02:00

There I was, happily playing about with a DirectShow sample, mentally designing my video sub system which will take YUV video data, and draw ito a window. Not too hard. I have a sort of sample. In the meantime, I've taken another DirectShow sample which grabs video frames and I'm modifying it to grab a sequence of frames. Useful test data. I have another utility which will batch convert to YUV.

Just as I was getting started, I hit F5 in Visual Studio and up pops a message. "SoftICE debugger detected. Stop debugger and restart". What? I know what an ICE is and I don't have one (yet). A search finds the answer. Somebody, somewhere thought it cute to protect their codecs by detecting the debugger and killing it. It took me hours to locate a codec manager, search through the codec list and find the offending articles.

My final thought as I was driving back home was 'Why are there over 110 codecs on my development machine?". "Why doesn't Microsoft ship an MPEG 2 codec with Media Player?". "Why are there so many video, audio and picture formats to deal with?". "Why do we need JPEG-2000 for crying out loud?".

I suppose I'll find out the answers to these and other questions but this doesn't help me get the job done.

DirectShow

2005-12-27T15:34:00.000+02:00

So there I was, needing to write some code that could feed a video stream. Start with DirectX I thought. Many downloads later, I realised that the header file I needed was nowhere to be found. After much heartache, I read the DirectX article in Wikipedia only to find that DirectShow was moved to the platform SDK in April 2005. Now why couldn't MSDN or Microsoft have told me that?

Firefox and Microsoft

2005-12-26T15:30:00.000+02:00

I was pleasantly surprised today when downloading DirectX 9.0 from Microsoft. As you know, you need to validate your Windows before getting downloads. In the past, it barfed with Firefox but now they have a plugin for it. Well done Microsoft.

timbl's blog | Decentralized Information Group (DIG) Breadcrumbs

2005-12-22T09:13:00.000+02:00

Tim Berners Lee has a blog. You can read it here. In the mean time I trying to find out how to convert video frames into something the computer can show.

Volunteer encyclopedia as accurate as Britannica, journal says

2005-12-15T10:11:00.000+02:00

According to Nature, Wikepedia is as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Just for science articles mind you.
I find WikePedia useful for a quick primer on interface standards, history and other good software hardware stuff.

Tired and making mistakes

2005-12-13T09:23:00.000+02:00

We had to stay late last night, to impress some visitors from far away. Around twelve hours after my start time I wrote a utility class for std::string number conversion. It's one I've done many times. To my annoyance, the IDE showed it just fine in IntelliSense but the complier objected. Not a namespace or overloaded function not found. I googled for it , not really thinking.

Today, in the morning I saw it in five minutes. For the first time in my life , I mistyped the standard header protection. Instead of '#ifndef UTILITIES_H' I'd missed the 'n'. That's taught me a valuable lesson. Don't write code when you're tired. Go read a book.

Perhaps it's time I used #pragma for this. Is it standard yet?

Missing before

2005-12-12T08:11:00.000+02:00

I get my hands dirty with Visual Studio .NET trying to slightly alter a code smaple for a board we have. It compiles just fine until I try and introduce a simple for loop round a read function call. I get

error C2143: syntax error : missing ';' before 'type'

I can even get the same error with an ' int fred; ' but no errors with the same line near the top of main. What ever can it be?

It's a 'C' program of course, not C++. The compiler is being strict about declarations so constructs like

for (int i=0;i<10i++)

are not allowed. Unless of course, you put them in a local scope. I'm amazed. I've been so used to C++ as a better 'C' that I'd forgotten all about type declarations and position.

Repeating mistakes

2005-12-10T16:40:00.000+02:00

I should have known. Recovering from a bout of flu, I was pondering the strimmer and wondering if the waste land at the bottom of the garden needed a trim. Along comes the Significant Other (SO) and pushes a small pamphlet in my hand. "Next door , down one have a problem with this . Sort it please."
I look. It's a instruction manual for a Games wheel with force feedback and pedals. My heart sinks. Well, newish neighbours, got to help out and all that. Noblesee oblige. I arrive in the attic where a group of kids are sitting around a PC. After they've been shooed away I sit down. A few minutes later my jaw drops. It's Hebrew W98 and it's like wading , naked in an active sewer. Every bit of malware, adware and crapware you can think off. Browser hijacked, home page is some search site and the active desktop has an invite to free porn, gambling and duty free booze. What a nice environment for young minds.
I grimly spend the next two hours restoring order only to feed the games wheel is missing something. Yes, it's USB and the drivers install but nothing works. Feeling my way through a maze of cabling I come across an extension to the USB. Obviously for a power supply as this thing must take 150ma at least. Someone at toy's'r'us used that box for a spare no doubt.

No, I said I can't fix Word. It wants to replace something and it's calling for the original disks. This appears to be a pirate copy and I don't touch that.

Future shock

2005-12-06T10:47:00.000+02:00

I was hit hard by Future Shock today. We have a PCI card the boss wants us to use with a PCI chipset on it. So, we get it going with our embedded system and today I transfered it to my development machine. Off comes the covers -for the first time - and I stare. Just what are those strange orange cables connected to the hard drive? Shouldn't I know exactly what those odd tiny connectors are for two of the card slots? A work colleague joins me. He feels the same. I am ashamed to have to ask the BOFH for the mother board manual and feelings of inadequacy hit me as I read about serial ATA and PCI-Express. I make a living with computers after all.

It's the same feeling I have when I took the car to have new disk pads fitted and a wheel bearing changed. Time was, I'd have done that myself. Now I can't, even I wanted too. Modern cars are not made for DIY maintenance.

Video and picture formats

2005-12-05T14:40:00.000+02:00

I knew there were a number of picture and video formats for the PC. It isn't until you start having to build a small system for reading video that the realisation slowly sinks in that, yes, there are really a lot. I never met the YUV video file format until today. I'm not sure I want to.

Obfuscators

2005-11-28T09:46:00.000+02:00

I am trying to learn .NET in my spare time and not getting very far. While trying hard not to goof off, I cam across an Obfuscator that comes with Visual Studio. It obfuscates MSIL code making it very hard to reverse engineer. An example:

private void CalcPayroll(SpecialList employeeGroup) {
  while (employeeGroup.HasMore()) {
       employee = employeeGroup.GetNext(true);
       employee.UpdateSalary();
       DistributeCheck(employee);
   }
}

would become

private void a(a b) {
   while (b.a()) {
       a = b.a(true);
       a.a();
       a(a);
   }

I know someone who codes in the second style by default.
}

Goto considered harmful

2005-11-24T08:31:00.000+02:00

Well, goto was deprecated , oh, back in 1968 I think. Then why in deities name do I get a CD on my desk, fresh from a local supplier with sample C code and verious apps for a board we're looking at full of 'goto's. Hundreds and hundreds of them . For example (suitably bowdlerized):

Xincr=1;
if ( (dX=Bx-Ax) >= 0) goto NEXTX;
dX=-dX;
Xincr=-1;
NEXTX:

Yincr = pSurface->width;
if ( (dY=By-Ay) >= 0) goto NEXTY;
Yincr=-pSurface->width;
dY=-dY;
NEXTY:

This could have been easily rewritten without the goto.

Just In Time Debugging

2005-11-17T08:47:00.000+02:00

I answered a usenet post recently in which someone asked "Is there a way to invoke Labview with a target Vi from an external debugger? ".

Yes there is I answered. Set JIT debugging in Visual Studio (I don't know about other debuggers) and set a breakpoint. That said, I realised I'd never tried it myself from LabView. COM objects from Javascript or Java , yes. So I set JIT, ran up LabView and just for curiousity ran my latest prototype.

Bang. A few seconds after watching the video playing and the thumbnails come up, Labview crashed bigtime. Not the app as such . I don't have any dll's of my own, just third party ones. Now I can guess what hapenned. Somewhere, someplace, there's an uncaught exception being ignored and the debugger found it. No way can I ever find out where it is though AFAIK. Reminds me of when I was doing Javascript with the JIT on. Lots and lots of external web pages gave me the 'Exception - would you like to debug?" message. Does anyone else every see this?

How was work today dear?

2005-11-16T07:48:00.000+02:00

Fine thank you. My highlight was ripping DVD video tracks into MPEG format so I could watch 20 minutes of an endoscope being inserted into someone's rectum. The ending was a bit lame though.

My curious lack of passion surprises me. Trying to deploy a prototype LabView VI onto my new Windows XP Embedded PC failed. I finally realised that my boss ordered the wrong version. We can't run the prototype anyplace else than my PC.

Studio

2005-11-14T08:44:00.000+02:00

It's been a while since I installed and used Visual Studio. The last version was 6 and since then it's been Java with Builder, Embedded C++ and Borland. So, installing what must be my umpteenth studio I was reflecting on the very first time I met Microsoft C++. I'd been using Borland which was the market leader in those days and I was unimpressed at first. MSVC7 was a dos set of tools.

Then came Visual Studio 1.0 (which I still have somewhere) and things improved. Borland dropped the ball, fiddled around with a name change and neglected their developers which they still do. Microsoft, on the other hand, never lost sight of it's developers and the growth of MSDN is the single biggest reason to stay with Microsoft. I shall never, ever , forget the video of Steve Ballmer doing his monkey impersonation while chanting 'Developers, developers, developers ' for what seemed hours. He's right.

Windows XP Embbeded Part II

2005-11-14T08:32:00.000+02:00

I'm getting there. The previous problem was due to me not running the Target Analyser after all necessary drivers have been installed. That means , for the target board we had, a dual boot system with WXP Pro and Embedded. I use the supplied CD that came with the target system to install all the drivers for USB, sound, chipset etc, then run target analyser.

The resultant PMQ file is fed into the following sets of steps.

Import PMQ to Component Designer
Generate an SLD and add this to the component database (called devices)
In Target Designer, add devices to the SLX
Pick and choose any needed OS bits such as which shell etc.
Set tools/options/dependency check to auto resolve
Check dependencies, fix, check, fix, rinse, lather repeat and finally blow dry.
Build image
Deploy and check

For the time being, the dual boot will stay on the target system. I will automate the deployment at some time as it's a pain to do by hand. Stay reading for more on my adventures with LabView and WXPe.

Windows XP Embedded

2005-11-10T11:11:00.000+02:00

Curious. We have our target system and every time I try to get past the FBA (First Boot Agent) is just goes to a very poor simulation of a command prompt and stops. I'll try and start over.

Post post note:

Memo to self. Check that all the motherboard drivers are installed before running the target analyser. Then it works.

Addendum: Bloody well backup and Target Designer project files and images that work. Keep them with a note as to what you did. Really. Backup working target sets. My bad.

Life and people

2005-11-09T11:13:00.000+02:00

I mustn't whinge , bitch or complain. Indeedy, so, I must grin and bear it. I find it passing strange that 'they', the powers that are, the bosses, management, PHB et al are perfectly content to spend $1500 on a training course for myself, some tens of thousands in software development tools yet get baulky when asked to buy a small set of screwdrivers costing perhaps eight dollars.

A mystery.

O'Reilly: What Is Web 2.0

2005-11-04T09:07:00.000+02:00

I'd heard of Web 2 but never bothered with it before. In case you're wondering, this is a Web2 page and the HTML manual that comes with anything is Web1. Now you know.

Amaze your friends with phrases like:

"Well, the development in the Web2 paradigm are fascinating to watch."

Nelson Rocks Preserve - Disclaimer

2005-11-03T08:37:00.000+02:00

A wonderful disclaimer here from Nelson Rocks Outdoor Rec centre.

Nelson Rocks Preserve is covered in steep terrain with loose, slippery and unstable footing. The weather can make matters worse. Sheer drops are everywhere. You may fall, be injured or die. There are hidden holes. You could break your leg. There are wild animals, which may be vicious, poisonous or carriers of dread diseases. These include poisonous snakes and insects. Plants can be poisonous as well. We don't do anything to protect you from any of this. We do not inspect, supervise or maintain the grounds, rocks, cliffs or other features, natural or otherwise.

The Preserve does not provide rangers or security personnel. The other people in the preserve, including other visitors, our employees, agents, and guests, and anyone else who might sneak in, may be stupid, reckless, or otherwise dangerous. They may be mentally ill, criminally insane, drunk, using illegal drugs and/or armed with deadly weapons and ready to use them. We aren't necessarily going to do anything about it. We refuse to take responsibility.

Beats the dense legalese you find inside software packages.

Techdirt:Pissed Off Usability Experts Vow To Make Things Easier

2005-11-02T16:07:00.000+02:00

Pissed Off Usability Experts Vow To Make Things Easier.

Right on.

I just got a new phone at work place. Three engineers can't figure out how to set the date on the damn thing.

2005-11-02T11:12:00.000+02:00

I loved this one.

Sex.com thief arrested

2005-10-30T15:09:00.000+02:00

That's going to be an interesting crime to tell the other inmates in Club Fed. Stephen Michael Cohen was arrested on an immigration violation by Mexican authorities and turned over to the US border patrol yesterday. He's the person who stole the sex.com domain from it's rightful owner.

EFF: DocuColor Tracking Dot Decoding Guide

2005-10-27T08:27:00.000+02:00

From the EFF, a detailed guide into how to decode the colour dots from some Colour Laser printers. This yellow dot code appears on all printouts and is intended to help track down countifiteirs. The privacy objections are that countries with less than stellar human rights may use it to track down dissidents. When it may be used against Greenpeace in the USA then is becomes wrong.

Windows XP Embedded

2005-10-23T14:12:00.000+02:00

In the absence of training courses, I am teaching my self how to configure Windows XP Embedded. The concept is simple. Decide what bits of Windows XP Pro you really need and then using the toolset provided, build an OS Image.

Well, one component I know I do not need is Internet Explorer. We don't want operating theatre staff to browse for porn while the Doctor is busy examing someone's rectum. It's also a footprint hog. So, I experiment. What is the footprint with and without Internet Explorer?

Except that I can't. Can't build an image without the damn thing. Every time I disable the component and run a dependency check it adds it back. Not the one I disabled I hasten to add, it keeps adding what it imagines the next version will be. So, disable Internet Explorer, Versions 3,4,5 and 6 and it comes back with version 7. I'm upto version 9 now and getting frightened.

Post post note:
Fixed it. Turn off auto resolve dependencies and increase visiblity to 100. Slowly remove any unresolved components and recheck. Lather , rinse and repeat.

IPV6

2005-10-20T12:27:00.000+02:00

So the .uk domain will resolve with IPv6. The ip address is 2001:630:181:35::83 which will take some getting used to.

Gmail: Help Center - Why are the contents of my messages missing?

2005-10-19T19:30:00.000+02:00

What? Some Norton products may strip away the contents of Gmail messages? Since when?

:LinuxDevices: The ELC is Dead; Long Live the OSDL

2005-10-19T15:02:00.000+02:00

Ok, so I won't be using embedded Linux for a while.

Microsoft Windows XP - DiskPart

2005-10-19T11:35:00.000+02:00

Annoyingingly I was wrong, wrong, wrong. There is a way of changing partitions and disk drives in Windows XP. It's a command line tool called 'diskpart'. It even has a 'clean' parameter to zero every byte of every sector on the specified disk. Just the thing for people with a modicum of guilt.

Runtimes - Part 1

2005-10-19T08:42:00.000+02:00

I am uncertain is my thoughts on machine independent runtimes ever made it here. Her's Part 1 of many parts.

Java, C# all depend on a runtime platform that sits between the application code and the operating system. It is this runtime that I have problems with. Neither fish, nor fowl, nor good red meat it is a bastard child , often forgotten and left in the corner.

Consider this table of Java runtimes on a pocket PC with the varying OSs available. The Java runtimes vary from Personal Java (?) through Kaffe and Sun runtime 1.3.1. Now consider your development environment and the runtime you have on your desktop. What chance is there that the built in class, method, callback or other feature is going to be on a Pocket PC?
Going for the desktop? Easy, I hear you say. We just deliver the same runtime as we use. Well done. How many other Java apps is the customer using? Are you going to do regression testing for him/her?

The Microsoft CLR is slightly improved. At least there is a mechanisim for updating the thing but this is not always desireable. I see on this PC I have the .NET frame work 1.1. What does that mean exactly. Is it the latest? Is it the one I want?

In my new job I have another scripting language to get to grips with. It's Lua, that nice Brazilian contribution to IT. Another runtime. More problems.

Joel on Software - Set Your Priorities

2005-10-16T15:26:00.000+02:00

A wonderful article on the dangers of adding a feature just because 'we promised the customer' and how to assign priorites to features.

RS232 et al

2005-10-10T10:25:00.000+02:00

Of course there is a new RS232 protocol to learn. Just wonderful. Hundreds of bit banging bytes sent to a board with no error correction or parameter checking, no way to find out what went wrong when the thing at the end goes belly up.

What is it with people? Why use an old , antiquated interface and make up your own protocol from scratch yet again. Not even a parity bit to be seen, no CRC, checksums, error feedback. The commercial implementations are all written by people who skimmed the 300 page spec and shuddered. Deep, deep sigh.

Yes, I know I've done it too. No excuse though.

Windows XP Embedded

2005-10-09T09:33:00.000+02:00

It seemed embarassing at the time. I had downloaded a trial edition of Windows XP Embedded to see what it was all about. Try as I might I could not install it even though the installer looked similar to many I have used before.

I gave up and posted a question on news:microsoft.public.windowsxp.embedded. Sure enough, I got an answer. The initial download gave me a small download executable. Running that, over time, gets you cab files and expanding those gives the familiar disk1 folder, disk2 etc. Running the setup from there won't work. Instead , look in c:\program files\windows embedded. The setup.exe there will work.

HTH.

Future shock

2005-10-03T08:23:00.000+03:00

It was quite a while ago I realised that I would never be able to service my own car ever again. Due to on board computers, and closed systems all I can do it take it to the local garage and watch. I could bear with that but I have a sneaky feeling it's happening with PCs as well. Take my new super-duper work PC. It has an annoying startup control centre which tells me lots of things I'm not interested in such as the DDR line voltage and the system fan r.p.m. It also makes a screaming noise in the earphones every morning and the only way I can find to stop it is to kill the silly thing once and for all.

Automatic updates are bad enough. If we lose control of the PC facing us, we do not look to a happy future.

Comment spam

2005-09-29T16:04:00.000+03:00

I can't believe it. There's no traffic here and I've just had my first comment spam. Time to turn on authentication.

IT managers say software, systems arrive untested.

2005-09-29T15:35:00.000+03:00

IT managers say software, systems arrive untested. Well, knock me down with a wet haddock. What, companies ship untested software? Never, surely.

New job, new PC and NTFS partitions

2005-09-29T14:41:00.000+03:00

It did take them a few days to get me a PC. I refused to stay yesterday and went to a bookshop then home. The boss did apoligise. I managed to read me dead tree copy of the C++ FAQ all the way through.

We're probably be going to use Windows XP embedded with a board level PC. No Linux though . The first thing I've done with my PC is to resize the primary partition so I could have more that one for XP development. Annoyingly there is no way to shrink an NTFS partition under Windows XP so I dowloaded Knoppix and used the very nice QT Part which worked well. The System Rescue alternative didn't seem to work as QT Part running from that refused to believe I was root.

Ah well.

Void pointers and casting

2005-09-11T13:46:00.000+03:00

Please don't. Really, really don't . There are only a very few cases where this should be necessary. If you are unsure don't do it. Anyway, if I find you I will sell your children into slavery and do dreadful things to your spouse.

UK.gov ditches 'Big Brother'-style e-voting

2005-09-08T09:00:00.000+03:00

Thanks to Vulture Central for the snippet of news via comp.risks. So no E-Voting right now in the UK. Other items today include a mention of classes of Byzantine faults. I quote.

Byzantine faults are faults in which agents (sensors, computers) in a distributed system "lie" to their interlocutors: they do not fail silently but distribute erroneous data, or data which is read differently by different receivers. The name arose from a whimsical analogy by Lamport, Shostak and Pease to a group of Byzantine generals trying to reach agreement in a situation in which no one trusts anyone else to speak the truth.

This particular case arose from a nose-up pitch event on a Boeing Model 777-200 series airplane while climbing through 36,000 feet altitude.

Finally, having read the preliminary report on the Cypriot airliner crash, I shudder sometimes at the thought of flying.

Shock

2005-09-04T09:38:00.000+03:00

I am in shock. Serious trembling mode. It a pre start meet, my new boss asked me what OS I would like and what development tools. He even took out the company credit card and I haven't even started there yet. I froze.

I am so going to need help on this one. 30 plus years of writing software and I get to choose? Help!

Windows NT

2005-08-30T09:44:00.000+03:00

It's been quite a while since I needed to make Windows NT in all it's flavours to logon automatically. It's a registry hack of course. I do have issues with explaining to people that while this is fine for stand alone PCs it is not acceptable for networked computers.

Communications

2005-08-25T13:44:00.000+03:00

So this new field in the database is called THINGIE_STAB_TIME. I see. It's not really a time is it because the business logic treats like a boolean. Sorry I didn't notice as I don't do the embedded stuff right now. Oh, it's defined as a floating point number as well. Only 1 or 0. But could be -10^307 to 10^308 with 15 significant digits yes? Thanks a bunch. We do have one very unhappy customer right now.

Linus trademarks Linux

2005-08-22T14:48:00.000+03:00

It says here that Linus Torvalds wants to charge companies $5000 for the use of the Linux name. Surely can't be right can it?

United States Patent: 6,415,335

2005-08-09T10:11:00.000+03:00

Via Slashdot, we have more indications that the U.S.A patent system is seriously broken.

The present invention teaches a method and apparatus for creating and managing custom Web sites. Specifically, one embodiment of the present invention claims a computer-implemented method for managing a dynamic Web page generation request to a Web server, the computer-implemented method comprising the steps of routing the request from the Web server to a page server, the page server receiving the request and releasing the Web server to process other requests, processing the request, the processing being performed by the page server concurrently with the Web server, as the Web server processes the other requests, and dynamically generating a Web page in response to the request, the Web page including data dynamically retrieved from one or more data sources.

This appears to describe a web server using dynamic data to make pages.

And the Verdict on Justice Kennedy Is: Guilty

2005-07-27T12:08:00.000+03:00

According to Edwin Vieira, a speaker at a conference of the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration, the US supreme court appears to be full of Marxist, Leninist, followers of Satan. Impeachment should naturally follow. I loved the use of Stalin's method of dealing with problematic people.

no man, no problem,

Wonderful.

InstallShield sucks

2005-07-27T11:59:00.000+03:00

We have , against my very firm advise , InstallShield X Express for installation work. When it comes to adding custom actions, you are only allowed to execute a .dll, and .exe or a VBS script file. No, you may not run a batch file or a .cmd file. Why I have no idea. My carefully crafted command file needed a vbs file to run it from installshield. Bummer.

Shame...

2005-07-26T15:26:00.000+03:00

So I've written a script file that on install sets a scheduled task to restart the app every week of so. Well, it could be worse. I could be doing it in perl.

Leaks

2005-07-25T09:19:00.000+03:00

For the first time in my life I've been beaten by a software engineering problem. Our app leaks 30K bytes per hours per connected unit and I have no idea why. So , my solution is to reboot the PC once a month automatically.

I am so ashamed.

How to Enable Heap Counters for Sysmon

2005-07-20T10:52:00.000+03:00

For those poor souls trying to find out what's going on with the heap, it is a dissapointment to find that Performance Monitor does not, be default, have the capability of monitoring the heap. Well, now you can and here's the link on how to do it.

How to Enable Heap Counters for Sysmon

or just add:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\PerfProc\Performance
"DisplayHeapPerfObject"=dword:00000001

to the registry.

Leaks and heaps

2005-07-17T11:14:00.000+03:00

I've now tried four different memory analyzers ranging from Bounds Checker through Memory validator. All of them insist that I have no runtime leak at all. I'm now investigating Heap fragmentation. What fun. The boss looks very worried.