Cyclopedia Square

At work we use minicom on our Linux workstations to connect to the serial port of our development hardware. It works fine, but it's very text oriented. It also loses everything in the window if you re-size it. I've sometimes wondered if there are better alternatives, and today someone on one of our internal forums gave me a nice list. Sadly I couldn't find any of the suggestions for our old Red Hat 8 development boxes, except screen. I've used screen before and it's great. I had no idea it could do serial communication too. Here's the command I used for our environment: screen /dev/ttyS0 115200,cs8,-ixon,-ixon,istrip I also have this .screenrc file that someone gave me years ago: # kill startup message startup_message off # define a bigger scrollback, default is 100 lines defscrollback 1024 # remap CTRL-A to CTRL-] escape ^]] # status bar hardstatus on hardstatus alwayslastline "%{rk}%H %{gk}%c %{yk}%M%d %{wk}%?%-Lw%?%{bw}%n*%f %t%?(%u)%?...

This is just too cool. You can print your own graph paper . Not just any graph paper, you can choose from these types: Cartesian Graph Paper Engineering Graph Paper Polar Graph Paper Isometric Graph Paper Logarithmic Graph Paper Hexagonal Graph Paper Probability Graph Paper Smith Chart Graph Paper You can customize paper size, units of measure, and grid-size within each of those, and I had never even heard of Probability Graph Paper! How cool is probability graph paper? Seeing a Smith Chart brought back some great memories from college. I almost printed one out just to hang on my wall. Very cool stuff.

If you need some good old pragmatic engineering cynicism to counter all the Steveys, Joels, and Pauls of the software blogosphere, go read the discipline and punish blog for a bit. Pretty insightful in a lot of places, and a good counterpoint to a lot of what those crazy programmer/bloggers are saying.

I spoke too soon in favor of Stevey's latest . I'm looking at all my C++ code now in a totally different light, and questioning everything...does that really need to be an enum there, or just an int? I was going to turn that C-function into a static function of this class, should I bother now? Do I need that error handler class like I was thinking Friday, or should I just stick a couple functions in this file? Are namespaces useless metadata too? Gee thanks, Steve! I mean, what do you want, for us to all write quick and dirty spaghetti code? After all, the experts who maintain it should be able to figure it out. Why don't we just write machine code, it's closer to the computation, without any verbose and useless metadata, right? Can we get a little moderation here? If you can't tell, I'm torn. I like what Steve had to say, but I hate it. I must be a noob still.

I think I'm beyond the noob stage Steve describes. I can definitely recall writing some comments like he describes a few years ago. I don't do it now. Usually. I admit that I did for that hairy calibration code just a couple months ago, for the algorithm that was handed down by the analog EE that I was supposed to just trust with blind faith. I couldn't do it. I had to understand how it worked. I read up on flyback regulators and peppered that code with so much metadata (now that I know that's what it's called) that comments and types were spilling out at every seam. So I have to disagree with Steve's conclusion a little here. He rightly points out that using the narrative style of commenting and other kinds of metadata are ways for us to learn about what we are doing, that it's a way to solidify our thought processes. His conclusion seems to be that this is a bad thing overall and that we should strive to avoid it. Personally, I hope I'm alw...

Video is slightly choppy on the XO, but you can play it with mplayer . Sweet!

I've been making a point lately of perusing " The Official Site of the Embedded Development Community ," since I consider myself an embedded developer, and well, apparently that's the "Official Site," um, for my, uh, "Community." It seems more like place for vendors and consultants to promote their business by writing promotional pieces thinly veiled as technical articles, but if it's Official who is a young upstart like me to judge. Anyway, that's really beside my point. The reason I'm writing is that there was one article that caught my eye this week about building your own Linux distribution . The main thing I got out of it was to learn of the existence of Puppy Linux . After the glowing review the author of the article gave of its distribution building tools, I read up a little more on Puppy, and decided to give it a try. Let me just report to you, that it is sweet! I'm typing this on my 7 and a half year-old Thinkpad T...