keeping simple

Author: yodaiken

  • The Embedded Enterprise, Pruit-Igoe, Ayn-Rand, the telecommunications stack and why software does not suck

    Programmers will readily tell you that “Windows sucks” or “Linux sucks” or “POSIX sucks” why this or that software is badly designed, bloated, slow, buggy, un-needed, ugly, and generally disgusting. But, Windows is actually an immensely useful and sophisticated program with astounding capabilities – Linux is too. POSIX is a comprehensive solution to many difficult…

  • Back from India

    We were going into a government facility in Mumbai, and the guard points at me and asks, as if finding it hard to believe “He is a foreigner?” This was my fourth visit to India and, like all the others so far, mostly a rushed series of meetings and trips to airports, but I got…

  • Another version of the slow moving recursive equations paper.

    I’ll finish it someday, but here is a variant.

  • Soft real time continues to sag

    Paul McKenney once wrote: Despite such complications, priority inheritance works reasonably well for exclusive locks, and is a major component of Ingo Molnar’s CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT patch. There are strongly held opinions both for and against priority inheritance, for example. http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT7168794919.html in which Victor Yodaiken considers priority inheritance to be harmful, and, as near as I can…

  • On the way to India

    I’m off to give a talk in Bangalore and then visit Chennai and Mumbai. In his delightful book called The Argumentative Indian Amrtya Sen writes A good example is the transformation of Âryabhat’s Sanskrit term jya … [which] was translated, through proximity of sound, into Arabic jiba (a meaningless word in Arabic) and later transformed…

  • Amar G. Bose on business

    B: Research in this country is going down. Prior to World War II, the United States was rather poor in research; that’s why radar was invented in England and Germany. We learned the value of research in World War II. But today the quickest way to save your bottom line is to cut off research.…

  • Soft real-time and soft design strategies versus QOS

    [ see revised version ] (edited August 18 2007 to add back link and formatting) “Soft real-time” is a perfect example of the “soft design” I was complaining about in the previous post. There are perfectly good ways of characterizing quality of service assurances. For example, you could say that the average = x and…

  • Programming design style

    Someone needs to come up with a slick name for “designed to fail during test instead of production” or for the more common “soft” type of programming. When we write code, we assume we screwed up somewhere, an assumption based on years of bitter experience (well, we assume someone screwed up, maybe in the tools,…

  • Afghanistani mountain village ponders Microsoft business tactics

    From Rory Stewart’s book the places in between about his absurd/wonderful walk accross Afghanistan in 2002: That night we stopped in Dahan-e-Rezak, Dr. Habidullah’ mothers village. This was my first night in a tribal hill village. … Everyone in Rezak was descended from a single grandfather. There were six houses and seventy people in the…

  • The embedded enterprise

    It is now possible to put together sophisticated and powerful embedded and control systems that are mostly composed of pre-existing working software. One of the demonstrations we showed at AMD’s recent embedded workshop was a small two processor (4 core) box running RTLinux and Windows XP. Embedded development teams for RTCore based products can mirror…