Working on an embedded Linux system is making me treat
everything I think I know with suspicion. It makes me
re-validate old assumptions. Memory and storage footprints of
common system utilities, behavior under heavy load, the cost of the various
kind of context switches, kernel behavior under adverse
conditions, debuggability, self stabilization, etc. There are
many areas for improvement.
Yesterday evening Oron
Peled gave a Haifux
talk on Advanced
Autoconf. The lecture was great, and we also had a special
guest from Italy at the club meeting, Marco Bodrato.
A few weeks ago, Marco emailed me after he found my GPG key on
biglumber.com. biglumber.com is a website for coordinating
key signings, and since Marco was planning to visit Israel, he
wanted to see if we could meet and sign each other’s keys. We
exchanged a few emails, and then Orna and I invited Marco to the
weekly Haifux meeting, to be followed by an impromptu key
signing party and one of the world famous Haifux dinners.
Thus, after Oron’s lecture we went out to Spargo and had a
delicious dinner. There were about ten people in attendance,
including a few new faces, and the talk ranged from the slightly
to the incredibly geeky. As usual, fun was had all around, and
the wine didn’t hurt, either. After dinner I drove Marco to
Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, and then drove home. Retired to
bed at 3 AM to continue reading about the Common
Lisp Object System.
Today I barely dragged myself out of bed at 10 AM and went to
work. There were two talks scheduled for today, the first by
Yehuda Lindel from IBM Watson on
The Security of Protocols in Modern Network Settings which
was interesting but too theretical for my not-quite-awake-yet
state at the time, and the other by Nadav Har’El on
Web Automation with libwww-perl, which was excellent.
Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal 
Building an embedded system using GNU/Linux & friends is not a simple task. It’s not very hard one either – you just have to skip some obvious and not so obvious pitfalls. If you’re experienced it’s really quite a nice embedded system.
If you think on an embedded system as a stripped down version of your run of the mill Debian/Redhat or Suse you’ll fail. You have to think about it as a different kind of beast and plan accordingly.
Gilad
Comment by Anonymous — February 25, 2004 @ 12:22 PM |
Building an embedded system using GNU/Linux & friends is not a simple task. It’s not very hard one either – you just have to skip some obvious and not so obvious pitfalls. If you’re experienced it’s really quite a nice embedded system.
I know… that’s partly my job description on this project – “double check everything and tell us what we’re doing wrong”. So far, I haven’t caught any glaring errors, but I did catch a lot of small inefficiencies and potentially dangerous assumption. I like it, it’s a mind game (with very real consequences…)
If you think on an embedded system as a stripped down version of your run of the mill Debian/Redhat or Suse you’ll fail. You have to think about it as a different kind of beast and plan accordingly.
I could tell you what distro we’re using, but then I would have to kill you 😉 seriously, some things are better left off the pages on the web.
In related news, a headhunter called me today looking for kernel experts. I gave her your contact info, and she already had it…
Comment by mulix — February 25, 2004 @ 6:46 PM |
(from Advogato)
That CLOS guide is a little misleading, since it suggests that methods “belong” to a class. Joe Marshall’s CLOS guide has a better overview. Sonja Keene’s tutorial book is also very good and provides detailed examples.
Comment by xach — February 25, 2004 @ 12:45 PM |
Thanks! I haven’t actually read it it, just typed ‘CLOS’ into google and looked for the first relevant response. I’m reading Paul Graham’s ANSI Common Lisp now, the chapter on CLOS. See also my other reply in your journal…
Comment by mulix — February 25, 2004 @ 6:44 PM |