I was working on a highly constrained consumer electronics device, a little "satellite device" that spoke to the main device over a CATV RF coax cable and also received commands from an IR remote control. My code was failing in bizarre ways. I adopted an extremely paranoid defensive programming stance, filling my code with asserts and doing ( Read more... )

I'm reading the July 2011 issue of "Linux Journal", and in "Upfront, diff -u" there is some text that is worth noting and repeating:

This is actually one of the first and greatest innovations Linus Torvalds achieved with Linux. While the GNU folks developed the idea of free software, they limited themselves by sticking with a just a tight group ( Read more... )

For assorted reasons, I've become mildly interested in AOL's "newly opened technology", such as AIMCC and X-Drive. So I've been browsing their online docs.

When they say their products and interfaces are "open", they mean "open" in their own typical AOL way.

Check this out: Q: Are there any restrictions on what I can build?
A: We tried to make ( Read more... )

I just had a random IM conversation with someone who needed some help duplicating a little open source hack re the ark3116 and gammu several months ago.

( IM transcript under the cut )