Bradford Embedded

I installed Debian Squeeze this morning and used a few resources I hadn’t known of before.

Yesterday there was a post to Hacker News about a blog post written by Antonio Cangiano (the author of the Prag Prog Technical Blogging book) about Amazon Associates and how to effectively use the program to make some money with your blog.

Sales leads are junk.

Big companies are well known for putting out complex products and completing complex projects, but they have a secret: Planning and documentation.

Today, on his Coding Horror blog, Jeff Atwood writes about “The Great MP3 Bitrate Experiment” and how no one can tell the difference between 192kbps encoded MP3s and raw CD audio.

Posture is important.

Restrooms and offices are interesting to compare.

The premise must seem like a stupid statement.

Structured learning is important.

Yesterday, I wrote a rant about why it shouldn’t take a team of engineers to buy a dev kit and get mainline Linux running.

It shouldn’t take a team of engineers to build a functional embedded GNU/Linux system on a dev kit.

Here are some things I want to learn more about: The Linux kernel Microprocessors: ARM, MIPS, x86, and OpenRISC Ruby and Rails git Flash memory.

Things you’ll need: The TI am335x-evm-sdk sources A git clone of the Arago am33xx v3.2-staging branch Linux source Some x86 to ARM cross compiler (I like Debian) Patience First clone the Arago am33xx kernel tree, or if you already have a kernel tree local…

Open office plans suck.

Engineering companies don’t iterate on hardware like they do with software.

If you boot your BeagleBone using the supplied micro SD card image, there are two LEDs (near the Ethernet jack) that will blink.

Waking up at 2 am yesterday morning, I smelled something funny.

I’m reading The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working by Tony Schwartz.

At work, we use both Atlassian’s OnDemand JIRA tool for tracking bugs and tasks, and we use GitHub for version control.

Shortly, Bradford Embedded will be moving away from Blogger!

I predict that within the next 2 years, open hardware designs really start giving semi-commodity hardware a run for its money.

I'm somewhat disappointed with the BeagleBone's USB based serial port setup to connect to a host PC.

Good chairs aren't cheap.

I've written about my experiences with my EliteBook 8560w a few times.

There's lots of talk about "stealth" start-ups that don't publicize their market segment.

I'm now working at my second "real job."

I like my HP 8560w laptop :) I currently have a 1 minute load average of 10.08 and the thing is still fairly responsive.

I'm now a fan (and customer) of NameCheap (that's an affiliate link, if you're interested in supporting Bradford Embedded).

Apparently a lot of people want to know things about BeagleBone boot time...

For those interested, here's my current Debian Squeeze armel multistrap configuration file that I'm using to build a Debian file system for my BeagleBones: It's going to be a little rails server :) EDIT: You'll probably want to use the backports version of

I like FAKEGRIMLOCK.

I've got my BeagleBone booting Debian 6 Squeeze!

SD cards generally have 2, 4, or 8 MiB (MiB = 1024 * 1024 bytes) erase blocks and 8 KiB write pages.

If you live near Rochester, NY, or if you know someone who does, please take a few minutes to visit ROCtheday.org and donate to one of our local not for profits.

I stumbled upon SanDisk's iNAND products today while doing some searching about SD cards.

Now that I've got my BeagleBone, I'm still not happy :) I'd like to be able to plug the USB cable into my host PC but not have the board power up.

2 BeagleBones were delivered by the friendly people at FedEx this morning!

My new laptop is an HP Elitebook Workstation 8560w.

I've removed Google AdWords from my blog and RSS feed.

I'm not a fan of Google's new look for GMail or Blogger.

I got my new laptop this week, it's a spiffy HP Elitebook Workstation 8560w.

I wrote about long term support for embedded Linux before, a few times, but I'm back for more!

EDIT 20111116 15:37: This post and the git repo have been updated to include info on the BeagleBoard-xM.

Somehow I missed the introduction of the BeagleBone!

There's a great set of articles (part 1, part 2) from LWN discussing some of the processes and issues that were used / encountered when attempting to bootstrap a build environment for ARMv7-a hard float.

Scott Adams recently wrote about calendar interfaces.

I attended a retirement lunch today for a former coworker.

I like Seth, his blog is in my Google Reader.

In my previous post about embedded Linux long term support, I neglected Ubuntu.

In software, don't ever tell a user that an "unknown error" has occurred.