2012
01.26
01.26
Another post for the Riverbed Technology Blog, on the value of looking back.
You can read it here.
Life in the Valley
Another post for the Riverbed Technology Blog, on the value of looking back.
You can read it here.
CPU emulation, particularly of older processors, is an interesting topic.
While emulation source code for various CPU cores is easily available, I wanted to better understand how to interface the emulated CPU with my host machine. Therefore I decided to write a simple example of a host system for an emulated MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor.
The goal would be to have the emulated 6502 write “Hello, world” to the console of my linux desktop machine.
It’s been almost 18 months since I installed Fedora Core 12, so I decided to move onto Fedora 15.
While the install went OK, I am not (yet) convinced it was worth the hassle. While it’s nice to pick up bug fixes, I haven’t noticed much change to the feature set.
Another post, written by me, for the Riverbed Technology blog — this time about the value of Alpha and Beta testing.
Software developers, such as myself, can get very involved with a single part of the new software on which we are working, sometimes losing perspective. Helping customers deploy and test pre-release software helps us to design better products when we are reminded we need to create a solution, not just a box running some clever software.
You can read my latest post here.
I recently wrote a entry for the Riverbed Technology blog, describing an interesting collaborative development experience I had with the AWS EC2 Cloud.
You can read it here.
I came to Django development from much lower-level development — embedded software, device drivers, and system software. What has impressed me most about Django (and python in general) is the manner in which it guides you to do the right thing in terms of code construction. The framework and language naturally make you think about better ways to express your designs.
I really like having inline source when using gdb. Code Complete, by Steve Mcconnell has an entire chapter explaining how you should proactively step through all code you write — and not just when you’re actively debugging an issue. Having followed this practice for a few years now, I can testify that it increases your productivity enormously. I simply can’t imagine not doing so before committing any code.
expect is a tool built using Tcl which allows you to automate many tasks that would otherwise mean tedious repetition at the command line. While many tools come with a command line interface, they don’t lend themselves well to scripting — telnet is the classic example. But with expect you can script these tools as easily as bash.
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After a good experience with Fedora Core 8, and a reasonable experience with Fedora Core 11, I decided to install Fedora Core 12 on my Chembook laptop.
In summary, while FC8 and FC11 worked out of the box, FC12 failed to provide me with sound. I discovered later that the KDE mixer had set the center volume to mute. Once I unset that, I had sound.
Other than that, it worked pretty well.
Valgrind comprises a bunch of very useful tools for detecting problems with your programs. I first came across it a couple of years back and find it to be excellent. In particular I use its memory profiler, which helps you catch errors such as memory leaks and invalid accesses. In my experience these types of errors sometimes indicate logic errors, not just areas where you’ve forgotten to free some previously allocated memory — which is another reason why it is such a great tool.
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