Embedded Man

One of my co-workers recently traded his iPhone 3G in for a brand new Motorola phone that runs Android.  I don’t recall the model number but it is basically an iPhone copy (what isn’t these days).  The thing that I found interesting is how he actually walked all they way to my cubicle to show off his phone.  Granted, it is nice and the screen is bigger than the iPhone but I just can’t see why people are so intent on pointing out how much better their phones are.

They like to point out that their phone is faster, has a bigger screen, can run several apps at once.  Their map app is much better than the iPhone Google Maps app, they claim.  Better performance, better OS, better battery life.

Maybe so.  I don’t dispute the fact that other manufacturers are taking advantage of better technology to build faster phones with operating systems that are more robust.  But the fact is that I still like my iPhone.  There’s something still very cool about it.  Sure it’s outdated by todays’ standards (I got my iPhone 4 back in December of 2010) but it still serves me well.  Yes, there are dropped calls but that’s more a function of the carrier than the phone (I have a case on it).

And to be truly honest with you it’s more an Apple thing.  I don’t own any Apple products other than the iPhone–although I secretly fantasize about a MacBook Pro–but I think their products are cool.  They just look cool and are designed in such a way as to make them appealing, both aesthetically and functionally.  Perhaps in a few month’s time another cell phone manufacturer will outsell Apple but for now it just seems like everyone else is playing catchup.  And the harder people try to convince me about how great their phones are, the more I’m convinced they are just jealous.

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Virtual machine users rejoice!!  No longer do you have to use one virtual machine tool at work and another at home.  Now VMWare has released a version of its free VMWare player that actually allows creation of virtual machines.  Some may recall that I previously posted about Virtual Box–Sun’s open source tool that you could use to create virtual machines.  While that was a good tool, the fact is that most of the virtual machines I was interested in using were created with VMWare so I had to have one virtual machine for work and one for home.  That meant learning how to use two tools and spending time creating virtual machines twice.

For a while I tried to use VMWare’s Server tool which allowed you to create virtual machines but it had this weird web interface that wasn’t very intuitive.  And since it ran from a web browser it was kind of slow.  Needless to say, that experiment was short lived.

But no more!!!  Now you can download a tool that will allow you to create virtual machines and/or use the ones you already have.  Just copy the virtual machine from work onto a portable drive and when you get home fire up VMWare Player and pick up right where you left off.    Not to mention that VMWare offers a whole boat load of pre-built virtual appliances so if you don’t want to spend time creating a virtual machine you can just download one from their site.

A really neat thing about this tool is the Unity feature.  It allows the windows you have open in your virtual machine to show up on your host desktop as if they were running native.  For example, today I had a browser and a terminal window open inside a Linux virtual machine.  When I enabled the Unity feature the virtual machine desktop minimized and both the browser and the terminal window appeared as regular windows on my Windows host machine.  Wayyyyyyy cool.  Of course that feature works once you install VMWare tools on the virtual machine.  I’ll post more on that later since it can take a bit of work.

For now, download and install this cool new tool and start creating machines to your heart’s content.  Happy vm-ing!!

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For some time now we’ve been bombarded with news about how bad the economy is.  It seems like every time you turn on the news there is talk of how the unemployment rate is the “highest it’s been in the last thousand years” (I’m paraphrasing, of course).  Even though I was aware of all the bad news I never really cared until about a month ago.  That’s when I was told that the company I was working for could not continue to employ all the personnel on hand.  Sooooo, I was given the proverbial boot.  Shown to the door.  Handed a pink slip.  You get the idea.

Of course I worried for since the last time I was laid off it took several years to find engineering work again.  So I began the regimen of getting the word out  that I was looking for work.  I dusted of the old resume and began posting it on one the major job boards.  I attended some local meetings of others who, like me, were hoping to “network” their way back into the workforce.  The fact is, those meetings depressed me more than encouraged me.  Most of the people attending those meetings are over 50 and all were at one time key employees in their organizations.  Some claimed to have invented some of the big communication protocols that are now part of everyday techno speak.  One time big shots now reduced to just another unemployed person.

What really got me down was that I’m not much younger than most of those people.  Worst yet, I’ve never invented anything.  I don’t have 20 patents to my name like a lot of them do.  If they can’t find a job what makes me think I can?

Then a funny thing happened:  I got a call from a recruiter.  He told me about a job that sounded interesting so I agreed to a phone interview.  The day after the phone interview I was told the company wanted to bring me in for a series of face-t0-face interviews.  I won’t bore you with the details but the point it is that almost one month after I was laid off, I have been offered a job (and, yes, I happily accepted).

I recently received the latest batch of trade journals in the mail and there were even job vacancies posted in them.  I don’t think I’d seen a job ad in a trade journal for several years now.  Then I got a call from another recruiter who left a message saying he wanted to “discuss opportunities in my area”.  So is the drought over?  Are jobs coming back?

Has anyone else noticed these trends?

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For many years its been common internet knowledge that you don’t open email messages from people you don’t know.  It’s also understood that you don’t click on popup ads.  Unfortunately, now malware coders are making their ads look like legitimate virus warnings so unsuspecting users think that they are really infected with some virus and they click on the ad thinking that the proposed application will clean their system.  What the application does is install itself then it constantly sends warnings about virus infections and requests you activate the program.  Of course, activation requires payment so your system is effectively rendered useless because of frequent interruptions.

One of these types of malware programs is Security Tool.  This is particularly nasty because it installs itself in a hidden folder and then registers itself as a service so it preempts most of the tools you would normally use to troubleshoot the problem.  Try to bring up Task Manager, you get Security Tool.  Try to get to the control panel, you get Security Tool.  Pretty much everything you try brings up Security Tool.

I recently had a friend bring a laptop to me that had been infected with this malware.  I tried booting into safe mode but there was no way to access the hidden folder from the directory explorer.  I remembered I had a Live Linux CD so I decided to use that as to fix the problem.  Here’s what I did (Note: this system was running Vista, yours may be a little different):

1. Before rebooting Vista, right click on the desktop shortcut to Security Tool and select properties.
2. Make note of the hidden folder where it is installed and the application name.  I my case, the application was at C:\Application Data\13324922\13324922.exe (your version may be different but it will probably have a number instead of a name so you can’t easily find it–evil).
3. Reboot using a Linux Live disk.
4. Once Linux boots, mount the hard disk (usually just a double-click is required) and locate the folder where Security Tool is installed.
5. Rename the folder to something it won’t expect (I just renamed the folder to “other”).
6. Remove the Linux disk and reboot into Vista.
7. At this point, Security Tool should no longer interrupt since it can’t find the location of the executable.  Open regedit and search for the name of the application (in my case, I searched for “13324922″).
8. Delete every entry in the registry that makes reference to the malware application.
9. Delete the folder you renamed in step 5.

That should do it.  Once you have removed the folder the executable can’t start and once you remove the registry entries, Vista can’t complain that it can’t find the application.  Now just make sure you purchase a true anti-virus application and install it so you don’t go through this again.

Happy debugging.

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Like a true geek, I’ve been dying to program my iPhone since I got it but I was hindered by one major obstacle:  I don’t own a Mac computer of any kind.  The SDK and all of the cool tools are only available on OSX and I only own a PC.  Yes, I know that there are open source tools available and I looked into all that but it was time consuming to get the right headers and build the toolchain.  On top of that, you have to jailbreak the device and that has it’s own set of issues.

Well I finally have access to one of those big 27″ iMacs.  No, I didn’t buy it but I’m allowed to program on it and that’s all that matters ;-)  I’d never really had a chance to work on a Mac and it’s really cool.  It takes some getting used to but the graphics are very nice.

To make things even better, I found out about the Corona SDK which allows you to develop for the iPhone without having to use Objective-C.  Instead, you use the lua language and that greatly reduces the amount of code you have to type to get simple things like text on the screen.

Of course, you don’t as extensive a library as you would if you use Objective-C but it’s a great starting point.  So for now, I’m a happy iPhone coder.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

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I’ve always been fond of state machines.  I don’t know why but perhaps it has to do with the fact that they have a visual representation that makes it easy to understand the sequence of operations.  Granted, I’m talking about well thought out state machines.  I have seen people abuse the state chart tool to get spaghetti code from an ugly state diagram.

For programmable logic design they are great but I don’t get to use them that often in software.  Most of the software projects I work on are already designed by the time they get to my hands and I can’t make architecture changes.  Still, I like to read about them and one good article I found some time ago is here.

In it the author describes designing UML State Machines.  He starts out by describing some errors that were found in a simple Visual Basic calculator program.  Errors that could be prevented by using state machines instead of relying on the traditional method of using if statements.  Not that there’s anything bad about using if conditions but we’ve all seen nested code that was almost impossible to read because it was so convoluted.

So, yes, state machines have more overhead and they are probably not the solution to all problems but they make nice alternatives to lengthy, nested conditionals.  Food for thought.

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So here it is, the last day of the decade and I’m nursing a cold.  What a way to go out.  Oh well, maybe it’s a sign that next year will be better.  I hope you all have a great and safe New Year celebration!  See you next year.  Keep coding!

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If you can’t make it to a lecture on C++, these videos will at least help you get a feel for what you’re getting into.  Even though C was for many years the defacto language for embedded systems, C++ is commonly used so you should get intimate with it.

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