In a perhaps vain attempt to recover this thread... I've more or less
(more less than more) settled on using a TS-5700 (PC-104 card, slow
pentium chip). Not the cheapest way to go, but I think I can get 4k
interrupts a second on it and get 6 channels of PWM out of it in
software (for dimmers), and that means no extra hardware, which for me
means no extra angst.

But the people over at www.embeddedarm.com are not answering my emails,
which admittedly are a little witless since I'm not very knowledgable
in this whole embedded world thing.

So maybe someone here will take pity on me. Anyone here with PC-104
experience want to help?

1. I want the aforementioned 4k interrupts/sec. My first thought was to
reprogram timer 2, but it's not tied to an IRQ. I thought of hacking
timer 0, but I'd like to keep the real time clock working, and that's a
hassle. Then I saw an example of reprogramming timer 1/IRQ 10. I
thought the world ended if you touched that timer;  can anyone comment
on if it's really safe to hack the timer and take over that interrupt?

2. I need 4 serial ports. Can they share IRQ 3 and 4? (I'm worried
about this because my fallback position is to tie timer 2 to IRQ6, both
of which are exposed pins on the board, and get my interrupts that way
- but then 6 isn't available for com ports).

3. I need TCP and UDP, some sizable I/O buffers, and my C++/assembled
code is already hitting 6000 lines. I'm wondering about code size.
What's the best choice of OS for flat memory model past, say, 640K of
memory, hookable interrupts, good support for TCP and so on? (It's been
decades since I looked at DOS, and when I knew it, it wasn't flat. That
part of my mind is mostly cobwebs.)

Thanks. I'm hoping this is the end of the naive questions.

larwe wrote:
> Tim Wescott wrote:
> 
>> Uh, check your history -- Shakespeare _was_ mass market in his time --
>> why do you think there's so much low comedy in everything he did, even
>> his dramas?
> 
> Mmm, it was a very bad example but the best I could think of. Can you
> name an author that would be recognized by name but doesn't write stuff
> people actually read?
> 

Umberto Eco?  The film of "The Name of the Rose" was so popular that his 
next puplication, "Focult's Pendulum", became a best seller - but very 
few people have actually read it.

Tim Wescott <tim@seemywebsite.com> wrote:

> Dostoyevski (_you_ check the spelling).  

... Obviously 100% incorrect, because not one of those letters you
used is from the kyrillic alphabet ;-> 

And as far as the transliteration from Russian written in kyrillic
letters to English in latins, it's not worth bothering about getting
that correct.  The Russian government has been known to change the
official transliterations of their citizens' names more than once per
decade.  Yes, that means they get new names roughly every time they
renew their passport.  So don't bother too much: whichever spelling of
Dostoyevski you use, it has a good chance of having been wrong for
about half of the last 20 years, and will be incorrect again within
the next 10.

-- 
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (broeker@physik.rwth-aachen.de)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.

cyberzl1@yahoo.com wrote:

>>Dostoyevski (_you_ check the spelling).  I've read the first half of
>>"The Brother's Karamotsov" twice, out of a feeling of duty (or
>>snobbishness, I can't remember which).
>>
>>At one place I worked we called the regression test spec "War and
>>Peace", even though no one had read the original -- not even those of us
>>who started calling it that.
> 
> 
> Hey!  I've read both of those(and other works).  I'm not if I should
> take offense or not.

Don't -- I may have made it through the second time, and enjoyed it, 
except that about 1/3 of the way through I got impatient with the story 
not really starting up and skimmed over all the stupid character 
descriptions.  2/3 of the way through I realized that the 'stupid' 
character descriptions _were_ the story.  I just didn't have the heart 
to try round 3 -- this was back when I was in high school.  Maybe I 
should try again.
> 
> I don't know why but I got on a kick of Russian classicals for awhile.
> I still like the style but have no where near the time to read such a
> tome anymore. :)
> 
> Oh, and for whatever it's worth it's I have only seen it as
> Dostoyevsky.  The trailing i seems more Polish, but I can't say which
> one is truly correct.
> 
If I only got one letter wrong it would be a happy miracle.

-- 

Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com

Posting from Google?  See http://cfaj.freeshell.org/google/

> Dostoyevski (_you_ check the spelling).  I've read the first half of
> "The Brother's Karamotsov" twice, out of a feeling of duty (or
> snobbishness, I can't remember which).
>
> At one place I worked we called the regression test spec "War and
> Peace", even though no one had read the original -- not even those of us
> who started calling it that.

Hey!  I've read both of those(and other works).  I'm not if I should
take offense or not.

I don't know why but I got on a kick of Russian classicals for awhile.
I still like the style but have no where near the time to read such a
tome anymore. :)

Oh, and for whatever it's worth it's I have only seen it as
Dostoyevsky.  The trailing i seems more Polish, but I can't say which
one is truly correct.

JW

larwe wrote:

> Tim Wescott wrote:
> 
> 
>>Uh, check your history -- Shakespeare _was_ mass market in his time --
>>why do you think there's so much low comedy in everything he did, even
>>his dramas?
> 
> 
> Mmm, it was a very bad example but the best I could think of. Can you
> name an author that would be recognized by name but doesn't write stuff
> people actually read?
> 
Dostoyevski (_you_ check the spelling).  I've read the first half of 
"The Brother's Karamotsov" twice, out of a feeling of duty (or 
snobbishness, I can't remember which).

At one place I worked we called the regression test spec "War and 
Peace", even though no one had read the original -- not even those of us 
who started calling it that.

-- 

Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com

Posting from Google?  See http://cfaj.freeshell.org/google/

On 24 Feb 2006 13:09:17 -0800, "larwe" <zwsdotcom@gmail.com> wrote:

>Tim Wescott wrote:
>
>> Uh, check your history -- Shakespeare _was_ mass market in his time --
>> why do you think there's so much low comedy in everything he did, even
>> his dramas?
>
>Mmm, it was a very bad example but the best I could think of. Can you
>name an author that would be recognized by name but doesn't write stuff
>people actually read?

Hmm.  What stands out from my literary experiences in taking 6-credit
hr courses on the damned subject (forced by the university scholars
program I was in) as fitting this is F. Scott Fitzgerald.  No one
sensibly reads him without being arm-twisted into it.  The Great
Gatsby is a classic -- an example of literature that hurts so much to
read out of struggling to wonder why anyone considers it important
literature, at all, that you will feel this incredible liberation when
you are allowed to finally stop reading it.

Jon

Tim Wescott wrote:
> larwe wrote:
> 
>> Jonathan Kirwan wrote:
>>
>>
>>>> My publisher is Elsevier, and they sell to anyone, anywhere, with money
>>>
>>>
>>> Strange.  Just the other day I just noted a comment by scientists who
>>> refuse categorically to review for, submit to, or subscribe to
>>> Elsevier owned publications -- unless and until they provide open
>>> access to the scientific papers after 6 months.
>>
>>
>>
>> I don't think that changes my sentence above - Elsevier will _SELL_ to
>> anyone with money, right?
>>
>> Scientific papers are a special case, I don't pretend to understand the
>> politics of academia. If I was going to emulate someone in my writing
>> career, it would be Dean Koontz (mass market), not Shakespeare (art).
>>
> -snip-
> 
> Uh, check your history -- Shakespeare _was_ mass market in his time -- 
> why do you think there's so much low comedy in everything he did, even 
> his dramas?
> 

And some give impression that Chaucer was "prim and proper" ;)

Tim Wescott wrote:

> Uh, check your history -- Shakespeare _was_ mass market in his time --
> why do you think there's so much low comedy in everything he did, even
> his dramas?

Mmm, it was a very bad example but the best I could think of. Can you
name an author that would be recognized by name but doesn't write stuff
people actually read?

"ScottM" <scott@mayo.name> wrote in message 
news:1140796823.990469.42600@i40g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
>
> As a software engineer, I'll put in a plug for OO languages. State
> machines like that are a lot nicer when you have an OO language. Though
> I personally DON'T like Java, because of the overhead it imposes, but
> it did make the state management a lot simpler. I could have done it in
> C, but the code would have been that much more obscure, and having
> things to be trivial to modify (as I change gear) is very important to
> me.

I prefer OO *design* and a neutral language. I routinely write OO in C, and 
much prefer it to C++, which to my mind is flawed (private elements in a 
public class definition? wtf?). I also have seen far too many C++ projects 
flounder due, IMO, to over-reliance on language features and not enough on 
design. I feel I can do a better job of implementing the spirit of OO in C 
(neutral, limited semantics) than I can in C++.

> Used with an eye
> towards efficiency (ie, no STL, no misuse of new/delete, leave the
> string classes alone, use well designed classes with a minimum of
> virtual declarations), it produces better code than C compilers,
> because C++ demands fully specified interface, so it can optimize more
> intelligently than C.

In theory, I take your point. In practice, not so sure.

> Maybe that's not true in the embedded world - no idea how good the
> tools are in this space.

They're getting better, for sure. It's far more common now to use C in 
embedded projects; years back we simply couldn't afford the overhead vs 
assembler. And it's not just that hardware resources (RAM etc) are cheaper - 
the venerable 8051 still sees a lot of use, and probably most 8051 code (I'm 
guessing) is written in C these days.

It's not just the tools, though, it's the understanding (as you indicate) of 
what's actually going on under the hood. The main thing about embedded work 
is that It Must Not Fail At Runtime. This often means no heap, and a healthy 
distrust of runtime language features (garbage collection, late binding etc 
etc). There's a mindset involved in writing code such that it's robust *by 
design* and simply can't generate runtime errors - one can write bad code in 
any language. My experience has been that C++ does not per se promote good 
code - it tends to promote obfuscation due to confusion over whether "data 
hiding" means "lack of side effects" (as it should) or "where the **** is 
this member variable defined and used??" ;). My (strongly-held) view: the 
clearer the code, the more likely it'll be bug-free.

> Unfortunately, I've seen a lot of stupid C++ - but then I've seen C
> which is absolutely obscene.

Yup ;).Fairly recently I had to maintain someone else's code. This guy was 
held in high respect - mainly, it seems, because no-one else could 
understand his code. His main() function had 1435 lines and 30-odd gotos. 
Good going, chap. (I scrapped it and started over.)

Steve
http://www.fivetrees.com