These are my own personal views and those of my company Phaedrus Systems. www.phaedsys.org which is where the full version of this column resides under the Technical Papers button.

 

Some of you will be on holiday this month, avoiding the school holidays at the end of next the month. Well you can look forward to the “two weeks in the summer” column next month with some food for though.  Also in the future we have the Embedded Systems Show in mid October. It is the largest embedded show in the UK and still expanding at 20% a year for the last couple of years.  It is an ideal place to get ideas and refresh your view of the industry. I know that many got project saving information last year that made the visit worth while just for that.  We will have a stand with the usual coffee & doughnuts so come for a chat about any of the topics in the column if you can find us, we’re in the middle this time. I have to say:  “Please visit all other stands as well” or someone will get upset!

 

Panorama (http://www.bbc.co.uk) a few weeks ago had an item on wi-fi in schools claiming that the signal was three times more powerful than the nearby mobile phone radio mast.  Well, I can understand the worry, as the damage caused by radio waves is well understood.  Take a micro wave cooker or a radar unit for example.  Of course there are mobile phones.  These are either significantly higher power than wi-fi or clamped to the side of your head.   Though, unless you are a teenager or a field-sales-rep, the phone will not be attached to your head 24/7. Whereas the wi-fi in the home/office is on 24/7, you are bathed in it all day and all night. 

 

What are the long term effects? Probably negligible compared to everything else.  However no one will really know for years to come. Mind you the same was said about radar and mobile phones in the past. Never mind the smoking/cancer debate. Can you imagine getting sued in 30 years time by employees who claim their tumour is the fault of the office wi-fi over the last two decades?

 

Whilst thinking about this it did occur to me that I can do my bit for the environment, security and my heath all in one go. Most routers will let you turn off the wi-fi, some up market ones will even let you program the on-off times.

 

This is worth seriously thinking about anyway. I have talked to people who have sat in a café/bus stop etc to find they can pick up wi-fi from the company 5 floors up the block the other side of the road! From my house I can pick up 6 networks one of which is completely unsecured.  Don’t be smug thinking your wi-fi is secured.  One major ISP uses the same WPA key on all its domestic routers and there are apparently “easily available tools on the internet” for hacking various levels of WEP.  How long before WPA can be breached?     One TV program did just that and hacked several “secure” domestic wi-fi routers and managed to do some identity theft. 

 

If your company/home has it’s wi-fi on 24/7 someone can sit outside all night/day hacking at the pass word.  It only takes time, and a bit of luck. So it makes sense from a security point of view, a health point of view and ecologically… If every wi-fi router in the country had the wi-fi circuits off for 50% of the time we could probably save enough for to heat a cup of tea or three.

 

As I sit only one meter from my wi-fi router and the main network is wired I leave the wi-fi off most of the time.  I just let visitors use next doors unsecured wi-fi…. J.   Whilst it is not legal to use someone else’s wi-fi, the chances of being caught are very low. It is irrelevant if they are using your wi-fi for criminal intent anyway. The law will not protect you it just helps the government clear up figures.

 

It is better to turn wi-fi off when not in use than discover the panic merchants were right….. Now that might be right about the health aspect, getting your net work hacked or saving power but either way there is no down side.   Now after that public service announcement I feel much better.  Though it is quite ironic as most of the new wi-fi routers are now touting longer ranges….

 

Having moved offices I have been having a clear out.  I came across an amusing an item I had put aside for this column.  It is a directory path.  I have changed some of the words to protect the innocent.  It was being fed into a tool on the command line without the “”:

Z:\Engineering\Projects (R+D Electronics)\AB3\AB4 C Code\AB2 Main Code –Iss V123 Devel\

 

The problem is that windows “permits” spaces and long file names it does not actually do anything with them, it leaves that to the receiving application.   Many older applications would get confused by the string(s) above.  Both – and + would be seen as switches by many and could see “–Iss “as include dir “ss”, +D as a define command.  Also whilst windows passes the line though many older tools with a less than infinite command line buffer will not be able to handle multiple instances to that line of you are giving a full path to multiple files. Actually Windows command line buffer used to be quite short too. So keep them short, no spaces or non alpha numbering characters.  Eg z:\Eng\projects\A1\A1code\a1main.

 

Whilst on things found whilst moving I came across a tech support query.  The client said “It’s a very simple arrangement. I use an 8051 with 64K flash and 1K RAM.  I use a simple programmer and debugging is what I get out from printf statements only…“  He wanted to be able to run a CRC in the application to check the integrity of that application in case of firmware bits dropping off over time. I asked why he needed to do this. He said “It will be very expensive if the system goes wrong. Will be used to program 100,000 EPROM’s a month! “.  When I suggested he should be debugging with an ICE rather than printf if it was that critical he replied that an ICE was too expensive…..  At this time a good 8051 Emulator completely full speed non-intrusive would have cost about 4,000 GBP.    What cost if the programming of 100,000 parts a month went wrong?  Well obviously enough to spend over £3000 of time on a CRC routine to check the flash. It never fails to surprise me that some programmers will still use “the old ways” rather than raise their head from the code logically analyse the bigger picture.

 

There has been a bit of an upheaval on Usenet (News Groups) with many youngsters thinking they are on a Google Group not realising that it is just a non-standard front end to something far bigger.  However as they are typing they seem to think that everyone on Google groups is under 25 and reads TXT SPK with little punktuasun or spelling that u or i would recognise.

 

Back in January William Graham put it rather well ”I don't mind new English words, but I insist that they be spelled correctly... After all, the spelling identifies the word's origins, or Latin/Greek/Whatever roots....by the same token, I can't stand the modern tendency to misspell words such as "thru" for "through".  For those of us who were taught how to spell and correctly, such abbreviated forms look alien and, according to our education, wrong.

 

However the rules of evolution dictate that they will most likely become the normal spelling in due course. "Thru" carries all the meaning of "through" with a saving of three characters. The effect of global digital communication will only accelerate this process that would otherwise have taken 300-500 years to occur, possibly down to less than 100 years.

 

It is a little sad that so many words and terms that had similar but subtly different meanings in the past have degenerated to synonyms in the last few decades, our language losing much of its flair for subtle nuance in favour of a truncated, simplified lexicon. Well so be it

 

For those under 25 Jim Hemenway penned “an AOL-er translation”….Read it and weep or get one of your children (5-25) to translate it back.

 

WILIM GRAHM WROTA

I DONT MIND NU ENGLISH WORDS BUT I INSIST TAHT THEY B SP3L3D OR3CTLY .. AFTER!1!!1!!!!!1!!!1!11!1!11!1!!! WTF AL TEH SPALNG IEDNTIFEIS  TEH WORDS ORIGINS OR WUT ROTS..BY1!11!!!1!1!1!1!!!1!1!1!!1 WTF LOL DA
SME 2KAN I CANT STAND TEH MODARN TANDENCY 2 MISPEL WORDS SUCH AS THRU  FOR THROUGH1!1!111 LOL

FOR THOSE OF US WHO WER3 TAUGHT HOW 2 SP3L AND CORACTLY SUCH ABR3VIAETD FORMS LOK ALEIN AND ACORDNG 2 OUR 3DUCATION WRONG HOWEVER!1!! OMG WTF TEH RULAS OF EVOLUTION DICTAET TAHT THAY WIL MOST LIEKLY BCOME TEH NORMAL SPELNG IN DU3 COURS311!1!!1! LOL THRU CAREIS AL DA M3ANNG OF THROUGH WIT A SAVNG OF THRE CHARACT3RS1!11!!! OMG WTF DA AF3CT OF GLOBAL DIGITAL COMUNICATION WIL ONLY ACALERAET THIS PROC3S TAHT

WUD OTH3RWIES HAEV TAEKN 30-50 YEARS 2 OCUR POSIBLY DOWN 2 LES TAHT 10 Y3ARS IT!!1!11! OMG LOL IS A LITL3 SAD TAHT SO MANY WORDS AND T3RMS TAHT HAD SIMILAR BUT SUBTLY DIFERANT MEANNGS IN TEH PAST HAEV D3G3NERAETD 2 SYNONYMS IN DA LAST F3W DECAEDS OUR LANGUAEG LOSNG MUCH OF ITS FLARE FOR SUBTLE NUANCE IN FAVOUR OF A TRUNCAETD SIMPLIFEID LEXICON!111111 LOL WEL SO B IT!11!11 OMG LOL

 

Now to be fair it is unusual to have it SHOUTED…. They usually stick to all lower case. When I was younger we would have reformatted that to four letter groups and passed it to Hut 6…..

 

Whilst on emotive beliefs: I note that the new version of windows is being claimed as “more secure” than the new Red Hat Linux release. Ignoring all the usual shouts of the FOSS Devotees  (Free Open source Software)  saying “they would say that wouldn’t they” and even if you ignore the numerical comparison the fact is a large number of holes were found in the new Red Hat Linux distribution. Also, by the way, in the MAC OSX so it is time to stop this mythical belief that Linux (and OSX) is bullet proof and Windows is a complete bag of nails.  There is an increase in MAC viruses and attacks because MAC is becoming more popular in the main stream not just the with arty media types. The same will happen with Linux. If Linux moves from the enthusiast to the mainstream average user (not just the technical people) it too will suffer an increase in viruses and attacks.  Just as Unix had when It was more widely used in universities (and there were no networked PC’s).

 

I say “if” because it appears as I suggested in the last months all is not well in the Utopia of FOSS. There are alliances between various Linux implementers and the Great Satan (Microsoft), FSF and Linux can’t agree on the new GPL V3 License terms, there are different versions of the MPL and there are vulnerabilities in new Linux releases.  It also appears some of the Big Names who appeared to be supporting Linux were doing it for marketing reasons rather than any real intent to actually supply…. They get more money for supplying other OS’s.

 

I think in many ways Linux is coming of age commercially. It is, to be blunt, an OS like any other. You have to buy one of the many different implementations and pay for support (or spend a lot of time and effort rolling your own). It has bugs, holes and viruses just like all the other desktop OS. There are the continual round of patches and add-on’s.  It now has all the usual licensing and corporate battles of any other commercial software.  The only difference, other than the main programmers don’t get paid is, as eWeek put it “...the open-source community needs to get over its overweening sense of superiority and messianic inevitability; the alternative is just good enough that if it doesn't get its act together, open source may find itself the subject of retrospectives like "Remember Unix?"”

 

On a lighter note to finish on:  I got an invitation from Microsoft TechNet Management Summit (UK) to see their presentation: Are You in Control? How to Manage and Secure Your Infrastructure which is presented by Stephen Lamb with the wonderful job title of: “IT Professional Evangelist”   A Professional Evangelist!     Some one once suggested a job title of Grand Wizard for a tech support person….   but “Professional Evangelist”?  Who thinks these up? Personally I would not want that title on my business card!  Does any one else have any interesting or unusual job titles?   

 

Incidentally there is still time to sign the petition for the term “Engineer” to become protected in the UK as it is in many other parts of the world, including in the EU.  See http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Engineer-Status/Lest the UK become one of the few western countries when anyone can be an “Engineer”. Next month Ethics… something Engineers need to be aware of or a series of jokes about young ladies?