Lost Art of Computer Programming

Talking Dirty with GDB and SSH Tunneling

Ever debugged a program remotely and felt like telling your computer where to go and how to get there? Hopelessly adding calls to printf() and recompiling as a steady string of explectatives flow from your over-caffeinated brain waves. Fear not! Help is on the way. Read on to learn...

Lifestyle Routing

Even with the best of maps and instruments, we can never fully chart our journeys. – Gail Pool The questions worth asking have not answers worth knowing, but rather they engender journeys worth taking. – Curt Brune This article describes the motivations behind and the inner workings of a...

Das U-Boot: The Universal Boot Loader

Exciting new embedded Linux devices are appearing at an astonishing rate. From tiny 3 inch "Gumstix" boards to PDAs and smart-phones embedded Linux is everywhere. Installing and booting Linux on these wildly varying boards is quite a chore. Without a good boot loader these machines are just complicated hunks...

Behind The Scenes at The Embedded Systems Conference

Inside are the gems I discovered at this year's Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco, including current directions in embedded Linux development ...

Existential Programming

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.
– Mark Twain

Back To School – Part II

The first six months were rough -- so much new information. While most of the computing terms were familar so many electronics terms left me in the dark. I had heard of programming concepts like spin-lock, semaphore, ISR, inter-locked linked list ... but I had never used them, therefore I...

Back To School – Part I

When last we met back in January 2002 (almost one year a go), the accidental programmer decided it was time to get serious and really learn the trade of computer programming. To that end I wanted to program embedded systems where a thorough knowledge of the underlying hardware is absolutely...

Crossover: WSDL to Gamma-Ray Telescopes

An accidental programmer takes a humbling journey as he attempts to crossover from high level web application programmer to bare iron coder � all the while looking for The Lost Art of Computer Programming.

Accidental Programming

Did you wake up one day to find that you had become a computer programmer almost entirely by accident? See the intriguing article, The Lost Art of Computer Programming, written by an accidental programmer.