My third book is released! Learn what you'll need to know in order to become an embedded engineer.

Check out my second book; learn practical stuff about building robots and control systems around Linux PCs and the Atmel AVR.

My first book gives you all the intro you need on developing 32-bit embedded systems on a hobbyist budget.

Diary Segment: 2007, November 01-15

Entries are shown in chronological order; scroll down to see later material.

November 11, 2007

Yet again, a long long delay since the previous update. It has been a complicated few months. Cristen and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary on October 5th, and in the process made some plans about savings and health goals. As part of this, we're both working on bringing our weight down. Hence the cornucopia of grocery goodness you see at left. While this kind of eating is very expensive in NYC, one of the sub-goals here is to stop eating out, or at least restrict it to once a week. If we can pull it off, we'll actually be saving a lot of money.

The release schedule for my fourth book has been pushed out by at least a couple of months, and it is seriously annoying. The reason for this change is that ST has (unofficially) made a 90° turn and more or less dumped their ARM7 and ARM9 product lines in favor of the all-new singing, dancing Cortex-M3 core. While the STM32 looks like a very interesting little part, I've been bitten so severely by this change that I have shifted the 32-bit parts of Book4 to the Luminary Micro range of devices (also Cortex-M3 based, FWIW).

Further very irritating news: I've been asked to testify in an ongoing civil suit in California. This suit relates (peripherally) to the Balance laptop I bought from Wal-Mart in roughly October 2004. While it's nice that I'll be compensated for the trip, I really really really (really really) don't enjoy air travel, and there's absolutely nothing I want to do or see in Los Angeles. I am contemplating, however, buying one of these cute little laptops to take with me on the flight. This is a fully PC-compatible ultraminiature (sub-2lb) laptop with a 4GB solid-state hard disk, USB, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, a built-in webcam, 512MB (upgradable) RAM and a 900MHz Intel ULV CPU. Highly nifty. It is shipped with a Linux distribution preloaded, but the included driver disk contains Windows XP drivers if you want to switch operating systems. Right now I'm dumping some of my unwanted test equipment on eBay and trying to put together enough "spare" money to buy this cool little device.

School is proceeding... frustratingly. (Notice a recurring theme here, kids?) This semester I'm doing one class online and one real in-person class. The online class is probably the worst-organized piece of education I've ever seen. The assessment process is messed up beyond belief; questions are being asked about material we haven't studied yet, and overall the whole thing is a shambles. The other class is just a simple computer science subject, but still quite stressful. The only good news here is that there are only a few weeks left in the semester. However, this will almost certainly be my first semester with a less than perfect GPA. I am strongly considering a transfer to Stonybrook, which is not only cheaper and far better respected, but also offers most or all of the EE courses I need online.

In literary news, Cristen recently introduced me to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy, comprised of The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. This is an interesting blend of sci-fi and fantasy (about 20%/80% respectively), with a slight atheist-explanation-of-religion flavor. It's definitely worth a read; I devoured the trilogy in a weekend. Audiobook versions are also available, and the first book has been made into a movie, Q1 2008 release date.