Linux application dev

Think Horses, not Zebras

by cbrake
2023-09-222023-09-23
1 Comment

There is a popular quote in medical circles:

When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras. — Dr. Theodore Woodward

“Zebra” is the American medical slang for arriving at a surprising, often exotic, medical diagnosis when a more commonplace explanation is more likely.¹ What does this have to do with product development? Like the medical profession, we often diagnose problems — we call it debugging. Below are three recent cases where I would have been helped by applying this approach a little more rigorously.

by Cliff Brake
2022-12-092025-04-15

As developers, we have many options for programming languages. On one hand, it is great to have choices. On the other hand, it can be a little overwhelming. Many times in life, we need to make decisions before we have the experience to know the best answer. There are many opinions as to what is best, and this article is just another one. There is no one-size-fits-all — a lot depends on your team and the task. In this article, we will examine the challenges we face in developing industrial IoT (IIoT) systems, review desirable attributes in a programming language, and discuss how Go meets these needs.

by Cliff Brake
2016-04-15

Go has a pretty neat development environment, and its helpful to set up a standard GOPATH on your workstation up front. This is what I do:

mkdir ~/go
add the following to .bashrc (or some file that configures your env on login)
- export GOPATH=~/go
- export PATH=$GOPATH/bin:$PATH

Now, after you log in, you can do things like:

A Review of Graphical Application Solutions for Embedded Linux Systems

by Cliff Brake
2012-08-07

One of the decisions we face when building Embedded Linux systems is what components to use. With Open Source software, there is often more than… Read More »A Review of Graphical Application Solutions for Embedded Linux Systems

OpenEmbedded srctree and gitver

by Cliff Brake
2010-10-11

Recently an OpenEmbedded class name srctree became usable. The srctree.bbclass enables operation inside of an existing source tree for a project, rather than using the… Read More »OpenEmbedded srctree and gitver

Qt Creator for C/C++ development

by Cliff Brake
2010-08-07

Recently, I’ve been evaluating Qt Creator for general C/C++ development. I’m currently involved in the development of a rather large C++ application that is approaching… Read More »Qt Creator for C/C++ development

Best practices for building Gtk+ applications with OpenEmbedded

by Cliff Brake
2009-09-08

I recently wrote an article about best practices building Qt applications with OpenEmbedded, and it occured to me that I should write an equivalent article… Read More »Best practices for building Gtk+ applications with OpenEmbedded

Best practices for building Qt applications with OpenEmbedded

by Cliff Brake
2009-08-06

This article describes how to cross compile a Qt application (named qt_tutorial) with OpenEmbedded, and several best practices you should consider. OpenEmbedded currently includes fairly… Read More »Best practices for building Qt applications with OpenEmbedded

Embedded Linux versus Windows CE

by Cliff Brake
2009-06-20

Occasionally I am asked how Embedded Linux compares with Windows CE. I have spent the past 5 years doing mostly embedded Linux development, and the… Read More »Embedded Linux versus Windows CE

Dealing with large data structures efficiently in embedded systems

by Cliff Brake
2009-05-26

I’m currently dealing with a programming problem where I need access to several 64MB, file-backed data structures concurrently on an Embedded Linux system that only… Read More »Dealing with large data structures efficiently in embedded systems