Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Hardware often makes me want to dress all in black, sit at the end of the bar, drink, and cry. Often Matthew Garrett is right there with me so at least I have company on my trip to black, black oblivion.

-- Dan Williams

So being such a hopeless optimist I set out to solve all pin controlling in this subsystem. The sales rap would be something like:

Do you need to bias your pin to 3.3 V with an 1MOhm resistor?
Do you want to mux your pin with different functions?
Do you want to set the load capacitance of your pin to 10pF?
Do you want to drive your pin as open collector?
Is all or some the above software-controlled in your ASIC?
Do you despair from the absence of relevant frameworks?

DON'T WORRY! The pinctrl subsystem is here to save YOU!

-- Linus Walleij

Due to intermittent email access on my vacation right now, the stable and longterm kernels will be delayed until late this week, or early next week.

In place of them, here's a lovely haiku to sooth you:

Sand castle contest
Rain falling sideways and cold
Summer in Oregon

-- Greg Kroah-Hartman

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Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 23, 2011 16:14 UTC (Thu) by xtifr (subscriber, #143) [Link]

I would describe it as beautifully geeky! :)

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 23, 2011 17:54 UTC (Thu) by linuxjacques (subscriber, #45768) [Link]

I liked it :-)

The haiku on the other hand; methinks it has one too many syllables.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 23, 2011 21:12 UTC (Thu) by cry_regarder (subscriber, #50545) [Link]

Oregon has only two syllables.

Or'gon

The Incredible Magical Pantech UML290

Posted Jun 23, 2011 17:20 UTC (Thu) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224) [Link]

Dan Williams whole blog entry is priceless, and contains what I would have put in a QoTW:

> WMC is just another binary protocol; essentially encoding structs on the wire but with a bunch of stupid at the front and some idiot at the end.

Man, I wish I had a nickle for everytime I'd run into some idiot protocol like this. Makes me think that the real reason why embedded companies don't want to publish specs on their super-duper special proprietary protocols (or drivers, or whatever) is that they don't want to be embarrassed.

The sad part is that I've seen my own company do silly things like, because they think there's some kind proprietary advantage to it. Sigh...

The Incredible Magical Pantech UML290

Posted Jun 23, 2011 19:19 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

My suspicion is that the reason embedded companies don't want to publish specs on their proprietary protocols is that they don't actually know what those protocols are. They stick some stuff they have together, and then they tweak it until it the parts talk to each other and don't get confused, and then they leave it. If they were going to release actual specs, they'd have to reverse-engineer their own device to figure out what the total effect of the layers of workarounds is, and they just don't want to do the work. Dan Williams probably understands this device at this point better than any individual at the company.

The Incredible Magical Pantech UML290

Posted Jun 24, 2011 16:16 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

Having worked in companies which sell linux-based appliances, the above has been my experience. Some developers try to be more conscientious but don't have the time resource given by management to do a better job and a number of developers just hack and hack and hack at the thing until they get something to work. I could tell some horror stories about temperamental internal software that had idiotic interfaces and failure modes that couldn't be replaced because "well, it worked..sort of and it's already a sunk cost".

Heck, thedailytwf.com is full of stories like that.

The Incredible Magical Pantech UML290

Posted Jun 25, 2011 9:13 UTC (Sat) by linusw (subscriber, #40300) [Link]

When I reverse-engineered the protocol used in the Creative NOMAD and Zen Jukeboxen (prior to the MTP protocol) I had a similar experience. Yes I think I know these protocols better than Creative by now. :-/