Jan. 8
  Last viewed: Dec 09, 2009, 06:12:06 AM (GMT)

Winnemucca, NV--My poor abandoned blog.

Never any updates.

The news with me is that I have, happily, been able to re-join my computer-writing career more or less where it left off somewhat ignominiously a couple of years ago. A former co-worker contracted my editing services in August at the LinuxWorld trade show, and I've since been cranking out 3-5 stories a day in the name of computer journalism.

The site is LinuxDevices.com, and the stories are about embedded Linux, real-time Linux, Linux appliances, Linux in industry, Linux programming in general, and once in a while, another open source embedded operating system like eCos or NetBSD.

The stories are about using Linux to build PDAs, cellphones, convergent media products like time-shifting TVs, networked media centers, set-top boxes, robots, closed circuit TVs, automotive telemetry systems, and other uses for computers where the system just isn't allowed to crash, ever.

We also cover carrier-grade Linux for telecommunications systems, industrial control systems, data acquisition, military applications, and that kind of thing. Clusters and super-computers often fall within our "embedded" Linux range.

As a technology site, we see a lot of processor stories, especially about the kind of low-power, specialty chips most used in embedded designs, chips from MIPS, ARM, Intel (XScale), Motorola (ColdFire, MPC), Renesas (SuperH, SH4), Texas Instruments RISC/DSP chips, and others.

We also cover reference designs, prototyping boards, board support packages, and development tools, including board bring-up tools, in-circuit emulators, kernel-aware debuggers, integrated development environments, compilers, and debuggers.

We cover the Linux kernel, drivers, some GPL issues once in a while, and open source software projects connected with embedded Linux, such as windowing toolkits, uclib, busybox, tinylogin, thhtd, boa, netfilter/iptables, and many more.

A lot of the work is writing, from press releases and reader leads. Another component is producing stories contributed by the embedded Linux community. Then there are interviews, device profiles, special reports, hot topic lists, and other information aggregation projects.

The site does pretty well, better than you might think if your eyes glazed over after the first paragraph above. We have several hundred thousand visitors each month, a core group of sponsoring companies, and another rotating group of banner advertisers.

The site was founded by a respected leader of the embedded community who is also an excellent journalist, principled, motivated, with a great eye for stories and many professional friends and acquiantances.

It's great to be among the working again, and to have a challenging, fun job, at that.

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Some readers have pointed out that the dates have become rather fouled up in this blog. This happened when I added a simple hit counter to the blog database, without remembered that I set up the date field, originally, with a timestamp data type. So, every time a story is read, its timestamp is updated. Whoops! I should fix it one of these days.

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