Today Cirrus Logic announced a new ARM9-based processor with ethernet baked right in. Even more interesting is the operating systems that they are supporting out of the main office: Cirrus Logic's Nine-Series embedded processors are provided with all the necessary driver software as well as Linux and Microsoft's Windows CE .NET operating systems, which are optimized and fully supported by an in-house Cirrus Logic software development and support team.

An interesting new draft was just published by Lisa Dusseault of the OSAF. Partial Document Changes (PATCH Method) for HTTP. Discussion is being carried out on ietf-http-wg@w3.org. My one nit with the RFC is that it fails to mention where the discussion is taking place. More thoughts later as I dig in further. beep Posted by John Beimler on 2004-05-19

Now that everyone is sufficiently sensitized to software licensing, here is the real power of open source: the ability to fork. I just saw an interview in which Miguel says Evolution 2 will depend on Mono. Looks like it's time to fork. [Nathan Myers]

It would appear that ARM is dipping its toe in the DSP waters, at least that is how EETimes is spinning it, but looking at the companies presenatations [pdf!] it looks more like they are trying to compete with DSPs. Their strategy is to offer "Data Engines" which are flexible parts of the architecture that are tuned at compile time to the algorithms being executed. If this sounds hauntingly familiar it's because this is the same strategy that Stretch recently announced with their S5000 processors.

It's been a spectacular day for news today, just way too much to break up into separate posts. Atom The first big item was that Google has added Atom feeds for Usenet. That is just amazing to have that kind of adoption for the format. Unfortunately, they don't currently validate, but hey, that's what a beta is all about. An Atom Supporter Then we learn the MoveableType 3.0 has a new license.

I love the term nitwit. I love what it means and I love how it sounds. From dictionary.com: nitwit A stupid or silly person. Now I grew up believing that nitwit was closely related to nitpicking, that both terms were about nits. nit The egg or young of a parasitic insect, such as a louse. That is, I thought the term nitpicking came from picking nits, which, louse being very small and their eggs being even smaller, well, you get the idea.

James Tauber notes some similarities between annotations, comments and trackbacks. This is the same similarity I noticed a while ago and was the impetus for the creation of the CommentAPI. The same functionality as the CommentAPI is also available under Atom since comments are treated the same as entries. The equivalent of the CommentAPI under the AtomAPI is a PostURI on the entry. That PostURI on the entry can be found either by a link tag in the feed or via a link tag in the HTML header of the entry.

Here is another AtomAPI implementation and this one has some interesting extensions. There are additions for creating new users and creating new groups. Particularly interesting to me is the use of the HTTP OPTIONS method supported on the Post, Edit and Feed URIs. SixApart has their own extension in their implementation. Their extensions include an UploadURI for uploading any file, and a CategoryURI used to query the list of allowed categories an entry can be classified under.

A new IETF working group has been proposed in the Applications Area. The IESG has not made any determination as yet. The following description was submitted, and is provided for informational purposes only. Please send your comments to the IESG mailing list (iesg@ietf.org) by May 12th. Atom Publishing Format and Protocol (atompub) ============================================= Current Status: Proposed Working Group ... Read the whole announcement for WG Review: Atom Publishing Format and Protocol (atompub).

The AtomAPI is an emerging interface for editing content. The interface is RESTful and uses XML and HTTP to define an editing scheme that's easy to implement and extend. History, basic operation, and applications to areas outside weblogs will be covered. The quote above is my Brief Session Description for my speaking proposal I just submitted for XML Conference & Exposition 2004. It's not very interesting on its own except that it is exactly 255 characters long.

First we had HTTP. Then we had SOAP, which tunneled RPC over HTTP. And now to complete the circle we have SOAP Resource Representation Header, which lets you tunnel HTTP over SOAP. Lovely. print '<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">' - source: An Atom-Powered Wiki [1] by Joe Gregorio, April 14, 2004 [1] http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/04/14/atomwiki.html Posted by Sam Ruby on 2004-04-30 so the light at the end of the tunnel is a serialized train?

One of the books that hasn't left my desk in the last month has been Apache Cookbook. Betweeen setting up web services at work, tweaking with the tools that support this site, plus the implementations I have been experimenting with in Atom, it has been in constant sight. The nice part about Apache Cookbook, like all of the books in the O'Reilly Cookbook series, is that the content is task oriented.

I talked the other day about the DSM2150F5 which is a DSP System Memory (DSM) which contains Flash, Digital I/O, and a PLD and was designed with the Analog Devices Blackfin DSP in mind. Now today Stretch has announced their S5000 family of processors. The chip combines an existing RISC (reduced instruction set computing) architecture with a large reconfigurable area of programmable logic called the Instruction Set Extension Fabric, ISEF.

Mark Nottingham has listed his top 5 favorite protocol design papers, which of course includes Roy Fielding's Thesis.

You've seen all the warnings when upgrading the firmware on some card, be it your PCMCIA Wi-Fi card, or maybe your MP3 player. Interrupting a firmware update in progress (i.e. during the firmware upload into the SOMEHARDWARE) may render the SOMEHARDWARE inoperative. If the firmware upload fails, and subsequent upload attempts prove unsuccessful, the unit may need to be returned to THE COMPANY for service. I've anonymized the above statement to save singling out a particular company, but I have seen this on a wide range of devices.

A new 100 square foot patio, constructed of pavers, requires the following consumables: 1 tube suntan lotion (spf 8) 3 bales of pine straw 7 two by fours 14 stakes 18 glasses of iced tea 48 hours 1000 lbs of sand 2000 lbs of pavers I'm typing this up now, as tomorrow I may not be able to lift my arms to the keyboard. GIF! GIF! Er, I mean PNG!

Tim Bray has posted a proposal on the Atom wiki for a method of tagging an entry as 'not for syndication'. As Tim explains in his entry on ongoing, his motivation is for pictures, and to nix multipart/alternative: The motivation for doing this was to get rid of the type="multipart/alternative"feature in the current Atom drafts, which strikes me as a "wouldn't-this-be-nice" kind of thing that doesn't do a good job on the most common use-cases.

What you do with a RISC chip with gobs of MIPS? Well you port Linux to it, what else? LinuxDevices.com is reporting that uClinux has been ported to the Blackfin by Metrowerks. Their port is based on the 2.4.6 kernel and contains support for many of the peripherals including the high-speed synchronous serial ports (SPORT). This is the first port of uClinux to a DSP but not the last, only recently Softier announced that they had completed a port of uClinux to the Texas Instruments (TI) TMS320DM64x line of DSPs.

My latest article, An Atom-Powered Wiki, is now available at XML.com. In this article I cover the steps needed to create an Atom Enabled wiki, paying attention in particular to the character encoding issues. As Sam Ruby has pointed out character encoding may be the number one cause of ill-formed feeds. The code for both the client and the server are both available as downloads from the live version of the wiki I describe in the article.

I may give Microsoft a lot of grief, but you have to give them credit when they do the right thing. [via Mark via Joey]