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Author Archives: Niall Cooling
On BashLite and Shellshock
A number of people have been in touch with me about the fact that our Linux courses use an embedded target system that deploys BusyBox as standard and that there’s a “known exploit” doing the rounds called BashLite.SMB – this is obviously a cause for alarm!… Right?
WRONG!! Never one to shy away from defending my beloved Linux I wanted to make a quick public service announcement to say that this appears to be a fairly run-of-the-mill piece of malware riding […]
Posted in General
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Acorn Goes to Market with RISC Microprocessor
No I’ve not lost the plot, this was actually the headline from Electronics back in August 1985!
Recently my father was clearing out his loft at home and came across a couple of bagfuls of “rubbish” (garbage) which was full of various memorabilia from my degree days. Among the various artefacts, to my great surprise, I came across a photocopy of this article.
For those of you, like me, who were involved in electronics at that time, it’s a real trip down […]
Posted in General
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Vulnerabilities in C : When integers go bad!
Insecure C?
We are at the dawn of a new era of connected embedded devices, broadly being marketed as the “Internet of Things” (IoT). The majority of these systems are likely to be programmed using C/C++. To date, much of the embedded world has been connected to propriety networks, however with the gold rush in to IoT we are not going to be able to rely on “Security through Obscurity“. This is the first in a series of articles looking […]
Static and Dynamic Libraries on Linux
A Quickstart Guide
We’re going to look at how to create and use libraries on Linux and try to gain some insight on how libraries work behind the scenes.
Decisions Decisions!
Often when working with 3rd party code you may be limited on the options available. Some well known open-source projects have dual-licensed binaries that dictate different terms for static or dynamic linking.
Writing a library is a good way to provide an interface to customers, get code reuse and can be […]
Rapid Application Development with Python
Following on from my previous post on Python and our new course on Python for Test Engineers which takes an elementary approach, I felt it was time to pay homage to that wonderful language once again but this time focusing on its applicability for Rapid Application Development.
The Higher Level the Language; The More Productive the Programmer
I love writing Python. I’ll be honest, it’s the closest I’ll get to writing executable pseudo-code which best mirrors how my mind works and I’m […]
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goto fail and embedded C Compilers
I can’t imagine anyone reading this posting hasn’t already read about the Apple “goto fail” bug in SSL. My reaction was one of incredulity; I really couldn’t believe this code could have got into the wild on so many levels.
First we’ve got to consider the testing (or lack thereof) for this codebase. The side effect of the bug was that all SSL certificates passed, even malformed ones. This implies positive testing (i.e. we can demonstrate it works), but no negative testing […]
Posted in ARM, C/C++ Programming, Industry Analysis, Testing
Tagged C Programming, goto fail, MISRA-C, quality, Static Analysis, Testing
5 Comments
The Top 5 Things I’ve Learnt about Git
During the last couple of years, internally we’ve moved over to using Git as our Revision Control System (RCS). It’s been an interesting exercise, especially where, like me, you’ve come from a traditional model (such as subversion or even back to good old SCCS). I’m sure you’ve all got your own “top 5” and I don’t necessarily expect you to agree with me, but here’s my key learning points:
#1 “Branch always, branch often”
At the outset this was […]
UK based One-day ARM User Conference (and it’s free!)
For those of you that are not on our company hit list, sorry I mean mailing list, then you may not have heard about next week’s ARM User Conference run by the good folks at Hitex UK.
The event is titled “ARM – Continually Raising the Standard” and is being held at Stoneleigh Park near Coventry on the 19th September 2013. This year there are two streams running to allow a wider choice of presentation.
The event is also preceded by a number of (paid) workshops on […]
Posted in ARM
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ARM TechCon 2013
ARM’s Technical Conference called TechCon™ is running between October 29th and 31st at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California.
This year I shall be making the trip over to present three classes:
Can Existing Embedded Applications Benefit from Multicore Technology?
Virtual Functions in C++ on the ARM Architecture
Developing a Generic Hard-Fault Handler for ARM Cortex-M3/Cortex-M4
For those of you who are regular readers of this blog you’ll recognise the Generic Hard-Fault Handler from a previous post.
The class “Can Existing Embedded Applications Benefit from […]
Style vs. Substance in C programming
In an email from UBM Tech this week there was a link to an article titled “A Simple Style for C Programming by Mansi Research“. It was actually authored back on May 2010 by Meetul Kinariwala but appeared this week under the what’s hot section, so I thought I’d take a look [advice to the reader; don’t bother].
The problem with guides like this is that style is a very subjective area (as any parent will tell you how their kids […]
Posted in C/C++ Programming, Design Issues, General
Tagged astyle, MISRA-C, Static Analysis
7 Comments