Humboldt Solutions Ltd

Many mobile data services implement a forced cache on access to port 80. These caches often have the unfortunate assumption that the access comes from a web browser, and that a human being will look at the page. Vodafone completely reformats page content, while T-Mobile simply recompresses images at a lower quality. For [...]

Every so often I see someone attempting to run the Linux kernel on a PCI add-in card. I’ve done this myself, but there are a lot of complications. This article covers the hardware, and a second article will cover software. Don’t take this as chipset selection advice: before you commit to hardware double-check both the [...]

If you’re designing an application where devices communicate with a server over a mobile network, there are trade-offs between implementation effort and data transfer. This may not apply to a consumer application, where the application developer doesn’t have to pay the data charges. But if the application is M2M these trade-offs matter.

I have now seen my first ever year 2038 bug. An embedded Linux system that was installed two years ago became unable to acquire a network address by DHCP. The machine did not require an accurate clock, and nobody had initialised its battery-backed real-time clock. Once installed, it had started counting forward from 1st [...]

Theora video on the DM642 may not be entirely successful, but Vorbis audio is a different story. I’ve been experimenting with the Tremor integer-only implementation of Vorbis decoding.
Tremor offers two modes of operation. Normal mode, and low precision mode. Normal mode requires 64-bit intermediate results in arithmetic operations, whereas low precision mode only requires 32-bit [...]