Introducing Barr Group
In the ten months since forming Barr Group, I have received many questions about the new company. As we enter the new year, I thought it a good time to use this blog post to answer the most frequently...
View ArticleAn Update on Toyota and Unintended Acceleration
In early 2011, I wrote a couple of blog posts (here and here) as well as a later article (here) describing my initial thoughts on skimming NASA’s official report on its analysis of Toyota’s electronic...
View ArticleLethal Software Defects: Patriot Missile Failure
During the Gulf War, twenty-eight U.S. soldiers were killed and almost one hundred others were wounded when a nearby Patriot missile defense system failed to properly track a Scud missile launched from...
View ArticleA Look Back at the Audi 5000 and Unintended Acceleration
I was in high school in the late 1980’s when NHTSA (pronounced “nit-suh”), Transport Canada, and others studied complaints of unintended acceleration in Audi 5000 vehicles. Looking back on the Audi...
View ArticleGovernment-Sponsored Hacking of Embedded Systems
Everywhere you look these days, it is readily apparent that embedded systems of all types are under attack by hackers. In just one example from the last few weeks, researchers at Kaspersky Lab (a...
View ArticleNew BlueBorne Security Flaw Affects Embedded Systems Running Linux
A major security flaw in the Bluetooth communications protocol was recently discovered and has since been confirmed as exploitable in the real world. It is important that designers of embedded systems...
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Is it a Bug or an Error?
Probably you’ve heard the story of how Adm. Grace Hopper attached a moth that was dislodged from a relay in the Harvard Mark II mainframe to an engineering notebook and labeled it the “First actual...
View ArticleThe Rise of the Full Stack Developers
I’m a connector within our embedded systems design community and, so, my LinkedIn account has more than 15,000 connections. Which is where I recently started to spot what appears to be an emerging...
View ArticleC’s goto Keyword: Should we Use It or Lose It?
In the 2008 and 2013 editions of my bug-killing Embedded C Coding Standard, I included this rule: Rule 1.7.c. The goto keyword shall not be used. Despite this coding standard being followed by about 1...
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Proposed Rule Changes for Embedded C Coding Standard
My book Embedded C Coding Standard began as an internal coding standard of a consulting company and was first published in 2008 by that company (Netrino). In 2013, the book’s cover was given a new look...
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