Author Archives: Dan Savilonis

Visualizing the Heap on Embedded Systems – Part II

By Dan Savilonis | Published: July 30, 2010
In the last article, I described a method to acquire heap allocation data from an embedded system. Next, I’ll describe how to visualize the data. First, though, to make things easier, I’ll acquire some real data from a regular Linux application. For simplicity, I profiled a Linux application built with gcc, but the same principle [...]
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Operation Aurora

By Dan Savilonis | Published: May 17, 2010
I have a general distrust for Mcafee, as the maker of the world’s most poorly performing virus scanner / security suite. However, when I came across a Wired article about security holes in the Perforce version control system, I was lured in with interest. I don’t use Perforce, but the catchy headline of stealing Google [...]
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FTDI USB Serial Port Enumeration on Windows

By Dan Savilonis | Published: April 11, 2010
FTDI is one of the two major manufacturers of USB UART chips, and they provide regularly updated and reliable drivers. Most devices I’ve used don’t bother to implement a custom VID/PID, so you can just use the drivers directly from FTDI. When you connect a large number of USB serial ports, it is often difficult to determine [...]
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Visualizing the Heap on Embedded Systems

By Dan Savilonis | Published: February 21, 2010
Debugging a memory leak can seem trivial compared to debugging fragmentation. Faced with such a problem recently, I decided I really needed to visualize what the heap looked like to determine how to fix the problem. Many embedded systems avoid using dynamic memory allocation entirely to avoid just this kind of problem, among others. But [...]
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Debugging USB Device Installation on Windows

By Dan Savilonis | Published: February 6, 2010
Recently, I ran into a problem trying to install a USB keyboard on Windows XP at work. Given that HID devices always just work with Windows, I wasn’t quite sure how to go about troubleshooting such a ridiculous problem. My first step was to investigate the problem, repeating the process to see what went wrong. [...]
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how to prevent feedback on your website

By Dan Savilonis | Published: August 21, 2009
Fidelity has done a remarkable job of unintentionally making it impossible to submit feedback on their website, 401k.com. I decided to send feedback after I noticed the new login form was obviously completely untested before being deployed: The username field assumes you are entering a social security number and masks all but the last four [...]
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makeshift iscsi san

By Dan Savilonis | Published: August 17, 2009
Aware that my aging PATA drives will slowly but surely descent toward an inevitable death along with the data contained on them, I decided to revive an old forsaken Soyo motherboard (free after rebate, if Soyo wasn’t in the business of fraud…) as a SAN. It’s previous incarnation as a dvr failed miserably, since it [...]
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