Rest In Peace Jim Williams

This week has been a sad one for anyone doing analog design. Jim Williams of Linear Technology died suddenly and unexpectedly from a stroke on June 12th. More on Jim here.

Jim is survived by his wife Siu and son Michael. His family requests that donations in Jim's memory be made to The Parkinson's Institute, 675 Almanor Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94085.

Archive of Jim's analog design collected writings can be found here and here. After reading those you will understand why we have lost the best among us.

I once had my own Jim Williams encounter, back at the height of the Dot Com Bubble around 1998, when I was writing Circuit Cellar Online Resource Pages. Out of the blue Jim called me up to tell me that I was miss applying his LT1088 (Yes it was his design, that he had to convince LT to make it), RMS wave form to Heat converter. We had a lengthy discussion on how to measure esoteric wave forms from even more esoteric sources (always work with First Principles if you can, like heat in the LT1088).

We never know when our own number is going to come up. Find an industry that lets you spend more time with your family and less time at work...

When is it safe to restore to factory defaults? Is the answer Never?

In a EDN, Design Idea (Jan/21/2010) Algorithm keeps data safe by Luis G Uribe C, Caracas, Venezuela; Edited by Martin Rowe and Fran Granville. There is discussion of how to prevent data loss while updating memory, even if a power fail or reset happens, based on a simple Gray Code State Machine.

The article Making Nonvolatile Data Reliable by David Hinerman, covers similar ground.

Also I have previously mentioned here Offsetof, which is very useful to help keep our data safe.

Now maybe you can help me out finding something. I have been trying to find the origin of a story, without success so far for some time, related to restoring default EEPROM settings to "factory" settings. The story goes like this:

A lady took her car back to the dealer, and asked that they disable the front seat passenger Air Bags, as her young son always road in that seat. The dealer did as the lady asked, "the customer is always right". Some time later something happened, possibly a jump start due to dead battery. This event caused the Engine Control Unit (ECU) to restore the EEPROM to the default factory values. The default factory setting re-enabled the passenger side Air Bag. There was then an accident, in which the boy was killed by the Air Bag deployment.

Even if the story is not true, it still illustrates just how hard it is to do a "safe" embedded system.

"Programming is a race between writing a program that any idiot can use, and the Universe building bigger and better idiots. The Universe is winning." -- Unknown