Mark Sutton's Home Page

Important information about the use of GIF images in web pages:

As a result, you'll find no GIF images on this site!

My various web pages:

A manual for the Linux driver for the SST 5136-DN family of devicenet interface cards that I wrote and maintained.

The quickstart help file for the Linux driver for the Matrox Meteor frame grabber. I was the driver maintainer for about 4 years and contributed quite a bit of code to it.

A help document describing how I installed Linux on my laptop, a Chicony MP-975.

An overview of the technology behind Direct Broadcast Satellite television. This was originally written in 1998, most of the text within it is the same as it was in 1998. A lot has changed about DBS since then! Particularly, the "opinion" comments I make about its picture quality, are totally obsolete. Both of the major providers have taken a terrible "quantity over quality" approach to their business. I added some annotations in January 2002 to reflect this. However, like I said, most of the text is from 1998, so consider the document "historical".

A list of all the cities in which I have lived. Pointless trivia and drivel...

Who am I?

About six years ago, we sold our 150 year old shotgun house in the Fauborg St. John neighborhood of New Orleans. We gave up being just two blocks from the famous New Orleans jazz fest for a huge lot (by New Orleans standards, anyway) and more square footage in Lakeview. This is absolutely as close to Leave-It-To-Beaver land as I am ever going to get, I swear! (At least it's still more or less in "the heart 'o the big city.")

Just as we get our old place in pristine condition, I go and buy another handy man's special. I guess I never learn!

(You may find yourself -no longer- living in a shotgun shack...and you may ask yourself: "Well, how did I get here?")

We are now about 10 minutes, rather than 5, away fromThis Live camera.

About six years ago (when we moved) I dumped cable TV in favor of Dish Network satellite service. I've become an enthusiastic advocate of dumping cable for satellite. As a result, one of my favorite web hangouts has become DBSForums. Here is a link directly to their Discussion area.

I had also become addicted to the "DishPlayer" PVR (personal video recorder) that DishNetwork introduced about a year after I became a subscriber.

The "DishPlayer" was the worlds first "PVR" to hit the market. It went on sale several months before the overwhelmingly most well known PVR product, the "TiVO"

Alas, the DishPlayer, which always had slightly tempermental software, became less stable with each software "upgrade". It eventually became so unstable that it was barely usable.

So, now, I'm a DirecTV subscriber, with three DirecTV with TiVO receivers.

What good am I to anybody?

My first project with Axonn, which is now mature and mostly needs maintenance (no software is ever "done"), was to design the hardware and write all the custom software for the embedded controlling processor in the cellular sites of a cellular telemetry system. This is now a functioning commercial product. Here is an overall description of the system.

The embedded processor I led the design of and wrote all the custom software for is the controller of the "Cell Transceiver Sites" described in the link above. It's heart consists of an AMD 5x86 processor running embedded Linux.

My most recent project with Axonn involved writing embedded controlling code for the Axess Transmitter line of products

For over 15 years, before joining Axonn, I worked for The Laitram Corporation, a privately owned New Orleans based corporation that designs and sells a wide spectrum of industrial products. My title at Laitram was Sr. Electrical Engineer.

My department designed seafood processing machinery. We built machines that used state of the art roboticsand artificial vision to process seafood with great efficiency, minimal waste and improved sanitation.

My primary task was to program the vision systems, robots, and some other automated machinery. I programmed mostly in C on computers running Linux.

I am also competent to program in FORTRAN, BASIC, Pascal, Forth, 80x86 assembly code, 68000 family assembly code.

I did much of the electrical and electronic design for the food processing machinery also.

Occasionally, on the side, I do fully digital audio recording, of demo tapes, self released tapes/cd's, and the like, under the business name "Spectra One".

Here is a copy of my resume.

I am a UNIX nerd. I am a Linux groupie. Linux is a freely distributed version of UNIX.

My Contributions to "Open Source" software.

The problem with the term "freeware" is most people took it to mean "free" in the sense of "free of cost". This conjured up images of communes full of hippy-hackers that had and desired no job, no money, and bartered in nuts and berries for whatever minimal earthly needs they required. The physical appearance of the worlds most vocal freeware advocate (and pioneer of the freeware concept), Richard Stallman, only tended to re-enforce this perception. (Sorry Richard, all in good fun!)

"Freeware", was always intended, however, to denote "freedom" in the sense of freedom to use and modify software to best fit ones needs, as opposed to free in the sense of price. AND... as opposed to traditional software licensing practices that legally restrict you to use a particular piece of software in "X" manner and NOT in "W","Y",or,"Z" manner.

As more and more companies found that they could make plenty of money selling and supporting "freeware", the term Open Source was coined in an attempt to more accurately describe this category of software and to encourage more companies to embrace this concept for the software that they release.

My humble contributions to the "Open Source" software community, apart from pure advocacy, include:

I have written and maintain a Linux driver and programming library for the SST DN-5136 family of DeviceNet interface cards. Here is the manual for it.

For about four years I was the maintainer of theLinux driver for the Matrox Meteor frame grabber. I wrote quite a bit of the code that is currently in it.

I have written This help document about installing Linux on a Chicony MP-975 laptop computer.

Education

My degree is a BS in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University. While attending this school I was a DJ at the US's first non-commercial radio station, WRCT.

And check out the web site of the public school district where I got my primary school education.

Write to me: <marksu@spectra-one.com>