• Random,  Uncategorized

    Back to Blogging!

    November 11, 2010 /

    I’m back to blogging! I simply didn’t have any time or energy for the last few months, so I’m sure my pagerank has dropped to about zero. Thats ok though, time to work on getting it back up there. Why did I stop blogging? Simply, my senior year of college was a huge drain, financially and emotionally. I was putting in 110 hour weeks during the fall semester to complete my Senior Thesis (400,000 lines of verilog!), which was a basic Out-of-Order, superscalar Alpha processor. When that was done, I was flying all over the country every weekend looking for jobs. When that was done, I was arranging to move…

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  • Coding,  Hardware,  Open Source,  Random,  Ubuntu

    Crash Course on Mixing C and Assembly on Linux/x86

    January 15, 2010 /

    Editor’s Note: This article is designed to get you thinking a bit about assembly on i386 machines, and to provide an example of x86 convention function calling. Its not really comprehensive enough to serve as a thorough tutorial. Look here, or here for a bit more comprehensive introduction. Tinkering with assembly code is a great way to learn about how code compiles and runs, and provides great insight into writing better code. Its probably easier and [frankly] more useful, to insert some carefully crafted assembly code into a C program at just the right place. However, you learn more about the machine, and the way your code is stitched together…

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  • News,  Random

    Back!

    December 29, 2009 /

    If you’ve been wondering where I’ve been the last few months, the short answer is simply “here”: View Larger Map (also known as my school’s Electrical Engineering Building) I was working on my Senior Design Project, which was to implement an out-of-order Alpha processor using the Verilog Hardware Description Language. Put simply, me and my 3 team members made a 200MHz processor with roughly the Pentium 4 architecture for our senior design project/thesis. The class is known as a trial-by-fire introduction to hardware description languages, and we came through with good grades (and the fastest clock period in the class). Point is, I haven’t had a lot of free time…

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  • Random

    Shatner of the Mount

    September 23, 2009 /

    “Picard v. Kirk” is a classic Holy War, and really part of geek heritage. I’m not gonna declare my allegiance here, just to keep this important new piece of evidence as pure as possible. Here it is for your evaluation: Apparently it is a remix taken from an interview with William Shatner as an “Extra Feature” on a Star Trek Movie DVD.

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  • Random

    Happy Birthday, America

    July 4, 2009 /

    This is the first 4th of July that I have ever spent outside of the country. I will be in Strasbourg, France for most of Independence Day. I’m pretty sure there won’t be any fireworks, no Star Spangled Banner. Therefore, I choose to celebrate the 4th of July via this blog post. I apologize for the deviation from my normal topic, technology. On this date two hundred and thirty three years ago, 50 men, and the 13 colonies they represented “pledge[d] to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor” in order to forge the nation of the United States of America. The philosophical underpinnings of the Declaration…

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  • Random

    Hello from Zurich…

    June 19, 2009 /

    Maybe a few days late, but work sent me to Zurich, Switzerland last week until the end of August to visit and reorganize the datacenters we have there. Its the first time I’ve been to Europe, and like it so far. The 6h time difference took a bit to get used to, but I’ve explored the city a bit and gotten over jetlag. Hopefully since I’m closer to UTC time, I won’t miss the Ubuntu Regional Board approval meeting next week like I did last time :P. I’m impressed by all the trains, trams, and busses in the city, and the overall orderliness of the city, considering how big it…

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