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Creole Wiki Markup

Sat, 06/26/2010 – 16:27 — Martin Vejnár

I’ve been using bitbucket for some time now to host my hgdeps Mercurial extension. I’ve never used any of the many features that bitbucket offers, including issue tracking and wiki hosting.

That changed today when I opened bitbucket and created a new repository, hoping to write down design notes regarding a software that I’m attempting to build. (I’ve made a simple “oscilloscope” – an analog converter that would sample a signal at 160kHz and send the samples through an Ethernet connection. I need a software to display and manipulate the trace. But I digress.)

Parameter Estimation by Model Checking for Biological Systems

Thu, 05/20/2010 – 19:11 — Martin Vejnár

During the last two semesters, I’ve been working as a member of the laboratory of systems biology on methods for estimation of parameters of biological systems. A paper is currently being written, which will hopefully appear on International Workshop on High Performance Computational Systems Biology (HiBi 2010). Though there still is work to be done, I’d like to summarize the results here in hopes that this text may also serve as a final report for the class “PA183 – Project in Systems Biology”.

The Hardships of C++ GUI Development

Wed, 05/19/2010 – 17:37 — Martin Vejnár

This post was intended to be about the development of GUI applications with C++, but if you read forward, you’ll soon realize that it became more of rant, a monument to my frustration with existing C++ GUI toolkits (sometimes referred to as widget toolkits. Applying a bit of a self-censorship, I’ve managed to tune down the tone of the article a bit, though I had to remove a lot of “craps” from the text in the process.

First question to answer is why would one even want to use a GUI toolkit. As far as I’m concerned, the answer is portability – I work on both Windows and Linux systems and I want my applications to work on both. The standard C++ library provides no support for GUI development, which is actually fine with me, as I believe that such a complex functionality should not be part of any standard library. (Java, I’m looking at you. The quality of your GUIs is pathetic.) On the other hand, a good place where I would expect a GUI toolkit to appear is Boost. Unfortunately, there is no Boost.Gui at the moment and there won’t be one in the foreseeable future.

Compact System Monitor Applet for Gnome

Sat, 05/08/2010 – 18:22 — Martin Vejnár

I’ve written a super-simple panel applet for Gnome which displays current CPU load and memory consumption. The applet is supposed to be a space-conserving replacement of the default (and ugly) system monitor applet shipped with Ubuntu.

The Remnants of an Old Friend

Thu, 01/28/2010 – 00:47 — Martin Vejnár

Few days ago a friend of mine, while tidying up our workroom, found remnants of a robot – Aya – which we built about 5 years ago for the Eurobot challenge. Ah, the memories. Back then we used Microchip’s PIC processors, specifically we were fond of PIC16F627A. It was very cheap and the aforementioned friend had had some experience with them.

We spent weeks fiddling with the PIC assembly, trying to get the robot to work. (There were no free C compilers available for the platform. There were free AVR compilers though.

ZigBit ATZB-24-A2 Pinout

Sun, 01/24/2010 – 21:55 — Martin Vejnár

I’ve spent the last Friday afternoon trying to get my radio controlled airplane talking to my transmitter via a ZigBee link. I’ve deemed the traditional RF connection utterly useless as I’m getting rather severe glitches as close as 15 meters away (maybe I shouldn’t have tinkered with the receiver, who knows).

My friend and I bought four ZigBit modules a few months ago, but I didn’t find the time to work on them until last week. The BitCloud stack provided in the SDK is surely impressive, though unsuitable for real-time control.

Minix reloaded

Thu, 12/24/2009 – 14:26 — Martin Vejnár

We had a class reunion last week and I had a chance to talk to one of my former classmates, who is currently studying computer science in Prague. What’s interesting is that he somehow got involved with Minix project.

I vaguely recall that Minix was originally intended to be a teaching tool written by a professor somewhere in Netherlands. It turns out that it made some interesting leaps forward.

Iterators Must Go

Fri, 12/11/2009 – 18:41 — Martin Vejnár

This is the catchphrase associated with the presentation given by Andrei Alexandrescu during boostcon 2009. I heard about that blasphemy a while ago, but I had neither the time, nor the interest to read it back then.

I finally read it today. You see, I was implementing an incidence graph (as defined by Boost Graph Library) yesterday; to do that one has to write an iterator that, for a given vertex, traverses a sequence of its outgoing edges. Since the graph was potentially very huge, it wasn’t represented explicitly. Instead, the set of adjacent vertices was calculated on-the-fly.

The Site's New Layout

Fri, 11/13/2009 – 21:06 — Martin Vejnár

I’ve had a headache the whole day today. I couldn’t really concentrate on programming, so after I got home from school I’ve decided to kill some time before the dose of ibuprofen would kick in, and post an article here. Unfortunately, when I looked at the state the site was in, I’ve decided to fix it instead. I’ve spent the rest of the afternoon relaying and reconfiguring the site.

Chaotic attractors

Thu, 05/28/2009 – 13:57 — Martin Vejnár

This Monday there was a deadline for submission of bachelor’s theses at my faculty. My girlfriend submitted a thesis on chaotic attractors. It concentrated more on their visual and aesthetic aspect rather than the scientific one, but I think it’s still worth reading through even for those, who can’t appreciate art.

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