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The Remnants of an Old Friend

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Extraction of Image Characteristics on GPU

While walking from school today, I ran into my bachelor’s thesis’ opponent (opponent is just the name of one of the members of thesis committee here in Czech Republic) and we chatted for a while. He told me that there is an interesting problem for me to tackle for my master’s thesis.

The First Post

I’ve been noticing for a while that in a conversation, I sometimes tend to stop my thoughts mid-sentence, leaving the listener wondering about the points I’m trying to make. These interruptions of speech are caused by nothing but a lack of vocabulary—stopping to search for an appropriate word, but effectively ending the conversation instead.

So here I go. I’m starting a blog. To improve my communication skills.

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