Kooker in School

I just posted a demo Stacy and I made of the OptiActor for iPad. It’s probably longer than it needs to be, and has a bit of a “home video” quality to it, but it’s still a fun demo of the project!

And after I posted it, I discovered that my class presentation had been uploaded too! So you can hear me talk fast and nervously for nearly 20 total minutes. Thank you, YouTube!

I’ve been updating my pages for this quarter’s courses, but RSS subscribers won’t notice those changes – oops! A quick update:

• My ECE 291 project is coming along really well! Links to the project, course website, and source are here.
• The Music Technology seminar on telematic production has been very interesting. Most of my work from that class has been documented in Google docs. I’ll move some of the information over here, or publish the docs, soon!

A couple quick notes about recent updates to the website:

• The job search is on, interviews are in full swing, and my resume is available!
• The Virtual Conductor (my ECE 285 project) is complete, with links to the final report/journal paper, presentation slides, and source available.

The quarter is over, and the iReactable report is done!

I’ll still try to add some polish early this summer, and submit the app to the App Store. It’ll be fun for the family and friends to play with.

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted about my CSE 237D project, but I’ve been plugging away all quarter long. In fact, today we had our end-of-the-quarter project demos! I got to show the iReactable system to my class, and the demo went very well.

I’ve posted the slides, and I mentioned in class that all of the source is available on Github. It may be a month or so before I can get the app on the iTunes App Store (and I’ll probably have to rename it when I do that), but in the meantime, you can play with it if you’ve got an iPhone Developer account.

The full project report is coming later this week!

I was just looking over the enhancements and refinements of Snow Leopard, and noticed the one about a “Redesigned Services menu.” That made me realize just how long it’s been since I even looked at my Services menu.

This thing is out of control. I’m glad Apple’s doing something about it. But as I looked down the list, one caught my eye:

ISA Reference > Lookup ARM Instruction?

No way! I’ve got the entire ARM reference manual on my laptop, with a customized instruction lookup field! This would have been great to know about last quarter, when I was taking Computer Architecture. Still, I’m excited: The Mac OS X developer tools (Shark, it seems) comes with instruction set manual browsing applications for x86, ARM, and PowerPC. They’re not the best for actually reading the manuals; for that, it’s probably better to just peek inside the packages and open the PDF in Preview. But to quickly look up an instruction, it’s fantastic.

And for those who don’t know, these instruction set manuals detail how particular processors (like the x86 on your Intel Mac, or the ARM inside your iPod touch) encode their assembly language instructions. When a student like myself is learning about processor architecture, figuring out how computer processors go about executing instructions, it helps to see how existing instruction sets have been defined. It helps even more to have a quick reference from an assembly language instruction to its digital layout.

Note: It looks like Wolf Rentzch blogged about these a while back, before they were standalone applications. They now live in /Library/Application Support/Shark/Helpers/.

When Quick Look was first introduced as a Leopard feature, I was pretty impressed, I’ll admit. But the feature needed a little help. When I selected a folder, and hit the space bar, I got the same info I could see via Get Info (Cmd-I). Same goes for source code files, and zip archives.

I have good news, my friends. Three wonderful (free!) Quick Look plugins later, this feature becomes indispensable. Download, install, and get hooked on hitting your space bar again.

BetterZip Quick Look Generator – Don’t get confused: the “buy” links are for the full-featured BetterZip app. The QL plugin is free.

BetterZip Quick Look Example

Folder – Don’t worry when half the page is in Japanese. You’re at the right place.

Folder Quick Look Example

QLColorCode - This one saves me hours of opening and closing. A must-have for any software developer. A should-have for everybody else.

QLColorCode Example

I keep my Quick Look plugins in ~/Library/QuickLook, in case I find any weird bugs with them. Enjoy!

I’ve posted the written progress report for my CSE 237D project, along with the slides from today’s oral presentation. It’s all available in the usual place!

Here are a few things we learned about today in class.

Physically unclonable function

• We use unpredictable properties of chip fabrication to enhance security. Now that’s how we turn lemons into lemonade.

BCH Code

• A form of error correcting code (ECC) that helps with thermal/voltage errors in the PUF’s above.

execl command

• Covered with reference to buffer overflows. Don’t use execl to run some command from memory, just after doing a strcopy around that area. (Probably better to use strncopy.)

We also talked about trusted signals on the digital logic level. For example:

So, if our trusted input A is 0, then we can trust the output (it’ll always be 0). If A is 1, then we can’t trust our output.

Today we covered Embedded Systems Security, and this was one of Prof. Kastner’s slides:

xkcd – A Webcomic – Alice and Bob.

xkcd + wikipedia = an education in itself.