View From The Peak
Welcome to the foremost industry blog covering current issues in Embedded Devices, Mobile & Web Clients and Digital Video. You'll also find specific information on a wide range of other issues including hardware and software/firmware design; and video, mobile application and signal processing technologies. We cover a wide range of industries including security, cable/satellite, enterprise video, oil and gas, law enforcement, smartphone, defense and communications, among others.
Inter-thread Communication without a Mutex
A simple way to avoid mutex-locking issues is to not use mutexes. This post describes a simple technique for passing objects between threads in a thread-safe manner without mutexes, which makes the entire class of possible mutex-related errors impossible to implement!
With TI, Hard is Good
Texas Instruments’ DaVinci series offers a range of processors optimized for digital video processing. Although not appropriate for broadcast video, they are well suited for number of other video applications. TI offers evaluation modules (EVMs), software development kits (SDKs) and [...]
Tags: Engineering Management, hardware engineering, Texas Instruments
The Continuing Devaluation of “k”
The digital video industry seems destined to make resolution confusing. I just got back from NAB last week, where “4k video” was everywhere, and I want to tell you a story about video resolutions. (This is all using the resolutions [...]
Google is feeling creepy
When you enable location access, Android says “Allow Google’s location service to collect anonymous location data. Some data may be stored on your device. Collection may occur even when no apps are running.” This seems both fair and harmless, so I didn’t think too much about it. But it turns out to be a little creepier than you might think.
I wish more engineers could write
Over a year ago, a computer science faculty member asked me what skills I wished CS programs would teach their graduates. I’m sure he expected a response along the lines of “teach Node.js” or “teach more networking” or “teach operating [...]
Beating Your Internal Estimate
Recently, we’ve had two potential customers say to us, in so many words, “My internal engineering team has estimated this project to take X months, and I think that’s too long—can you do it faster?” There are two ways to interpret this…
How Low Can You Go?
Last night I went to the Denver IEEE meeting of the Signal Processing Society. I was particularly interested in this talk because it was given by Gary Sullivan, the co-chair of the recent international standardization effort to create the High Efficiency Video Coding Standard (HEVC).
Understanding the Cyclic Redundancy Check
CRC stands for Cyclic Redundancy Check—an error-detecting code used to determine if a block of data has been corrupted. The mathematics behind CRCs initially appears daunting, but it doesn’t have to be.I’d like to present an alternative explanation here that is useful to the software implementor of CRCs.
TI’s video SoC dilemma
We’ve had the pleasure to work with Texas Instruments’ high-end video processor families (DM8168 and DM8148) over the past few years on a number of different projects. These are highly integrated Systems-on-Chip (SoC) that contain many independent subsystems such as [...]
Tags: Engineering Management, hardware engineering, Texas Instruments
My threads question
If we interview you here at Cardinal Peak, we’re going to assume you’re competent to use Google and we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you can look up answers to weird corner cases. What we really want to know is how deeply you understand how a computer works.
Tags: C, Engineering Management, Interviewing, threads
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