Our blog focuses on sharing our experience and knowledge across a wide range of technologies and industries including hardware and software design, audio, video, internet of things, mobile application and signal processing technologies.
Thoughts on 3D After NAB
Video
By Mike Perkins
I just returned from this year’s NAB show, where I was bombarded with 3D demos in virtually every booth. Most of the factors driving this 3D superabundance originate outside of the broadcast industry itself. First, TV manufacturers are hot on 3D as a way to get everyone who just bought an HDTV to upgrade to… View ArticleDetails
Encoders Aren’t Commodities
Video
By Howdy Pierce
My partner Ben Mesander had a really cool post the other day: An H.264 encoder written in 30 lines of C code. Ben’s encoder outputs completely valid H.264, but it doesn’t actually compress anything. (What do you expect from 30 lines!) In fact, because of the necessary H.264 headers, the output of Ben’s encoder is… View ArticleDetails
More on Patents
Outsourced Engineering
By Howdy Pierce
I had intended to give the indemnification issue a rest. But then the following caught my attention this morning: One big difference between patents and other kinds of intellectual property, like copyrights and trademarks, is that patent-holders who want to sue someone for infringement don’t have to show that their patents or their products were… View ArticleDetails
Providing Indemnification for Patent Infringement
Outsourced Engineering
By Howdy Pierce
Cardinal Peak recently had an unfortunate “first”: We chose to walk away from a promising engineering engagement because we couldn’t reach agreement with our customer about an indemnification clause. Let me give a little background before diving into the issue. “Indemnification” technically is the legal obligation to compensate a business partner for losses that the… View ArticleDetails
Writing Defensive Code to Automatically Find Memory Leaks
Software Development
By Ben Mesander
In an earlier post, I suggested making all your memory allocations go through a single routine, and deletions through another. When you centralize allocation and deallocation like this, you gain a couple of benefits. First of all, you make the memory allocation more explicit, which will tend to make programmers more careful. Second, you can… View ArticleDetails
How To Find a Memory Leak
Security
By Ben Mesander
Finding memory leaks and other problems in your code can be challenging, but there are tools available to help simplify that process. Remember to add time to your schedule so that you can apply the available tools for finding memory leaks and other problems. Details
Delta Sigma Converters: Modulation
Signal Processing
By Mike Perkins
The web is filled with introductions to Delta Sigma modulation (also sometimes referred to as Sigma Delta modulation) in the context of Delta Sigma converters. Unfortunately, the ones I’ve looked at fail to intuitively motivate how the modulator works. Therefore, my goal in this post is to show how the structure of a first-order ΔΣ… View ArticleDetails