Blog Post Cardinal Peak Develops Blockbuster App I’m proud to announce the release of the Blockbuster app for Android, developed by Cardinal Peak. The app launched this week in the Google Play store. It allows subscribers to manage their Blockbuster By Mail queue as well as find nearby stores, check a title’s availability in a store, and more. Check it out!
Read More Blog Post Computing Primes in Python and C++ I recently had the opportunity to implement a Python program to compute prime numbers. After I was done, I wondered how the Python implementation compared to doing the same exact thing in C++, so I decided to do a comparison. First, the Python program. I computed prime numbers using the Sieve of Eratosthenes. (No, I…
View Article Read More Blog Post ElcomSoft’s Hack of Image Authentication There was some interesting news yesterday about the cracking of an image authentication mechanism built into Nikon cameras. The hack was announced in what seemed to me like a rather adolescent post on the ElcomSoft company blog: ElcomSoft Co. Ltd. researched Nikon’s Image Authentication System, a secure suite validating if an image has been altered…
View Article Read More Blog Post High School Prior Art Based on a Slashdot link, I read a blog post today about the Oracle/Google lawsuit over Java virtual machine patents. Among the list of software patents that Oracle has decided to sue Google with are two that I’m fairly certain that I wrote prior art for. This was in 1983 or 1984 while I was…
View Article Read More Blog Post Real-Time Ethernet A recent project for a customer was to implement a transport for a real-time signal processing application over Gigabit Ethernet (GbE). The project was especially interesting because our customer’s requirement was for extremely low latency: The transport needed to be able to send replies to incoming packets with a custom EtherType within 74.4 μsec. This…
View Article Read More Blog Post How To Find a Memory Leak 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.
Read More Blog Post Ben’s Golden Rule for Preventing Memory Leaks As an embedded software engineer, I spend the majority of my time writing code in C and C++. One somewhat-justified knock on these languages is that they both force the programmer to sweat all the details involved with memory management. One particular bugaboo of the C/C++ engineer is the memory leak: Memory that is dynamically…
View Article Read More Blog Post GCC’s Unhelpful Error Messages Something must be done about the obtuse error messages issued by the GCC compiler, particularly when using C++ and STL classes. Take this, for example, which is the output I got recently after a one-line change: ‘std::_Rb_tree_iterator >’ to non-scalar type ‘std::_Rb_tree_iterator, std::allocatorView Article
Read More Blog Post Working With CUDA We’ve recently been working with a cool technology that is rapidly penetrating scientific and engineering computing, but seems little known otherwise. It’s called CUDA. In a nutshell, it is an SDK to allow you to run parallelizable compute-intensive applications on your Nvidia graphics card instead of serially on your CPU. CUDA is one of a…
View Article Read More Blog Post Announcing PhotoDialer for the Palm Pre Cardinal Peak is proud to announce that our PhotoDialer application is now available for free download in the Palm Pre App Catalog. Our history with Palm and passion for their products encouraged us to get involved early with their platform. Early usage of the Palm Pre left us wishing there were an easier way to…
View Article Read More Blog Post WebOS List Formatters Here at Cardinal Peak, we’ve been doing quite a bit of development on webOS, Palm’s new operating system for smartphones. WebOS is based on Linux, and it relies heavily on web standards like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It’s a great programming environment, but since it’s also rather new, there’s a lot of tribal knowledge still…
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