Tag: Blog

I came across the article “Why the “Next Silicon Valley” is Always Silicon Valley” during my lunchtime reading today and found it really interesting. I would summarize it — obviously not justly! — as follows: Excellence is a snowball rolling down hill. Excellence attracts more excellence in a virtuous circle. Getting the snowball started is... View Article

The heartbleed bug in OpenSSL has been all over the news. XKCD perhaps had the most succinct explanation. I’d like to take a deeper look at this bug and the process that allowed it to be created. Catastrophic failures are often caused by a chain of bad decisions or errors that finally result in a... View Article

We have recently had several prospective customers approach us who are self-funded startups. Each of these customers was hoping we could help them develop an embedded product to the point where it could be sold on Kickstarter. And each of them wanted us to get them through some hard technical challenge that stands between them... View Article

We’re a little late in posting this, but I wrote a blog entry for EDN last week that discusses how to choose the correct video sampling format. An excerpt: To process signals digitally, they must first be sampled and quantized. Sampling refers to measuring the light intensity at discrete space-time points, while quantization is the... View Article

In Part One of this blog post, I discussed how to state an experiment in the form of probability spaces. Determining the sample space and the event space is necessary to be able to talk intelligently about probability measures, which is the topic of this post. Approach 1: Counting We’ve figured out the sample space... View Article

I recently read this article by John Carbone about using UDP in embedded systems. The advice in the article is accurate, but there are some other issues to consider when designing UDP based protocols in embedded systems that Carbone did not address. I wanted to tackle them here. First and foremost: UDP datagrams are trivial... View Article

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Cardinal Peak’s big data practice is expanding as we continue adding data scientists to our staff. In a recent discussion regarding a data set we’re analyzing, a probability problem conceptually equivalent to the following arose: In a room filled with N people, what is the probability that none of them have the same birthday? In... View Article

Hash-based message authentication code, or HMAC, is an important building block for proving that data transmitted between the components of a system has not been tampered with. It is a widely used cryptographic technology. I recently came across its use in an RFID system.

I’ve got a new article up at Xconomy, sharing some thoughts about how to find the right Chief Technology Officer for your startup: I’ve got a strong bias that you are likely to need at least one member of your founding team who is a strong technology visionary and evangelist. Assuming you’re an entrepreneur with... View Article

Based on the success of our last job fair, Cardinal Peak will once again be co-hosting the Boulder Tech Job Fair with the Boulder Chamber. We were thrilled by our experience at the last fair in September, so we will be joining 13 other tech companies offering more than 200 open positions ranging from entry-level... View Article

We'd like to congratulate our client Skydrop for a spectacular launch at CES this week. The Skydrop Sprinkler Controller is a great example of a next-generation Internet-of-Things product.