Tag: Blog

Out of the box, Chromecast has no idea who I am, or what my available content is. In a few simple steps I'm up and running with my content. I didn't even enter my username and password! How did Google do that? The answer involves a protocol called oAuth.

The kind folks at EDN have asked Cardinal Peak to author an occasional blog about streaming video. The first post went live this morning and discusses streaming video securely: Until recently, the accepted wisdom in the industry was that end users didn’t care about encrypting this type of video, as long as it was a... View Article

Attacks that are initially restricted to the realm of esoteric, government-backed spooks become accessible over time to run-of-the-mill cybercriminals. Take, for example, the Linux.Darlloz worm, which attacks embedded devices and is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it propagates by exploiting a vulnerability that was patched in May 2012. But the firmware images on many embedded devices are much older than that. The second reason I find it particularly interesting is it targets PHP, a scripting language largely used for web development.

When I was a freshman in college, we had an engineering seminar where the Dean told us that we should expect to re-educate ourselves many times throughout our career. This has certainly been true in my career. In the Web and Mobile development world it seems like if you blink your skills are out of... View Article

I’ve got a new blog post up today at EE Times, discussing how to secure devices on the Internet of Things: It used to be academically interesting, perhaps, that an attacker could compromise an unconnected home thermostat. Today, it’s another thing entirely that an attacker can potentially target thousands of home thermostats from afar, determine... View Article

We needed a simple C++ class for linear phase FIR filtering, so our expert offers a how-to and a download to help others implement a FIR filter.

Originally this was going to be a blog post ranting about remote controls for home entertainment systems. For the most part, they have way too many buttons! I don’t think I have a particularly high-end setup at home — but I still had to type up instructions so that the rest of the family could... View Article

One of my partners pointed this Slate article out to me about healthcare.gov. It is clear at this point that there have been a ton of embarrassing problems with the rollout of this site. I don’t want to get into the politics of healthcare, but I do find it interesting to look at what might... View Article

Mike Perkins and I wrote an article for Electronic Component News about the various approaches — hardware and software — to building a video encoder or decoder. Raw IC processing power has multiple manifestations including General Purpose CPUs (GP-CPUs), Systems on a Chip (SoCs), custom ASICs and FPGAs. Not surprisingly, all of these approaches can... View Article

There's a lot of buzz about the Internet of Things — a catchphrase designed to encompass a range of embedded devices that connect to cloud servers to act more intelligently than they could on their own. One problem that comes up is how to design the Thing to connect back to the Cloud Server — how does the Thing phone home? It's tricky, because, usually, we are trying to balance several factors.

Looking for a challenging new opportunity? Don’t miss the chance to learn about nearly 100 available tech positions at 13 technology companies in Boulder on Wednesday, Sept. 11. The Boulder Tech Job Fair, hosted by Cardinal Peak and the Boulder Chamber, will take place from 3-7 p.m. on Sept. 11 at the Boulder Chamber, located... View Article

Regression testing is a simple (and wonderful) idea. The idea is that once you have working software, you should easily be able to ensure it keeps working after further changes are made. This is achieved by constructing a set of tests along with their known-correct outputs, and then re-running these tests after any modifications to ensure the known-correct outputs are still obtained.