Tag: Blog

Software developers love writing new code. There’s something thrilling and exciting about designing creative, efficient solutions to new problems. Given the chance, many would rather write something new than reuse existing code, but despite what developers want, rewriting an entire codebase is not always good for business. At the other end of the spectrum, most... View Article

I’ve got a new blog post up on the Altera system design blog. It’s about designing secure IoT devices: Many Internet of Things (IoT) devices are real-world objects like appliances and thermostats, and therefore network security should be a paramount concern for vendors of IoT systems. Nothing erodes trust faster than real-world and personal consequences:... View Article

Cardinal Peak is currently developing an embedded product for a customer whose business is innovative lighting products. We have chosen to base the embedded system on Linux because it includes a wealth of infrastructure, it is open source and royalty free, and we have substantial experience with it. The embedded system is configured with an... View Article

I was interviewed by Xconomy today in a piece entitled “Could Fallout from Aereo Ruling Have “Chilling Effect On Startups?” Here’s a little more analysis than what was covered in the Xconomy article. The question of how the decision would affect innovation was raised immediately after the ruling by Chet Kanojia, Aereo’s CEO, when he... View Article

Recently we tweeted an interesting article on big data, from the Financial Times. The author’s key point is that sampling bias and sampling error are possible even with large data sets. As illustration, the author discusses a classic case where the Literary Digest incorrectly predicted that Alf Landon would beat FDR in the 1936 election.... View Article

I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the EE Live Internet-of-Things conference in San Jose last month. Since then, I’ve been reflecting on some of the bleeding edge technical concepts that were discussed there. It occurs to me that many of the IoT devices we are asked to design act as a standalone... View Article

I’ve got a new blog post up at EE Times, talking about how to architect the network communications protocols for Internet-of-Things devices: Crafting a communications software stack tailored to the needs of your Internet of Things design is crucial — and not necessarily easy, given that options are continually evolving. Read the whole thing here.

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