Chris M.

Online learning has started to move into the mainstream. Stamford, MIT and others have been offering online classes for years but  in the past few years the idea really stated to take off.  While it may seem obvious that the Internet might provide a great conduit to educate, it has taken dozens of years for the approach to gain traction. As online education improves there are clear signs of disruption in the traditional education system. Udacity CS344 - Introduction to parallel programming The model for online courses is a powerful one. A single set of materials can be created once and distributed at almost zero incremental cost. Some courses are self paced and fully automated. Others are supported by a teacher and staff that grade submissions, provides help on forums and may hold group chats. Some colleges/courses are experimenting with a hybrid model  that leverages the Internet to deliver the portions of the course best suited to it, such as lecture notes or p...

As a follower of technology companies and products I've been watching Tesla Motors  for years. With the Model S , Tesla has produced a luxury car that has raised the bar in terms of usability, features, performance, and safety and scored a near perfect score in Consumer Reports review. Tesla appears to be putting significant pressure on luxury car brands. The Model S  outsold, in the first half of 2013, Porsche, Jaguar and Land Rover  in California and in the first quarter of 2013  some models of Audi, BMW and Lexus . At this point, demand for the Model S appears to be outpacing production capacity. The current delivery wait on the Model S is two months or more, as indicated on the Tesla website. Today, at ~$70k USD, the Model S is in a different market segment and significantly more expensive than the the biggest selling EVs on the market. The  Toyota Plug-in-prius  (US$32,000),  Nissan Leaf  (US$29,650), and  Chevy Volt  (US$34,99...

c++11 has been officially released since August 2011. I'm not sure if other compilers are planning or have added c++11 support but I primarily use gcc. Even though gcc   still classifies c++11 support as experimental  their support appears nearly complete. At my day job we've been doing some prototyping and early development of a next generation platform and have started to try out c++11. So far I've been happy with the improvements in c++11 over c++98 . After a handful of months of using c++11 here are the things that have stood out. auto The ' auto ' keyword mirrors one of my favorite language features in c#, the 'var' keyword. auto  indicates that the compiler should perform type-inference. With auto I'm not going to miss having to type dozen of letters twice to declare and create a verbosely named template. Two pitfalls of auto are the lack of a specific type that might require a programmer to look at the function prototype to determine the typ...

I've been a long time Linux user after first being introduced to it in 1997 when I arrived at college. At that time Linux was pretty primitive. Users usually had to setup their own X windows modelines  or they would be greeted with low resolution video. Some of the big distributions at the time were RedHat , SuSE, Caldera , Stampede , Slackware , and  Debian . Every couple of months I ended up messing something up and breaking the bootloader, kernel or some important libraries. I was mostly using the computer to learn and experiment with so I would re-install with a new distribution each time. I must have tried a more than a half dozen distributions over a few year period. KDE on Debian/Ubuntu Around 2004 or so I made the switch to Linux, with a virtual machine for Windows. Over the years since the switch I ended up running Debian for several years and most recently Ubuntu for four or five years now. Throughout this time I've preferred and used KDE , the K Desktop E...

This year we decided to build a raised bed garden and grow some of our own vegetables. It's a nice idea to be able to grow your own food. You can choose to grown things organically as we are doing, you know where the food came from, and its fresh. This is a picture of the beds after we built them and filled them with soil. You can see the rows at the end of one of the beds where we planted the first seeds for Brussels sprouts and peas. After building the beds After the garden started coming up we put up a short wire fence to keep small animals like rabbits out of the garden. Garden starting August, 2013 zucchini So far we've gotten several zucchini out of the garden, along with a few handfuls of peas. We've made a couple of batches of zucchini muffins so far. There are some tomatoes growing and turning from green to red and a few peppers. The carrots and beets are growing well. Early in the year some Japanese and Flea beetles were eating a lo...

As part of an on-going discussion on the KiCAD devleopers mailing list about library crowdsourcing, I wanted to put together more detail about the issue. I've been using KiCAD for a handful of months and was unaware of some of the organizations, such as CircuitHub  and KiCadCloud , that have been working to improve the situation until this discussion. Background PCB development flow A typical circuit board development process in KiCAD looks something like: Schematic (eeschema) Design a circuit Locate components (or create the component symbols ) Add components to the schematic Connect components on a schematic using the component symbol Map component to footprint (cvpcb) Choose the specific footprint for each component in the schematic (or create the necessary footprints ) Layout (pcbnew) Place components Route the signals on the board The problem During schematic step #2 and the component mapping process, the highlighted steps above, any componen...

Top side of a BeagleBone Black I've been working a bit with the BeagleBone Black (BBB) , a $45USD single board computer, for the last couple of months. It's capabilities, relative to its cost, are impressive. Several sites have compared the specs of the BBB and the popular  Raspberry Pi (RPi) , another powerful and low cost single board computer. You can check out some analysis of the two  here . One important difference between the BBB and the RPi is that the BBB lacks a video processing unit (VPU) to accelerate video playback . A video processing unit helps improve video decoding and/or encoding rates by performing some or all of the specialized operations involved in video processing. Without a VPU or other specialized hardware, a system would have to perform the video processing using the system's core processor , likely a general purpose processor, and at a far slower rate.  This RPi and BBB comparison  picks up on the video decoding capab...