My apartment in Amsterdam has a very old and extremely loud doorbell. I decided to make a new one, because I was tired of being startled every time someone rang the doorbell. I had a music box sitting around, and…
GOTO Still considered harmful…
I hate to break it to all the C/Linux hackers out there, but Dijkstra is right. Even though Linus says that goto is ok in error handling (as a poor mans exception handler basically) he is wrong. Now I will show why with…
Posted in Programming
SparkFun Hacker-in-Non-Residence: Cooperative Instruments
I want to thank SparkFun for selecting me as a Hacker-in-residence, even though I couldn’t get out to Boulder I am very excited to be working with the SparkFun team. I will use this post to keep track of the…
Posted in SparkFun
Yet another ATX bench top power supply
Everyone has hacked their ATX supply to provide a crude and cheap bench top supply. However at work I have a “real” bench top power supply, and it is really nice to be able to adjust the voltage with a…
Posted in Programming
X-ray Beam hardening calibrator
X-ray beam hardening calibration is a method of calibrating an X-ray detector for use with a multi spectral X-ray source. Because I am not a particle physicist, I will not attempt to explain it any further than that, here is…
Posted in Amsterdam Scientific Instruments
A use case for intrusive pointers
Why use intrusive pointers? In the docs for boost intrusive_ptr it states: The main reasons to use intrusive_ptr are: Some existing frameworks or OSes provide objects with embedded reference counts; The memory footprint of intrusive_ptr is the same as the corresponding raw pointer; intrusive_ptr<T> can…
Posted in Programming
A simple thread safe queue for use in multi-threaded C++ applications
An efficient thread safe queue is one of the first things that should be implemented in any multithreaded application. The requirements for my thread safe queues are usually something like this: The thread safe queue shall provide the ability to…
Posted in Programming
TCP Message Framing
TCP is a streaming protocol, it is most efficient at sending large amounts of “stream” type data, but the best thing about TCP is that it is reliable. If you send data over TCP, unless there is a catastrophic network…
Posted in Programming
How to run threads
Frequently people struggle with simple things when writing multithreaded applications, here I will lay out some simple rules and provide a C++ pattern that can be followed to make multithreading a breeze. This will be focused on C++, but most…
Posted in Programming
Tekelec Test Tools
Another development effort that I got to lead was a system test tool for the Tekelec signal transfer point (STP) which enables Tekelc personnel to stress the backbone of the STP in a controlled fashion. The STP is basically a…
Posted in Tekelec
