Author Archives: samkerr
Reverse Engineering the Master Boot Record
One day, I was curious about how the computer system goes from booting to actually loading up an operating system. Obviously, it must retrieve the operating system from disk at some point, so I decided to investigate this. The first … Continue reading
PEAR, my first publication!
During my time at school, I participate in research. I have been doing this since freshman year, and have been co-author on a few papers, but have never been lead author. Well, that is now changing.
One architecture to rule them all… Or at least rule my free time
I’m a pretty lazy person. I like to put things off, drag my feet, and make plans that I know will never come true. Perfect example, Fall 2008 I took a digital systems course where we designed a very basic … Continue reading
Ever want to build your own computer?
I find hardware and electronics pretty interesting. So when I was looking around on the internet and saw a link to a home built CPU, I just had to click! A fellow named Jim has made a complete CPU, called … Continue reading
Websites, Propellers, and Sweet Music!
Well, I’m sure that you’ve noticed the new layout and domain name for my blog. Over winter break, I decided it was silly to have both a blog site and a school website. So, I purchased this domain (www.samkerr.com was … Continue reading
PUFs are just so cuddly!
As I wrote a few entries ago, I have been using FPGAs this semester in my research group. Since it’s the end of the semester and the paper has been submitted, I thought I would talk to you about my … Continue reading
Intel Developer Forum shows off some cool stuff!
This year, the Intel Developer Forum has some pretty neat stuff to talk about. I’ve been reading their site today and the article from AnandTech about it. I’d highly recommend reading the AnandTech article since it has a lot better … Continue reading
First steps with an FPGA!
For my research group at Purdue, we’ve decided we want to do some work with FPGA (or Field Programmable Gate Arrays). These are essentially chips that you can use to program very complex, very fast circuits. They are superior to … Continue reading
Ciphers, Beaufort, and Bears… Oh my!
In my cryptography class, we’re starting to learn about various ciphers, and for a homework assignment, we were tasked with doing some ciphering by hand. I find the task very interesting, but I quickly got tired of coding even a … Continue reading
I've passed under the Linux Arch!
Last time, I wrote about how I was working on installing Linux on my computer. The main question with any Linux install though is, what distro do I use? I’ve used many different distros before, such as the popular Ubuntu, … Continue reading