Category Archives: Code
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
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
Time to Organize the Book Collection!
I consider my book collection to be pretty large. I make genuine efforts to read through all my books, but by the time I finish one book, I’ve bought two more. While I like curling up with just one book … Continue reading
I'm So Sick of Testing and Sorting Through Logs by Hand
Software testing is a very important part of releasing any product. After all, no one wants a big buggy product. (Especially when it can ruin your whole mission.) On the other hand though, testing software is boring. I’d much rather … Continue reading
Make Tutorial: Part 2
Colleges will be back in session in a month or two. When I first started school, I was forced to use Unix for all CS classes, but given very little instruction in it. Very “sink-or-swim”. I actually still have a … Continue reading
Who would have thought Sublime Text was so, well, sublime!
A few days ago, I wrote about my Quest for the Perfect Editor. Well, the quest is over, with Sublime Text being a clear winner. I’ve used it as my main editor these past few days to give it a … Continue reading
Is Erlang actually fast? Why not just stick with C?
What’s the point of learning Erlang when I already know {your language here}? It will take a long time to learn the language and even longer to become good with it… I don’t want to learn a whole new library… … Continue reading
Massive parallelism? I'll have a plate. Functional programming? Give me a grande.
Imagine that you just bought a brand new Super McAwesome 500-core computer. Dommage-pour-toi, all your applications can only use one core at a time. Doh. Well, what if there was a language that increased its performance linearly with the number … Continue reading
Make Tutorial: Part 1
Colleges will be back in session in a month or two. When I first started school, I was forced to use Unix for all CS classes, but given very little instruction in it. Very “sink-or-swim”. I actually still have a … Continue reading