Baby Don't Hertz Me

This May I started my Master's in Electrical Engineering. My supervisor is very supportive of me reading anything that might be related to my research but also things that interest me. One of my favorite things is his insistence that I read at least one paper a day. I generally end up reading more than one most days as well as reading chapters from numerous textbooks. I enjoyed most of my undergraduate degree but found that the purpose of it was to follow a curriculum. My experience with grad school so far has been nothing but self-guided learning. In the Fall and Winter semesters I am taking some courses that are required for my studies but for the most part my learning will be managed by myself and guided by my supervisor. Due to a number of professors in department getting to take their sabbaticals in consecutive years, I will miss out on taking a few courses that I really wanted to take but my supervisor has given me access to all the course notes so I can teach myself. ...

Despite all the woes around internet accessibility and net neutrality occurring in the USA in recent times, the internet remains a modern marvel. Sure, there is always the risk of your data being sold (if it isn't already) but in exchange you gain access to the majority of humankind's knowledge. All of our joy, sorrow, science and math. The internet is an endless supply of data and learning. It isn't all about making pretty graphs like you might find on /r/dataisbeautiful but amazing stuff can be done regardless. The massive amounts of data accessible on the internet will allow for the identification of the driving forces of certain actions. As can be seen below, Bitcoin prices correlate very nicely with Google searches relating to it. From /r/dataisbeautiful and /u/DeanLa As my second last semester in university wraps up I realize the true power of data. In a course I took about pattern recognition and machine learning we got to see first hand what can happen wit...

Writing register level code is something I have always viewed as both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is absolute control over almost every aspect of the system while the curse is trying to understand all of the system requirements at the lowest level. As I have previously mentioned I am working on a micro-satellite prototype for my senior electrical engineering design project. My role in the project is the communication system. I was required to select and setup the hardware and software to be able to transmit data from the satellite to the ground station with handshaking and error correction.  HopeRF RFM69HCW Transceiver Module This is the transceiver chip that we decided to use. It is surprisingly inexpensive considering the features it includes. The version we are using is the 915 MHz model (ITU ISM band in the Americas) to avoid having our own spectrum license or to have to request usage of an amateur radio band.  One of the instructors in the course ...

Canada is a wonderful place to live. Hot summers, beautiful trees in the fall, and snowy winters. As December raced away, Mother Nature decided to turn the thermostat down to -15°C. The ground was covered in a blanket of snow and going more than a few days without snow was rather shocking. Several of my siblings live on the other side of Canada. My parents were gone to visit for the holidays. As the only child still in town, house sitting naturally was my duty. This job does come with its own perks. Instead of living in my relatively small apartment I have access to a large house and two cars. The only downside of the house is that it is across the river on the other side of town. So the day my parents were leaving they planned to drop their SUV at my apartment building and then take a cab to the airport. I had an exam that morning and driving my parents to the airport at 3 AM was definitely out of the question. I get up in the morning and get ready to go write my exam. On my way...

Humans have an enormous variety of ways to interact with the world around them. Touch, smell, taste, hearing, but most important (in my mind) is vision. Computers are presently limited in their interactions with the world. They are allowed to crunch numbers, post a Facebook status that none of your friends want to read but ultimately don't get to touch, taste, smell, or see the world around them. One thing that I find fascinating is object recognition using neural networks. I am currently taking a class with a focus on pattern recognition and machine learning where we have to do a project of our choosing. My classmate and I are comparing performance of traditional classification and deep learning for object detection (in our case an orange hockey ball). I was extremely happy when our prof approved the usage of deep learning despite the focus of the course being more on traditional classifying techniques. The project work division is that my classmate is developing the traditional...

Every 6 months I get excited. REALLY excited. My friends and wife may roll their eyes as I approach fan girl screaming over the latest Ubuntu release. I have been using Ubuntu as my main OS since Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron). They may no longer play their beautiful login sound (listen here ) but all around have dramatically improved. 17.10 is a big release. It is one of the first major change to the operating system since Canonical changed from Gnome 2 to Unity. This release has Canonical swapping Unity for Gnome 3 and I am not quite sure how I feel about it so far. I realise there will always be the "it is new just give it a try" but the new GUI just feels a lot more clunky to me so far. Out of the box I find 17.10 to be much clunkier than any recent release. At least there are some ways to improve. 1. Install Updates! I used to get annoyed when every list ever said to update. For a young release this is really important. Normally Canonical releases really well mad...

UBUNTU 17.10 IS COMING OUT SO SOON! Short post today but I will do a longer post next week focusing on the beautiful new operating system that is getting released. I am really sorry about the posting dry-spell of late. I have been immensely busy with school work and training. You could go so far as to describe my life with the following pseudocode: > location = &Alex; > self_approval = 0; > > if (location == school) || (location == judo); >     self_approval = 1; // hooray! > > else >     self_approval = 0; // GET BACK TO WORK I finally have a course at school where I get to formally learn about Artificial Intelligence. My university has graduate level courses that are about AI for electrical engineers but until this year had no undergraduate courses for ECE students. The course is looking at pattern recognition and data processing and so far it has been fantastic. AI has been an interest of mine for a while but I ...