Welcome
Greetings and salutations to those that happen upon the www.cognitus.net site. This is my personal domain and is where I post odds and ends including short how-to files, tutorials, software packages and documents such as my resumes.
Greetings and salutations to those that happen upon the www.cognitus.net site. This is my personal domain and is where I post odds and ends including short how-to files, tutorials, software packages and documents such as my resumes.
For those that may notice - the updates since 2006 have been lost... as in PERMANENTLY LOST.
As time allows I will re-write the various network, threading and etc. tutorials and such that are missing but there are not guarantees as to when this will actually occur.
On a side note - I will be back on the hunt for a new contract shortly and a rough copy updated version ( doc format ) of my resume is HERE. One interesting item is that in addition to my typical network programming work I do have a new item in my repetriore. In particular I have spent most of the past year and a half working on RFID systems for both Intel and other organizations. So please take a look to see if there is a match.
Before I forget - I would like to say thank you to Intel and the Intel R1000 team for the chance to work with the group and the development tools they supplied for my independent projects. If you would like to find out more about Intel's RFID offering, the landing page is HERE
Well, I am back in the United States as of the afternoon of March 22... in Milpitas, California to be exact. I figured I would do a few interviews and see if there were any jobs that I felt were a match. So far its a no go with both the interviews I have had overstating the required job qualifications and really appearing to need junior level personnel and not senior engineers. In fact one interviewer after throwing all their "hardest" questions out at me and getting them answered made the statement that he was sure I would be "really bored with this job"... lol.
So that adventure will continue for a while... and lets move onto other things...
Since I re-listed the PThreads (Semi) FAQ document its hits have started picking up once again. I had crunched it down into a single HTML page thinking that would be easiest to maintain. The downside is that if the numbers continue to increase and get their prior levels having it as one page will cause my allotted bandwith to be exceeded fairly quickly. Due to this fact I have once again split it back into its various sections. That means the previous address for the document is now a page which contains only the table of contents and links to the sub-sections.
Again that link is HERE.
Just because of time contraints I think I am going to discontinue to plain text document and let it go out of date. It isn't really getting many hits and didn't get many in the past either so why bother, right?
Even more changes on the PThreads "Semi-FAQ" as I continue to update it... I have re-done parts of the segment on reader–locks and put it back into the document. As usual, hopefully I didn't introduce new errors as I was removing and updating old information.
Location is the same as before with the all text copy HERE and the HTML version at THIS LINK.
I am a moderator on several boards which discuss different aspects of programming. Recently a discussion occurred on two of them concerning the use of the keyword "volatile" in a C program. It appears that a large number of software engineers are barely aware of it’s existence. Out of those who do know about it, there seems to be a significant number who misunderstand it’s proper use.
As a result I figured I would, as they say, "kill two birds with one stone" and post a short tutorial with examples of how to use volatile. The document is now on the site and located HERE.
Please feel free to contact me if you find any errors.
Boredom means coding to amuse myself. On that note, some code in C for you today... Synchronizing on ints, performing various operations on their values and then conditionally executing a synchronous or asynchronous user supplied function... Header here and Source here.
Btw... those files are a first pass at converting some of my C++ templates over to C so there may be many bugs. I don't think so and certainly hope not but let me know if anyone sees anything obvious.
More changes on the PThreads "Semi-FAQ" as I continue to update it... I have added in more of the old information now that I have verified it as being correct. I also reformatted the plain text so that it has a maximum line width of 72 characters. This means viewing it HERE is much easier as the line no longer run off the page
Also, there is a first pass at an HTML version ( this is the FIRST TIME that I have attempted doing that document in HTML ). The result is now linked in the How-To section and can also be reached directly by THIS LINK.
I'm still working on the site layout... and formatting other pictures so they don't destroy my bandwidth when people view them... Lotsa fun that is...
On other fronts I pulled out archived copies of my POSIX Threading Semi-FAQ and have been playing with it. There was a lot of old material to update and remove, some spell checking and other nonsense. If there is any interest it is HERE. Fair warning though, the draft revision is in plain text at this point AND has no line breaks except at the end of paragraphs at this time. So if you really want to read it then download it and put it in a word processor with auto-wrapping turned on. Also, the sections on thread cancellation, spin locks, read / write locks and conditional variables are gone for now since they are parts of document that were really out of date. Maybe I will be able to start adding those sections back later this week.
It looks like there will be further modifications to the site layout. I didn't catch it the first time around but Firefox requires anyone visiting any page on the site for the first time to do a re-load of the page or else the main text gets shifted all the way below the Google search box and if one is present, the sidebar menu. I am still attempting to determine a solution for this problem.
Some of the pictures are back online ( Singapore 2004 ) and accessible along with updated versions of my resume. Additionally, some of the how–to and tutorials are back up but they are mostly in fragmented form and still being re-written. The only complete ones are the how–tos on using GPG to sign RPM files and installing Rational Rose Unix on x86_64 machines.
Some people just cannot leave well enough alone. Anyone who has visited the site over the past week will notice that I have made more modifications. The primary change is that now the entire site display will expand and contract as you resize your window horizontally where as previously it was a fixed width of 756 pixels.
The first problem with the new layout scheme is that it caused an issue for people using the Firefox browser with the Google™ advertisements being displayed in the embedded side column. Don't worry if that is unintelligible to you, lets just say that the end result is that the advertisement portion is now contained at the bottom of the page instead of a side menu. On a positive note, the Google™ search box still functions so it stays where in the original location.
The second issue with this layout concerns all the broken links that I was fixing after the first make-over caused their breakage. Um... Most of the links that I had fixed over the past week are now again pointing at temporary pages. Concerning the breaks, I will continue trying to fix them and to stop from fiddling around with the site layout.
I have updated the site once again and you will notice that it is now in the process of being colorized using CSS ( cascading style sheets ). The reason for this modification is due to the fact that the previous grey scale scheme seemed to garner only neutral and negative reviews. Hopefully the new version(s), even though they are still mostly monochromatic, are more pleasing to everyone visiting Cognitus.
On that note, I would like to remind everyone that I am a Software Engineer / Architect and have little to no experience in web site design or color theory. The point is that, hey... It may not look like it but I really am trying to do my best here.
Google™ and Amazon™ have partner programs for web sites and I signed up for both this past week. As I get time I will be adding a new right hand column to all the pages to contain the search box(es) and the targeted advertisements.
Since the advertisements are targeted based on the content of the site page on which they are located and seeing as how Cognitus has not been recently indexed, random and seemingly inane offers may appear. With time and a bit of luck the rebuild and indexing will be finished and only appropriate offers will be shown.
The target advertisements are set to filter out adult content. If by some chance adult content does make it through I would appreciate it if users would send me the offending ad's URL at michael dot lampkin at ieee dot org.