Category Archives: ECE2524

June 27, 2013
3:23 pm
by: lilengineerthatcould

Move to the Dark Side

I have officially moved my blog away from blogs.lt.vt.edu to my own website: hazyblue.me, which eventually will host not only my blog, but also my teaching philosophy, CV and other professional- related tidbits. I hope that everyone will follow me … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in ECE2524, GEDI, GRAD 5104, vtclis13

May 15, 2013
5:09 pm
by: lilengineerthatcould

And Now You’re an Anstronaut: Open Source Treks to The Final Frontier

There have been a couple of blog posts recently referencing the recent switch NASA made from Windows to Debian 6, a GNU/Linux distribution, as the OS running on the laptops abord the International Space Station. It’s worth noting that Linux … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in *nix, ECE2524, ece2524s13, gpl, iss, linux, nasa, open source, technology, vtclis13

December 24, 2012
5:15 pm
by: lilengineerthatcould

Semester in Review

Well, as I’m about 6 hours in* into a 14 hour bus+train journey to Massachusetts I figured this would be a good time to reflect and respond to the past semester which seems to have flown bye. The Blogs I … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in curriculum, ECE2524, future, review, Teaching

December 12, 2012
2:34 pm
by: lilengineerthatcould

Re: the little things of ubuntu

In a recent post thomaswy mentioned some things he liked about the CLI in Ubuntu (Linux in general, running bash in any distribution should yield an extremely consistent experience) and some things he disliked about the GUI. He’s not alone, … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Cinnamon, Desktop Managers, ECE2524, Gnome, i3, Unity

December 7, 2012
4:46 pm
by: lilengineerthatcould

Structure, Language and Art

In a recent post tylera5 commented that the last time he wrote poetry was in high school, and wasn’t expecting to have to write a poem for a programming course. I got the idea for a poetry assignment from a … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in ECE2524, engineering, expression, GEDI, language, poetry, programming

December 3, 2012
10:50 pm
by: lilengineerthatcould

The Tides of Change?

As Linus Torvalds has mentioned in several video interviews, probably the main reason Linux has been lagging behind in the desktop market is that it doesn’t come pre-installed on desktop hardware, and the average computer user just isn’t going to … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in desktop computing, ECE2524, linux, operating system, technology

November 26, 2012
4:56 am
by: lilengineerthatcould

Re: large scale makefiles

In a recent post thomaswy asked about maintaining makefiles for larger projects.  It is certainly true that manually updating lists of dependencies for many (hundreds… thousands even, the Linux kernel is comprised of some 22,000 source files) can become tedious.  Luckily there … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in ECE2524

October 20, 2012
10:21 pm
by: lilengineerthatcould

Response to “Class Material – reposted”

In his post titled Class Material – reposted, zickbe asked a very good question about the content of ECE2524.  This is a question that has come up at least once every semester, to paraphrase it is “Since there are modern GUI … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in command line, ECE2524, engineering, response

October 12, 2012
7:30 pm
by: lilengineerthatcould

List of Projects Past

I wanted to generate a list of Unix projects from last semester to provide a reference for what has been done before. The first complete list I found was in the forum of last semester’s Scholar site. There wasn’t a … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in ECE2524, Examples, meta, projects

October 1, 2012
3:35 pm
by: lilengineerthatcould

Response to “Advanced Python exercises”

Recently Matt brought up some good points in his post Advanced Python exercises.  First, the more easily addressed one: To break up a Python program into multiple functions, just store related functions in a separate `.py` file, then in the main … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in ECE2524, exceptions, programming, Python, response