Categories
Life

Year in Review and Preview 2015/2016

Looks like I haven’t done a yearly review last year, the latest one on the blog is from the end of 2013. That’s surprising, but then it’s even more pressing to take stock of 2015 and set up the coming year.

2015 – Results

This year have seen a long trip to Europe in February (Hungary, Prague, Vienna) which definitely opened my eyes to a lot of things that I probably should have understood back in high school (especially regarding history). On the other hand, I was a visitor back in my home country Hungary too, and tried a bunch of things that I have never tried when I lived there before, been there with different eyes (and would love to spend more time home again too).

The rest of the year was spent here in Taiwan, on small trips all around the north and east coast, and around Taipei City.  A lot can fit into day trips, and it is fun to mix popular places with off the beaten track.

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Categories
Programming

Language of the Month: Rust, the results

Every now and then I do a “Language of the Month” feature when I spend one month to learn a new programming language. This last month in November I’ve spent with Rust, and it’s time to take stock. Will look at the impression I had in this short time, show one project that I get done in Rust, and some ideas what I’d like to do with Rust in the future!

Experience

According to my time log, I have spent about 20 hours this month learning Rust. That’s way too little to have a good understanding, but definitely enough to have some educated guesses (and excitement, and horror , as appropriate). This time I’m generally very impressed as Rust comes across as indeed a very modern and smart language, although that modernness is mostly in the tooling and non-essential parts. It is also changing very quickly, for good and bad. Here are some, admittedly subjective and incomplete list of observations. Good is what I like, Bad what’s less nice IMHO, and Ugly is what’s imperfect or confusing (at this stage of my Rust learning):

Good

It’s great to see that documentation is a not an afterthought, but a core part, that is making use a lot of modern development experience. Having a standard way to include example code in docstrings and actual tests are run on them to make sure the examples are also up-to-date with the code is a very cool concept. Also being able to auto-generate HTML documentation from the code is probably going to be standard in most new languages (I think Go does that also, and other languages have gained similar optional tools)

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Categories
Computers Lab

Dual Satellite NTP server with Navspark

A friend from NIST recently told me about a Raspberry Pi Stratum-1 NTP server project, and that reminded me of the experiments I did with the Navspark dual GPS+Beidou receiver module. Navspark is a small, Arduino-compatible module that besides GPS can also receive data from China’s Beidou 北斗 satellite navigation system , that is currently being built. I thought it would be fun to build a Beidou-powered Stratum-1 NTP server to see how does it compare to GPS.

Hardware

To have a really good really good, satellite-powered reference clock, I have to have access to a 1-pulse-per-second (1PPS) signal from the receiver. The pure USB-connected receivers don’t really seem to do that yet (looks like plenty of opportunities there!), instead I have to use separate hardware for it.

The Navspark module has a 1PPS pin (GPO3 below), and the only other pin I’ll really need is a serial pin to receive the NMEA stream of the satellite lock data (TXD1 below).

Detailed Navspark pinout with pin functions
Navspark pinout from the User Manual
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Categories
Learning Programming

Language of the Month: Rust

I found it hard to believe, that it’s been 4 years now since I finished the previous installment of “language of the month” column, in which I pick a programming language and dive in for a month to see something new. In that 4 years I have learned a lot of programming for sure – though probably very little computer science, and barely any new languages. It’s time to chance, and for the revival of this I’m checking out Rust.

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Categories
Programming Taiwan

Taiwan WWII Map Overlays

A while ago I came across the Formosa (Taiwan) City Plans, U.S. Army Map Service, 1944-1945 collection, in the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection of the University of Texas in Austin. I’m a sucker for maps, enjoy learning about history a lot, and I have a lot of interest in my current home, Taiwan – so you can call this a magic mix of cool stuff.

There are 26 maps in the collection, made by the US Army by flying over different parts of the island, and mostly I guess stitching together aerial photographs. The maps themselves were not that easy check in an image viewer, since there’s no context, zoom is clumsy, and have no idea where about half the places should be located. Instead, I thought it would be great to have them as an overlay on top of current maps and satellite imagery on Google Maps.

The result is Taiwan City Maps overlays, which does exactly that. Feel free to click the link and explore right now! In the rest of this post, I try to first show how that page was made, and also some history lessons I gained by making it.

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