I often feel inclined to start new projects to avoid working on old ones. In a particularly ironic display of procrastination, I have written a productivity-oriented application in order to avoid actual productivity. The app is called InSTiL, and its goal is to make it easy to log how much time you spend working on various projects. The source is available on Github, and the Readme provides a succinct overview of InSTiL’s functionality.
A C++ encapsulation of the Linux inotify API
The inotify API allows you to monitor a file or directory for various events such as file creation, modification, and deletion. It is part of the Linux kernel and the glibc userspace library, however its C API can be cumbersome to use in a C++ application. A C++ binding of inotify does exist, but it still requires the application developer to write an unsightly wait-and-handle loop. My goal for this project was to create an asynchronous event-driven API through which filesystem events can be processed.
RIOT OS ported to TI Tiva C Connected Launchpad
My current project is porting RIOT OS to the EK-TM4C1294XL evaluation board. RIOT is an embedded operating system aimed at the Internet of Things, developed primarily by Free University of Berlin. The EK-TM4C1294XL is a pretty powerful board, featuring an ARM Cortex M4 MCU and built-in Ethernet MAC. So far, I have implemented only the most basic support for the CPU - just timers and UART. However, I’m currently working on the Ethernet drivers (almost done) and my next focus will be drivers for an XBee add-in.
A dumb SVM classifier for Python
Tonight I got bored and implemented a linear SVM in Python. Though Python has its own facilities for solving quadratic programming problems, I chose to write a module which interfaces with Octave instead. My implementation simply writes an Octave script then runs it in order to solve the QP. All other aspects of the SVM are implemented in pure Python.
Executable Octave scripts with interpreter arguments
I prefer to make my scripts executable, rather than invoking the interpreter explicitly every time I want to run them. Most interpreters are friendly enough to make shebang lines easy to write, but Octave isn’t quite the team player…