ASCIIMath creating images

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Update: Real Life interference

I haven't been updating this blog since Real Life (tm) has this nasty habit of making me too busy to work on fun projects.

The first thing that has taken over my time is that I was recruited into being the co-instructor for the ECSE-436: Signal Processing Hardware course here at McGill.  This is actually a fun course to teach: I get to teach the kids all about C programming, actual real-world DSP usage, hardware, fixed-point arithmetic, etc.  The final project this year is to implement a simplified voice-band modem (the DSP portion only).  Not quite as cool as the projects we have had them do in previous years (when I was a TA for the course in previous years, we had them do wavetable synthesizers, guitar effect boxes and time-scale modification of speech), but due to external factors the schedule got a bit squeezed.  Still, I think the students are learning quite a bit, and I know some of them are keen to perhaps study more advanced DSP in the future.

The other major thing is that I have accepted a new job, to start in January.  Well, technically, it's a postdoc position - it's like a job, but more work and less pay.  Still, I'm looking forward to it as it is with a very good group: the METISS group at IRISA.  This of course means moving from Montreal to Rennes, France - not a simple task if you have to move an entire household and sell the house!

And while I did get two papers submitted to ICASSP 2012 (one first-author, the other second author) I am still working on a journal paper.  And I really want to get that done before we pack up to move.

I do try to squeeze a little bit of VHDL coding in here and there; as someone on the classiccmp list noted, Xilinx ISE is no longer a horrible mess on Linux, so I did install it on my main work machine (that actually has a decent amount of RAM).  So far, I was using it on an old P4 with 1 Gig RAM which was unbearably slow.  Or maybe I'm just spoiled.

One of these days I will also program the Arduino a bit again.  Real soon now.

1 comment:

  1. I was one of the students in the class and can safely say we did learn a lot of useful things (those of us who did the work and didn't put everything off until the last minute). You're also right in thinking that some of us are interested in studying more advanced DSP techniques in the future. I know a few of the guys are interested in the medical applications while I myself am interested in audio applications.

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