Jacob’s Technical Blog

I’m taking an open source software engineering class at PSU, and I have a presentation to the class about Embedded system programming, and how writing open source software for embedded systems is different than writing other types of open source software.

Many articles on the web introduce the Open Source concept to embedded system engineers, this presentation attempted to do the opposite: introduce embedded system engineering to open source advocates.

Embedded Open Source

I must be a nerd because web site security worries keeps me awake at night. Tonight I was worried about particular web site designs that might discourage users from logging out and I was curious about how many users were actually logging out.
Continue reading Is the logout button obsolete?…

I saw today on the Google Mac Blog that they released a version of the Google Web Toolkit for Mac. I’ve been having some ideas about some web applications that I think the GWT might be good for, so I thought I would try it out.
Continue reading Google Web Toolkit for Mac didn’t work for me…

Yesterday I launched my first open source project. It is actually a really small project, and will probably stay permanently in I-mode development. I published it under the LGPL license, because the code base I started with used that license.

The project is just a simple little plugin for Wordpress which displayed related links for religious subject matters.

Links: official announcement, project homepage.

The rise of RSS and Atom feeds brought increased usage of the word, aggregate, which meant to gather many articles together to one destination. This turns out to be a really great thing. No longer do I have to go from site to site to check on all my favorite news. I can use an aggregator, and bring all the news from all my favorite sites together to one point. Not only can I do this with news, but also blog posts, photos, audio clips, events, alerts, and the list goes on.
Continue reading Aggregate your searches with OpenSearch…

The last couple of days I spent just a little bit of time throwing together a new homepage. I’m not really sure what the idea behind it is, I just thought that I should have something, especially with having three different blogs to keep track of.

So the home page is basically a personalized aggregator of blogs and comments I write or read. It was coded in PHP and makes use of the MagpieRSS parser. The HTML code for the page is also very simple, making good use of some CSS features for a quick layout.

The page is likely to evolve over time.

I’ve seen video cameras on model airplanes before, but this guy has taken it further with pan/tilt controls on the camera connected to a gyroscope with virtual reality glasses.

Today, BYU released a preview of their new look for the home page and Route Y. This new look is code-named Collage and will eventually be used universally across BYU.
Continue reading BYU releases new web site look…