ChrisThompson.ca Programming and making art in Vancouver, BC

The Lego MindStorms NXT Brick is controlled by a pair of Atmel microcontrollers: Atmel 32-bit ARM processor, AT91SAM7S256 Atmel 8-bit AVR processor, ATmega48 The AT91SAM7S256 is part of an Atmel series of low pin-count Flash microcontrollers based on the 32-bit ARM7DMI ARM Thumb RISC processor. It features: a maximum clock speed of 55 MHz (48 [...]

Land art or earth art has existed for millennia. Materials such as rocks, sticks, soil, plants and so on are often used, and the works generally exist in the open and are left to change and erode under natural conditions. Particularly large works are sometimes known as earthworks. In most respects land art has become [...]

A rhetorical contextualization of Brian Jungen’s art within the post-modern paradigm That the city of Vancouver, and the province of British Columbia as a whole, are promoted by our government both domestically and abroad as Canada’s Pacific gateway to corporate prosperity and profit is an unmistaken and unabashed truism in today’s economy of commoditization. That [...]

I wrote this after reading Greenberg’s seminal essay Avant-garde and Kitsch which was published in 1939. Clement Greenberg Hello Chris. Chris Hi Mr. Greenberg, it’s a pleasure to meet you and a little surreal since I was just sitting here in my lush garden on a lovely teak chaise sipping a gin and tonic whilst [...]

Description The following description of the cdump program is based on the documentation of the hexdump utility: NAME cdump – ascii, hexadecimal, octal dump SYNOPSIS cdump [-bcC] [-nlength] [-soffset] [file] DESCRIPTION The cdump utility is a filter which displays the specified file, or the standard input, if no file is specified, in a user specified [...]

Description A simple command prompt calculator that uses Reverse Polish Notation. In Reverse Polish Notation the operators follow their operands; for instance, to add three and four, one would write “3 4 +” rather than “3 + 4″. If there are multiple operations, the operator is given immediately after its second operand; so the expression [...]

Scott and I drove out to Manning Provincial Park, 250 km east of Vancouver, for a Canada Day BBQ and hike this year.  We stopped at a few different spots to hike through the forest.  Scott spotted this fantastic little plant in a pine grove less than 100 metres from the parking lot just inside [...]

Description A program that tells the user if a parity-encoded word is valid or not, and if a Hamming codeword is valid or not. A parity-encoded word is a series of binary digits (zero or one) where the left most digit is either a zero or one depending on the type of parity being used [...]

Description A set of UML 2.0-compliant diagrams that describe the functional requirements for a fictitious courier company’s new Geographic Information and Delivery Route Optimization System. Diagrams completed include: Domain Model Class Diagram Use Case Diagram for “Create Route” Use Case Description for “Create Route” System (Black Box) Sequence Diagram for “Create Route” Use Case Sequence [...]

Talk about nightmare on Robson Street! A few weeks ago I decided to export about half a gig of accumulated email from Evolution on my Ubuntu partition to Outlook 2007 on my Vista partition <insert Vista jokes here>. Why? Last year I was doing a lot of C and C++ development so I was living [...]