Ben's Blog

Last term I took a course that involved a lot of FPGA programming. We used Altera’s DE2 development board as well as their example labs (Digital Logic and the first few Computer Organization labs). While the labs were quite enjoyable and very educational, it was a LOT of work compared to labs in other courses. This was also my first experience with Verilog (or any HDL for that matter) which didn’t help. Getting help with these labs was a bit tough as my classmates were all in the same boat, plus the professor and TA hadn’t done the labs yet. I have decided to post my solutions to these labs in case someone else down the line needs help with them too. I have included a README file with the code with a little more information and emails (or comments on this post) are welcome.

As an aside, I am currently hosting my code at github.com, but am debating switching to Gitorious (they seem to be more open source friendly) or possibly self hosting (Gitorious can be self hosted, or I might try cgit or Redmine). Does anyone have any thoughts on these? Perhaps other suggestions? I would love to self host, but the redundant offsite backups these services provide is always nice. Perhaps I will have to invest in a secondary, offsite server so I can do my own.

Entry 8 – February 7, 2010

This weekend was ESN’s Freshman Camp. We all got on a big bus and went for a two hour drive out to Eger. This town is famous for a number of things, primarily for it’s castle which was able to fend off a strong Turkish invasion, but also for it’s wine brewery.

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Entry 4 – January 29, 2010

Yesterday was a little bit of a hectic day. We (4 U of M guys plus Sunny, the guy from SFU) got up early (compared to our past few days) in order to go to BME and meet with the lady in charge of administration for the English engineering program. We got a bunch of information from her and then went off to the bank to pay for our insurance, required for international students to enroll at BME. That process was a little confusing and took much longer than we thought it should have. After that, we went to Allee to pick up a couple of things (I got a “Universal Switching Power Supply Unit” for use with my trimmer and cordless mouse charger) and for lunch (I had some kebab stuff that was really good).

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Entry 3 – January 27, 2010

Yesterday was a bit of a lazy day. We got up early to check our emails, hoping to have heard from Pierpaolo regarding his flats. At breakfast we decided that we wanted to take the first flat that we saw on Friday, the one downtown. We knew that there was another flat that we hadn’t seen that was nearby, so we had asked Pierpaolo if he might be able to show us that flat before we made up our mind. We stayed in the hotel in order to retain access to our email, our current primary source of communication. We eventually got in contact with him, but neither he nor his associates could show us the flat on that day. We called Pierpaolo (this was around dinner time) to make alternate arrangements and decided that we could see the flat at 8 am on Jan 27. For the rest of the day, we pretty much sat around the hotel.

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I’m in Hungary! I forget if I mentioned this before, but I am on an exchange-like program between University of Manitoba (U of M) and Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME). I will be studying here until mid-late May and will be traveling from then until the middle of June. This whole program will be counted as my final year group design project required for my Computer Engineering degree.

Many people have told me that I should be keeping a journal of my time here, and I just decided I might as well share it on my blog. It might be a bit lengthy, so feel free to skim. I have included the first 2 entries in my journal as part of this post.

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