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Kia-Ora! Welcome to my personal site. My name is Hans de Ruiter, and I am an electrical & electronic engineer. This site covers various software development projects of mine (mostly Amiga OS 4 related) and anything else that I find interesting (e.g., electronics, mechatronics, or anything engineering related). I hope that you find this website both interesting and useful. Feel free to contact me if you have any suggestions.
Recent Website Updates
A C++ Class for Controlling a Serial Port in Windows
Whilst serial ports are old technology now, and has mostly been superceded by USB, it is still an easy way to communicate with embedded hardware; it is great for small projects. This page presents a simple C++ class for communicating with hardware via a serial port. It should work with Windows XP and Vista, and, unlike other classes out there, it does not require MFC or AFX, meaning that it can be used with Visual Studio 2003+ Express edition.
Stalled Software Development
I have had to take a break from developing this driver. Basically, I have completed my Ph.D., and am about to move back to New Zealand from Canada. As a consequence, my Amigaone is now somewhere on the Pacific ocean, en-route to New Zealand. With no hardware to develop on, this project has been stalled. Even if I did have hardware, I am simply too busy right now to work on it.
Doctor of Philosophy
Yes, I have finally graduated from graduate school with a Ph.D. (i.e., Doctor of Philosophy). In New Zealand, graduate studies are called post-graduate studies (because they occur after graduating with a bachelors university degree), but they are one and the same. This has taken five years from starting in a Masters program at the University of Toronto through to graduating with a doctorate. It is great to finally be finished.
About Me
Hans de Ruiter
I am an electrical & electronic engineer from New Zealand. Recently (October 2008), I received a Ph.D. in applied science/engineering from the University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. As can be expected, many of my interests are computer and engineering related. However, I also enjoy hiking and the outdoors. Playing violin and piano are also spare time hobbies of mine.
When Life Gets in the Way (Moving)
Anyone viewing either the home page, or this blog will probably notice a distinct lack of updates to this website during this month. The simple truth is, I've been really busy. Not only have I been working on a humanoid robot for a colleague, I will also be moving back to New Zealand shortly. As a result, the list of things that had to be done just inflated over time, and this website suffered as a result.
Month in Review - October 2008
This month saw a sizable traffic spike due to progress with the RadeonHD project. In particular, the log entry for the first major milestone saw over one-thousand page-views (1043 and counting); that is over half the total number of page views for the entire website in September (1707). The website has also grown to over one hundred pages (107 pages, or 108 including this blog entry). Thus, adding a search feature should probably be made soon, in order to help people locate information.
Testing the Radeon X1550
A Radeon X1550 has been generously donated, and arrived today. One minor modification to the driver was required in order to get it to use the card. The HIS Radeon X1550 PCI card has the Hot-Plug Detect (HPD) pins swapped between the connectors. Thus, connecting a monitor (or a VGA to DVI adaptor) to the DVI port registers as a monitor connected to the VGA port (which it thinks is a DVI port). Moreover, the VGA connector is not supposed to have an HPD pin, since this is a DVI feature. Thus, the driver skipped checking the VGA output for a connected monitor and decided that there was nothing to output an image to. A quick fix, eliminated this problem, resulting in a working card.
Month in Review - August 2008
It has been a busy week, so this review has been delayed. August saw a modest increase in content on this website. The first personal project has been added, resulting in a traffic spike for a few days. This has resulted in a number of external links to this website that were not created by me. One negative consequence of this increased visibility is hacking attempts. None of them have been successful, but hacking attempts have been a significant number of hits on this website over the last month. Likewise, spammers have started posting comments, forcing me to install a spam filter.
RadeonHD Driver
The goal of this project is to write an Amiga OS 4.x graphics driver for R5xx and higher graphics cards. One of the motivations for this is that, my computer vision research extensively uses shaders that are present in modern GPUs. None of the existing supported graphics cards for Amiga OS 4.x support shaders. Shaders are rapidly becoming an essential component for running newer games. This project, however, focuses on the 2D driver, not 3D. Without a 2D driver, there will be no 3D driver. Hence, this is the first important step toward supporting more modern graphics cards. Once the 2D driver is in place, and a full MESA port is underway, a 3D OpenGL driver can be considered.
Month in Review - September 2008
This month spam comments and hacking attempts have become almost continuous. Akismet is doing a fairly good job of filtering out spam. However, a few very objectionable spam comments are still getting through. For now I have simply deleted these, but if it becomes worse, I may have to install Captcha as well. Captcha requires users to enter letters presented in image form, thus making it hard for spam-bots to automatically post spam comments. Silverstripe has a Captcha module available so it should be fairly easy to add.