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Cigar Box Guitars

steve — Thu, 13 May 2010 04:09:00 +0000

A co-worker of mine turned me on to the cigar box guitar community. If you haven’t seen or heard one your missing out. The earliest cigar box guitars date from the mid nineteenth century. They can consist of a cigar box with something as simple as a plain plank of wood through it acting as a neck with 3 strings. More modern ones can have standard necks with 6 strings and pickups. They look cool, are fairly indestructible if built correctly and have a sound all their own. You can get more information at http://cigarboxguitars.com or http://www.cigarboxnation.com . This will definitely be a future project once I finish the current batch of guitars I am working on. I will blog the project when I get to it so check back. Listen to the video below to hear the amazing sound of one of these guitars.

The Promise of OpenCL

steve — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 04:32:08 +0000

One of the promises of OpenCL is one we should be familiar with. Portability. However, like many attempts before it, it cannot truly deliver. While it is true that if you stick to the OpenCL API, the code will run any any device that supports it. The problem is that this is only half the story. The main reason to implement heterogeneous computing topologies is for throughput performance. Here lies the rub. If you write a a performant kernel optimized for some platform architecture, it will assuredly run much slower on another architecture. For instance, code optimized for performance on a graphics/compute card will possibly run slower on a CPU than standard serial code. In the past most portable computing solutions were “write once, and recompile everywhere”. In this case it is worse. For OpenCL it becomes “write once, and rewrite everywhere”. With this in mind I believe the biggest positive of OpenCL is the idea of a single API for all platforms. Even this is an unsure proposition taking into account the support for native kernels in OpenCL. Who knows, perhaps just-in-time compilation can make all this work. I for one am not holding my breath.

Intro

steve — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 05:54:49 +0000

These pages contain my ramblings and other possibly helpful information. I am a software engineer by trade and a guitar builder, guitar player, and skateboarder on an ever declining basis. I have been living in the Pacific Northwest for about 2 years now. After relocating here from Arizona, the environments could not be more different. I have been very happy with the move for the most part. I love all the trees and greenery and can’t get enough of it. I am even starting to get used to the 7-8 months of gray skies and rain. I graduated from ASU with a Master’s degree in Computer Science with a focus in Computer Graphics and Scientific Visualization. Since then I have done quite a bit of work in graphics and visualization. I have also done quite a bit in the fields of distributed computing and simulations as well as parallel programming. Please browse the pages here and feel free to contact me if you would like to comment or just want clarification on any information here. Enjoy!