Monthly archives: March 2017


Getting started with NetBSD on embedded platforms – London 20/4/2017

NetBSDOn the 20 April 2017, 17:30 – 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA, [map] (51.510812, -0.121733)

Please register to attend and share on Lanyrd.

Workshop scope

You’re hired at the latest startup as a hardware engineer and required to build the firmware which will run on “The Greatest Next Generation Appliance” (GNA). The GNA boots, prints a message and interacts with a device (in this case an LED).

In this workshop we cover how a person with an interest and a focus on hardware can make progress with the software side by using the NetBSD operating system and the features it offers to save considerable time and effort.

  • NetBSD supports a wide & diverse range of systems & CPU architectures.
  • Support for cross compilation is offered by default and works out of the box.
  • There is a high level language interface to interact with the system internals.
  • File integrity verification support to detect tampering of binaries and preventing execution is builtin.
  • An instance of the kernel can be run as a user process on different operating systems where rapid development can take place.

Things we will cover:

  1. An introduction to cross-compilation with build.sh and constructing an image to boot on your hardware.
  2. Interacting with the system using Lua (which is embedded in the kernel, avoiding having to write C or have knowledge of OS internals) to e.g. access GPIO.
  3. Preventing the execution of tampered or unauthorised binaries with veriexec.
  4. Using rump kernel for rapid development away from a potentially slow dev board.

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Perl, Object-Orientation (and a little Graph Theory) – London 9/3/2017

On the 9th March 2017, 18:00 – 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA, [map] (51.510812, -0.121733)

Please register to attend

Speaker:
Nick Stylianou MEng, ACGI, MBCS

 

Summary: 

This presentation will introduce some of the core features of the Perl language, and illustrate how these features are used to program in Perl using the object-oriented paradigm. Code examples will cover the fundamentals, such as object attributes and methods, through to higher-level concepts such as inheritance and abstraction. Working with Perl’s apparent lack of explicit object-oriented features exposes useful insight into the underlying concepts and gives a practical understanding of how to utilise, and contribute to, Perl’s extensive collection of additional library packages. Graph theory will be used as an example to illustrate how these ideas can be used in practice. A brief history of Perl and an overview of available resources will also be given.

Speaker Biography:

Nick StylianouSince graduating from the Department of Computing at Imperial College, London in the early 1990s, Nick Stylianou has worked in the IT industry as a CAD/CAM software developer, UNIX Systems Administrator & Enterprise Architect, and a Text and Data Mining Analyst. He now works independently, specialising in Research & Development in Computational Musicology, with current projects including a forthcoming music theory reference eBook and interactive music theory and analysis software.

Closing date for bookings is Wednesday 8 March 2017 at 11:59 pm. No more bookings will be taken after this date.