Christian Meunier Home Page

An old version of this web site is located here.

General information

This web page has been up since june 17, 1996. I have been present on the Internet (affectionnately called "the Net" by many) since 1989, when I began my Computer Science undergraduate course. This is "long" before its popularization in 1996 (or so), at a time when the telnet and FTP protocols were as ubiquituous as HTTP is now. (Translation: at that "remote" time, the Internet seemed only useful to log on to another computer or transfer computer files from one site to the other, instead of using it to surf the Web.)

That was the time when I used to say that mice and GUI (Graphical User Interfaces, like Microsoft Windows or The MIT X Window System) were a waste of computer resources, until the day that specialized hardware will completely handle the screen and mouse events. This "specialized hardware" is called today "graphical accelarator cards"; you now find one in almost every PC you find on the market nowadays... which is a lesson the PC vendors took about 8 years more than other vendors (like Amiga) to learn!

Professional information

I am currently working as a Software Project Engineer for CMC Electronics Inc. , formerly known as Canadian Marconi Corporation. The company has also been known as the "Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of Canada, Limited", estabilshed in 1903 by Guglielmo Marconi, and (if I am not mistaken) has given birth to a number of well-known spin-offs, like General Electrics and Matrox. The company currently specializes in Flight Management Systems, GPS receivers, and Military Communication Radios.

I have graduated with a Master's Degree (M.Ing.) in 1999 from the Electrical Engineering Department of the École Polytechnique de Montreal university.

I have been an ACM member since 1993. If you can apply, you should seriously consider joining. This is the kind of channel that can really help a computing career, keeping you informed of what trends are coming in the years to come. If you are an engineer, the IEEE and IEEE-CS also serve this purpose.

Interests

Here are a few topics of interest for me, with a few links to direct people who want to know more.

Reverse Engineering It is of my opinion that: anything that can be executed on one specific computer, can be understood by any other machine. Past research indicates that this marchine understanding can lead to presenting source code to the user, given only an executable stripped of its debug information.
Software Testing Making a Master's degree specialized in software testing has solidified my experience in software development by stressing the crucial importance of testing in the process. My testing interests turn especially to automated software testing and automated test case generation. Anybody who does not think that 50% of the coding process should be spent on writing and executing test cases, should revide his position towards testing.
Aibo Sony Electronics markets a very interesting robotic platform for entertainment robotics, with the unstated goal of gaining market lead on the burgeoning home robotics market. The Aibo has a very flexible and solid architecture making it a very firm ground to base on.
Avionics simulation At CMC Electronics, me and my team have the chance to develop a Part-Task Trainer for multiple uses. The particular PTT we are developing find application in training, FMS developement, and avionics components simulation. As of writing it simulates various avionics systems for the CMC C++ and Ada-83 Flight Management Systems (military and commercial, fixed wing and rotary wing) line of products, with more features in various stages of completion.

Projects

I'm interested in a number of topics in software engineering... and my main interests gravitate around the low-level aspects of computing, finding ways to automate them, and making the whole process highly portable. To give you a good picture of what I like to do: If compilers weren't so much studied already, I would probably have been thrilled to invent 'yacc' and 'lex'!

Past projects include:

Collection of database applications for the Montreal, Canada municipal elections

Games for the local cable company, Videotron, on their Videoway platform. Videoway is based on a 2MHz 6809 computer receiving informations (application and data) broadcast digitally on a few dedicated analog channels of Videotron's cable network.

An emulator so that Videoway binaries can execute in a virtual environment on a Windows machine instead of the native hardware platform. This cut down software development time, and provides a much more stable environment than the Windows version of the Videoway API.

A portable, real-time multitasking application in Ada 95 for simulating a robotic arm, running its graphics using OpenGL on Linux and Windows;

A unix C++ application for parsing C and C++ applications, outputting static function structure graphs in graphics form (using AT&T's dotty) and generating the list of execution paths in the program that must be taken if we would want to have a 100% coverage testing of either the source instructions, or the edges, of the function structure graphs;

The prototype for a real-time image processing test platform running on Windows ( see here for a presentation (in french) );

Architecture for network management applications for DWDM fiber networking applications

I have given university-level programming courses in C, C++ and Assembly language at École Polytechnique de Montreal .

Here's a link to my early article on programming the Aibo , written for aibolifestyle.com . There is a local copy stored here if the main link doesn't work.

...and a lot of other projects!

As time go by, I'll try to make as many of those projects available one way or another. Some are or will be released for commercial use, some projects could be released as Free Software, and others could have other licenses. I just have to find the time to publish older projects while I continue to go forward.

Current projects include :

Aibo games launched starting February 2002. Those are the first games for Sony's Aibo robotic dog not published by Sony, and probably the most interesting Aibo games on the market now! See aibotoys.com for details...

A low-cost PC oscilloscope that I would like to commercialize. The software and circuitry is pretty much completed; I'm stuck on building a plastic encasing before I can proceed, and probably will postpone the release of this project until I find somebody who can help.

Future projects

Too many projects to list here, not to mention that I do not discuss ongoing projects until they are completed.

Ham Radio

On the air, I am VE2 JVA; since I only have a small protable 2m radio (a 5W Kenwood TH-22AT), I am not exceedingly present. I look forward to having a real emitter, or at least a real antenna to replace the rubber-duck antenna there is on my portable...

This page is maintained with plaintext editors on Windows or with /usr/bin/vi on Debian GNU/Linux.
June 17th 1996; updated on October 29th, 2003.