There is an eternal debate going on in virtual platform land over what the right kind of abstraction is for each job. Depending on background, people favor different levels. For those with a hardware background, more details tend to be the comfort zone, while for those with a software background like myself, we are quite comfortable with less details. I recently did some experiments about the use of quite low levels of hardware modeling details for early architecture exploration and system specification.
Monthly Archives: March 2009
EETimes.com – Multicore CPUs face slow road in comms
The EETimes article Multicore CPUs face slow road in comms piqued my interest. There is an interesting chart in there about just how slow more-than-one-core processors will be in penetrating a vaguely defined “comms” market place. I can believe that, but I think their comments on the PowerQUICC series require some commentary…
Swedish ESC Finals: What a Fantastic Surprise
The Swedish qualification contest for the ESC (the Eurovision Song Contest, not the ESC that is about some kind of variant of computing) just finished tonight. With one of the most amazing votes I have seen.
Questioning the Choice of C++
In FLOSS Weekly issue 57, about 20 minutes into the show, Randall Schwartz and Leo Laporte express genuine surprise that the XMBC media player application is all in C++. That is pretty telling, some parts of the computing world are indeed moving on to more modern pastures like Python, Perl, Ruby, and even Objective C (for the Mac people). And quite a contrast to the EDA world where C++ is still considered the new shiny thing, as I have lamented before… thanks for that small but golden genuine surprise, Randall and Leo!
Biking Topic: Chariot Carrier Baby Seat
This is a follow-up to last year’s post on the Chariot Corsaire XL bike trailer we have. Now that we have a baby girl as well as our older boy, we have upgraded the trailer with a baby seat. Works very well, even though it was quite a bit of work to install it.
Off-Topic: Excel Surrealism
As stated in another CS song I like, “I pressed something wrong, what it was, I could not tell…”…
And here is what Excel gave me as a graph. Totally surreal.
The Tyranny of Syntax on Stackoverflow
The 44th episode of the Stackoverflow podcast contains an interesting discussion on what I have liked to call “the tyranny of syntax”.They note that for some reason people are scared of anything that does not look like C, but still lament some of the less good design patterns in C, such as the fact that closing braces have no annotations as to what is being closed. They also talk about the use of “little languages”, and an old favorite song of mine.
Yubikey Follow-Up
Now I have had my yubikey for about a week, and I have put it on my keychain. It really works extremely well! The only small issue is that I tend not to have my keys immediately within reach while at home in the house or on travel, so there is a step of “go retrieve the keys” before I can use it for login.