Just for fun, I tried to surf the web of today using a Netscape 4 browser from 2001.
The result: not exactly useful. Netscape 4 was bad back then, and it does not work at all with the current style of web coding.
Author: Jakob
Wind River Blog: A Virtual Year
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about hypersimulation in virtual platforms and how it lets virtual time fly much faster than real time. It was the result of simple mistake of leaving Simics running in the background as I did other work on my machine.
IBM i – I’m Impressed
From what little I had heard and read, the IBM AS/400 (later known as iSeries, and now known as simply IBM i) sounded like a fascinating system. I knew that it had a rich OS stack that contained most of the services a program needs, and a JVM-style byte code format for applications that let it change from custom processors to Power Architecture without impacting users at all. It was supposedly business-critical and IBM-quality rock solid. But that was about it.
So when Software Engineering Radio episode 177 interviewed the i chief architect Steve Will, I was hooked. It turned out that IBM i was cooler than I imagined. Here are my notes on why I think that IBM i is one of the most interesting systems out there in real use.
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Steve Furber: Emulated BBC Micro on Archimedes on PC
I just read an interview with Steve Furber, the original ARM designer, in the May 2011 issue of the Communications of the ACM. It is a good read about the early days of the home computing revolution in the UK. He not only designed the ARM processor, but also the BBC Micro and some other early machines.
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Wind River Blog: How to Get Virtual
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about how you build virtual platforms with Simics. The post is more about the methodology than the nature of models, cycle accuracy, endianness, and all the other details of virtual platform modeling. I have written about modeling methodology on this blog too, and in particular I would recommend looking at “Two perspectives on modeling“.
Off-Topic: Sex, Bombs, and Burgers Review
I just read the book Sex, Bombs, and Burgers, written by technology journalist Peter Nowak. The summary (minus some unnecessary hyperbole) from the book’s website reads:
Peter Nowak argues that most of the major technological advances of the last sixty years have stemmed from the trio of billion-dollar industries that cater to our basest impulses. From Saran Wrap to aerosols, digital cameras to cold medicine and GM foods to Google, many of the gadgets and conveniences we enjoy today can be traced back to either the porn, military or fast food industry.
This certainly sounded interesting. And the book was a good read. However, it was not a great read.
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Register Design Languages – DSL or not?
Recently, Gary Stringham has been running a series of interviews with providers of register design tools on his website. Register design tools seems to be an active area with several small companies (and some open-source tools) fighting for the market. I have written about Gary Stringham and register designs before, and it is an area that keeps fascinating me. There is something about the task of register design that keeps it separate from the main hardware design languages, tools, and flows.The different approaches taken by the tools supporting the register design task also illustrates some points about programming language standards, domain-specific languages, and exchange formats that I want to address.
Off-Topic: Sälen in the Summer (Vacation)
This Summer, our travel-away-from-home vacation was spent in Sälen, Sweden. Sälen is normally considered a winter destination, one of the biggest ski resorts in Sweden – but they are working on making it more of a year-round attraction. To be more precise, we went to Lindvallen, which is one of the seven or so separate “villages” that form the “Sälen” area. It was a nice and relaxed place, with little stress from having too many things to do, but enough to keep the kids happy. Seeing the mountains in the Summer was nice.
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Wind River Blog: Software at the Toddler Stage
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about the “Toddler stage” of software in general and Simics 4.6 in particular. To me, software in an early stage of development shares many traits with a toddler:
The software will sometimes behave as expected, but more often than not it will not. It will do something else, or crash, or generally do the wrong thing. It is very much like a toddler – you can rely on it to some extent, but you never know when it will decide to do something unexpected, funny, or just throw a fit over something that would have seemed inconsequential.
It’s the Problem, Stupid
For some reason, in the past few weeks I have talked to more than a few PhD students and researchers about various ideas. It is striking how often fundamentally very smart people have a problem in articulating just why what they are doing is useful, relevant, and potentially commercially interesting. Of course, we all know that this is hard, and all PhD students get some kind of training in presentation and selling their ideas. It is also unfair to expect a fresh graduate student to be able to put on a show like a Simon Peyton-Jones.
However, this did get me thinking some about the articulation of problems.
Memory Models: x86 is TSO, TSO is Good
By chance, I got to attend a day at the UPMARC Summer School with a very enjoyable talk by Francesco Zappa Nardelli from INRIA. He described his work (along with others) on understanding and modeling multiprocessor memory models. It is a very complex subject, but he managed to explain it very well.
Off-topic: Windows tip: Hide Desktop Icons
I often have to create screenshots and screen recordings as part of my job, and to make that look good I don’t want any part of my Windows desktop or task bar to show in the results. Until now, I have done this the hard way by using very few desktop icons and putting them around the edges of the screen.
There is a better way.
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Wind River Blog: Simics 4.6 Initial Impressions
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about the new Simics 4.6 release. 4.6 has some serious new goodies in it, including an Eclipse source-code debugger and a way to build blinking lights front panels for boards.
SecurityNow on Randomness
Episodes 299 and 301 of the SecurityNow podcast deal with the problem of how to get randomness out of a computer. As usual, Steve Gibson does a good job of explaining things, but I felt that there was some more that needed to be said about computers and randomness, as well as the related ideas of predictability, observability, repeatability, and determinism. I have worked and wrangled with these concepts for almost 15 years now, from my research into timing prediction for embedded processors to my current work with the repeatable and reversible Simics simulator.
Disappointing SystemC Debugger Integration Paper
Since I have a certain interest in debugging, I was happy find the article “Guidelines for SystemC – Debugger Integration” at the usually interesting Design and Reuse website. However, I must say that it was pretty disappointing.
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