Month: August 2007

Fastscale minimal virtual machines — beautiful simple idea

A company called Fastscale Technologies has a product that is simple in concept and yet very powerful. Instead of using complete installs of heavy operating systems like Linux or Windows to run applications on virtual machines, they offer tools that provide minimal operating system configurations that are tailored to the needs of a particular application. Since only that application is going to be run on the virtual machine, this is sufficient. According to press reports, this means that you can run several times more virtual machines on a given host, compared to default OS installs. And boot an order of a magnitude faster.

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The Simulation of the first Amiga Custom Chips (1983)

ArsTechnica is running a history of the Amiga, and in part 3, “The first prototype” they describe a really interesting “simulation” solution for the custom chips in the first Amiga. This is in 1982-83, and there are no VHDL or Verilog simulators, nor any other EDA tools as we know them today. Even if they were, the Amiga company would not have been able to afford them. So in order to test their design, the Amiga engineers built chip replicas using breadboards and discrete logic chips. All in all, 7200 chips and a very large numbers of wires. Quite fascinating stuff, and they did manage to interface the main 68000 CPU to the breadboards and get a fully functional if a bit slow simulation of a complete Amiga computer with all its unique custom chips.

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DVL & DVP 25 years

My dear old education program, DVL, later DVP, (which made us call it DV*) is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a large dinner at Norrlands Nation on October 6, 2007. The official site is www.dvp.nu/25. I really hope that I can make it, it would be great seeing all of the other alumni från datavetenskapliga linjen/programmet and see where they have ended up and what they are doing now.

They also emailed out a call for pictures from the history of DV*. I’ll look through my old collections of memorabilia and see what I can find. What a chance for a trip down memory lane. It’s been ten years since I graduated. Time flies.

Real-Time in Sweden (RTiS) 2007

RTiS 2007 just took place in Västerås, Sweden. It is a biannual event where Swedish real-time research (and that really means embedded in general these days) presents new results and summarizes results from the past two years. For someone who has worked in the field for ten years, it really feels like a gathering of friends and old acquaintances. And always some fresh new faces. Due to a scheduling conflict, I was only able to make it to day one of two.

I presented a short summary of a paper I and a colleague at Virtutech wrote last year together with Ericsson and TietoEnator, on the Simics-based simulator for the Ericsson CPP system (see the publications page for 2006 and soon for 2007). I also presented the Simics tool and demoed it in the demo session. Overall, nice to be talking to the mixed academic-industrial audience.

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Solaris to IBM, x86 to Apple, Power to Microsoft, and other flying pig events

The register report “IBM embraces – wtf – Sun’s Solaris across x86 server line” is a very appropriate headline for something quite surprising. The day before this happened, we discussed the announced announcement and said “nah, it can’t be about operating systems”. The idea of IBM in-sourcing Solaris for x86 just felt like the kind of thing that was in the same realm as flying pigs, freezing hells, and similar unlikely events.

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Matts Today in History: The Vasa Sinks, August 10, 1628

Matts Today in History: The Vasa Sinks, August 10, 1628
is the latest installment in the very good and long-running PodCast called “Matt’s Today in History”. I really appreciate the effort going into the production of it, and the perserverance of Matt in keeping it up for more than two years.

This particular issue was interesting in two regards.

First, I suggested the topic.

Second, it featured what at least seemed like real paid advertising at the start. This is thanks to PodShow, the “media network” used to distribute this podcast. The deal behind PodShow is quite simple fo the podcaster: you get bandwitdh for free, in return for the possibility of there being advertising inserted into the audio.

The reasoning behind PodShow is nicely explained in a podcast from the Stanford Technology Ventures Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series. Here, Ron Bloom and Ray Lane of PodShow describe the way PodShow got started and just what it is. Basically, they are building a new media company, to compete with radio and television. It is not just a nice place to find podcasts. Recommended listen for anyone interested in just how podcasting can be monetized. They describe how their staff constantly monitors the various shows that they carry, and find those popular and targeted enough to carry some paid advertising. Other shows carry intros and pointers to various other PodShow shows, to drive audience to more popular properties.

Thus, the conclusion must be that Matt’s Today in History has reached some threshold of audience that makes it valuable enough to carry advertising. Great job, and a sure sign of popularity of the podcast.

The Customer is not always Right

I just listened to Episode 103 of the Security Now podcast, where Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson talk to the head of security at PayPal. PayPal is doing the right thing right now, issuing their customers with RSA security keys. Which gives them two-factor authentication (password and security key passnumber).

But for some reason, they do not enforce the use of security keys on their customers. Even when you have obtained a security key (which is optional, weirdly enough) and said you are using it, you can still login without it doing some additional security questions. For the reason of convenience! Which basically reduces the security added to nothing, since you can still login in a traditional fashion.

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