I just read Stephen Fry’s latest blog post about smartphones in general and the Apple iPhone in particular. He really loves the iPhone, but the interesting thing to me was the wish list of future improvements to the device. In particular, support for MMS. That was one of the things that made the iPhone unacceptable to me and not really to be considered a serious mobile phone (along with no bluetooth modem).
Month: December 2008
WordPress 2.7 Almost Broke this Site
My hosting service just told me to update to WordPress 2.7 — as the previous version had known security holes. So I did, and after I upgraded, the blog itself broke.
Just after the first post on the front page, there was a nasty error message:
Fatal error: Only variables can be passed by reference in .../functions.php on line ...
“Nulticore Effect”
Jack Ganssle wrote a column about the failure of multicore to scale, based on an article in IEEE Spectrum. He makes the following claim:
Now a study in IEEE Spectrum shows that even for the classic embarrassingly parallel problems like weather simulations multicore offers little benefit. The curve in that article is priceless. As the number of cores grow from two to 64 performance plummets by a factor of five. Additional processors nullify each other.
Call it the Nulticore Effect.
Notes from the IP 08 Panel
Now I am home again, and some days have passed since the IP 08 panel discussion about software and hardware virtual platforms. This was an EDA hardware-oriented conference, and thus the audience was quite interested in how to tie things to hardware design. Any case, it was a fun panel, and Pierre Bricaud did a good job of moderating and keeping things interesting.
Article in Elektronik i Norden: Virtual Platforms
I have an article appearing in the latest issue of Elektronik i Norden, about using virtual platforms for multicore computer systems. It is framed in the context of the Freescale multicore push, in particular the QorIQ P4080, and addresses the common issues of debug, execution speed, and the need to zoom in on details every once in a while.
Off-topic: Outlook 2007 Zoom Bad GUI
It is a symptom of bad UI design when things just happen, and you have no why, and no visible indication to help you figure it out. Last night, I noted that the text in Outlook when composing email suddenly was way larger than normal. I put that way as a fluke, but today, the effect was still there, all the time. Strange. So I went in and checked my font settings, which were all fine. This being Office 2007, I suspected some kind of zoom effect, but there was no zoom indicator in any Outlook window. I tried ctrl-+ and ctrl– to see if Outlook respected the web-style view size shortcuts. But no effect.
Blog redesign in progress
I managed to break the categories in my old system, moving everything to tags, after which my old theme turned out to be too old. So I will tweak this new theme some I think, but now tags is the way to organize this blog. Which was essentially how I misused categories previously.
IP08 Panel on Virtual Platforms and Software
On Wednesday this week, I will take part of a panel discussion about virtual platforms and using them for software development, at the IP08 conference in Grenoble in France. We have a good crew, including Markus Willems from Synopsys, Peter Flake from ELDA, and Loic le Toumelin from TI (who I have not met before).