Month: June 2010

Wind River Blog Post: Scripting or Programming?

I have a blog post called “When is Scripting Really Programming” up at the Wind River blog network. In that post, I discuss how scripting is really not clearly separated from “real programming” in the way I once believed it was… today, the line between higher-level programming languages and scripting languages look very thin in many cases. I illustrate with examples from Simics and its CLI and Python scripting systems.

Third Swedish Workshop on Multicore: Call for Papers

The call for papers for the third annual Swedish Workshop on Multicore Computing (MCC10) is now out! MCC is a nice venue for multicore research about everything from computer design to software and debug. It is fairly informal, but still attracts some good papers and provides good discussions. It is not restricted to Swedish submissions, in 2009 there were several international participants. I gave a keynote talk about multicore and Simics at last year’s MCC, and for this year, I am on the program committee and looking forward to many great submissions to review!

Wind River Blog: True Concurrency is Different

I have another blog up at Wind River. This one is about multicore bugs that cannot happen on multithreaded systems, and is called True Concurrency is Truly Different (Again). It bounces from a recent interesting Windows security flaw into how Simics works with multicore systems.

Poking Holes in Products

I recently started using a new mobile phone, a Blackberry Bold 9700. I am a bit ambivalent on some of its design features, but it is certainly a very different device from the much more friendly SonyEricsson I had before. Like anybody would do, I have been playing around with it to see what it can do and what not (notable things not working: the “AppWorld” application store is not available in Sweden, YouTube videos do not play in any way that I can figure out).

And almost inevitably, as you play around with a complex modern piece of software (which is what most of the phone is, after all), you find some obvious things which are just plain broken. You wonder, “why didn’t they think of this”, and “how could this ever escape testing?” My current best example is that the built-in web browser does not render the pages from Blackberry’s own support knowledgebase.

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