Short list updated weekly of articles and papers we read and found worth mentioning. read more...

Short list updated weekly of articles and papers we read and found worth mentioning. read more...

These are the Youtube video and slides about responsive-waves I presented at Sourcegraph in September. read more...

Short list updated weekly of articles and papers we read and found worth mentioning in 2014. read more...

It has been a while since I posted here. No, it is not because I went surfing along the Pacific Beaches all summer long. In fact I was quite busy distilling the feedback from DAC2013 to the team. read more...

In the popular series on how technical decisions are made, we will see Today why fortylines picked django-jenkins, phantomjs, casperjs and django-casper to build its continuous integration infrastructure on. read more...

Zak, CEO of Upverter, took an hour out of his busy investment tour to chat with me. read more...

There has been a lot of companies that are started with a virtual server in the cloud. It is hugely convenient because you can be up and running in five minutes. There is no need to buy a physical machine, rent space in a data center, cable the machine into a rack, etc. read more...

In the bare metal space, there is a lot more going on these days than shrinking technology process. FinFET, 3D ICs and Producing Semiconductors from Graphene are just a few of the advances putting pressure on the current generation of EDA tools - translate space for innovative companies. read more...

Electronics

After the successful Curiosity landing on Mars, here a great article on energy harvesting designs. In advanced micro-electronics, news on DARPA THz Electronics program are worth mentioning as well as TSMC investment in ASML. In that last article I found the following quote that will resonate with many here: read more...

While condor focuses on bringing heterogeneous machines into a compute cloud, Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management (SLURM) deals mostly with homogeneous clusters. Condor assumes that machines not dedicated to a cluster and only available when someone does not sit in front of it. SLURM was made for High-Performance Computer dedicated clusters. As a result, SLURM's daemons architecture is a lot simpler than condor's. read more...

As I was mucking around with my install of fop to generate PDFs out of MathML, I decided to also fix a long standing warning about hyphenation pattern not found. read more...

I have been involved with a project that has been using cvs for the longest time. Over the years, a great deal of experience has been acquired in source control management, processes and tools have evolved to reflect that knowledge. A lot of third-party tools like wikis, bug trackers, etc. actively maintain git plug-ins. Cvs is increasingly an afterthought, for very good reasons. So despite everything running smoothly with cvs for now, it won't be long before sticking with cvs becomes a huge technical debt. read more...

I have never quite understood why python (or ruby) packages are delivered through their own manager (pip, gem) instead of the local system package manager (apt, yum, etc). I mean I understand the python developer rationale and disagrees with it. My main problem with side-stepping the local package manager is that now the programming stack of prerequisites matters, a lot. It is not just about dependencies and APIs anymore but also about which package manager to use. That creates tons of problems especially when you rely on something with some very problematic design issues like easy_install. read more...

I have been playing around with condor since last week. It is available through apt-get so it was somehow straightforward to experiment with it. As it turns out the .deb package installed version 7.2.4 which is unfortunate because the support for transferring directories was only added in version 7.5.4 (with further releases fixing a slew of bugs related to that feature). read more...

If you are interested in C++ and the new C++11 standard, you definitely want to see this panel discussion and this talk by Stroustrup himself. Paul Krill also conducted a very insightful interview of Stroustrup for infoworld. read more...

First the track pad stopped working, then the notebook would heat-up when I flip the screen down and put it in my bag; to the point it would not come back up without a hard reset. After two years and a half, it is time to upgrade. I like the 13'' form factor so I just got a new MacBook Pro, increased specs, better cpu, more memory, and oh yes, an SSD hard drive. read more...

First I created a cron job to dump the databases running on production servers in SQL format. read more...

Many times while validating a software product, you have to substitute a few parts in order to enable automated testing. This was again the case recently when I was confronted with a java application built as a jar file. The application relied on a complex subsystem of components that needed to be stubbed out in the test runner. read more...

Time for a little maintenance, I downloaded the latest emacs package available (Emacs-23.3-universal-10.6.6.dmg) and started to re-install the extensions I use everyday, as well as some new ones I would like to try. Since so far I had use CarbonEmacs, there were also a few configuration settings I had to tweak differently. Some useful information to run Emacs.app on OSX can be found here. read more...

I can feel my mind started to work at 200 km/h again. Hmmm maybe 125MPH... I have to admit I still have a hard time with the complexity of the US customary system, plus 200 is a bigger number - more impressive. read more...

First time at MacWorld, that was a lot fun. Between the numerous earbuds and iPhone cases, I managed to find a couple cool products. read more...

2012 Personal Reading List

Short list updated weekly of articles and papers I read and found worth mentioning in 2012. read more...

I recently read "Why programs fail, a guide to systematic debugging" by Andreas Zeller. Experienced programmers will find an easy read of their day-to-day activities described in much details. This makes it a valuable book to recommend to anyone that manages technology projects but who might not have a strong programming background. Chapter two in particular will definitely appeal to people having to manage problems as opposed to directly solving them. My thoughts on the subject are captured in this note. read more...

HTML and the <img> tag

When you process a docbook formatted document into HTML, <imagedata> tags are transformed into <img> tags by default. Unfortunately the HTML specification does not support SVG content in <img> tags and thus browsers render an error instead of the svg graphic. read more...

I've picked up "Management Rewired" by Charles S. Jacobs in the San Francisco library, and started to read through it quickly. It talks about neuroscience, how stories affect people and group decisions and ultimately how it applies to the field of management. It is a fascinating read and today's blog entry is about such an experience. Unfortunately, the subject was myself and the conditions were a very bad car wreck I got into Saturday night. read more...

I had to do work remotely on a machine that required long session recently and the ssh connection kept dropping at random. It is very annoying and it seems almost impossible to track it down. The best explanation so far looks to lie with the way routers, firewalls and other bridges between me and the remote machine maintain some sanity into their NAT tables. In any case, I started to use GNU screen such that least running jobs do not just get killed off when the connection dropped. read more...

I attended the Hot Chips conference from August 23rd to August 24th at Stanford University Campus in Palo Alto. The temperature outside was definitely hot, the hottest days on record as a matter of fact. Inside the chips were also running hot with the presentation of gargantuan power consumption numbers. If you are interested in the press announcements, you can look into a good coverage of the IBM Z196 and the AMD Bulldozer. I will cover here the bits and pieces that were not written down in the slides and that I found personally interesting. read more...

There are many reasons to structure your business as an open source business. For example, your business largely relies on open source software itself and it sounds like fair practice to do such yourself. A second example is that your business is small. It does not have the resources to seek out talents and knowledge on its own. This is a real problem in a knowledge-based economy where a business competitive edge relies increasingly on who, what, as much as when you know something. An open source business can leverage contributions from diverse relevant sources around the world. In the end though, noble or practical, a business only survives through sustainable profits. It is thus important to control costs and setup channels through which revenue can stream into the business. read more...

I happily compiled git 1.7.1.1 and installed it. Then I tried to clone a git repository through http I got a very strange error. read more...

In the last few years, there are been exciting technologies in home entertainment: H264, Blu-ray, HDTV, USB3.0, etc. They all represent building steps to a richer experience in your living room, but unfortunately, unless you are very technology-savy, it is as meaningless as the next acronym. This is about to change because there are two technologies this year that will define "before" and "after" for even the most neophyte: 3DTV and live-gesture. read more...

XCode is a great Development Environment; it is great for edit/compile/run cycles. For nightly packaging, testing and Quality Assurance so far I have not found anything better than fully automated systems built around regular makefiles and shell/python scripts. To find out how to write a make-oriented system to build OSX applications, best is to download an example project and start playing with it. read more...

Operating System and Applications

Snow Leopard was released Friday for $29 so I could not resist a stop by the Apple Store to pick a fresh copy up. As I decided to take the opportunity to upgrade other everyday tools as well, it took me about ten hours to complete the process. read more...

It often happens that source files include meta information written by the source control software in the comments. As a result, when you use diff to find relevent differences between branches, the output gets clottered with "diff noise". You can use the -I option to get rid of it. read more...