Last week the 50th Design Automation Conference (DAC2013) was held in Austin Texas and, of course, fortylines was there. 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...

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...

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

2012 Personal Reading List

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

September is here again. The summer is almost over and as usual the cold and foggy days have given ways to the warm season here in San Francisco. It is a good time to compile a list of the articles and books I have read through the last months that have held my thoughts. 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...

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...

Hardware engineers build products, products with limitations in the physical world. With today’s wide interconnected networks, computers, either it be desktop or mobile phones, have the capability to "talk" to each other. Unlike the limitations of manufactured products, software applications do not have those same constraints. Software applications have the ability to be re-programmed or re-designed and then be transposed to become a different product. One can say that software is bound to be grown, woven into the fabric of the Internet, more than it is manufactured. read more...

Software is an artistic endeavor where elegance and flow are key factors to success. A passionate debate on two versus four versus eight spaces indentation reveals how much style and form matters to the practitioner. Software is as brutal and cold as any other engineering activities. It is the kind of work where only humble and honest people can thrive because either the computed result is correct or it is not. In most cases, you can objectively trace an error back to an individual. Software is a living entity the same way a manufacturing plant is. It requires the pragmatism and ingenuity of people to fix, update, and extend a system beyond its original intent. 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...

I attended a meet-up presenting some start-ups and products around the Kinetec recently. Kinetec-like devices have the potential to make accurate 3D data acquisition faster, quicker, cheaper. MatterPort shows great promise of the kind of tools available to architects in the near future. The iClone mocap plug-in has a potential to end-up in every video game studio requiring motion capture (mocap). 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...

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...

Last Game Developer Conference I attended was in 2000 and, at the time, it was located in San Jose. As the GDC is now conveniently located at a mere twenty minutes walk from my house, I decided to spend the last week walking the exhibitors floor and listening to various interesting talks. 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...

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...

When we picked SLURM because of the accounting feature, we also deployed a MySQL database as recommended. We also wanted to tightly integrate our Django project with SLURM so we created models out of the slurmdbd schemas and tweaked the foreign key definitions, etc. The following is the account of everything that went wrong. read more...

I gave a another shot at the paypal API Today. Since I am most interested in encrypted web payments, after signing up with a business account, I went through the steps of generating a private key and corresponding public certificate. read more...

There are basic tasks you need in any development stack: Style Checking, Code Coverage and Reference Documentation. As it reaches maturity, all language ecosystem provides tools for managing those activities. Scala is not exception. read more...

CruiseControl is a continuous build application written in Java, using a jsp web framework. It is not as straightforward to setup as running "aptitude install cruisecontrol". So while the 73Mb cruisecontrol-src-2.8.4.zip file was downloading from the website, I started to read through a good introduction to cruisecontrol. read more...

In order to get payments processed through Amazon, you need to register with one of amazon payment systems. Amazon provides a lot of different services and it is a little confusing at first to understand how each service relates to each other. I figured that you first need to get an "Amazon Web Services Account" then register for an "Amazon Payments Account" and finally sign up for an "Amazon Payments Business Account". You will need a U.S.-based credit card and information about your business to complete the registration. I have created a specific e-mail address on fortylines mail server that is only used for communication with Amazon services. read more...

Anticipated the upcoming next release of Ubuntu, I decided to setup an Ubuntu Server Edition sandbox under VMware to test the configuration scripts. I do not know about you, but I feel a little anxious about upgrading the customer-facing Internet server, fixing bugs in real-time. 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...

I liked Mail.app very much and was very happy with it until I started to have to exchange encrypted emails. Since Thunderbird seemed like the only email client with a reasonably working GnuPG plug-in, I switched about a year ago. In the process, among a few other little annoyances, I started to get a "--" showing up above my signature. read more...

Ubuntu 10.10 comes with support for Virtual Machines. As I started to port fortylines testing infrastructure to a new more quiet machine, it is a good time to start playing around with virtual machine provisioning and decommissioning. read more...

I have setup mailman web interface to run on the private website, accessible at http://localhost:8000 after the ssh tunnel has been constructed with the following command. 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...

Whenever you run your own fixed-size compute cluster, you are contending with two issues: utilization and time-in-queue. Utilization is the extend to which your installed productive capacity is used (expressed in percentage). Time-in-queue is the delay between submission of a job and the start of its execution - obviously the shorter the better. read more...

We are building a webapp that interacts with the mysql database slurmdbd relies on. One of the features involves creating entries into a cluster assoc_table. One INSERT and we fire a sbatch command. The command complains: read more...

[UPDATED] Use these instructions to use the version 2.0 API from Rackspace instead. read more...

VMWorld was happening last week in the Moscone center in San Francisco and it was definitely very crowed. Virtualization is a key technology to enable cloud computing, the quiet IT revolution, and VMware was definitely on top of its game at VMworld 2010. read more...