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My phone is an old blackberry curve that I found used on craigslist. I’m cheap. It was in decent shape, but there was one scratch on the screen that kept bothering me. The internet said I might be able to polish it out with brasso metal polish . It wasn’t too expensive, so I ordered some and gave it a try. After polishing until my hand was cramped, the one scratch had become lost amongst a million new scratches. My eyes watered as I tried to focus on the screen through the damaged plastic. Dismayed, but still hopeful, I rested a bit and then polished some more, thinking that sometimes things have to get worse before they get better. Well, I’m still wondering if better was just around the corner, because I finally gave up. In disappointment I went back to the internet to try and find a better answer. Namely, a new plastic screen. It took me a while to figure it out, but the correct search term is blackberry curve housing . Only $15, perfectly clear plasti...

I noticed a few places mentioning that emacs 23.2 has been released , and I went and read the changelog and noticed a few cool new things. Probably the best was down in the emacs 23.1 section. Yes, emacs now has an uptime command, M-x emacs-uptime . That is awesome. My current emacs uptime (on my work machine): 4 days, 21 hours, 52 minutes, 47 seconds. What's yours? P.S. if you aren't using emacs-server and emacs-client yet, you probably don't stand a chance in this contest. P.P.S. Hmm, did Steve Yegge have anything to do with this new feature?

This is the coolest thing I've read in a while. If the article is too long and/or technical, at least watch the high-speed video of the mosquito getting fried. It's awesome! Backyard Star Wars (the weapon system, not the movie).

I stumbled onto a new build tool today: fabricate . I can't believe how cool it is, and that nobody has thought of it before (OK, actually, one person did , but still!). You give it a command, and it runs the command with strace and looks for all the files the command reads and produces and uses those as the command's dependencies and outputs, respectively. The next time you run the command with fabricate, if the outputs don't exist or the dependencies have changed it re-runs the command, otherwise, it doesn't. In other words, it does all the work that you normally would try and do with make, automatically. Another cool thing about this is that it will work with anything. You don't have to write builders for it like you would for scons (another tool I looked at for a bit). I spent some time trying to get scons to run modelsim compiles and simulations for me, and it was way too hard to make it work. I just tried fabricate with a small modelsim job and it ...

Since my family and I just moved to a new state for this new job, we took the opportunity to look at different options for home phone. Some friends had switched to ooma and liked it, and after a little research, we decided to go with ooma too, specifically the ooma telo . We got it at best buy on sale for about $225, and that's all you pay. Apparently we'll eventually have to start paying about $11 a year for some sort of telecom tax. Other than that, nothing. You might be able to find the telo for cheaper on ebay or something too, I didn't look into that too much. I connect my cable modem directly to the telo, and then the telo to my router, and then my computers to my router. You plug your normal land-line phone into telo too, and then it works like it always has. With everything going through the telo, it does QOS to make sure your voice traffic always has enough bandwidth, and it can do port forwarding so web and ssh requests still get to my linux machine. It...

A friend of mine who is also a verification engineer lamented to me that Cadence didn't seem to be supporting SystemVerilog very well. This is what fell out of my head and into the email reply I sent him. I notice that Cadence bloggers seem to all like specmen E better than systemverilog, and synopsys people, of course, like VMM more than anything else. So, I guess I’m not surprised that Cadence isn’t supporting SystemVerilog that well. The EDA industry is weird. I like how the software world, with open source, collaborates so well on developing the best tools for everyone. There almost needs to be a Linux-like simulator that everyone in EDA rallies around and works together on. Or if Linux isn’t the best comparison, maybe gcc, or firefox, or apache. They are defacto standard tools now in the software world. In the software world, if you have a new compiled language, you pretty much have to write a gcc (Gnu Compiler Collection) compiler for it. If you have a...

I read the “tutorial”: and thought, “the syntax is Frankenstein ugly. They have Guido on staff, but this looks like they consulted Larry Wall. Why didn’t they just write an open source D compiler?” Then I read the FAQ . Some very interesting ideas, and personally, ever since using C++ for some large embedded programming projects (large? embedded? not as oxymoronic as you might think), I’ve been thinking these same things for a while now: No major systems language has emerged in over a decade, but over that time the computing landscape has changed tremendously. There are several trends: Computers are enormously quicker but software development is not faster. Dependency management is a big part of software development today but the “header files” of languages in the C tradition are antithetical to clean dependency analysis—and fast compilation. There is a growing rebellion against cumbersome type systems like those of Java and...