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Intel recently announced new tools for FPGA design. I should probably try to understand OpenCL better before bagging on it, but when I read, "[OpenCL] allows users to abstract away hardware-specific development and use a higher-level software development flow." I cringe. I don't think that's how we get to a productive, higher-level of abstraction in FPGA design. When you look at the progress of software from low-level detailed design to high-level abstract design you see assembly to C to Java to Python (to pick one line of progression among many). The thing that happened every time a new higher-level language gained traction is people recognized patterns that developers were using over and over in one language and made language features in a new language that made those patterns one-liners to implement. Examples of design patterns turning into language features are, in assembly people developed the patterns of function calls: push arguments onto the stack, save...

Facebook has done wonders to get people creating and consuming content on the internet. However, Facebook has grown to the point where it has no competition and is no longer innovating in ways that benefit us. Facebook should split into Facebook the aggregator and Facebook the content hoster.  You could talk about a third piece that is Facebook the content provider, which is for providing things like gifs, templates, memes, emoji, games, and other stuff like that.  Because Facebook hasn't completely broken from open web standards those types of content providers already exist today. Aggregators would be where you go to set up your friend list and see your feed.  It could look and feel like Facebook does now.  It would have an open standard protocol that content hosters would use if they wanted to be aggregated.  This could still be an add driven business, but subscription, self hosted, and DIY solutions could exist too. Content hosters could either charge a monthly hosting fe...

Introduction No team says, "write your code however the heck you want." Unless you are coding alone, it generally helps to have an agreed upon coding standard. Agreeing upon a coding standard, however, can be a painful process full of heated arguments and hurt feelings. This morning I thought it might be useful to first categorize coding standard items before starting the arguments. My hope is that once we categorize coding standard items we can use better decision criteria for each category of items and cut down on arguing. Below are the categories I came up with really quickly with descriptions, examples, and decision criteria for each category. Feedback is welcome in the comments. Categories of Things in Coding Standards Language Specific Pitfalls Characteristics​ not subjective, easy to recognize pattern well recognized in the industry as dangerous people have war stories and about these with associated scars to prove it Examples no multiple dec...

Design patterns in programming are when engineers find themselves writing the same code over and over to solve the same problems. Design patterns for statically typed object oriented languages (C++ and Java) were cataloged and enshrined in the famous book, " Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software " by Erich Gamma, John Vlissides, Ralph Johnson, and Richard Helm. The authors are lovingly called, The Gang of Four , or the GOF and the book is often referred to as the GOF book. The subset of SystemVerilog used in writing testbenches is a statically typed object oriented language (it's most similar to Java). As people started using SystemVerilog to write testbenches, frameworks for writing testbenches quickly became popular. These frameworks all provide code that implements design patterns from the GOF book. The various frameworks were similar because they were all essentially implementing the same design patterns. Eventually the various frameworks al...

I just installed Arch Linux on my 4th machine. It has been fun and painful. Painfully fun? I have learned a lot and that is always fun. There. I have loved using Ubuntu over the last several (eight, I think) years. Ubuntu is easy to install and most things Just Work. It's easy to find packages for most software I want to run, and there is lots of help on the internet for accomplishing whatever you want to accomplish with Ubuntu. My frustrations have been that even though you can find instructions for getting whatever software you want to run, it's not always a simple apt-get install. Sometimes it's configuring a PPA source and sometimes it's compiling from source. Sometimes a PPA works and serves you well for years and then suddenly it disappears. Another frustration is out of date packages, and full system upgrades in general. Keeping up with the latest emacs was a chore. Going from one release of Ubuntu to another works surprisingly well, but it's a...

I had a packed struct who's size was not evenly divisible by 8 (it was one bit short, in fact) and I had an array of bytes that I needed to stream into it. The extra bits in the array of bytes were not relevant, so I tried just doing this: my_struct = {>>byte{my_array_of_bytes}}; But my simulator complained that my_array_of_bytes was bigger than the destination (my_struct). It took me longer to figure out than I'd like to admit that I just needed to do this: bit extra_bit; {my_struct, extra_bit} = {>>byte{my_array_of_bytes}}; That did the trick.

Xpra is like screen or tmux for X apps.  There is a commercial app called Exceed on Demand and xpra seems to work very similarly to that.  Xpra is a very nice alternative to VNC and performs a lot better than forwarding X over ssh.  Here's how I got it to work using Ubuntu 14.04 as a server and windoze (is that joke getting old yet?) as a client.  Xpra says you can run Mac and Linux clients as well, but I haven't tried that yet. To get it installed and running, dig down from the main Xpra site to the trusty download area, or just click here for 64-bit .  Download the highest version numbered python-rencode and xpra packages there, then do this on your command line: sudo dpkg -i ~/Downloads/python-rencode_1.0.3-1_amd64.deb sudo apt-get install python-numpy python-opengl python-lzo python-appindicator python-gtkglext1 xvfb sudo dpkg -i ~/Downloads/xpra_0.15.10-1_amd64.deb When you try to install either .deb package it might report other dependencies that ar...