Cute video.

I sometimes wish that people who use my processor would notify me when they publish some useful results. I usually end up randomly stumbling over these results when I google for related information. One such result that I just recently uncovered was a benchmark of the AEMB, which would have proved extremely useful.

I have claimed that the AEMB is the world’s fastest and smallest 32-bit multi-threaded RISC processor. Chapter 2 of this thesis put it in terms of real numbers!

First, the author found that in terms of MHz versus LUT (resource consumption), it provided the best performance of the five RISC processor cores compared. Next, the author did some Dhrystone and Fibonacci software benchmarks and found the performance to be good too.

I’m happy that they managed to measure and show that the AEMB is a good processor.

There are lessons to be learned from the looming war between Google and Oracle. However, one lesson to take away as a developer is this:

Never Let Your Company File for Patents on Your Work

James Gosling is usually pretty cryptic in his non-technical writing, but I think if you read carefully, it seems to me that Gosling regrets that Oracle now holds his patents on Java. I know developers get nice bonuses if they let their company apply for patents on their work. I also know there’s pressure in most large companies to get more patents. We, as developers, must simply refuse this. We invent this stuff, not the suits and the lawyers who want to exploit our work for larger and larger profits. As a community of developers and computer scientists, we must simply refuse to ever let someone patent our work. In a phrase: just say no.

Even if you like your company today, you never know who will own those software patents later. I’m sure James Gosling originally never considered the idea that a company as revolting as Oracle would have control of everything he’s invented for the last two decades. But they do, and there’s nothing Gosling can do about what’s done with his work and “inventions”. Learn from this example; don’t let your company patent your work. Instead, publish online to establish prior art as quickly as possible.

I just read an article in TheStar that touches on information security and our government. Okay, regular readers will know that I just have to say something when our government decides to dabble in technology. I shall quote two portions of the article.

He said the Cabinet decided on Feb 24 that these agencies must obtain the Information Security Management System (ISMS) certification within three years to ensure that they were ready to face cyber threats and attacks.

What this means, once it passed through my BS filter is: Our Cabinet has mandated that certain agencies must now spend some money to enrich certain parties in order to hire security consultants, conduct security training, hold security certifications and what nots. This might be a good opportunity for certain applied research institutes that shall remain nameless, to get a slice of the pie and provide secure infrastructure to these agencies.

Any certified information security professionals should start picking up the phone and making calls to their friends, and friends of friends, to secure contracts to provide security training. Unfortunately, it seems that all the pie is going towards one security agency – Cybersecurity Malaysia – who are our local agents for various international security certifications and training.

CyberSecurity Malaysia chief operating officer Zahri Yunos said the most worrying threat was distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks.

This almost made me fall off my chair in Secret Recipe. I know for a fact that this is not the most worrying security threat faced by our government, or any other large organisation for that matter. A DDoS attack is the most basic of all potential threats and the solutions to handle the problem are already widely known – all it takes is more money as the solution is an arms race between attacker and defender.

The most worrying threat to all security systems is internal – human beings. All major technology companies take great pains in locking information down. Anyone who has worked in a major technology company will have stories about glued USB ports, removed CD-writers, restricted network access and more. Some organisations even fire employees that bring in mobile phones and cameras.

So, I think that it is scary for the COO of Cybersecurity Malaysia to talk that way. Granted, he’s not the CTO but maybe he should have picked up a little about security from his colleagues before mouthing off.

I was invited to be a judge for the zone competition today. I really like doing these things. I won’t reveal the results of the competition as it is still on-going. However, of all the teams that I judged, I was extremely impressed by a certain individual. He stood barely to my shoulders, was about 12/13 and seemed to be very capable in delivering a cogent presentation of a technically elegant use of the Lego Mindstorm kit.

When we threw questions at him, he would answer it intelligently and with analytical thought. It was just unfortunate to me that he was still too young to be employed. If he was older, I would have given him my card and hired him on the spot. This pre-teen who was still a budak hingus could code better and solve problems harder than some of the people I work with.

I even tried to apply my skills and break his design and programme. I have to say that I can usually break the stuff written by my apprentice in under 15 seconds. I can even break stuff written by public listed companies in a matter of minutes. I couldn’t break this young man’s programme though. Then he showed us his little programme and I was suitably impressed at its simplicity and elegance.

Anyone who knows me will know that it is ‘difficult’ to impress me, especially technically. This boy is good, really good – might even be better than me.

I truly feel that this Lego robotics competition needs to be supported at all levels. If and when my company grows to a decent size, I will fully invest into supporting this competition. I cannot think of a better way to encourage engineering and problem solving in our kids than through the spirit of an engineering competition accessible to all.

Unfortunately, of all the teams I judged today, only one had girls in it. I would like to see more young girls take to the field – otherwise we run the risk of turning into a mono-culture.

The topic of online voter-registration came up during my regular voter-registration drive last night. Since it was highlighted in today’s news, I thought that I should share some of my opinions on this matter. The EC is right in saying that online voter-registration is open to abuse.

The key issue is that of authentication. It is not easy to do identity authentication online unless we have that infrastructure set-up. However, it is not entirely impossible to do so. There are alternatives

We could insist on photo identification. So, someone who registers online would need to use a high resolution camera to take the photo of him/her holding the MyKAD. That would allow an authorised registrar to approve or reject the application and authenticate the identity manually. In this scenario, the Internet merely serves as a medium of communication between the registrar and registrant.

In fact, this method is already in use by certain OpenID service providers.

However, the better solution to the problem of voter registration would be automatic voter registration. There is no conceivable reason why this is not already the case. The National Registration Department has everyone’s information in a database. They can just easily extract out the new registrants each month and send that information to the Elections Commission.

Alternatively, we can harmonise the two systems by reducing the voting age to 18. This allows anyone who goes to renew their MyKAD to immediately fill in the voter registration form alongside. In fact, this should already be automatically done for those who change addresses. The NRD should be authorised by the EC as a registering body.

Why none of this is happening, is anybody’s guess.

Now, the idea of online voting is another whole can of worms that I do not want to discuss until adequate measures are in place. It is quite difficult to both ensure identity authentication while making a vote anonymous. You really need to trust the programmer who wrote the lines of code controlling the elections.

To those lazy asses who are brainless enough to suggest these things, sticking the word “on-line” in front of everything doesn’t solve all your problems. Just get off the couch, and go register at a post-office and vote at the designated school.

Final Fantasy 7 on an Android Phone! Sweet!

I’m quite impressed with the computing power in hand-held devices these days. There is more in our palms than there were in high-end machines just over a decade ago.

I just got another business idea!

Wow!

(I couldn’t sleep and it is almost 3am)

While randomly surfing the Internet and vainly googling my name, I came across some random Chinese sites. Since I don’t have a Chinese presence, I wondered what it was all about. Clicking on it turned out to be an interesting surprise. It seems that some diligent Chinese students decided to build a System-on-Chip (SoC) using my processor and ported a popular Real-Time-Operating-System (RTOS) to it! They even published an academic paper early this year to prove it. It was even reported in the local Chinese media.

So, now instead of just having the capability to boot Linux, my littlest processor that could is also capable of booting uC/OS-II (a popular commercial RTOS). I’m seriously proud of its accomplishments. Honestly, I don’t think that there is any reason that it won’t boot any other operating system as long as someone bothers to port it.

It’s just too bad that my Chinese is a little rusty. I can sort of make out what it says but I will try to get someone to do a proper translation of it for me instead. I can roughly understand that they chose my processor because it is Open Source and useful for research. There are other popular Open Source microprocessors out there and I wonder what made them choose mine. I wonder if it was because of the good real-time characteristics of my processor. I actually designed that as a feature – to provide good real-time support.

So, what have I learned from this paper – that the AEMB is now in China in addition to the US and EU; that the AEMB is capable of running an RTOS – uC/OS-II easily; that the AEMB has been implemented on Altera FPGA.

PS: I wonder if this counts as a citation. They did list me in the references section of their paper. I doubt that my present employer would care.

I’d just realised that I cannot call myself a chip-architect or microprocessor guru until I actually built one myself – from scratch! It’s not that I have not built a microprocessor before – I have and it is used in real-world products. However, I have not actually designed one of the most fundamental components of a microprocessor before – the instruction set!

A microprocessor’s instruction set is a set of predefined ones and zeros that have certain fixed patterns. These patterns are the most fundamental language that a microprocessor understands. You can consider them the basic vocabulary of a microprocessor. So, I think that until I have designed one myself, I cannot call myself a microprocessor guru.

Although AMD started off by making chips that use the Intel X86 instruction set, they eventually came up with their own extensions and finally designed their own AMD64 instruction set, that Intel was forced to copy instead. That’s demonstrating technical superiority right there – forcing your competition to imitate you.

So, I think that I will sit down one of these days and design an instruction set for my new processor – that I am keeping a little secret for now.

Wow!