Sybreon Ones Nought

Okay, it’s been a while since I stopped writing temporarily. I think that I the short hiatus from blogging was a good one. I can now return to writing about totally random and impersonal stuff like I used to. So, I think that I will kick things off by talking about recent developments on the aeMB processor.

A French company had decided to take the aeMB and build a modular routing platform around it. The platform is intended to work as a network router that can be used for mesh Wi-Fi networks, as an alternative to ISPs home gateways, and as a development platform for SoC projects. They have not reported any bugs and have instead been reporting a string of successes with the aeMB.

Firstly, on the hardware front. As a result of using my processor, they were able to reduce their total resource consumption. They previously used a Microblaze based platform that consumed about 67% of the total FPGA resources but by building an equivalent platform around the aeMB, they ended up only using about 40% of the FPGA resources. This is a very significant savings which gives them plenty of room for expansion.

In fact the US company that chose to use the aeMB at the heart of their platform, also chose it because of its small size and performance. This was done after comparing it with offerings from other people. The small size comes from the fact that care was taken while designing it to differentiate the aeMB from other embedded processors by being small and efficient instead of being a raw number cruncher.

Next, on the software front. The French company had previously used Linux on their platform and they have reported success with running Linux on the aeMB. Put differently, the aeMB is capable of booting Linux, today! Although I have always been confident that the aeMB can run Linux, I have never actually tried it before as none of the other users have needed to use Linux in their applications.

This has always been a sticking point at my side and has always stayed on my long TODO list. However, this French company has just saved me a tonne of time by actually proving that Linux works on it. They are planning to run OpenWRT on the aeMB, which is a Linux distribution originally made for Linksys routers but is now available on a variety of platforms.

Finally, on the enhancement front, everyone wants something different. This means that the TODO list is just getting longer and longer. The US people want to have a faster algorithm performance while the French people want to have better memory protection and some other people have asked for hardware debugging support.

For the moment, I don’t really have the time to actually work on any of the enhancements. So, I will just continue to let them use it as is, and work out any existing bugs. Then, at some point in the future, I will definitely find ways to add in all those things. At that time, it would become a full featured high performance embedded processor.

Both the US and French companies would like to see their enhancements built in and have offered to help in whatever way they can. I think that I will take them up on their offers at some point in the future. I just want to grow the aeMB thoughtfully and not jump into any random decisions on where to take it. Maybe it’s time that I published a road map and solicit some feedback on it.

It is evident that I am not fit to do anything right now, particularly blogging. So, until further notice, this blog is currently suspended.

I’m sorry for being an idiot and writing about things that I should not have written. Although I have taken it off, what is done cannot be undone. I hope that the person who was slighted, will accept my sincerest apologies. I will understand it if we never speak again. I can only plead temporary insanity and that is a lame excuse, I know. Once again, accept my humblest apologies for lashing out.

My question was simple enough and I was perfectly prepared for a no or a yes but what I got instead was an ambiguous answer that leaves more questions than it answers. I had sent my question and her reply to 3 different people who came back with 4 different interpretations. Plus mine, that gives at least 5 possible interpretations. That’s just how ambiguous the answer is that I have no idea what to do next.

She is a close friend and wishes to continue to be one. However, I don’t understand how she could give me such an answer knowing full well all the previous experiences that I have had. Getting an ambiguous answer like the one she gave me just hurts the hell out of me. Coming from someone who knows better than to do that just pains me even more.

While I would like to continue to be close friends, how does one continue to be close friends with someone who has knowingly inflicted so much hurt and pain?

Yesterday was a very bad day for me, having lost my entire Tier 1 support network in a day. This is not a good time to lose my support network but I guess that it is the price that I pay for being the foolish idiot that I am.

Anyway, I mentioned at the beginning that I will not turn this blog into the emotional basket case that the previous one was and I intend to keep it that way. This one is going to be kept clean. Your regular programming will return very soon.

A friend once told me that I am a diva, in the sense that the way I do things is often very dramatic. Well, my life has always been a very dramatic one, regardless of what it is that I do or not do. So it was, with recent events. I needed to ask this person how she felt about me, about how ngam key she felt we were.

First, I wanted to ask her the question face-to-face so I was hoping to meet up with her on a certain weekend. However, she fell sick and so we were unable to meet up and I was unable to ask her the question face-to-face.

Next, I decided to send her a box of tasty hand made Belgian chocolates and ask the question in the gift message. The delivery tracking code says that the chocolates were delivered but for some reason, the chocolates decided to take a walk as she did not receive them even after a week.

So, I decided to just ask her directly the next time I saw her online. Then, the very next day, I got an email from her saying that her computer had crashed and she cannot get online. I knew then that the gods must be playing games with me. Once is chance, twice is coincidence and thrice is a conspiracy.

Then, I decided to send her another gift with the same message, this time a rose in a vase hugged by a bear. This was going to be last attempt and if this gift went missing again, I would have to revert to some other more subversive means of getting the message across.

However, she actually ended up receiving both the gifts in the end. For some reason, the chocolates had decided to make their way to her after all, just a day before the other one was delivered. I certainly hope that the chocolates had not gone bad after wandering around town for more than a week.

Anyway, some of you must be wondering why I just didn’t pick up the phone and ask her directly on the phone.

I am terrible on the phone as I rarely ever use it for communication (my friends will know this). My primary means of communication is face-to-face and online. I can neither convey nor pick up on emotions through the phone. It is always my last choice of communication for these kinds of things.

For some reason, things like this always happen to me and a day hardly ever goes by without something interesting happening in my life. Not quite sure yet if this is a good or bad thing.

I have been gradually building up a collection of Korean film DVDs at home. I have become so used to buying original DVDs while I was in the UK that I have decided to steer clear of pirated products back at home. Korean originals range in price from about RM17 (£2.60) to about RM40 (£6.15). So, they are amongst the more affordable originals and Korean cinema is perfectly watchable.

I watched this film today about a race horse and his jockey. It’s called Lump of Sugar. On the surface, it is just another sad story about horse racing and horse trading. At a slightly deeper level, it is about the relationship and love between a girl and a horse. At an even deeper level, it is about living with humility and dying with dignity. Going further, it is a classic film about love and loss. The story itself was fairly straightforward and predictable throughout. However, as a result of the acting, I was literally driven to tears at the end.

A movie needs to be fairly good to evoke any sort of emotional response from me. Because of the weirdness in how my brain works, most films end up as an exercise in film making for me. When I watch a film, I am constantly analysing it for storyline errors and how the elements were synthesised into the final scene. I don’t do this actively but it is already trained as a natural response from me to any sort of stimuli. I am just weird that way.

I am beginning to learn which Korean film companies produce better films and which ones are sub standard. I am also learning which local distributor tends to bring in the more famous films and which ones bring in the less popular ones. All this will help me in selecting future Korean films to add to my collection. Now, if I could only find a copy of The Classic on the shelf somewhere. That was another film that drove me to tears when I watched it with a housemate of mine several years ago.

Anyway, here is the trailer for a Lump of Sugar (it’s in Korean!):

I thought about writing this entry after replying an earlier comment. I am not a normal person by any measure. Granted, everyone is a unique individual but I am also weird on so many levels all stemming from the way that my brain works. An example of my weirdness is exemplified by the simple request for a spoonful of rice.

I can recall the very event that happened while I was having dinner with a few other friends at a Chinese restaurant in Cambridge. It was the Shanghai Family Restaurant, which is one of the two Chinese restaurants with edible Chinese food in Cambridge. It has the most wonderful of all Chinese dishes in this world on its menu: pig’s leg (or hand – depending on how you look at it).

Anyway, I digress. A few friends and I were happily having dinner when the time came for our second helping of rice. For some reason, probably because the rice bowl was next to me, I was scooping the rice. This was when my friend asked for just a spoonful of rice. I immediately stopped and looked rather stunned and confused because I did not know how much a spoonful of rice was. Eventually, someone else took the spoon out of my hand and did the scooping instead.

I have to reiterate that I was neither pretending nor was I doing it as some sort of ploy. However, I honestly did not know how to scoop a spoonful of rice as I did not know how much rice that entailed. I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be exactly a spoonful of rice filled to the top, or an overflowing mountain of rice, or a specific number of grains, weight or volume of rice.

A lot of people do not understand how I could come to think like this. I have to attribute it to the fact that I am used to dealing in the unambiguous world of computer programming and hardware design. In this line of work, everything is meticulously defined and spelled out to the minutest detail. You are unlikely to know how far we’ll actually go to define things, so I will use a well known anecdote to illustrate it.

A computer science professor walks into an introductory programming class with enough material for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He then asked the class for instructions on how to make it. It went as follows:

1. Put the peanut butter on the slice of bread.
   He held the jar over the slice of bread and started to shake the jar.
2. No, you take the knife and use it to spread the peanut jelly.
   He started to grab the knife by the blade end.
3. No, grab the knife by the other end.
   This time he holds the knife correctly.
4. Spread the peanut butter on the slice of bread.
   He starts to put the peanut butter on the edges of the bread.

This went on in minute detail until it dawned on the students that in everyday speech, we leave a lot out assuming that everyone knows what we are talking about. The students got an understanding of how we must communicate with computers.

People in my line, will have little problem with analysis and synthesis because we go through them all the time. For someone like me, who lives and breathes computers, I go through these processes in almost everything, not just when it comes to computer work. So, when I receive a request for a spoonful of rice, it will stump me thoroughly because the term “spoonful” is ill defined.

PS: There is now a “wall” on the right sidebar and you can leave any messages that you feel like shouting out! Of course, leave comments on the relevant blog entries.