recommends Apple + eliminate software

It’s been a while I was offline and I’ll still be offline for another one or two months.

When Apple launched iPad, I saw a couple of blog posts from opensource software developers including from fedora contributors and this talking ill about Apple’s product. One thing I can’t understand is that it’s an Apple’s product (hardware) let them add whatever they want. If you don’t like it, don’t buy the hardware and wait till someone can create a real opensource hardware made with opensource software which FEL is providing.

Apple has gained my respect due to the fact they respect microelectronic engineers. Their hiring and their products do the talking. Their acquisition of PA Semi has enabled them developed their A4 processor in-house (so claimed many websites). This is what makes them the so-called “real men”. They designed their own hardware for their software.

Secondly, I now recommend itunes instead of any media player since it is the only player which provides free weekly one-hour/two hours long non-stop progressive trance music from at least 7 outstanding DJs (AvB,PvD,Kyau&Albert,Solarstone,A&B… and even JohnDigweed). Who promotes progressive trance music gets my support

After the Toyota recall scandal, there are rumours in France where Field Application Engineers are now facing demands from customers who wish to reduce software from their products. In other words, eliminate the software load and implement it physically as hardware. Other rumours in Germany are pointing fingers to potential risk in FPGA-based products which are developed by software engineers. Something that I have already seen in Belgium. To sum up, Verification is now the demand. No witchcraft behind it, since there is already a growing interest for SystemVerilog.

Filed under: Uncategorized, taste

Don’t say No cuesheet support to Trance Music !

Unlike many people, I love Trance music and not only I like it but it’s the only type of music I can listen anywhere and anytime, while sleeping, while working 10 or more hours straight on complex VHDL/Verilog designs, … and still be productive.

However Amarok (the player I advised people to use at that time) developers dropped Cuesheet support since they move towards the 2.0 branch. Some of the other trance addicts have already filed RFE, but now nearly two years already still the 2.* series is pretty useless to be proud of.

• no cuesheet support.
• no ipod support.
• cover fetching feature broken.
• text on widgets overlap on the gui like spaghetti.

I have some complex Verilog designs to complete and yet to interface with analog. These lack of features on media players are not good for my productivity and neither can I vote the “tunes of the week” in the Trance community.

Since I have some friends who are DJs, I receive their two hours livesets straight from the studio along with the cuesheet (nowadays I am using the IPOD as a USB stick to such transfer).

I had to dual both Centos-5 and Fedora-12 so that I can still use Amarok 1.4 for my work. But soon the lack of software compatibilities between CentOS-5 and Fedora-12, I decided dual boot is not making me productive.

For about two months now, I’ve been experimenting many music players, both opensource and proprietary. The one which matches most of my needs was Rhythmbox. The latter was. in the past, among the first software to yum remove after a clean install. I’m impressed with Rhythmbox autosupport for cover transfer while transferring music from Rhythmbox to my IPOD nano. The GUI of Rhythmbox is not WOW, but at least it’s far more stable than that of Amarok 2 spagettis.

I spent days looking for cuesheet support or related plugins online. For some reason people out there use cuesheet to split last mp3s only. But why ? In the Trance Community a DJ releases a set, every week one will hear a new remix of the same music. Splitting also refers to the zero offset issues most media players suffer and one must manually rename all the remixes by hand. Doesn’t it defeat the purpose? I’ve even decided to port that on Rhythmbox. But python, oh dear after one week, I decided that it was too software for me to play with. Hence the quickest way for me to get cuesheet support and start playing with Verilog and also learn the new features of the VHDL IEEE standard 1076-2008, was to write a simple Tk script coupled with a basic python script to interface with DBUS.

For the time being, these scripts do the basic stuffs.

• Read the cuesheet file of the mp3 being played on rhythmbox
• List all the tunes on a tktable
• Allow double clicks to switch tunes within the same mp3
• On track change, restart Tcl/Tk. This could be automated if I find time. But since each mp3 plays for about 2hours non-stop, restarting the script doesn’t affect much.

$ wish cuesheet.tcl

If one likes amarok, I believe, tuning the python script one can get this cuesheet support on amarok too.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Don’t read this !!! Lack of knowledge in the field

OSNews just posted this blog post about Reflections on the hardware industry . To me it is someone who just want to be on a well-known news site article.

The author of the article says:
“As a chip maker, you first and foremost concern should be to sell as many units as possible. You don’t care what kind of software your customers use. You don’t care where they get their software from, or what development methodology they use.”

EDA Vendors and even chip makers CARE which kind of software their customers use and they do care about the development methodology their customers use. !!! DO NOT CONSIDER EDA VENDORS STUPID !

The simple real life proof is : whenever you order samples from local distributors of any chip maker, the local distributor will ask you at least the following questions:

• what is the reason you choose this set of EDA tools ?
• why or how have you selected this package ?
• …

Every time I’ve been asked this question, I know he/she is trying to learn more about my design methodology and which tools I am using and if I’m using a competitor’s tool they will react right away. Software of chip makers is not like firefox in a way that you just use it, but these software contains confidential parameters of the chips such as capacitance, voltage, design of the pins, package, heat flow,… These software are most of the time free such as LTSpice, QuartusII, ISE,… but not opensource. The reason behind this is that chipmaker is not only the one in business, but a long chain of marketing, distributors, designer team, …. By keeping their tools free, they attract the users to evaluate their chips and not giving it under an opensource license, they protect that chain from the designer to the local distributor together with the competitors.

Being an opensource contributor to both EDA world and software world, I believe this blog post is not the right way to approach the hardware industry as the word is not spread to the chipmakers, but to eyes only. A more professional and long term approach would be wise. The blog post also does NOT reflect the current financial crisis the hardware industry is facing. I would say this blog post was written in december 2007 and not in 2009.

Filed under: Uncategorized

I’m in the top 20 fedora packagers owners

Someone ping’ed me on IRC to share that I’m in the top 20 fedora packagers owners with 59 packages today. Wow, that’s quite a shock.

By the way, those figures don’t reflect much from my point of view, since the objective is to achieve multiple electronic design flows and methodologies. If you are following the current industry trend, C-Synthesis has attracted a fair number of heads. That reminds me : I have to review verilator and shape perl-SystemPerl.

I still have a few packages under review. If you got nothing to do before FOSDEM, do review my pending package requests

Filed under: Uncategorized

Opensource software community loses focus easily

The main problem with opensource software community is that it loses focus to easily.

Most of the time, outstanding opensource leaders forget their real roadmaps and got distracted by minor discussions and politics. It is sad because this is retaining progress in getting things done.

It is also the case for the rest of the opensource software contributors. Last night, I saw someone talking how people can benefit from “free and opensource software”.

After 10 minutes, explaining the achievements made by “free and opensource software”, the speaker had a killer question from the audience:
“Am I contributing to the community if I use free software?”

The speaker started explaining free is not like the gnu free. The audience got confused. Then, he explained that there is a difference between “free software”, “opensource software” and “free and opensource software”. Several questions popped in and the presentation got deviated from the actual theme the “how”. A good presentation got spoiled and at the end of this 3 hours presentation, what the audience has retained:

• free is complicated.
• they didn’t learn much from what they already knew.
• software is not meant to seat on the computer, but is a tool to realise something.

I wasted my night eventually, which I would better spend reading my RSS feeds or viewing webcasts from Altera and Lattice.

The other killer question is “Is opensource software more important than opensource content ?”. My personal experience told me that even great opensource leaders failed to answer it.

Filed under: Uncategorized

FEL: magic updated and 3 new packages

perl-Hardware-Vhdl-Tidy, perl-Hardware-Verilog-Parser, perl-Verilog have been pushed as new package for fedora repositories.

magic was updated to 7.5.169.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Fedora Electronic Lab 8 RC3

Fedora Electronic Lab 8 Release Candidate 3 has been released on the torrent site (http://torrent.fedoraproject.org).

Happy testing.

The abstract and the flyer for Fedora Electronic Lab are ready. Fill free to pass it over to your friends.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Fedora Everywhere

Le merveilleux quartier de Greenwitch village, à New York
Photo de Guillaume Assens.

Filed under: Uncategorized

A glimpse of KDE4′s marble on Fedora

Since Moonshine was released, it was shipping marble already. I’ve blogged about it before. Well there is another release Sladibadfast (0.4) this weekend and the latter will be in your updates soon.

yum install marble

Marble is a generic geographical map widget that is meant to be used by KDE4 applications. It shows the earth as a sphere but doesn’t make use of any hardware acceleration (No OpenGL). So although it might look similar to professional applications like Google Earth or Nasa World Wind it’s rather meant to be a small light weight multi purpose widget.

Marble 0.4 is not feature complete with regard to the aim of providing a fully featured Atlas. But it should be very stable and is aimed for everyday usage already for those people where Marble suits the needs already.

Marble 0.4 hasn’t got the GSoC 2007 features enabled yet. It will be the primary aim of Marble 0.5 to have the work of the Google Summer of Code 2007 students very well integrated, enabled and exposed to the user.

Please also take note that Marble already comes with its own Marble library. This library is still in development and while it’s pretty mature already it’s certainly to early to put the library into it’s own package to be offered for development in third party applications. The Qt version of Marble doesn’t offer translations and updated documentation yet. This will be enabled later on in an extra release.

You are welcome to join discussions on the mailing list marble-devel [AT] kde DOT org.

Marble sets up on the first launch. This should take a few seconds.

If you are planning to go to Frankfurt(am Main),Germany from Strasbourg, France or vice-versa, there are 2 common journeys you will make by train:
- Strasbourg -> Karlsruhe -> Mannheim -> Frankfurt
- Strasbourg -> Offenburg -> Karlsruhe -> Mannheim -> Frankfurt

Stupid as I am, I don’t know how far is Frankfurt from Strasbourg and which of the above journeys is shorter.

What shall I do ? Sit down and scream as loud as I can ? NO, marble will help
Right click on the city “Strasbourg” and use the “Add Measure Point”. Automatically the distance is calculated.

The fedora version of marble is built against gpsd, so you will have gpsd support on marble.
Lars Aronsson made a trip to Linköping. His .gpx file can be downloaded from here.
The release 0.4 doesn’t have “file view” and “current location” enabled by default as GPS is not intended for everyday use yet. But if you want to try them out anyway by enabling the two tabs via the command line:

marble –enableFileView –enableCurrentLocation

Open the file mjolby.gpx with marble. Use the Navigation tab and search “Linköping”. You can zoom in for more details.

Marble comes already with basic Google Earth KML file support. For the worldwide KDE revolution, KDE contributors registered themselves to be listed on Marble.

Download Rainer’s fresh KDE Community KML file and open it with marble. Do zoom in on marble to see the contents of the file.

There are 2 youtube videos that might be interesting to watch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL6isDOFCFU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxOS37RIEcY&eurl=

Filed under: Uncategorized

Feature 8: Fedora Electronic Lab

During the FESCo Meeting, today,Fedora Electronic Lab was voted and approved as a Feature for F8.

Since F7 development cycle new opensource tools were introduced for electronic engineering. However it was too late to make it a feature for Moonshine at that time. A few months later, I’ve been focusing primarily on the VLSI(Very Large Scale Integration, about 10⁶ to 10⁷ transistors per chip) field and tried to ensure that one _can_ complete a design flow. If we don’t have at least a complete design flow, there’s no use for a user to use bits of it as it will cost him/her time and money.

So as you might have guess, these simulators should be mature and they are. Magic and alliance are around for more than 10 years. Now with Alliance VLSI CAD, ngspice, magic and irsim,…, one can create and simulates his/her own chip on Fedora and asks a particular foundry to create it in real life.

Those tools are used worldwide by more than 250 universities. Surely these VLSI tools are not for my mother, nor my neighbour but targeted for VLSI/ASIC students and hobbyists for educational purposes.

However gEDA/gaf, pcb, gerbv, kicad do also share the cake. gEDA/gaf is actively developed and its community is growing. I’ve seen more and more activity from Fedora users on the geda-users mailing list, showing a demand for Electronic Simulation packages in the Fedora World.

The idea behind the Fedora’s Electronic Laboratory is to provide a complete electronic laboratory setup with reliable open source design tools in order to meet one’s requirements to keep one in pace with current technological race. This Electronic Laboratory can either be deployed by:

yum or

a custom Fedora spin

When I introduced this Electronic Lab idea to the mailing list, many suggested to build a custom spin for Fedora Electronic Lab. So most probably we will see a special spin for that.

The Fedora’s Electronic Laboratory includes design tools for

Analog/Digital Simulation

Spice Simulation

Hardware Development (VHDL,Verilog)- Modeling, Designing, Simulation, Synthesis, Verification and Documentation

VLSI (layout, schematics, synthesis, Finite State Machines…)

Micro Controller (µC) Programming

Embedded Systems Development

Key Highlights of this Electronic Lab

A complete VLSI Simulation Kit Electronic Engineering ensuring Interoperability.

Interoperability between Hardware Description Languages

Interoperability between opensource Layout Editors which Fedora is shipping (alliance, magic, toped)

Open source standard cell libraries at disposal – sxlib standard cell library description (Alliance)
We are in contact with Graham Petley (author of vsclib, wsclib, vxlib, vgalib and rgalib shipped with pharosc). We are seeking to work with him to make pharosc more distribution independent and to provide testing grounds.

Filed under: Uncategorized