May 2008 Archives

Just got a press release email from www.design-reuse.com. They're appearing at DAC with "a major release of [their] IP Reuse Enterprise Platform". I wish them well; I really do. But I couldn't help recall a story by Jamie Zawinski in which he infamously (or maybe just famously) said, of Groupware:

"Jesus Mother of Fuck, what are you thinking! Do not strap the 'Groupware' albatross around your neck! That's what killed Netscape, are you insane?"

Well, for "Groupware" read "IP Reuse Platforms".

Let's do an experiment.

I'm going to ask you to close your eyes. (Not yet, or you won't be able to read the next bit!) OK, you'll close your eyes and focus your attention on your hands for a second or two. Don't move them, or wiggle your fingers; just focus your attention on them. After that, and still keeping your eyes closed, you'll move your attention to your shins. Again, a few seconds of focus. Ready? Go ahead.

OK, done? Now, which felt bigger - your hands or your shins? If you answered "shins", please see a doctor. Otherwise, that effect - the feeling that your hands are bigger than your shins - is due to the fact that your brain "sees" your body differently from the way it appears to our eyes. And if we were to build a physical representation of that brain's-view of the body, we'd get the grotesque little figure known as a Cortical Homunculus.

The size of each part of the distorted body of the Cortical Homunculus represents the number and sensitivity of nerves at that part. The Homunculus is what we'd look like to everyone else if we looked the way we felt. But of course, we don't look like that at all.

Today is Memorial Day in the US. Verilab Inc (Texas) observes today as a holiday, along with six other days. Verilab GmbH (Germany) and Verilab Ltd (Scotland), however, do not. GmbH, on the other hand, has between eleven and thirteen holidays, depending on the year. Ltd has eight. Current base vacation levels are: 17 for the US (total holidays plus vacation is therefore 25), 26 for the UK (total of 34), and 30 for Germany (total of 41 to 43). The US has six "sick" days; by contrast our European sites have no specified limit on how often you can be sick. And each of the governments of the regions all have different rules about what someone must or must be able to do with "untaken" time off. Within the US, each state has rules about that. The one thing that is common to all of them is that the time we're talking about - vacation and holiday - is paid time off.

It is, to be honest, a pain in the elbow.

In "Be Realistic. Demand the Impossible", a commenter argues that in pushing free software, Richard Stallman was really just pushing his own ego by "...framing the narrative in terms of 'freedom'"

I don't know if Stallman was actually doing that or not, but I'm firmly of the view that his underlying point - that freedom is The Point -- is correct.

DAC (Design Autotomation Conference) is the Main Event in our field. It hasn't quite regained the full spectacle of the glory years of the pre-NASDAQ bubble burst, but it's still the key conference for VLSI design tools and technologies.

Already, the main conference hotel looks full, and bloggers are noting interest. Harry the ASIC guy appears to be going; as does John over at his Semi-Blog. At Verilab, we'll be sending our own SWAT team. I'll be there, along with JL and David Robinson to name but two. JL will be presenting on Monday at the RealIntent booth. And David will be talking about verification planning at the Novas booth.

Please don't hesitate to say hi if you see me or any of the team there. Verilab is, as always, looking for very smart/opinionated/ambitious/energetic/enthusiastic engineers and consultants to join our international team.

"Don't let your employees blog. And if they do anyway, don't admit it to anyone. And make sure they post a disclaimer. Otherwise, one of them will give away all your company secrets; another will commit libel and drop you in a lawsuit; and if you're really unlucky, and you're not an American, you'll end up in G'tmo. And your skin will turn green."

OK, that maybe exaggerates the warnings I got when looking into the idea of corporate blogging, but not by much. Here, however, is what I did ponder as I discussed the pros and cons of blogging with one of Verilab's consultants, JL Gray, author of Cool Verification.

It took me about half an hour to set up the Verilab Ltd corporation in the UK. I popped into the lawyer's office, picked a name, and did the stuff. We just bought an off-the-shelf pre-formed company (CrestEdge I think it was called), and renamed it. Verilab Inc, in Texas, took a wee bit longer - a month - but only because I was based in Scotland at the time. But for Verilab GmbH in Munich? Thirteen months. That's just over a year from start to finish, to hack my way through rules, and notarizations, and peculiar customs and conventions. And I can't deny that, given that lots of those peculiarities persist after formation, I sometimes wonder why I bothered.

Paul Graham has just come out with another thought-provoking essay, this time on dealing with distraction and its ugly child, procrastination. I have had a lot of experience with those things over the years, especially as I moved from being an engineer to being a company founder and then a company runner.

Hands-on engineering used to be my daily work. And one of the fond memories I have of that is focus; the ability to concentrate on one specific problem for hours at a time, until it was solved. It was like having missile lock. In the best moments of flow, you could have hit me on the head with a brick, and the chances are I'd have thought it was a mere gnat and absent-mindedly (because my mind was on the problem) slapped it away.

But now I'm a CEO, and so as I mentioned recently in an interview my work is pretty much to make sure that everything that needs done, gets done. Of course I don't actually do it all myself, but my todo list has changed from that of my engineering days where it had a few large tasks, to having a large number of small ones.

The first post's the hardest I'm told. Apart from the second one, and the one after that. And of course the next one again is even tougher. Or so, as I say, I'm told. In fact, following that inverted Zeno-esque logic, the first post is actually the easiest. So let's get on with it.

I run an international consulting firm, Verilab. We specialize in a particular (and particularly difficult and critical) chunk of the design of complex integrated circuits; functional verification. In a sense, what we do is a bit like what a proof-reader does for a publisher. We check a pre-manufacturing version of a thing, prior to millions of copies of it being produced at great expense.

The difference between us and a proof-reader is, however, that our pre-manufactured thing is actually a software program vastly more complex than any book draft; the cost of turning that software program into actual microchips is much, much higher (running to hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars) than the cost of printing copies of the next John Grisham; and so the "Cost of Failure" - if a silicon "spelling mistake" gets past our checking - is enormous. As a result, what we do in our "proof checking" is actually a major piece of engineering in its own right. My teams combine years of experience in the design of both hardware and software and use that to construct highly sophisticated software programs to check that the main software program (the one from which the chips will be built) actually does what the original writers of that original software intended.

But while that's the heart of Verilab's work, and I will often post about that aspect, it's not really what this blog is about. Rather it's about the day to day rewards and challenges of being a small, high grade professional services firm. It's about being surrounded by very smart dudes and seeing clients wowed as my teams solve very hard problems; and it's about herding cats. It's about the excitement of international expansion; and about how the governments of both the US and Europe appear to hate business and want it to die. And it's about bootstrapping a company, and questions as diverse as, "To VC or not to VC?", "Is it possible to design a bonus scheme without using differential equations?", "Excuse me but Germans expect how many vacation days!!?" and "Who is Sarbane? And why should I care about his Oxley?".

And finally, why "Darkling Wood"? It's a snippet from Dante's Inferno. At the risk of turning the Florentine poet in his grave, I'll take this rendering of a piece of Canto 1:

"In the middle of life's journey I found myself in a darkling wood,..."

Because apart from all of the above, this blog is about me, and my view of things from the "mid-point of life", that peculiarly poignant platform known as 40-something. Far enough from birth to have gathered data points about the world and our reactions to it; far enough from death (we hope) to be able to put that data to some use; life does, again I am told, begin in the Darkling Wood.