February 2009 Archives

I've decided I need two blogs: one a "work" blog to talk about Verilab, verification, consulting and so on;  the other a "personal" blog to rant about everything else. In practice, I don't have a clear line between work and personal, so who knows what will end up where. But let's try, shall we. Hmm, yes, let's.

To make the split, I've duplicated the entire blog up to and including this, the fork entry. If you are reading this at http://www.darklingwood.com, you are on my personal blog. If you are reading it at http://blogs.verilab.com/tommyk, you are on my work blog. Until now, which you chose made no difference. From now on, it will.

If you're on the personal and would rather be on the work, unsubscribe from Darkling Wood via http://feeds2.feedburner.com/DarklingWood and subscribe to Tommy's Veriblog via http://feeds2.feedburner.com/TommysVeriblog. If you want the opposite, do the opposite. Or you can do both. And of course, it's not too late to come to your senses and do neither. And anyway, if you're lucky I'll be caught up by the paradox of choice, and end up never making a single post ever again.

Another one of the Verilab team has started The Blogging Thing. Will is our systems guy, but that can sometimes imply not much more than someone who makes sure your email works and who runs the backups. In practice, Will -- a functional programmer by training -- is really a systems guy on steroids. He is part of our ongoing strategy for keeping Verilab right as far as the convergence of hardware and software methodologies is concerned. If you've ever wondered if recursive make is harmful for chip builds, if you've ever struggled to filter out those bogus non-warnings from the log output of <insert your favourite EDA tool>, if you've ever wanted to jump out of a high window because your <insert your favourite EDA vendor> simulator won't work unless you first run a seventy-two-line csh script (and you're running bash), I think you'll find his stuff useful.

One of the scariest movies ever is Father Of The Bride. It's bad enough the poor dad, George Banks (played by Steve Martin) having his retirement funds sucked out of him by the sinister wedding-planning villain, Franck (Martin Shott). But the worst part is when the daughter Annie (Kimberley Williams-Paisley) announces to George that she is getting married. We see the twenty-something beauty announce the marriage, but George double-takes because all he can see is the five year old version of Annie, his precious baby girl, speaking the same words. As the father of daughters myself, I have to blink back a tear every time I'm forced to watch the damn thing. A similar, although less emotional marking of the quiet, inexorable passage of time happened to me today in Best Buy.