Fabrizio Fazzino's Blog

Nuclear plants around Bristol

2011-03-28T00:13:00.000+01:00

Some days ago my sister told me that I shouldn't be happy to have four nuclear plants in my area.

I have just checked, as usual on Wikipedia, and apparently this is exactly what this map says:

Then I followed the links to the four nuclear power stations and I found that:

Berkeley has been decommissioned between 1989 and 2001
Oldbury has one reactor that will be closed in June 2011 and another one in 2012
Hinkley Point A has been decommissioned in year 2000
Hinkley Point B should be closed in year 2016

So the only long-term harm could come from Hinkley Point B, if it will not be closed in 2016; or from a new "Hinkley Point C" if this will be actually built.

Anyway I have also checked the air distance between Hinkley Point and my current house and it's more than 30 miles, a distance which is usually be considered quite safe... especially in countries which do not experience strong Earthquakes.

Missing SATA connectors...

2010-09-14T18:10:00.000+01:00

Everybody who knows me, also knows that I am extremely lucky.

Today I was going to assemble a Micro ATX computer to be used at home, since the old one (the Soltek Qbic) died some months ago and I had to use only the notebook (using which I miss my 10K rpm WD Raptor).

The mobo was an ASRock P4i65G, but during the assembly at a certain point I had to stop because I was unable to connect the SATA cable... because the connectors are missing!

As you can see there are just some straight pins on the PCB board and it is impossible to connect a SATA cable on them:

Obviously if you check the official picture from the ASRock website the connectors should be there! This picture (rotated and with the red circle added by me) is taken from the official page of the mobo:

So I'm going to ask for a replacement from Amazon, and keep fingers crossed.

Comparison Table for Relocation from Italy

2010-09-04T16:00:00.000+01:00

I recently had to evaluate pros and cons about moving from Italy to another country, and I ended up compiling the following table:

Obviously the table is very subjective, so I have to explain some items and cite some sources.

European Union and the Euro Currency are quite obvious.

The Metric System is used in Europe, but even if both Ireland and the UK switched to this system, it seems that you can live in Ireland using it only, but that in the UK and Canada the Imperial Units are still in widespread use. Furthermore, in the States you will have to learn the Customary System...

This is the list of countries where English is an official language.

This is a map of the world with RHD (Right-Hand Drive) countries and LHD (Left-Hand Drive) contries in different colors:

About quakes, I've been talking about seismic risk in a previous post; now I just want to make clear that I'm marking the States as "dangerous" since the only State I could relocate to is California, that is known to be waiting for the Big One.

About queens and kings someone could argue that they are way better than some prime minister, but I decided to include this row anyway...

About guns and rifles freely available at the grocery shops (Tesco or Wal-Mart or your preferred ones) it's easy to understand that I do not agree (at all) with this degree of freedom.

And finally, I listed the countries officially taking part in the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (as you can see, officially Spain has been present for some months and Canada is absent).

This post has no conclusion: I could only note that the countries with the best non-weighted scores are France and Ireland.

Italy's growth

2010-09-04T10:09:00.000+01:00

I recently discovered from a book written by Charles Young that in the years from 2001 to 2009 the GDP per capita in Italy decreased, and that it can't be due only to the economic downturn since only Zimbabwe, Haiti and Ivory Coast performed worse in the whole planet.

This first chart, taken from the book, shows how bad Italy did compared with the rest of Europe:

And this second chart shows that Italy is the only listed country for which the per capita GDP decreased (in blue bar) from 2001 to 2009:

In the same chart the green circle shows also how the same per capita GDP used to increase in the previous 8 years (i.e. from 1993 to 2001).

World Map of Seismic Risk

2010-06-26T06:09:00.000+01:00

Should one have the ability to relocate anywhere in the world, I would suggest looking at the following map first, and picking up a white or green region (currently I live in a yellow/orange area and it is clearly unsafe, unless you are in California or Japan):

Where is Springfield?

2010-06-22T00:41:00.002+01:00

Having a 4-years-old daughter who is already a fan of the Simpsons (and especially of Maggie) I recently noticed that in The Movie they say that their hometown Springfield "borders Ohio, Nevada, Maine and Kentucky".

I am not American and so I do not have a clear idea about the geographical location of all the 50 States: should they have said Massachussets or Florida or California it was much easier also for me, but I had no idea about Ohio, Nevada, Maine and Kentucky.

So I had to check a map, and I realized that...

...there are no borders that join them! Only Ohio and Kentucky are neighbours, but Maine is at the top North-Eastern corner and Nevada is in the Far West...

So I also discovered that Simpsons' Springfield is a fictional city and that this name has been chosen because it is a very common place-name, especially in the United States: the full list is here... please note that in USA there are more than 30 cities with this name, and more than 10 are in the UK!

Google Merchandise

2010-06-18T10:03:00.007+01:00

If you're looking for Google corporate merchandise then the Google Store is what you are looking for.

There's plenty of items (the main categories are Accessories, Fun, Kids, Office, Wearables and Doodles), just have a look and you'll find something that you can't really miss!

Furthermore, the European e-commerce store is managed by Merchandise Mania, a reliable company that will ship items immediately and that will solve any problem you may experience with shipping (no, I don't get money for this advertising but I want to publicly thank "Dave" for his helpful solution!).

Pictured below are some items that I already have:

Beware!

2010-05-06T11:31:00.006+01:00

I recently found this funny sign in front of Buckingham Palace:

If you still don't see why I find it funny, please read and understand it first. Then look at how they have chained it to the electricity pole: with a chain and a padlock! This means that "thieves" may have already stolen some similar signs in the past...

Policemen beware! :)

New OpenSPARC-based Project

2010-04-09T14:47:00.005+01:00

Some days ago I've published on the home page of Simply RISC an article written by Dmitry Rozhdestvenskiy in which he explained how he started from Simply RISC's S1 Core and then created a new OpenSPARC-based project able to run the Linux kernel 2.6.

The new project is hosted on OpenCores, but I'm receiving lots of email from people who had difficulties downloading it directly from this website.

If the "Download" link on OpenCores doesn't work, a single-line shell command will do all the work for you:

svn co http://opencores.org/ocsvn/sparc64soc/sparc64soc/trunk

Obviously in order to execute it you will need Subversion installed on your machine and an account created on OpenCores, since it will prompt for username and password.

The London Salary Calculator

2010-02-28T08:16:00.004Z

Yesterday I found some spare minutes to write a simple Java 6 application (just a few lines of code). It will just tell you how much you will "take home" given a base salary for a job in London in the range 40K to 100K.

You may download the JAR file from here; you need Java 6 JRE installed to run it onto your preferred Operating System, then right-click the JAR file to select to open it using the JRE (that file extension may be associated with some archive manager on your system). Please note that the source file (just one) is included in the archive.

If you don't want to try it (it's completely useless if you don't intend to look for a job in London and you are not going to rent a house for 1250 GBP per month!) then you may just watch this screenshot to see how it looks like:

Intel buys MIPS

2010-01-15T08:51:00.004Z

The title of this post is intentionally provocatory, and should be read as "Will Intel acquire MIPS? If I was Intel, I would".

There is some speculation around the fact that Intel could try to acquire one of the two leading FPGA companies: a 30 percent premium would put Altera at approximately $8.5 billion and Xilinx at $8.7 billion.

But if I was at Intel, I would definitively try to enter again the embedded (and mobile) RISC market, where Intel was already years ago with the ARM-based XScale line of products that was then sold to Marvell in 2006.

That move stopped the flow of royalties from Intel to ARM, but the ARM architecture and microarchitecture still have a huge base of licensees due to the advantage of a minimal power consumption required by mobile devices, against with x86 cannot (still) compete.

Just to provide some numbers: the power consumption of a generic ARM core is around 300 mW, while the lowest power Atom is around ten times that.

And the market shows that a lot of microprocessors for mobile phones will be sold over the next few years.

Then, could Intel buy ARM now? The market capitalization of ARM Holdings is around 4 billions, and that's still a huge amount of money even for Intel.

Why don't buy MIPS instead? Their shares declined from a maximum (in year 2000) of 80$ to just 4$, so the market capitalization of MIPS Technologies is just around 200 millions, and this would be a very cheap purchase for the Intel giant.

And finally consider that currently MIPS lacks a CEO; and it wouldn't ever need one if it becomes a group inside Intel Corp.

White Britain

2010-01-08T16:03:00.006Z

If you missed the terrific picture of Great Britain under the snow taken by a NASA satellite, just click the picture to go the official one:

Directions from Bristol to Timbuktu

2009-11-12T11:56:00.002Z

If you plan to drive your car from Bristol to Timbuktu you will get the correct directions, according to this funny article published on ThisIsBristol (online edition of the Evening Post daily newspaper):

Install GCC 3.4 on Ubuntu 9.10

2009-11-11T14:18:00.008Z

It seems that Karmic Koala, the last version of Ubuntu, has dropped support for versions of GCC/G++ prior to version 4.1.

Here is a quick script to add GCC and G++ 3.4 from the repository of the previous version:

mkdir DELEME &&

cd DELEME &&

wget http://ge.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/gcc-3.4/libstdc++6-dev_3.4.6-6ubuntu3_i386.deb &&

wget http://ge.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/gcc-3.4/cpp-3.4_3.4.6-8ubuntu2_i386.deb &&

wget http://ge.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/gcc-3.4/gcc-3.4_3.4.6-8ubuntu2_i386.deb &&

wget http://ge.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/gcc-3.4/gcc-3.4-base_3.4.6-8ubuntu2_i386.deb &&

wget http://ge.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/gcc-3.4/g++-3.4_3.4.6-6ubuntu3_i386.deb &&

sudo dpkg -i *.deb &&

cd .. &&

rm -rf DELEME

Beatles Apples & Flowchart

2009-11-04T18:12:00.005Z

Today I found two interesting news about The Beatles.

First, EMI is going to release an apple-shaped USB memory stick containing the whole remastered Beatles catalog and some extras:

Second, thanks to Andrea Spadaccini, I found this great flowchart of "Hey Jude"...

Instruct Firefox to open mailto links using GMail

2009-09-11T09:57:00.001+01:00

This is a useful hack if you don't use an email client anymore but just the web version.

Japanese companies to develop a novel CPU

2009-09-08T10:51:00.004+01:00

Read the full article on CrunchGear... details to come!

Update 1: More details on Forbes.

Update 2: These are the research fields of Professor Hironori Kasahara.

Manage symlinks in Debian/Ubuntu using update-alternatives

2009-08-22T13:06:00.005+01:00

In a previous post I explained how to build Google Gears under Debian/Ubuntu, and the process involved some hacks to use a version of GCC different from the most updated one.

Then my friend Davide sent me some suggestions explaining that I could have used the "update-alternatives" command to manage symbolic links to the desired version of a tool.

For instance:

update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-4.2 10

update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-4.3 20

update-alternatives --config g++

Convert POI from Google Maps to TomTom Navigator using Ubuntu

2009-07-19T11:07:00.002+01:00

This has been tested with a PC running Ubuntu 9.04 and TomTom Navigator 6 installed on a HP iPAQ PDA running Windows Mobile 6:

on your PC display your customized map on Google Maps
click "Link" and copy-paste the URL on the address bar
append "&output=kml" to the URL and press return
save the downloaded file as "MyMap.kml"
edit the resulting file to remove every HTML formatting tags (e.g. DIV)
connect your WinCE/WinMobile/PocketPC PDA/Smartphone through USB
sudo apt-get gpsbabel synce-multisync-plugin
gpsbabel -i kml -o tomtom -f MyMap.kml -F MyMap.ov2
synce-pcp MyMap.ov2
on the PDA run TomTom Navigator
tap "Preferences|PDI|Add category" -> "MyMap"
run "File Explorer" and go to the "My Documents" folder
locate the file "MyMap" (the .ov2 extension will be hidden)
cut that file and paste it into your TomTom's map directory
you should be prompted to overwrite the existing file
run TomTom Navigator and you should find the new POI category!

Building Google Gears on Linux

2009-07-13T13:31:00.003+01:00

sudo apt-get install build-essential g++-4.2
svn checkout http://gears.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ gears-read-only
cd gears-read-only/gears/
Edit "tools/config.mk" to replace the 9 occurrences of "g++" with "g++-4.2"
chmod +x ../third_party/gecko_1.9/linux/gecko_sdk/bin/*
make
Done! The Firefox installer is in bin-dbg/installers/gears-linux-dbg-0.5.25.0.xpi

I support England 2018 !!!

2009-06-26T23:16:00.003+01:00

This is the personalised widget I obtained after registering at England2018Bid.com:

Irish Id Card for St. Patrick's Day

2009-03-19T16:06:00.004Z

I recently found a funny webapp on the Guinness website (yes, the ones of the black beer) that let me create a fake temporary Irish Identity Card to be used for Saint Patrick's Day (March 17).

Here is the result...

How to install latest Icarus Verilog

2009-03-18T13:49:00.008Z

The latest stable version of Icarus Verilog (0.8.x) does not support the "generate" construct, while the development branch (0.9.x) does.

As a remainder, the quickest way to install it on Debian/Ubuntu is:

sudo su

apt-get purge verilog

apt-get install build-essential git-core autoconf gperf flex bison

git clone git://icarus.com/~steve-icarus/verilog

cd verilog

source autoconf.sh

./configure

make

make install

cd ..

rm -rf verilog

Dartboard unwrapping

2009-03-17T09:57:00.008Z

In the process of becoming a perfect English gentleman and having to choose a sporting activity I decided to discard Badminton (the preferred sport of my former colleague Witek Konarski) and preferred Darts.

Yesterday I received a package of darts-related stuff ordered online from Darts Corner, and the following pictures show the unwrapping of the whole thing.

This will make happy some current colleagues who actually own some of the items in the box and want to see immediately how they look like.

Ubuntu vs. Vista vs. Seven

2009-02-09T11:30:00.002Z

I'm enjoying a comparison of benchmarks on Ubuntu (both the stable and the beta versions) against Windows (again the stable [?] Vista and the forthcoming Seven): it's on Tux Radar and if you are short of time you can just look at the pictures.

My favourite hi-tech news

2008-12-13T10:56:00.003Z

Every day I use to follow some news sites talking about technology; and one of the quickest way to have an aggregate view is using iGoogle:

As you may probably see in the above picture, my favourite sites talking about hi-tech news are:

The Register
The Inquirer
EE Times

Both El Reg and the INQ were founded by Mike Magee (in 1994 and 2001 respectively) and they make extensive use of sarcasm, satire and slang terms.

The EE Times (Electronic Engineering Times) is specific to the semiconductor world and is a reference for every electronic engineer.

The "full Internet" arriving on mobiles

2008-11-17T09:55:00.005Z

One month ago Intel's "Director of ecosystems for ultra-mobility group" Pankaj Kedia said at the Intel Developer Forum that "If you want to run full internet, you're going to have to run an Intel-based architecture".

This is something stupid to hear for everybody who knows a little how things work. His position (that was later followed by Intel's apologies) was built around the idea that the Flash Player plugin was only available in binaries for the x86 platform.

What he said is silly because for years I used to watch Flash animations on my old iBook PowerPC G3 with Debian using the free Gnash plugin, but anyway...

The real news today is that obviously ARM and Adobe are going to announce the release of a Flash Player plugin for ARM platforms (such as the iPhone, Google Android and Windows Mobile devices presumably).

So in just one month Intel's director obtained the result that we'll be able to see Flash animations on our mobile phones and MIDs even with a RISC CPU... thanks Pankaj!!!

I love Ratan Tata!

2008-11-15T16:11:00.008Z

Yesterday I've read an article about Ratan Tata, the chairman of the Tata Group that recently acquired Jaguar, Land Rover and the Rover brand from Ford.

If you carefully read this article on AutoWeek you will probably love this man as I do.
He's like some entrepreneurs of the past, like Henry Ford for instance.

And I just hope that they will really design a new E-type (referred to as XK-E in the article) for the XXI century (yes, it happens that I love sports cars, even the ones that I can't afford...).

How to install Xilinx cable drivers on Ubuntu

2008-10-28T15:33:00.004Z

Yesterday I had to manually install the cable drivers on Ubuntu in order to be able to program a Xilinx FPGA board from ISE and Impact.
I'm using Ubuntu 8.04.1 and ISE WepPack 10.1; I found several detailed guides on the web but I want to write down the whole process in a compact form to easily replicate it on other machines:


sudo su
apt-get install git-core libusb-dev fxload
cd
mkdir CABLE_DRIVER
cd CABLE_DRIVER
git clone git://git.zerfleddert.de/usb-driver
tar zxvf usb-driver-HEAD.tar.gz
cd usb-driver
make
cp libusb-driver.so /usr/local/lib/
cd
rm -rf CABLE_DRIVER
echo 'ACTION=="add", BUS=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="03fd", MODE="666"' > /etc/udev/rules.d/libusb-driver.rules
echo "export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/local/lib/libusb-driver.so" >> $XILINX/settings32.sh

That's all; I would just suggest to execute the last two commands by hand being careful to understand what they really mean (in the first one I'm not sure that the single quote will work, in the second one I would insert the line at the beginning of the file rather than at the end but I think there's no shell operator to do this).

Biodiversity

2008-09-01T23:08:00.004+01:00

Wikipedia defines Biodiversity as "the variation of life forms within a given ecosystem". In the field of processor architectures I'm sorry to see that the market is going towards a two-species-only world: x86 and ARM. Thus, bye-bye biodiversity.

I recently noticed that EETimes started talking about "ARM industry standard"; I know the difference between a standard de iure and a standard de facto (I claim to have a good knowledge of written Latin in my CV), but I can't forget that the only standard Instruction Set Architecture is the ancient 32-bit SPARC v8 ISA (standardized as IEEE 1754-1994). In spite of this, try this Google Fight...

Create a local APT/Debian repository

2008-06-16T11:16:00.003+01:00

Some posts ago I wrote some lines about the creation of custom .deb Debian packages; now I wanted to publish them on the LAN to allow easy installation across all the computers.All you have to do is to put them in a 'yourdir' directory accessible through the http protocol (so you must have an Apache configured and running) and run the following command:

dpkg-scanpackages yourdir /dev/null | gzip > yourdir/Packages.gz

Then you just have to add this line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file (you can easily do it with Synaptic):

deb http://yourserver/yourdir/ ./

That's all! Just update the list of packages and yours will appear in Synaptic as well.

The Skypephone Manager & VMware

2008-06-03T14:34:00.006+01:00

I recently bought a Three Skypephone. Several people know about it, it's a device that lets you contact Skype users and let them contact you for free. What is [deliberately] missing is the support for SkypeIn and SkypeOut - i.e. you have to pay the normal H3G rate to call ordinary telephone numbers.

But a very smart guy named Leon Mayne has created a program that lets you use another copy of Skype running on a PC as a bridge to forward your Skype calls to the normal telephone lines using your SkypeOut credit; this program is named the Three Skypephone Manager.

I tried it and it works very well; the only problems at the moment are that you need a PC always turned on, and secondly that this PC must be running Microsoft Windows (why should one keep a Windows PC running while away from the screen otherwise?!?...).

Since I do not like keeping machines busy with a useless (strictly from an open-source developer perspective...) operating system then I tried running Leon's program in alternative environments.

First I tried rebuilding the program on my Ubuntu box starting from the source files using MonoDevelop, but I had no luck since the provided DLL just works with Windows. Then I tried running the Skypephone Manager in Wine but I had no luck even updating it to the most recent ("unstable") version; then I tried running it in a Virtual Machine... et voilà!!! It just works.

I installed VMware Server with Synaptic from the official Ubuntu packages; then I registered for free on the VMware website to obtain a serial number; and I legally downloaded an ISO of Windows XP from the MSDN Academic Alliance website through my IEEE subscription (it's one of the benefits that I did never use before).

Then I can run the Skypephone Manager keeping always-on not a Windows but an Ubuntu machine (and it is very useful since it can be interfaced to the rest of the world through standard services like FTP, ssh, X11 etc).

Finally I just have to tell that I'm very happy about the functionality of the program developed by Leon Mayne, but that I'm not happy as well about the quality of the voice during my Skype calls (even direct calls Skype-to-Skype). Actually the phone (real name AMOI WP-S1) does not have a real Skype client installed on it but just the GUI, developed by iSkoot, that for each Skype call performs a regular call to the gateway provided by H3G that then transforms the voice into the Skype protocol and route it to the TCP/IP networks.

The people talking with me using a landline phone or Skype on a PC can listen to my voice perfectly, but what I hear using the Skypephone is horrible... probably the speed of the gateways set up by H3G is not sized properly and they are unable to perform 100% of the Skype encoding in real-time (while the reverse thing, i.e. decoding my voice to the Skype protocol, seems to be easier to obtain).

Anyway I'm happy of this piece of technology and I would definitively suggest buying it; especially if one plan to use the Three Skypephone Manager... many thanks Leon!!!

I have to choose another Carputer!!!

2008-04-08T14:43:00.008+01:00

After 4 months the eBay seller from which I bought the Carputer preferred to send me a full refund instead than the LCD radio I talked about in one of my previous posts... this happened presumably because I won the auction at a price that was too low for him (371 Euros for a Linellae LF7100G + 10 Euros of shipping fee, for a total of 381 Euros). So now I have to start again from scratch...

But I still want to buy a jewel of technology from the Chinese firm Linellae, and I have seen that the best way to obtain one without the problems of the eBay auctions is to buy one from CarDVDKit, a site specialized in importing stuff from Linellae to the UK and sending them directly to western european customers without hidden custom fees.

But the prices are slightly higher than their counterparts on eBay... the LF7100G model here would cost 419 Euros + 41 fixed shipping fee to European Countries, for a total of 460 Euros... it is 80 Euros more than the price I obtained through the auction (and this explains why the seller preferred to incur in a negative feedback rather than sending me the radio; BTW I was unable to send him the negative feedback because of the too long time elapsed from the auction date).

So if I want to save money I can choose a less expensive model... this is why I prepared a comparison table for the in-dash radios in double DIN format available from CarDVDKit:

Model	LF6202	LF7001	LF6502G	LF6800G	LF6510G	LF6806G	LF7100G
LCD size	6.2"	7"	6.2"	7"	6.5"	6.5"	7"
Radio w/RDS	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	No	Yes
DivX player	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
DVD slot	8cm	8cm	8cm	8cm	8cm	8cm	8cm
SD Card	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
USB stick input	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Bluetooth hands-free	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
GPS w/TomTom	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
GPS runs w/Music	N/A	N/A	Yes	No	No	No	No
EUR	179	179	319	369	449	469	419

As you can see the LF7100G (in the final column) is the only one to feature the in-built GPS receiver with TomTom preinstalled and also the radio with RDS/EON (very useful to easily find by name the radio station you are looking for); it only lacks the ability to listen to the music while using the navigation software. If I renounce to one of these two features I will be able to save some money... a LOT of money if I purchase a model without the in-built GPS (but in this case I will not be able to sacrifice my HP iPAQ hx2415 PDA to the Google Android cause...).

UltraSPARC T1 vs. T2

2008-02-27T20:28:00.015Z

Some time ago I had to briefly compare the UltraSPARC T1 (aka Niagara) vs. the T2. I'm going to loose the sheet with my notes, so before it finally happens I will report that table here:

	UltraSPARC T1	UltraSPARC T2
Technology	TI 90nm, 9LM	TI 65nm
Max Frequency	1200 MHz	1400 MHz
Transistors	279M
Total die area	378 mm2	342 mm2
CPU core area	11 mm2	12 mm2
Total pins	1933 BGA	1831 BGA
Power Dissipation	70W	95W typical (60 to 123)
Cores per die	8	8
Threads per core	4	8
Total threads	32	64
ISA	SPARC v9 + VIS subset	SPARC v9 + full VIS 2.0
Pipeline stages	6 int	8 int, 12 fp
Integer ALUs	8	16
FPUs	1	8
Load/Store Units	8	8
Crypto Units	8 small	8 large
Max IPC	8	16
Max MIPS	9'600	22'400
L1-I$	16KB, 4-way, 32B line	16KB, 8-way, 32B line
L1-D$	8KB, 4-way, 16B line	8KB, 4-way, 16B line
I-TLB	64 entry, fully assoc.	64 entry, fully assoc.
D-TLB	64 entry, fully assoc	128 entry, fully assoc.
L2 Caches	4 banks x 3 MB, 12-way, 64B line	8 banks x 4 MB, 16-way, 64B line
Memory Controllers	4 x DDR2 @ 200 MHz	4 x FB-DIMM @ 667 MHz
Memory Bandwidth	25 GB/s	60 GB/s
Supported mem. size	128 GB	128 GB
Integrated I/O	Jbus (legacy)	PCI-Express x8
Integrated I/O Bandwidth	3.2 GB/s	2.5 GB/s
Networking	-	2 x 10/1Gb Ethernet

DIY: Debian package

2008-01-17T13:37:00.005Z

I have just completed my first .deb package, that can be installed on Debian and Ubuntu with a couple of clicks, and I need to write down a short note as a reminder for future packetizations.

First of all, create a directory that will have the name of your package, e.g. my-program_1.0_i386, and copy all the binary files you need into it, using their absolute paths as relative paths.

For instance, if the program executable is /usr/bin/pippo, then you will copy this file into my-program_1.0_i386/usr/bin/pippo and you have to repeat this step for all the files (including the ones under /etc and so forth).

Since the package will not include only files but also configuration informations, create a DEBIAN subdir and fill it with the following files:

control: is the most important control file, analyzed later
conffiles: list of absolute paths of files (one each line) that you are going to install and that have to be considered as configuration files (this is why Synaptic shows two different kind of uninstallations)
preinst: executable script executed before copying the files
postinst: script executed after file copy
prerm: script executed before file removal on uninstall
postrm: script executed after file removal

The four executable scripts can be written in the language you prefer, probably they will be bash shell script files.

The control file will then have relative path my-program_1.0_i386/DEBIAN/control and it will be a text file that will include the following informations:

Section: electronics
Priority: optional
Package: my-program
Version: 1.0
Architecture: i386
Installed-Size: 12345
Depends: sed, libncurses4
Maintainer: Fabrizio Fazzino <fabrizio@fazzino.it>
Description: My Program
This is the long description for My Program.
Please indent this description with one blank space at the beginning
of each line and use a full stop alone on a line to leave a break:
.
* Unordered lists are obtained...
* ...by placing an asterisk at the beginning of a line.

The installed size must be reported in KByte (so in the example you must know that the files you are copying are about 12 MBytes).

When you think that everything is OK, just run the command dpkg -b my-program_1.0_i386 from the upper directory and it will create a file named my-program_1.0_i386.deb for you.

Now you are ready to try to install and uninstall it several times from the command line (with dpkg) or from the GUI (with GDebi or Synaptic).

When you're sure that it's OK you can share it with the world, or at least to save it for future installations.

Goodbye Jaguar!

2008-01-17T10:23:00.000Z

No, I didn't sell my car... I've just updated the operating system on my old Apple iBook Firewire G3 466 MHz Special Edition Graphite from Jaguar (10.2) to Tiger (10.4); it is too ancient to support Leopard (10.5) so this will be its final Mac OS X update.

After the OS installation I've added the following programs that I would definitively recommend to every Mac user:

Apple X11 server (from the installation disc)
Emacs editor
AbiWord word processor
KeyNote presentation program I bought time ago
OpenOffice.org (X11 version)
Firefox browser
Cyberduck FTP client (nicest icon on the dock!)
Adium instant messenger (supports ICQ and MSN accounts like Pidgin on Linux)
GIMP graphics editor
VLC media player

Common subset GCC/Linux

2008-01-04T13:50:00.002Z

Now that I've printed the two different lists of the architectures supported by the GCC cross-compiler provided by SpeedBlue.org and the targets supported by the mainstream Linux kernel from Kernel.org, I'll try to write the subset of the architectures common to both the lists.

Starting from the GCC list (that is much shorter) and counterchecking on the Linux one, I see that I have to exclude just the HP-PA architecture for which Julien Lemoine does provide a precompiled Debian package but the kernel guys don't.

I will then group the remaining architectures, for which a Linux kernel can be built in minutes on a Debian/Ubuntu IA-32 machine, in 3 different lists.

Non-RISC Architectures:

Intel x86 a.k.a. IA-32 (from the i386)
Intel 64 a.k.a. AMD64 a.k.a. Intel EM64T
Intel/HP IA-64 (actually I like this VLIW/EPIC stuff)
IBM S/390 (from the old world of mainframes)
Motorola 68000 (the CISC that lost the war against x86)

RISC Architectures that I don't like:

Alpha (extinct)
ARM (I said in a previous post why I don't like it)

RISC Architectures that I strongly suggest to play with:

MIPS
SPARC
POWER / PowerPC

Architectures supported by Linux Kernel

2007-12-22T14:51:00.000Z

Almost every processor architecture existing on Earth can support the Linux kernel, but only some of them are available directly inside the mainstream official sources as available from kernel.org.
If you download the latest tarball and you list the content of the "arch" subdirectory you'll find the following architecture names:

alpha
arm
avr32
blackfin
cris
frv
h8300
i386
ia64
m32r
m68k
m68knommu
mips
parisc
powerpc
ppc
s390
sh
sh64
sparc
sparc64
um
v850
x86_64
xtensa

They're even more than the ones supported by the GCC cross-compilers I was describing yesterday! It's simply because Julien does not package all the available ones but only the main ones.
The next step will be to calculate the intersection between the two lists, to see which are the preferred platforms to play with...

Why I love RISC

2007-12-19T23:18:00.000Z

All the Laws of Nature are relatively simple: this is a reason why I used to love physics when I attended the Lyceum.
The greatness of simplicity and modularity applied to computers led me to love RISC architectures (for hardware) and UNIX systems (for software).
When I started learning the x86 Assembly language and I discovered that every instruction can belong from one to 17 (seventeen!) bytes I was shocked; there is an interesting comment about this written by Hennessy and Patterson in their books.

When studying RISC architectures the first ones encountered by the students are always MIPS (for its simplicity and orthogonality) and SPARC (for the idea of adding register windows to minimize accesses to memory); they are still my preferred ones.

To have an idea of which architectures are most widely used today you can have a look at the GCC cross-compilers maintained by Julien Lemoine on his site speedblue.org.
His page of the unstable packages for Debian reports the following architectures:

alpha
arm
hppa
ia64
m68k
mips
mipsel
powerpc
powerpc64
s390
sparc
sparc64
x86-64

As you can easily see, MIPS and SPARC have a great part here with 2 different targets each (MIPS is split by endianess and SPARC by register bit number).

Other important RISC architectures here being ARM and PowerPC.
For some reasons I do not like ARM cores:

for a long period of time their cores have been an extension of the Intel monopoly under the names StrongARM and XScale (I have a PXA270 in my iPAQ);
their strict IP protection policy made impossible for amateurs to access internals and to write their own HDL models (I remember a module named nnARM disappearing from OpenCores after developers received a letter from ARM lawyers);
there are even too many implementation in current technological gadgets (this interesting article on EETimes explains that there could be up to 8 different ARM cores inside each Apple iPhones), and I love diversity as opposed to monopolies.

The last important RISC architecture is PowerPC (or POWER for IBM): after the switch of Apple Macs to use Intel micros their best implementation is in the Cell microprocessor of the Sony PlayStation 3 and in IBM POWER6 servers, while Motorola uses them in several embedded devices.
PowerPC cores could have changed the history of computers - but they didn't. So I'm always I bit sad when I have to talk about them.

The next step will be to see which architectures are actively supported by the Linux kernel.

And finally I bought the carputer

2007-12-14T14:38:00.000Z

OK, so leave the news about the websites and start talking about real technology... I have a car with a double DIN slot (approx 18cm x 10cm) so I had the possibility to change the 8-years-old radio (compact cassette based) with a modern model. For a while I've been thinking a lot about building a Carputer by myself, using software and hints available from mp3car.com and motherboards with small form factors available from VIA or Intel.
But soon I realized that a model with all the characteristics I needed did not exist:

LCD touchscreen with 16:9 ratio and 7" wide;
ability to watch movies in DVD and DivX format and listen MP3 songs;
FM radio with RDS and TV tuner;
TomTom navigation software with maps of Europe on SD-Card.

Then I found the only model that supports it all: it is LF7100G from Linellae and if you want an idea of the price you can look at the CarDvdKit online shop. I've been following eBay auctions for a while and finally I won one for exactly 100 Euros less than the price you find on the online shop: the product will arrive in a few days and I hope that it is worth the 370 Euros I spent... I'll let you know!

Credits for the images

2007-12-13T11:37:00.000Z

Sorry, I forgot to mention the authors of the images shown on my new home page.

The montage should have been done by my former colleagues Giuseppe Reitano, Massimo Spata and Gabriele Forzano (I did never know who had the major part in the work, so I'll say the three names). I'm not paying any royalties to them since the montage was their gift to convince me to leave the company...

Yesterday I copypasted their original Gladiator/Verificator montage into a frame I have bought on iStockphoto: for about 10 Euros I bought 10 credits and spent 2 of them for this frame designed by Peter Nguyen. I just rotated it to be exactly vertical.

Finally, the current corner of the page was taken from the mentioned Deziner Folio theme for WordPress that should have been designed by Navdeep Raj. His work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 India License.

Thanks to everybody!

...and yet another very simple web site...

2007-12-12T23:34:00.002Z

Yesterday I started this blog, and today to celebrate it I also renewed my personal web site at fazzino.it.
I removed a lot of old stuff that I do not want to share anymore (actually I did not remove the pages physically, but only the links, so you could still access them following Google's results).

I really wanted a very simple website, and to accomplish this task I created a site that now has only a single page with external links.

The new home page is very simple, and shows a white sheet on a black background. Since in the last days I've been studying a lot the blog software WordPress, I had access to several themes for it, and I found a very good "corner" in the Deziner Folio Theme 2.0 (it only has the bottom left corner, so I just had to rotate it several times with GIMP to obtain the 3 missing corners).

The center of the home page now shows a montage of the Gladiator promotional movie poster that my former colleagues at STMicroelectronics donated when I left the company on 2001-08-31. The face is mine, and they also substituted the writing "the Gladiator" with "il Verificatore" ("the Verifier" in Italian language). This happened because in ST I worked for some years in the field of Functional Verification. I still miss my colleagues.

Now that both the personal page and the web log are in place, in the next days I will be able to start writing about my interests: technology in general and especially processor architectures.

YAB - Yet Another Blog

2007-12-11T22:23:00.000Z

Olé! Now I have a blog as well...
I was going to restyle my own site at fazzino.it and for a while I was thinking to install a blog software by myself, but for a series of reasons I had to change my mind.
After seeking for a while about freely available Blog Softwares, I chose WordPress, but then I realized that I did not have a working database server to access.
In fact:

Aruba.it, that hosts my website, offers MySQL databases for an additional fee, but I unsubscribed from this service when I renewed the hosting contract;
WordPress can be modified to run without MySQL dabases and using only a SQLite file, but the version of Apache installed on the hosts of Aruba.it only supports PHP4 without SQLite support;
I have access to other empty MySQL databases but they are hosted by GoDaddy and they can be accessed only from GoDaddy's network.

Then I tried some workarounds without success... and finally I decided to use an external blog, yet another free service available from the Big-G (I am already a full-time user of Gmail, Calendar, Analytics, iGoogle, Maps, Earth... and Android maybe next year).
I only have to say something about the URL of this blog... "simplyrisc" may refer to the company I work for, but it could also refer to the fact that the answer to many digital design problems is... simply RISC.
Keep in touch!