San Jose – days 2 & 3
April 1st, 2009 at 4:07 pmMonday, March 30th
The conference began. My hotel is conveniently located 5 minutes of walking distance from the convention center, so it takes me almost no time in the morning. Yesterday was dedicated to full-day tutorials. The one I picked was “Embedding TCP/IP”. It was presented by a VP of Micrium – the company that produces the uCos RTOS. Most of the tutorial was a basic introduction to the TCP/IP suite of protocols, with some emphasis on including it in embedded application. He talked a bit about the embedded TCP/IP stack his company is developing.
The conference rooms are comfortable, with long tables on which you can write and/or place a laptop. There’s also WiFi available for free in most rooms. Having power sockets in the tables would be perfect, however…
Sometime during the morning we felt the earth moving. It wasn’t strong and lasted only a few seconds. Later it turned out that it indeed was an earthquake. A true Californian welcome!
In the evening I met Baruch and we took the bus to Santana Row. In the bus I fed a $10 bill into the ticket machine, only to find out it doesn’t give change. When I asked the driver why he didn’t warn me, he said he thought it was obvious. Oh well…
While waiting on a bus we had a chat with a drunkard of Mexican origin, who asked us for spare 50 cents and began talking about wars, peace, and stuff like that. Overall, there are quite a few people on the streets nagging for money here, although not all of them seem homeless.
We ate at a fancy restaurant on Santana Row. One of these places with high prices and small servings. Lucky they serve bread with butter before meals. Otherwise, I would have been remained hungry after the tiny salad plate I had for $11.
Tuesday, March 31st
In the morning, I attended a somewhat weak session on “Model based design for FPGA development”. The presenter didn’t go too far with model based design, and only used it as a rapid prototyping tool, using Simulink to pre-design and simulate something before porting to VHDL. For some reason he didn’t include code generation. I met him afterwards and asked about it, and he actually said that he has another lecture when he does use code-generation.
After that there was a keynote talk by Ken Mattingly – a former astronaut who flew on the Apollo 16 and was also scheduled on Apollo 13, but was replaced at the last moment due to an illness. He gave an inspiring talk about crisis management, re-telling the story of Apollo 13 from his angle.
After him there was an “industry address” by a Microsoft executive. It was way too buzzword-y for me, so I left early and went to lunch and to the exhibition which just opened today at noon. At the exhibition I spoke with representatives from Freescale, Altera and QNX and got answers to some issues I was thinking about. I also won a yet-another t-shirt by finding the bug in a C function presented by Grammatech (a firm that makes a static code analysis tool). All in all it was informative and I definitely plan to walk around the exhibition tomorrow and on Thursday.
Then I attended another two sessions. One on Motor Control, that was quite introductory – though I gained some interesting insights. The second one was better. It was by a guy who works for Caltech designing boards that process data collected by arrays of radio telescopes. He talked about some of the boards he did, wow! A board with 5 Stratix II FPGAs, plus a PowerPC CPU, and dual 1-GHz ADC processing lots of data (and dissipating 70W). He built a cluster of dozens of such boards for processing the telescope data – at Terrabytes of sustained bandwidth. Quite impressive. Unfortunately, he dedicated the second half of his lecture to “basic DSP techniques” that was a weird mixture of introductory signal processing and advanced DSP coding tricks. I wish he’d continue talking about the boards he designed instead.
In the evening I met Betty and Moran and we went out to a nice place in Cupertino (just next to Apple’s headquarters). We had a pleasant dinner and an assortment of locally brewed beers which were very good.
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