Aasemoon'z Cluster

The computer models used to determine whether it was safe for airlines to fly through the ash resulting from the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in southern Iceland were flawed, European Union officials now admit, says a story in the Financial Times of London.

The vision of a smarter grid is of course a lovely thing to behold: an electric power system that’s much more interactive, interoperable, reliable, and robust—“self-healing,” even. That’s why so much excitement attended the news this time last year that the U.S. stimulus bill would contain billions of dollars in new funding to support smart grid construction, and the news six months later than the National Institute for Standards and Technology was issuing draft standards and a roadmap for completing standardization of the smart grid (the Framework and Roadmap for Smart Grid Interoperability Standards, issued in final form in January). And it's the reason too why such high expectations ride on the avalanche of smart meter installation projects launched in the last year.

Since I wrote a bittorrent client in both Erlang and Haskell, etorrent and combinatorrent respectively, I decided to put up some bait. This might erupt in a language war and “My language is better than yours”, but I feel I am obligated to write something subjective. Here is to woes of programming in Haskell and Erlang.Neither Haskell, nor Erlang was a first language for me. I have programmed serious programs in C, Standard ML, Ocaml, Python, Java and Perl; tasted the cake of Go, Javascript, Scheme and Ruby; and has written substantial stuff in Coq and Twelf. I love static type systems, a bias that will rear its ugly head and breathe fire.I have written Haskell code seriously since 2005 and Erlang code seriously since 2007. I have programmed functionally since 1997 or so. My toilet reading currently is “Categories for the working mathematician” by Mac Lane. Ten years ago it was “ML for the working programmer” by Paulson.Enough about me.

Model based Optical proximity correction is usually used to compensate for the pattern distortion during the microlithography process. Currently, almost all the lithography effects, such as the proximity effects from the limited NA, the 3D mask effects due to the shrinking critical dimension, the photo resist effects, and some other well known physical process, can all be well considered into modeling with the OPC algorithm. However, the micro-lithography is not the final step of the pattern transformation procedure from the mask to the wafer. The etch process is also a very important stage. It is well known that till now, the etch process still can't be well explained by physics theory. In this paper, we will demonstrate our study on the model based etch bias retarget for OPC.

Samplify Systems Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) has announced an autofocus beamforming technology for ultrasound imaging. The technology uses a 32-channel ultrasound analog front-end receiver module in an ultra-small small-outline dual-in-line configuration based on the SAM1600 family of compressing ADCs.

Today sees the launch of Visual Studio 2010, at five launch events around the world, as announced by Bob Muglia, Jason Zander and S. Somasegar, and presented live today in Las Vegas.   Visual Studio 2010 includes the official version 2.0 of the F# language. As is our custom on the F# team, we also release a matching MSI and ZIP of F# 2.0 (for use with Visual Studio 2008 and as a standalone compiler on a range of platforms)   Today represents the culmination of 7 years of work on the language at Microsoft Research, and, more recently, the Microsoft Developer Division. I am immensely proud of what we’ve achieved. F# brings a productive functional and object-oriented programming language to .NET, extending the platform to new audiences in technical, algorithmic, data-rich, parallel and explorative domains, and its inclusion in Visual Studio 2010 represents a huge milestone for the language.   To help understand what we’re doing with F#, I’ve listed some of the common questions people have about the language below.  We thank everyone who has been involved in the production of F#, especially the many users who have given us feedback on the language!

In this talk Microsoft Technical Fellow and C# Chief Architect Anders Hejlsberg gives an overview of the new features in C# 4.0, including dynamic typing, co- and contra-variance, named and optional parameters, and improved COM interoperability. Anders will also discuss some of the ideas that are envisioned for future versions of C#. This session is presented by Anders Hejlsberg during Microsoft DevDays 2010 in The Hague in The Netherlands.

How's this for a wedge issue on a slow news week? When Xilinx announced earlier this year that it was changing one of its foundry suppliers from UMC to TSMC for the 28-nm node, it seemed like a blow to differentiation—at least from a process technology standpoint—between Xilinx and Altera, which has been using TSMC for years. But while Xilinx chose to go with TSMC's high-performance/low power process, Altera said this week it is going with TSMC's high-performance process. Altera maintains that customers in the high end communications equipment market are much more concerned about performance than power. Luanne Schirrmeister, senior director of product marketing at Altera, put it this way: "In communications infrastructure, nothing is battery powered. Everything is plugged into a wall."

Part 1 of an excerpt from the book "Acoustics and Psychoacoustics", 4th edition, examines the ways to make rooms better for the purpose of critically listening to music.

Part 2 of an excerpt from the book "Acoustics and Psychoacoustics", 4th edition, looks at acoustic and psychoacoustic principles applied to the clinical measurement of hearing ability, as well as procedures used in psychoacoustic testing.

Dr. Cormac Herley spends most of his time thinking about why and how computer users reject security advice (originating from both fellow humans and software security warning prompts). Recently, his paper So Long, and No Thanks for the Externalities: the Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users, received a fair amount of attention from the general media (Boston Globe, Tech Republic, NPR, etc). The paper also prompted our favorite software renegade, Dr. Erik Meijer, to send me an email simply asking "please set up and E2E with Cormac Herley". I did just that and the following conversation is what happened...

The portal is about in and around the world of entertainment. Also information links to other places that cater for event listings and news from the demoscene. Demo groups and music artists have a contributional aspect to the making of this inspirational website. Some links will open a new browser window. Enjoy..sjt

Visual Studio 2010 is a fairly important release of the developer tool of choice for writing Windows applications. One of the important advancements in the new update is how it enables developers and architects to better visualize the assets and dependencies through UML (Unified Modeling Language) diagrams. In this episode, Cameron Skinner gives us a quick overview of how Visual Studio 2010’s new UML visualization tool's design might help you with better understanding the overall structure of your applications.

As I noted last week, US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Robert Mueller told the US House Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies that the follow-on to the notoriously failed $170 million Virtual Case File program called Sentinel would once again slip its schedule and cost targets. The latest cost estimate is in excess of $481 million with a total program slip now of some two years and counting.    Director Mueller told the House Committee that the FBI decided to suspend work on Sentinel in early March to correct some "minor" technical issues and make some design changes. These issues included, according to the New York Times, "slow response times, awkward display pages and screen print that was too small."

Margus Veanes, a Researcher from the RiSE group at Microsoft Research, gives an overview of Rex, a tool that generates matching string from .NET regular expressions. Rex turns regular expressions into symbolic automatons, then gives them to a constraint solver to find matching strings.

The design of a generator system requires many hours of detailed planning with the goal of creating an extremely reliable backup power source. Properly installed, the system will deliver the intended level of reliability. However, if incorrectly wired, the system can become a problem for both the owner and the manufacturer. While the generator installation can be handled by a range of people, from a trained technician to the typical homeowner, wiring mistakes can occur. Installation includes working with 120 VAC split phase, 240 V line voltage, along with low-voltage signals below 50 V. A small and easily made mistake, such as miswiring high voltage to low voltage, will destroy sensitive electronics quickly and may render the equipment inoperable. Thus, a resettable overcurrent and overvoltage solution capable of handling line voltage, electrostatic discharge (ESD), electrical fast transients (EFT), and current surge is required to protect low voltage interface circuits against this problem.