chess

I have now 3 methods to investigate for my internship:

1. Polis (Esterel)
   
2. SDL
   
3. ForSyDe (Haskell)
   

Today I gave an informal presentation about these methods and my internship schedule (PDF or Powerpoint). My ambition is to be ready with my internship in week 11 (March 14th, 2003). Tomorrow I'll look for a decent scenario to use, so that Wednesday I can start with the first method.

I'll start with Polis because this is the most commonly used system. Therefore there is a lot of documentation and there are a number of case studies available which can be quite helpful.

Today I went to see Ralf Lämmel at the CWI and we had a very useful meeting. We looked into the Haskell design method I found a few days ago and discussed the paper in general.

I took some pictures when going to the CWI (click on 'Read More').

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	The CWI is located almost outside Amsterdam.
	Art.
	When I came into the library and said that I'm coming to pick up a book, the response was: "Oh, then you must be Mr. Bosman".
	Christmas-party invitation -- mathematician's style.
	'For reasons of hygiene this toilet is monitored by videos'.

Today I've been experimenting a lot. It doesn't feel very productive but sometimes it is necessary.

In the morning I installed Haskell (so I can used it as a second method to research). The installation went smooth and there's plenty of documentation available but the paper I read lacks a lot of details. The homepage of the project isn't very extensive either so the implementation of this ForSyDe development method as they call it might be a bit difficult.


The afternoon I've been working with some hardware (on the second desk on the picture). It's a programmable chip (FPGA) together with some memory and a processor on a single board. The software that comes with allows for graphical designing of hardware, pretty neat.

There's a Chess meeting in Utrecht this evening.

I hope the trains back to Haarlem will go; yesterday evening when I came back from Ettie it was pretty bad. There were hardly any trains at all leaving from Centraal Station and I had to wait there 45 minutes.

This time I'm fully prepared: I'm bringing enough to read for about 2 or 3 hours and a walkman.

I put my first picture in my thesis. It's the VU logo.


For more on my internship see here.

I think I found a second design-method to investigate. There's a really interesting article on using Haskell as a high-level design language for Co-Design.


During the last weeks I found a number of papers, and it's very useful to spent a whole day only reading them.

A new draft version of my thesis is online. The sources I used too.


I won't announce newer version of this thesis all the time anymore since it's changing every day. However, you can always read it through my internship page.

I just found a really cool article. In my internship I want to find out how to design hardware and software simultanously (preferably using a single language).


My goal is to investigate 3 different methods (languages) to do so and the paper I found is a detailed description how to do so using a specific language (which is called SDL). It's a paper from 2002, which is very nice as well.

Spoke with some collegues about the hardware part of my assignment. I've never really worked with embedded hardware (chips) but they told me there is a lot of hardware (FPGA's, programmable chips) that I can experiment with.

For all of you who asked for pictures on Co-Design: I found one in the Bibliography of Hardware/Software Codesign.

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The picture is a three-dimensional Codesign cube that rotates in space. To view it use a sheet of paper (A4) and hold up to the screen. Make sure that the left eye sees only the left cube and the right eye only the right cube.

First try to match the pictures so you see only one rotating cube. Then focus on the yellow text in the picture. Last follow an upper corner of the cube. It's fun!!

(Design of the Cube by Christian Veith, Rendering by Stefan Micko, Stereo by Klaus Buchenrieder).

Yesterday I've installed Latex, a professional typesetting system. I'll use it to write my thesis. After some experimenting the first version (.PDF) is ready.

It contains only a little bit real content but there are some nice features working already. For example the automatic Table of Content and the automatic Bibliography (which is generated using this file).