Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life - page 4

Mexico’s education sector had one of the longest lockdowns due to COVID: As everybody, we “went virtual” in March 2020, and it was only by late February 2022 that I went back to teach presentially at the University. But for the semester starting next Tuesday, I’m going back to a full-online mode. Why? Because me and my family will be travelling to Argentina for six months, starting this October and until next March. When I went to ask for my teaching to be “frozen” for two semesters, the Head of Division told me he was actually looking for teachers wanting...

We took a couple of days of for a family vacation / road trip through the hills of Central Mexico. The overall trip does not look like anything out of the ordinary… …Other than the fact that Google forecasted we’d take approximately 15.5 hours driving for 852Km — that is, an average of almost 55 Km/h. And yes, that’s what we signed up for. And that’s what we got. Of course, the exact routes are not exactly what Google suggested (I can say we optimized a bit the route, i.e., by avoiding the metropolitan area of Querétaro, at the extreme...

As computer professionals, we mostly envision computers as general-purpose tools by default. Over the past decades, Moore’s law and Dennard scaling have, year after year, given us consistently better “toys”: faster computers, larger storage spaces. With these tools, computer science has changed the face of humankind. However, most computing professionals focus on building software. Can software developers work to produce domain-specific accelerators (DSAs), that is, purpose-built computers (application-specific integrated circuits, ASICs) that, at the cost of losing generality, can deliver much better performance and energy efficiency than general-purpose chips? The authors’ main focus is to present AutoDSE, a design-space exploration...

It’s been a very long time I haven’t blogged about e-voting, although some might remember it’s been a topic I have long worked with; particularly, it was the topic of my 2018 Masters thesis, plus some five articles I wrote in the 2010-2018 period. After the thesis, I have to admit I got weary of the subject, and haven’t pursued it anymore. So, I was saddened and dismayed to read that –once again, as it has already happened– the electoral authorities would set up a pilot e-voting program in the local elections this year, that would probably lead to a...

After my father passed away, I brought home most of the personal items he had, both at home and at his office. Among many, many (many, many, many) other things, I brought two of his personal treasures: His photo collection and a box with the 8mm movies he shot approximately between 1956 and 1989, when he was forced into modernity and got a portable videocassette recorder. I have talked with several friends, as I really want to get it all in a digital format, and while I’ve been making slow but steady advances scanning the photo reels, I was particularly...

It has often been stated that the videogaming environment is filled with machismo, and there are many observations to that end: numerous studies have been published that back this assertion, based on the size comparison of the male and female gaming communities, on the graphic representations of male and female characters, on the interactions between male and female players in online gaming communities, and a long etcetera; the author quotes studies such as “Gender differences in video game characters’ roles, appearances, and attire as portrayed in video game magazines” by Miller and Summers [1] and “A content analysis of female...

Twenty years… A seemingly big, very round number, at least for me. I can recall several very well-known songs mentioning this timespan: «It was twenty years ago today Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play», sang four youth idols in 1967 for whom said timespan was not-quite-but-almost their full lifes so far. «Si las cosas que uno quiere se pudieran alcanzar, tú me quisieras lo mismo que veinte años atrás» (if what one wants could be achieved, you would love me the same as twenty years ago), says a heartbroken song by María Teresa Vera where she is resigned not...

Phew! Today, after four days of combing through code I am unfamiliar with, I was finally able to change my expression. I’m finally at the part of my PhD work where I am tasked with implementing the protocol I claim improves from the current situation. I wrote a script to deploy the infrastructure I need for the experiment, and was not expecting any issues — I am not (yet) familiar with the Go language (in which the Hockeypuck key server is developed), but I have managed to install it several times, and it holds no terrible surprises anymore for me....

After my last post, Bálint (who prompted it with his last post) suggested I should do a hybrid test of his tests and my extremes. He suggested I should build the Linux kernel using my Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB model), but using the Firebuild build accelerator. Before going any further: I must make clear that while Firebuild is freely redistributable, it is not made available under a free license. It is free for personal use or commercial trial, but otherwise requires licensing. Bálint managed to build a Linux kernel in just over 8 seconds. So, how did my test go?...

Given that Bálint just braggedblogged about how efficiently he can build a Linux kernel (less than 8 seconds, wow! Well, yes, until you read it is the result of aggressive caching and is achieved only for a second run), and that a question just popped up today on the Debian ARM mailing list, «is an ARM computer a good choice? Which one?», I decided to share my results of an experiment I did several months ago, to graphically show to my students the effects of parallelism, the artifacts of hyperthreading, the effects of different architecture sets, and even illustrate about...