Archive for the '7. just me' Category

It’s been never-ending excitement in the standards game since September 2007 when this blog began. After nearly 4 years, it’s time for a short vacation from blogging. I’m certainly not leaving the standards arena. Instead, I’ll likely be doing even more with the IEEE Standards Association. I’m also starting to work with people who are entering the world of standards and are looking for advice and guidance.

I”ll be around in many places. Listen as I host interesting guests on Conversation Central. Follow me on Twitter. See what we’re up to on Synopsys’ Facebook page. Connect with me on LinkedIn.

In the Fall, I promise I’ll be back. There will be interesting standards topics to write about. Hint: IEEE 1801 (UPF) and CPF.

Have a great summer, everyone!

Two of my (many) passions are Twitter and standards. Recently, I completed a fun project that combined both. But in an old-fashioned way. The publisher of the THINKaha book series encouraged me to write a book for their “#XYZ tweet” collection. Each of these short books contain 140 bite-sized ideas on a topic that lets the reader get a quick taste of the subject and/or the author.

I agreed, and the” #STANDARDS tweet” book was born. Tweets in print are rather odd, but it was a fun experience. Thanks again to Rick Jamison (@rickjamison), there are some clever cartoons that adorn the text. Also, thanks to JL Gray (@jlgray) for writing the Foreword and supplying the funniest headshot I’ve ever seen. Too bad I couldn’t bring myself to use it – instead, the book has JL’s officially nice face in the front matter.

If you’d like a free copy of this little book, post a comment, send me an email, connect with me on LinkedIn, message me on  Facebook, or tweet an @mention or DM, and I’ll put one in the mail for you.

Happy Tweeting and Happy Standardization!

@karenbartleson

There comes a time in any writer’s life when she or he just can’t write. The well-known phenomenon of
“writer’s block” plaques professional authors, college students, and thank-you-note-writing-kids alike. Today, I have a bad case of it.

I wanted to write about something interesting. Posts about the WiMAX vs. LTE standards war, “The Web is Dead” from Wired magazine, and legal issues in social networking are sitting in my drafts folder, unformed and uninteresting.

One of my colleagues (“Rick Jamison of “The Listening Post” blog) compiled a list of resources that you might find helpful the next time writer’s block strikes you. Here they are. I’m going to read them.

Ten Ways to Cure Writers Block

How to Cure Writer’s Block

Writer’s Block: Is It All in Your Head?

How to Cure Writer’s Block – Eleven Tips

6 tips to cure writer’s block

How to Cure Writer’s Block

36 Ways To Cure Writer’s Block

Writer’s Block/ Writer’s Anxiety

Easy Ways to Stop Writer’s Block

There’s an interesting article in the July 2010 edition of Wired magazine (yes, it’s the print publication I subscribe to, but only because the FAA won’t let us read electronically during takeoff and landing – one of the best times to read). The article is about Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google. Brin estimates that he has a 50/50 chance of contracting Parkinson’s, and he is helping fund research to find a cure – hopefully, before he develops the debilitating disease.

The entire article is intriguing – what Parkinson’s is, its possible genetic links, and the personal story of an intelligent, highly successful man. Yet, what fascinated me most was an underlying theme that the standard scientific method as we’ve known it could become extinct in the future.

You remember the scientific method: propose a hypothesis, design tests, analyze results, repeat until convinced. This standard method for gaining knowledge – for seeking the truth – has been used for a thousand years and has led to countless discoveries and breakthroughs.

The internet, or I should probably say the Information Age, could bring about the demise of the standard scientific method. How? By virtue of the massive amount of data that continues to be produced – prior to any hypotheses. The new scientific method, as talked about in the Wired article, could look like this: scan the data, look for patterns, draw conclusions, find truth. No more would a scientist have a sudden thought and seek to prove it. Instead, “regular” people would contribute data that, when aggregated, would reveal the secrets of science.

With an estimated 2 billion users of the internet today, the amount of data they can provide about a given problem is enormous. In the case of disease, for instance, people who report on their health and living conditions could reveal commonalities that today’s monster search engines could uncover: things that a limited set of tests, no matter how carefully thought out, could not. Disclosure would be voluntary – I don’t want to get into privacy issues here – and I suspect people who become ill or have loved ones in danger would be more than willing to contribute information to finding a cure, and even better, prevention.

The standards that I deal with every day are miniscule and fleeting compared to the scientific method. When a standard as ingrained as the scientific method is abandoned, I’m in awe.

I’m excited to tell everyone that my book is now available! It comes in hardcover, paperback, Kindle, and eBook through Amazon.com, Synopsys Press, and other book outlets. Rick Jamison, who created amusing cartoons for the book, and I are blatantly proud of our accomplishment. If you’ll be at the Design Automation Conference, stop by The Standards Booth for a complimentary copy.

“The Ten Commandments for Effective Standards” is a short book that expands upon my blog posts of the same name. I also wove in ideas from my blog readers’ comments on those posts. I included chapters on why I believe standards are important and what I think effective standards are. The book summarizes what I learned over many years (how did that happen?) of participating in creating EDA standards.

I’m quite sure that the challenges we face in the EDA industry when we standardize are similar to those in other technical fields. I found countless examples of challenges in other standardization efforts and included some interesting ones in the book. I hope my book will be of value to people involved in standards everywhere.

As I say in the Introduction, I realized that writing a book about how to create effective standards is like writing a book on parenting. There’s no single right way to do it and opinions abound. I look forward to lively discussions about my book.

Several people have asked me to write about my new car and post some pictures here. If you’re tired of hearing about it, be sure to stop reading now. I’m having a whole lot of fun with this vehicle, and it doesn’t take much to get me to talk about it.

Chevrolet’s engineers designed an amazing automobile that is in very high demand. People have been waiting 6 months or more for their orders to be delivered from the GM factory in Oshawa, Canada. For a period of time last year, the 2010 Camaros were as difficult to get as the new Priuses. I was lucky enough to wait only 7 weeks.

Two Saturdays ago I picked up my brand new 2010 2SS Camaro. It’s a limited Transformers edition “Bumblebee” – right out of the movie – with special emblems and logos that charm kids and adults who are kids at heart (like me). It has just about every feature you can imagine, and under the hood is a 6.2 liter 400hp V8 engine. (Believe it or not, it’s rated at 25 mpg on the highway.) There must be a quite a large number of ICs performing all sorts of tasks to make my Camaro safe and powerful. And to the delight of my fellow blogger, Eric Huang of “To USB or Not to USB”, there’s a USB port in the console.

This time, however, I didn’t want a standard. I chose the automatic transmission. A few of my friends scoffed. I did give up a little bit of horsepower, but 400 is plenty for me! If I feel like shifting manually, I can do it with the buttons on the steering wheel that remind me of a video game controller. Plus, the automatic transmission came with a remote starter. I can’t wait to surprise parking lot onlookers.

Enough talk – here are a few pictures of my Bumblebee on the showroom floor, right before I drove it home.

On the last work day of the year, I thought I’d write a non-work, non-standards related post.

I really like Brussels sprouts.  Even as a child, I enjoyed the little cabbages, peeling the leaves off one at time to eat them slowly.  This year I discovered some wonderful produce stands in Half Moon Bay CA that sell Brussels sprouts still on the stalk.

If you’ve never seen how they grow, it’s pretty amazing. Here’s a picture. The stalk is about 4 feet tall, and the sprouts are smaller towards the bottom and quite large on the top. The sprouts are easily popped off the stalk and ready to cook in so many delicious ways.

Not only do I like to eat them, but I get a kick out of carrying a stalk of sprouts through the San Francisco airport. Carrying a stalk of Brussels sprouts makes an otherwise boring wait in the airport quite fun.

Talk about a conversation starter. People smile at them. “I love Brussels sprouts,” they say. “Here’s my favorite recipe,” they share. People are amazed by them. “I never knew how they grow,” they tell me. “Wow! That’s beautiful,” they exclaim. And sometimes, people even cringe. “What *are* those? Brussels sprouts? I hate them!”, they state. I always ask them if they’ve ever tried them, and it’s funny how often they say “no”.

The TSA agents enjoy the Brussels sprouts stalk, too. One of them asked me if it was a weapon. I told him of course not, it’s a vegetable. His partner said, “Ah. A third-grader’s worst nightmare – death by Brussels sprouts.”

My thanks to all of you who’ve read my blog in 2009, and thanks also for your comments here and to me as @karenbartleson on Twitter. If you have a Brussels sprouts story or recipe, do tell!

I wish you and your loved ones a wonderful holiday season and a successful 2010!

Again this year, Synopsys is sponsoring a standards booth at the Design Automation Conference. I bet you think I’m going to say it’s the best ever standards booth. It’s going to be great, for sure, with an impressive line-up of speakers (see below for details) and in-depth information about key industry standards. But I have to say, IMHO, that the best ever DAC standards booth had to have been our first one, back in 1999.

Synopsys has worked hard for more than two decades to bring improved interoperability and standards to the industry. In 1999, we took a very bold step and created a DAC booth dedicated solely to standards and interoperability. We surprised people by not branding it as Synopsys’ booth and by featuring standards that everyone could use (including our competitors). I can’t tell you how excited and scared I was! We played a game named “Interopardy” and sang a song called “My Flow’s in Jeopardy”. It was a blast, and the traffic through the booth far exceeded my expectations.

*** UPDATE: Listen to the song – the lyrics are funny (if you’re an engineer, anyway). Thanks, Harry.***

Here’s Rich Goldman and me – high-fiving after a round of Interopardy. Herb Reiter is in the background.

Rich, Bonnie George, and me – having a ton of fun in the booth:

Rich, Bonnie, the well-loved Ron Waxman, me, and Angela Sutton singing, “My Flow’s in Jeopardy”. Ron was enthralled:

(Photos courtesy of Roy Stahl, inventor of Interopardy and “My Flow’s in Jeopardy”.)

Now – 10 years later – I’m looking forward to our standards booth because of its rich program and the valuable information it will provide. Will I enjoy the standards booth as much as the first time? Come see for yourself. Oh, and don’t forget to visit Conversation Central and vote for me (please) as the Next EDA Top Blogger.

This year’s DAC standards booth will have four stations focusing on standards initiatives that are vital to modern chip design: IEEE 1800 (SystemVerilog), IEEE 1801 (Unified Power Format – UPF), IEEE 1666 (SystemC), and IPL (Interoperable PDK libraries). In the theatre there will be 33 speakers (wow!) presenting on a wide variety of topics. Here’s a sampling:

“Verification Interoperability Best Practices” and “Standards Update” by Accellera

“Importance of Standards in IC Design” by the IEEE Standards Association

“Interoperable PDK Libraries – IPL” by TSMC, by SpringSoft, by Parallel Engines, by Helic, and by Synopsys

“Verification Methodology Manual – VMM” by ARM, by Verilab, and by Doulos

“VMM-Enabled VIP & Verification Planning” by Denali

“Unified Power Format” by ARM, by DOCEA, and by Elastix

“Power-Aware Debug Automation” by SpringSoft

“Troubleshooting TLM2.0 Models” by JEDA

“Fast OVP Processor Models for TLM-2.0-Based Virtual Platforms” by Imperas.

“Reach New Levels of Virtual Prototyping” by CebaTech

“Impact of EDAC on EDA Industry” by EDAC

“Bridging Abstraction Levels Between Transaction and Signal Level” by SDV

“The Truth about Power and Process Technology” by the SOI Consortium

“Automatic generation of SystemC IPs & use cases for Innovator from CoFluent Studio“ by CoFluent

“SystemC Standards Interoperability with CoWare: Get Value from Using–not Building–a Virtual Platform” by CoWare

“Flashing System-Level Power Using PowerOpt” by ChipVision

“IP-XACT and System Level Low Power Design” by IEEE 1685

“GreenSocs Interoperable Modeling Kits Working with Innovator” by GreenSocs

“Design of Heterogeneous Multi-core SoCs using SystemC, Virtual Platforms, and ASIP Design Tools” by Target Compiler Technologies

I hope you enjoy our standards booth!

As the year draws to a close, I want to wish all of you the very best during the holiday season. Let’s hope for a bright 2009.

Take care, everyone -
Karen

Over the years, I have gone through a lot of baggage.  (I’m talking about luggage, not the emotional kind.)  I have become a loyal customer of Briggs & Riley, and I won’t buy any other brand of travel bags.  Why?  Because of their guarantee. 

Briggs & Riley will fix any bag they make for its lifetime, even if the airlines damage it!  Their guarantee also covers normal wear and tear – really!  I’ve sent my bags to them at least three times for repairs, so I can attest that they cheerfully honor their guarantee.

What I find even more remarkable than their guarantee is an underlying reason for why they offer it.  Obviously, it builds customer devotion, but it also provides an opportunity for Briggs & Riley engineers to continuously improve their products. 

When a broken bag comes in for repair, they analyze what happened and figure out how to prevent the same kind of damage from occurring in their next generation of bags.  Over time, their bags have become more and more durable, saving them repair costs and saving their customers from having to replace bags as frequently.

It’s a business model that seems to work well.  I wonder if there’s a way to apply it to standards.

EDA standards blog
The Standards Game
briggs & riley briggs and riley baggage luggage