Protégé Disassociation Disorder

I dislike the aphorism “all good things must come to pass.” Do they? Really?! Sixteen weeks seemed like it would be a long time when we started; but it passed in a milli-moment. The lab is quieter (I don’t talk to myself much), and even though the sun is shining brightly on the future, there is unquestionably a sadness in such things. Selected solution vector: Go forward and be awesome with the tools and talent we can muster. I like that.
Hit up a recommendation of our erstwhile intern over at LinkedIn.

Christina at work, Fall 2012

Productivity Multiplied

"Productivity. Multiplied." that's the slogan for Xilinx's Vivado tool suite. I wonder if the marketing folk understand that actual multiplication of productivity stems not from the tools; but from those who design, train, support and ultimately use them? We love Vivado, warts and all. When you consider the depth and sophistication of the offering, it is possibly one of the best digital design CAD tool values ever. That it's married up with 28nm series-7 silicon that has been evolving for over a quarter a century doesn't hurt. Add the standardization of AXI interfaces, as opposed to the wild-west with every IP for itself; and the situation looks good.
Mike with Christina, holding the one series-7 platform we have spent almost no time with!

Xilinx DocNav in RHEL6

With a little more effort, we got Xilinx DocNav up and running with RHEL6.3. This includes multi-tabbed browsing with Acrobat Reader when clicking multiple documents in DocNav.

If you haven't used DocNav, you should try it. Quick access to the latest versions of almost all Xilinx doc.

One insight here is that neither Red Hat or Xilinx can redistribute Acrobat, we're told. So we found and tried a blog post that makes it easy to do a clean install of Acrobat Reader from the Adobe repos.

The RHEL6.3 desktop is starting to be a nice place to code.