ISE support for Trimaran, A How-to

The tool is about to finish, and will be released to the public shortly. With the finish of it, my time as a Ph.D student is also approaching its end. What I have to do next is writing up the thesis and going outside to the big wild world. I hope other researchers in the field of custom architectures can benefit from my papers and this tool. Doing open-source is always one of my dreams, and this tool is something I've done towards that way...

Here is a link for the document in edit (requiring a google account):
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dg7t3rmx_24hdznjn

The software will be released with a set of benchmarks after thorough test (now partially).

Web 2.0 services, my online office

Blogging is surely one of the pioneers of Web2.0, and also the first one I started to participate. In fact, the concept of wiki was before blogging, and I also started to search in wikipedia before writing my blogs, but I've never contributed anything to wiki except for "using" it. Below is a sketch of Web2.0 services I'm using currently:

• www.blogger.com google's blogging service.
• www.citeulike.org research literature store, commenting and sharing.
• del.icio.us online bookmarking.
• docs.google.com document editing, not sure if it is Web2.0, but it can be used as a editor for blogger.
• picasaweb.google.com photo store and sharing.
• www.youtube.com google's video store and sharing.
• www.mp3tunes.com music store, online playback and sharing
• www.imdb.com movie info database.

Half of them are google services. In fact, from day one google launched gmail, the light of personal online office had turned on based on the large storage available for each account. Google had acquired a lot of Web2.0 companies and integrated their services under a universal account for each gmail user. An era of online office has come, just open your arms and brace it!

My Must-have Firefox Addons

As a IT guy, switching among different OS and migrating from systems to systems (e.g., my desktop and a few of my laptops) is not uncommon. Whenever this happens, the first thing I would make sure is the up-to-date Firefox is installed with the following must-have addons:

1. Del.icio.us Bookmarks: for online bookmarking service, sharing bookmark links with others or myself (so that i don't need to synchronize the bookmarks from 3, 4 computers I use).
2. GUtil: grants me instant access to various google services I'm using (i.e., gmail, reader, docs, calendar, blogger, album) with button click.
3. ScrapBook: great substitution for "save page as..." function, which allows you to capture (and capture certain parts), organize, comment and edit on interesting web pages. The only problem is that it's not an online thing, and you need to export/import among different systems you have.
4. Google Toolbar for Firefox: this is actually with Firefox package, but I remind you to click on the "G" icon with the downward arrow, you will find it's not only for googling (i.g., I need Webster for English words that doesn't recognize me).
5. Session Manager: resume the tabs I was reading last time after restarting Firefox.
6. FireFTP: for lazy guys.