Archive for December, 2009
IEEE, ACM, Elsevier, Springerlink, etc. are “evil”
Posted by lekernel in Uncategorized on December 31, 2009
At 26C3, Robert Helling, string theorist from Ludwig Maximilians Universität München, says that IEEE, ACM, Elsevier, Springerlink, and other scientific publishers that ask for paid (and usually extremely expensive) subscriptions are “evil”.
Breizh Entropy Congress organization meeting
Posted by lekernel in Breizh Entropy Congress on December 31, 2009
Breizh Entropy Congress is a zero-budget volunteering-based hackfest oriented towards creative use of free and libre technologies which is planned to take place on April 15 to 17 2010 (preliminary dates, do not book anything yet) in the city of Rennes, France.
If you are interested in taking part in the organization of this event, or be part of the programming committee, we invite you to our orga meeting on January 7th 2010 19:00, at Golden Gate Cafe, 3 rue Saint Georges, 35000 Rennes.
The call for proposals will be published shortly after, around January 9th.
26C3 Milkymist slides
Slides for the Milkymist presentation at 26C3 are now available here. Yes, they are based on the Hacker Space Festival presentation last June (which are technically oriented), which were updated with the project advances and feedbacks.
The Milkymist project will also be present at the PHACK! project space in the hackcenter, with a demo board (ML401) to play with.
Coming back to Sweden and what happened to AK4
Posted by lekernel in Geek collectives, Uncategorized on December 25, 2009
Last week, I had to come back to Sweden for a few days, and I used that occasion to check out what has become of the building that formerly hosted the AK4 squat and the Abbenay hackspace, and was forcefully evicted by the pigs after roughly five weeks of existence. The reason invoked was the imminent opening of an art gallery there.
Surprisingly enough, I was greeted by signs saying that an art gallery was actually there. They said “CAGA, Concrete Art Gallery & Academy, Betonggalleriet”. The building was however still empty, even though they installed new lights and an alarm system. If they eventually use the building at all, it’s hard to tell whether there will be actual artistic creativity happening there, or if it’s just some pseudo-artistic marketing plan for the Cementa AB concrete company that also happened to counter our arguments of using the building for cultural purposes. The reservation of the betonggalleriet.biz and caga.biz domain names by Cementa AB suggests the latter.
Abbenay Hackspace is currently using the office of Unga Forskare (“Young Researchers”), a somewhat sleepy association who wants to teach science to children.
Thanks to all of you who wrote support letters in an attempt to let us stay there.
CAGA sign
Current state of the building
OpenWrt/Milkymist coding party, Dec 21st 17:00
Posted by lekernel in Geek collectives, Milkymist on December 17, 2009
A workshop/coding party will take place at the /tmp/lab in order to finalize the porting of the OpenWrt Linux distribution to the Milkymist open hardware system-on-chip.
Every interested person is welcome.
Venue: http://www.tmplab.org/contact
Date: Monday Dec 21st 2009, starting at 17:00
UPDATE!!!! Because the train that goes to /tmp/lab has suddenly broken down, the event is moved to DigitalNonSense (Paris 17) at 19:00
LatticeMico32 in TSMC 90nm
Posted by lekernel in Milkymist, Uncategorized on December 15, 2009
Lately, I have had access to a computer with the Cadence RTL Compiler and the TSMC 90nm standard cell libraries to play with, so by curiosity I tried to run synthesis of the LatticeMico32 core.
The most interesting result is that it’s RIDICULOUSLY FAST. It nearly meets timing at 800MHz, which is 7-8 times the speed on Virtex-4. Power consumption is 29mW only at this frequency. Area is very small, with only 13K cells used (0.081 square millimeters).
If I did not do a mistake using the synthesizer (since it gets approximately the same number of flip-flops as in the FPGA implementation it’s probably correct) and if these results are for real, they definitely make me want to leave FPGAs and do ASICs instead 
The LM32 configuration is the same as the one used on ML401, except that I disabled the caches because the synthesizer apparently does not support RAM extraction and generated a mess of flip-flops instead.
Those results were obtained from the gate-level netlist only, with a wire load model. I did not try to lay out the core in silicon.
(original post with synthesis script and detailed reports)
La Nuit du Kimchi
Posted by lekernel in Uncategorized on December 11, 2009
Mardi 15 décembre 2009,
La Suite, 27 rue de la Glacière, 75013 Paris.
A partir de 19h, Free!
Au menu:
- Dégustation de divers Kimchis et de Kimbap, Kombucha, fermentations diverses…
- Atelier de fabrication du Kimchi:
Venez avec vos légumes (choux, carrotes, radis noirs ou blancs, poireaux, n’importe quoi!), et surtout… de l’ail!
Nous fournissons piments, sauces, condiments. Venez aussi avec un truc genre tupperware pour emporter votre création. - avec aussi les joyeux hackers de la Suite Logique.
- Et une ambiance K-pop expé du Séoul underground.
Une proposition de La Suite et de FFF / http://kefir.wikidot.com/events