Ganesh Swami

I came across a pure Tamil URL today: http://உதாரணம்.பரிட்சை/முதற்_பக்கம். Searching for such website is hard if ones doesn’t know how to type these.

In other news, lack of WiFi at my hotel encouraged me to walk around downtown SF. I should have gone earlier and rented a bike (shop closes at 6pm.)

I’ll be at Stanford for the next few days for Hot Chips 20, a symposium on high performance chips. Sessions I’m particularly interested in:

• D.E. Shaw’s specialized ASIC for molecular dynamics which I’ve written about earlier and IBM’s PowerXCell powering Roadrunner.
• Upcoming architectures: AMD’s 780G and Intel’s Nehalem (dot products of special interest to me.)
• Chips tuned for network or IO (Sun’s Rock, Fujitsu’s SPARC64VII and Intel’s Tukwila.)
• Algorithmic content: Roofline models for automatic tuning of kernels (good addition to Demmel’s talk on the future of linear algebra from MMDS.)
• Intel’s Larrabee: response to “the can of whoop-ass” (detailed architectural paper from SIGRAPH.)
• CUDA: useful for a class of algorithms (based on memory access.)

I’m going to be trying something new this time — live blogging. I’ll try to push constant updates to my twitter stream : gane5h.

I’ll be staying at the Sheraton in Palo Alto. Drop me a line if you want to meetup for a chat.

I’m now a proud owner of an Apple iPhone 3G. There are tons of reviews out there that you can lookup, but here’s mine with the purpose of getting-shit-done:

Pros:

• The easiest phone on the planet. This has got to be one of the most usable devices I’ve ever used. Everything from looking up contacts, syncing, WiFi is so easy.
• Native syncing with Exchange. Hate duplicate copies of my contacts.
• Inbuilt music player.
• Seamless integration with my Mac.
• Volume controls as physical buttons on the outside unlike the iPod Touch.

Cons:

• The touch screen is “cool” for a few minutes but not usable. I regularly lookup information on my phone while driving — this practice will now have to stop.
• Web browsing on the phone isn’t even marginally useful for me.
• GPS isn’t very good. That’s OK because I got a real GPS unit.
• 50% battery charge in two days. Wow. In a year, I’ll need to keep the phone plugged in at all times.
• Sluggish. Skips music when syncing contacts.
• The alarm module is less useful than my 4 year Nokia phone.