Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: July 11th, 2022Integrating Hardware and Software TeamsWe've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for July 11th, 2022.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our esteemed guest was Jon Masters. Other speakers included Nathaneal Huffman, Tom Lyon, Dan Cross, Rick Altherr, Matt Keeter, Peter Corless, Timon, Siddharth Joshi, Bob Mader, Aaron David Goldman, Simeon Miteff, Remy Goldschmidt, and MattSci. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:@4:32 Fostering of mutual hatred between hardware and software peopleHuge difference in cost of errors in both time and money@9:38 Dealing with perishable pre-preg material Tachyon 100GTachyon 100G@15:06 The black magic that is DDRDIMM training demo@21:58 Open source tooling for EEsOpen FPGA toolingOpen RISCRISC VZero to ASIC courseLinux from scratchBen Eater's 8bit computerPhil's lab, KiCad 6 PCB design walkthoughPhil's lab, Altium Designer PCB design walkthough@33:18 Matt Keeter's take on ECAD toolsEagle CADSmaller breakout boards made with KiCad for unit testing@36:55 Timon's take on EE curriculumMath-heavy electrical engineering curriculumArts of ElectronicsKnowing at least basics of adjacent disciplines goes a long way@49:03 Software shouldn't pierce abstractions in order to work reliably, but people should to deepen their knowledge@1:04:54 Making microchips at homeSam Zeloof, maskless-photolithographyJeri Elseworth, making microchips at home@1:06:05 Oxide gets a Pick'n'Place machine?Open Hardware Pick'n'Place machine@1:09:40 Bob's take on silosSMM, System Management Mode@1:22:15 Vintage gaming as an intro into embedded softwareWiFi Game Boy Cartridge@1:26:14 Fabs at UNI@1:29:40 Intel Tofino (TM) Series Programmable Ethernet Switch ASICIntel Tofino@1:31:13 Google's open source high level synth. (HLS) tool XLSXLSBluespecChiselIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Special guest Scott Johnson joins for a Twitter Space recording where topics range from 'Beautiful C++' to 'Reinventing the Wheel'. The conversation covers tech software, business success, and memorable books, offering a blend of nostalgia and insightful discussions.

pending

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: June 13th, 2022The Rise and Fall of DECWe've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for June 13th, 2022.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on June 13th included Tom Lyon, Dan Cross, Tim Bray, Ian Grunert, and XXX. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Pronunciation and mispronunciationBryan's DEC reading list:The Ultimate Entrepreneur by Glenn Rifkin, George HarrarLearn, Earn & Return - My Life as a Computer Pioneer by Harlan AndersonHigh-tech Ventures: The Guide For Entrepreneurial Success by C. Gordon Bell, John McNamaraComputer engineering: A DEC view of hardware systems design by C. Gordon Bell, J. Craig Mudge, John McNamaraCreative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital by Spencer E. AnteDEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC: The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation by Edgar H. Schein, Paul J. Kampas, Michael M. Sonduck, Peter S. Delisi@1:29:05 Ian mentions Computer History Museum's oral history program prompting strong recommendations:Ian: Bernie LacrouteAdam: Pierre LamondBryan: Dave CutlerIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: May 23rd, 2022Surviving the Dot-Com BustWe've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for May 23rd, 2022.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on May 23rd included Dan McDonald, Dan Cross, Joshua Clulow, Steve Tuck, Matt Campbell and Theo Schlossnagle. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:@1:37 Pick and shovels story circulating at SunOakes Ames "King of Spades", pbs article, wikiboo.com wikipets.com wiki@11:00 IPOs and public exposuretheGlobe.com wiki@18:20 "The Correction"Feasting like 19th century robber baronsNov 2000, free fallTrilogy, Inc wiki@28:49 Students looking for placementClarity of the bust@36:35 Billboards on the 101garden.com, cnn blurb@39:13 Theo's story, roulette at TrilogyExpansion and contraction of CS student enrollment@46:20 Matt's memoriesAllAdvantage wikiExcite@Home wikiJohn Talbott "The Fall of Silicon Graphics" articleFucked Company wikiCamaraderie over watching your companies imploding@53:39 Looking towards the looming housing bubbleDuring Oxide raise, race against time for VC fundingPandemicHot venture environment, over-valued companiesStimulus, spending on non-essentials, exacerbating income inequality@58:56 Differences from the dot-com era, more defined revenue models?Food delivery services, harbingers of bust?Steve anecdote: Dellionaires, margin call day, layoffs@1:08:12 Dan's second startup experienceWindows on the World wiki@1:10:15 Matt's question: can Oxide weather a tech bust?Adam: downturn can motivate seeking value, looking away from (stable, pricey) incumbents to (riskier, cheaper) new offeringsBryan: dot com bust pushed us toward open-source, for economic reasons.@1:15:51 Are we headed for a bust? How deep?How does a company survive the lean times?Negative human consequencesmammon (money, material wealth) wikiAdvice for practitioners?Dan McDonald: controlling inflation, starting companiesTheo: downturn will hit industries differently, concerns over global supply chainAdam: don't forget about helping others, looking out for other people, for the future of our world.Dan Cross: if it looks to good to be true, it probably is.If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: May 16th, 2022Debugging MethodologiesWe've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for May 16th, 2022.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guests on May 16th were Jordan Hendricks and Luqman Aden. Other speakers included jasonbking, Rick Altherr and Ben Kimock. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Green Room wikiNVMe wiki (Non-Volatile Memory. PCI Express)@3:38 Jordan's storyJordan's thorough bug write-up, (reported by Josh Clulow as "nvme_quiesce() can hang preventing reboot")Non-maskable interrupt wiki@8:04 Adam interrupts a box with a kitchen knifekmdb man page and page in the mdb book@14:11 Josh recites a poem about timeoutsAvoiding getting stuck, experimenting@20:10 A previous encounter with NVMe/PCIe issues (see also: Jordan's NVMe Hotplug discussion video ~26mins)mdb format character "j" (for Jordan!) (and jazzed-up) feature@26:50 Normal and abrupt shutdown notification, breakthrough, writing up a narrative@32:27 Luqman's storyThe blog post "Achievement Unlocked: rustc segfault"dtrace usdtcscope, rust analyzer@43:50 Inspecting LLVM IR, RustC MIRasync blocks, inline assemblyboiling down reproducible casesmaking quality write-ups, telling a story, teaching debuggingpopular on Hacker Newsdead reproducible?@1:03:02 Bugs: psychotic, non reproducibleDebugging mindsetDifferent tools and methodologies for different problemsanonymous tracing book page, speculative tracing page@1:10:03 Jason: number literal formats with underscores, now in mdb@1:12:35 Ben prompts a debugging story, checking conditions in debug, program abort on errorud2 instructionRick describes the Oxide boot loaderXMODEM wikiTriple fault wikiRust "heapless" crateIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: April 25th, 2022Fail WhalingWe've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for April 25th, 2022.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Jason Hoffman. Other speakers included Joshua Clulow, Matt Campbell and Ian. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Debugging RailsJason walks chain of events leading to "twttr"@10:46 The first mock up, SMS@13:42 Twitter goes live, early daysTcl, Mongrel, LiteSpeed@19:30 First problemsBryan's debugging story, exceptions and backtraces, index out of boundsDiscovery of the problem was not met with gratitude@29:53 Jason tells another problem story, production directories full of junk test files@38:30 Story of the first Hadoop cluster@42:22 Matt's comment on directory limits@46:35 Companies growing up, on-prem and cloud infrastructure@49:26 The Fail WhaleRuby runtime, Ryan DahlMoved to Java, Scala eventuallyDTrace and dynamic languagesRaku, Parrot VM, MoarVM@59:53 Changing language and hardware landscapes, video presentation sharing, short social media handles, ahl, getting into hockey@1:12:30 Billionaire's playground?Quick diversion, history trivia bet@1:18:43 ModerationMicrosoft Tay bot (shutdown 16 hours after launch)Can anything kill Twitter?@1;29:26 Matt: what replaces Spaces?How could an alternative be built? What would it look like?Bryan predicts: change of headquarters, "burning the flag"Adam predicts: resale or IPO within 3 yearsSee also: Jason Hoffman and Bryan Cantrill CTO vs VP Engineering video ~45mins (audio is rough, content is good)If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: April 18th, 2022More Tales from the Bringup LabWe've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for April 18th, 2022.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by members of the Oxide team: Arjen Roodselaar, Nathaneal Huffman, Robert Mustacchi, Aaron Hartwig, Steve Tuck, Matt Keeter, Eric Aasen, Rick Altherr, and RFK.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:@2:25 Overview of upcoming themes related to the bringup lab@4:28 Defining the different terms and code-names of the hardware in development at oxide@4:40 Gimlet, the compute node@5:10 Sidecar, a board based on a switching ASIC from Intel@7:24 Arjen's twitter thread with details related to the bringup and Eric's description of the challenges in designing the PDN (Power Delivery Network) ATT@15:34 The load-slammer, an electronic load to simulate the power draw of an ASIC / BGA-part LS@19:06 Bouncing supply cables on load steps@22:27 FPGA that controls everything on the Sidecar board@24:05 TOML's unstable table order made the team pop a couple ICs off the board searching for bugs@31:41 Brown-out in the hotel during first bringup session from a blown bus duct@33:45 Debugging ground bounce issues while testing the PDN with the load-slammer (phantom over/undershoot)@40:15 Hardware team pranks the management during a meeting with a potential investor@43:20 Chonky heat sink that weighs 8 pounds / moment arm crisis@48:19 First time powering up, checking temperature with thermal camera, learning about "puppy dog warm"@52:12 Matt talks about the second, "lesser" network switch on the Sidecar board@57:28 Secret 8051 cores, slew-rate woes: impedance missmatch on SPI traces that manifested in unreliable communication in full bandwidth mode of the SPI/GPIO driver@1:03:19 PLL config issues and Matt's verbose config tool to fix them@1:04:26 Load-bearing dongles@1:06:37 Debugging PCIe link, Arjen's Frankenstein PCIe analyzer/exerciser@1:22:36 Gimlet, stumbling blocks found in January@1:30:08 Arjen's big breakthrough on the Sidecar, shouting at the T6@1:32:08 Cursed pull-downs, Rick's remote hardware debugging support by incrementally breaking his T6 boards to find issue with the DUT@1:36:24 T6 finally comes out of reset, "we're gonna live! we're gonna live!"@1:41:06 Rick reworks gnarly footprint error, on multiple ICs, to verify design for Rev. B - dead bug style.@1:53:12 Sidecar progress continuation, cable oupsi, off-by-one error@1:59:42 Dedicated support by IC vendor with very understanding wives@2:01:20 Summary and parting thoughtsIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: April 4th, 2022Another LPC55 ROM VulnerabilityWe've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for April 4th, 2022.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Laura Abbott.Other speakers on April 4th included Ian, jasonbking, Todd Gamblin?, Ben ?, MattSci, jasonbking and Evan?. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Jonathan Goldstein's Heavyweight podcastOxide and Friends podcasttransistor.fm launch point, has links to Spotify, Google, Amazon etc playersLaura did talk about the first LPC55 vulnerability in the May 3, 2021 space, but the recording for that day missed it.Laura Abbott (30 April, 2021) Exploiting Undocumented Hardware Blocks in the LPC55S69 write-upAnd DEF CON talk with Rick Altherr@4:01 Today's topic: Laura Abbott (23 March 2022) Another vulnerability in the LPC55S69 ROM write upHow do you brick a chip?@7:20 The spreadsheet, ROM patch after bootCompany dismisses or downplays vulnerabilitiesSees CVEs as optional??@15:19 CVEs as more software focused. What does a CVE for hardware even mean?NXP doesn't want to open their software"Even though we are not believers in security by obscurity, the product specific ROM code is not open to external parties except for approved test labs for vulnerability reviews"@19:43 The story of the current vulnerabilityGhidra@27:26 Picking apart the codeBounds checks, writing outside the bounds of the bufferDICE by Trusted Computing GroupRequest for DiscussionEvaluating potential chips when building a product@41:09 Secure hardware, work around potential pitfallsOpen source would help@45:37 Disclosed to NXP, more receptive this timeDiscussion on HN@54:21 Security review industry@57:11 Ian: building up your own (open) documentation on LPC55?@1:01:31 Jason: questionable definitions of "open" sourceAccess to source as building confidence in the product@1:05:20 Todd: securing supply chain for code in large scale projects with lots of contributorsVulnerabilities can occur so easily@1:08:54 Ben: custom setups abound. Hard to trust a whole stack of assembled pieces@1:12:16 Matt: what is the ROM doing? Assembly or C? Could the provider's hands be tied as far as releasing proprietary code?@1:17:19 Jason: X.509 parsing as a good place to look for vulnerabilities?@1:18:25 Evan: encouragement around fuzzing X.509Next time: more tales from the bringup lab!If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: March 28th, 2022Time, Timezones, Metric Time, Losing and SavingWe’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for March 28th, 2022.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on March 28th included Tom Lyon, jasonbking, Matt Campbell, Akshay Kumar, Aaron Goldman and Simeon Miteff. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:[@8:07](https://youtu.be/BHtfqleSHAs?t=487) Y2K, leap years The Staff of Ra“at” command[@15:28](https://youtu.be/BHtfqleSHAs?t=928) Matt’s stories elm email[@23:29](https://youtu.be/BHtfqleSHAs?t=1409) Jason: daylight saving time in Indiana “Time in Indiana” wiki[@26:31](https://youtu.be/BHtfqleSHAs?t=1591) Time zone database John Bemelmans Marciano (2014) Whatever Happened to the Metric System? How America Kept Its Feet bookGeopolitical aspects of timeEastman plan calendar[@32:23](https://youtu.be/BHtfqleSHAs?t=1943) Aaron’s stories, setting clocks back, Leap Day[@35:54](https://youtu.be/BHtfqleSHAs?t=2154) Akshay: Ken Thompson’s six day work week?Leap seconds Time of day hardware bug[@48:54](https://youtu.be/BHtfqleSHAs?t=2934) 2038 - the end of time Y2K problemsGPS week number rollover wiki[@57:58](https://youtu.be/BHtfqleSHAs?t=3478) Matt: Cory Doctorow’s “Epoch” short story podcast commissioned by Mark Shuttleworth[@1:00:28](https://youtu.be/BHtfqleSHAs?t=3628) Ultimate, penultimate, antepenultimateOxide and Friends podcast!! transistor.fm launch point, has links to Spotify, Google, Amazon etc playersLaura Abbott (23 March 2022) Another vulnerability in the LPC55S69 ROM write upIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!