Internships at AESTE

Listen to one of the interns here talk a little about his internship experience at AESTE. The work we do is HARD – but fruitful. The working culture here is different – in a good way. You get to meet other interesting people – who will enrich you. An internship Read more…

Misunderstood Motivations

In the latest blog entry from one of our AESTE interns, he raised a couple of pertinent questions with regards to the very raison d’etre at AESTE. I thought that this might be an opportune time to address the issue. First, I shall address a very commonly held misconception – Read more…

Farewell Makan #2

Two of our interns will be leaving us by the end of August. It’s tradition here to treat everyone to a farewell makan when people leave. However, since August will be Ramadhan, we had to bring forward the farewell so that everyone could partake in it. For the farewell makan Read more…

Clustering Icarus Verilog

Icarus Verilog is a popular open-source digital circuit simulator distributed as part of gEDA. While it is a fast simulator, it runs largely single-threaded and does not exploit the modern developments in computing. Depending on the complexity of the circuit involved, a single simulation run can be fairly time consuming. Read more…

Upgraded Office Plans

Our office plans have been upgraded! This is the new layout of the office plan. Compared to the previous one, there are a few changes. Firstly, the lounge area has been turned into another meeting area. The sofa has been removed. This mini meeting area is particularly suitable for close Read more…

DistCC Workstation Cluster

Another good thing to do with a bunch of work-stations is to combine their computing capabilities to speed up complex tasks. One such complex task in an engineering company is compiling code. Thankfully, there are useful solutions to this problem that can be implemented easily. Guide here. It took about Read more…

GlusterFS Workstation Cluster

At our office, there are a number of work-stations used for development work. However, I have a small concern about the safety of the files on these machines because they are all stored on a local hard-disk. The traditional method of backing-up would involve the use of a file-server and Read more…

Unifi is Coming

Earlier this week, there was some construction work along a side-road leading away from the office. At first, I did not know what it was until I took a closer look – they were contractors installing a couple of large enclosures for Unifi – our national optical fibre broadband service. Read more…

Small-office System Infrastructure

Virtualisation comes in handy for a small-office – we can run a bunch of disparate services on limited hardware. Hardware A second-hand laptop is used as the KVM host and is installed with Debian and Lib-virt. I like using laptops as servers because of the built-in UPS. However, it is Read more…

Small-office Physical Networking

I’ll talk a little about the wiring up and networking infrastructure in the office. I had a lot of old networking equipment lying around my home and decided to work with that instead of buying new ones. However, the future is also important and I have planned for easy upgrades Read more…