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. This means that the area around the office has been earmarked for the next stage of fibre deployment. Although I was not sure when the office would be covered, I Read more
My journey at Aeste started on 1st of March 2011 when I was welcomed by my supervisor and was briefed about the company road-map. Well, to be honest with you my friend, from the moment that I approached the company, I knew for sure that working here won’t be a waste of time and it will need a lot of effort considering my background and what the company is doing. So after being briefed on my first day, i was Read more
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 important to take care of cooling and hard-disk reliability in laptops. For the purpose of cooling, some cheap (RM10) laptop cooler fans were installed. Storage is off-loaded to a dedicated Read more
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 and growth. Wiring The main backbone of the office network is wired. While wireless networking has its place, it is not a replacement for good old copper wiring in terms Read more
AESTE moved out of my home and into its new offices at Queen’s Avenue about a year ago. The renovations were completed and the furniture was installed in stages. Almost all of the furniture comes from IKEA because they sell startup-friendly furniture at a very startup-friendly price. The image above illustrates the office plan. While things are always under construction, there is very little deviation from the original plan. Let’s start with a virtual walk-through of the office. When a Read more
We are happy to announce our parnership with Otak-Otak – The Internship Programme for Leaders. Quoting the official website: The Otak-Otak Program will be built around a first of its kind, unique talent development schedule consisting of leadership training and site visits. Our core mission is to connect top student leaders to Malaysian companies, select the 50 best interns to be placed in internships with our Corporate Partners, and to build meaningful internship experiences for both the Corporate Partner and Read more
There is an interesting article in TC recently, about how it is now an excellent time to join startups. Just to note that AESTE is HIRING NOW. Quoting the article: Today, most interesting technology is built directly for end users and it is a crucial skill for an engineer to understand quick iteration based on user feedback, however complex the technology. Increased technology and distribution leverage means that in the future, smaller teams are going to build higher impact things Read more
This is a short introductory talk on Open Source Hardware given to a mixed crowd of both software and business types at a local FireStarter event organised by Hailer Communications.
An idea about hardware assisted synchronisation for the AEMB came about recently. The idea centered on the problem of how multiple threads would communicated between each other. The solution to this problem has always been synchronisation primitives. The AEMB already supports the atomic MSRSET/MSRCLR instructions, which can be used as a mutex primitive. This hardware mutex can be used to build additional synchronisation operations in software. However, this is an inefficient method for doing software synchronisation. Since the AEMB is Read more
Seems like there are three important pieces of news to report: that the AEMB has made in-roads into China; that the AEMB has been implemented on Altera hardware; and that the AEMB is capable of booting uC/OS-II. According to the information provided at a Chinese media website, a key Chinese university (Shandong University of Science and Technology) has successfully implemented an SoC system using the AEMB on an Altera platform and boots uC/OS-II. They published a paper on this earlier Read more