Ashish Patel

I’ll be attending the LEAP conference in San Jose, CA. I put my name into the barrell back in 2005, and finally a spot opened up for me yesterday. This event will run from Feb 26 - March 2.

Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics, Inc. (LEAP) has been intent on “growing leaders” within the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities across the country. When LEAP opened its doors 25 years ago, it had a simple yet powerful idea: that in order for AAPI communities to realize their full potential and to foster robust participation in the larger democratic process, those communities would have to begin producing leaders who could advocate and speak on their behalf.

Through the creation of culturally relevant workshops and programs, 125,000 people across the nation have participated in over 2,500 leadership development programs, organizational development workshops, career management and diversity trainings for an extensive roster of clients, including colleges and universities, community and student organizations, federal and state government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies across the country. Click here to view client list.

I’m really looking forward to meeting all the people from various organizations. It will be really interesting networking opportunity.

We’re also being put up in a sweet mansion, yep you heard that right…a MANSION. Its the Dolce Hayes Mansion in SJ, CA. Check it out below:

A little update on my participation on the World Community Grid project. I’ve been running one of my desktops at work on the project for over a year now and the progress is looking quite impressive.

Each project has unique minimum requirements. If your computer does not meet the minimum requirements for a project, you will not receive work from that project. I have been involved in the following projects:

• FightAIDS@Home
• Genome Comparison
• Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy
• Help Defeat Cancer
• Human Proteome Folding 2

My statistics from the day I started this project include solving 1511 results and accumulating over 350000 points, ranking me a mere 8790 in the project. So much for being number one I strongly encourage anyone with an idle computer to join the program and put that computing power to bettering mankind!

I have gotten my first tutorial on IBM DeveloperWorks published! The article is called “Build ARM performance monitoring in your applications“. Read it and feel free to comment This article/tutorial comes from a paper I submitted to the Computing Measurement Group (CMG) in Reno 2006.

The Eclipse Test & Performance Tools Platform (TPTP) project released an open source and Application Response Measurement (ARM) V4.0-compliant implementation in June 2006, based on TPTP V4.2. This tutorial describes the TPTP project and explains how ARM has been implemented and integrated with TPTP. The trade-offs involved in getting to this point are discussed, along with the challenges in moving forward. Specific examples show how to get started using ARM for your application with TPTP.

This tutorial describes how the Eclipse Test & Performance Tools Platform (TPTP) project is extending its toolset to use The Open Group Application Response Measurement (ARM) instrumentation methodology for response-time tracking. Starting with TPTP V4.2, performance analysts will be able to use Eclipse TPTP — or products based on TPTP technology — to identify and monitor individual transactions as they pass through the various components of composite applications. The implementation of ARM described here was released as a Technology Preview with TPTP V4.2 in June 2006. In the future, it will be fully integrated into TPTP.

Complements of Ars Technica, I’ve learned some secrets about the Nintendo Revolution.

• Nintendo is taking a third route. Knowing that their “virtual console” service will leave users wanting hard drives, they’re supporting them, but they’re not requiring them, either. The console will have 512MB of Flash memory for storage, and will also support SD cards. Even better, the Revolution will be equipped with USB ports, and Iwata’s comments imply that Nintendo is going to be open to third-party storage products, saying that “practically any storage method can be used.”

Nintendo may in fact release their own add-on hard drive, but for now there’s hope that Nintendo will actually leave the storage solution up to the user. This could be another feather in Nintendo’s pricing cap, inasmuch as it will hold console prices down, while allowing users who want storage to go and buy it at competitive rates.

• The Power-PC based CPU will reportedly run at 739MHz, which is a boost of 50 percent over the GameCube in terms of clockspeed alone. Compared to the Xbox 360, the ticks of the clock sound weak: Microsoft’s offering sports three 3.2 GHz cores. Indeed, IGN notes that the Revolution’s CPU clock is quite close to the original Xbox, which ran at 733MHz. Still, we all know that comparing clockspeeds alone isn’t particularly useful. In this case, however, I do think it speaks to Nintendo’s target with this console, i.e., not the bleeding edge.

The Hollywood GPU, built by ATI, runs at a modest 243MHz, and “is a large-scale integrated chip that includes the GPU, DSP, I/O bridge and 3MBs of texture memory,” according to sources. All in all, the Revolution looks to be a extension to the GameCube’s Gekko and Flipper architectures, rather than a complete revolution in approach.

• To go along with an inexpensive console, Nintendo is hoping for inexpensive games, too. Iwata already announced that the Revolution would ship for less than $300, making it cheaper than the Xbox 360 and the PS3. He is now saying that he expects the games to also be priced lower than the competition’s, saying “I cannot imagine any first party title could be priced for more than $50.”

I can totally see people buying into this console, seeing that the PS3 is super charged in its pricing scheme. Kudos to IBM for closing on the deals for another gaming console chip - take that Apple!