Cool Verification

As many of you have noticed, I've fallen into quite an irregular posting schedule here on Cool Verification. After almost 6 years I don't feel too bad about not having a post up ever week (um, well, once a quarter?). But one reason for the irregular posting schedule is that I've been communicating much more heavily with many of you via Facebook and Twitter. If you'd like to join in the conversation, I'd recommend you head over to one of the following sites and "like" or "follow" me to participate!

• Cool Verification on Facebook
• JL Gray on Twitter

As a side note, I've got an audio recording of my "Making Great Products Great" panel from last week. I'm trying to work out the best way to post it. If you have suggestions on how to do it (beyond embedding a streaming link in a blog post) let me know.

Happy new year all!  I thought I'd pass along a link to an excellent post written by John Ford over at DFTdigest about techniques for "repairing" embedded memories.  Enjoy!

This is a bit of old news but I've been on and off vacation for the last month and haven't had a chance to post for awhile.  Cadence now has a blog online on the new Cadence online community website.  For better or for worse they've chosen to create a group blog (though thankfully you can select a category of posts to view, such as Functional Verification).  My first impression? 

There are eight posts up in the Functional Verification category.  Only two of the posts are written by people without "Marketing" in their title (those would be posts written by Mike Stellfox and Jason Andrews).  It's not that I don't think the marketing guys like Adam, Joe, and Tom have anything interesting to say, it's just that I immediately have to treat what they write about the products they market with more suspicion than I would from people on the engineering side.  For that reason, I'd rather see the marketing message kept separate from the technical message. For example, I'd much rather see the marketing guys write a separate blog on their experiences marketing a verification library.  Plus, I want to hear more about the nitty-gritty techncial details of the OVM, not just why everyone loves it so much!

At DVCon this past February I had the pleasure of meeting Ron Ploof, New Media Evangelist for Synopsys.  Ron helps run (among other things) the Synopsys blogging site.  He also has his own blog, RonAmok!  Earlier today Ron posted a video describing his experiences after posting a video about his bad experience with buying flowers online (got that?).  It's a fascinating look at what happens when your average, everyday Joe (or Ron in this case) posts content about a company on the Internet.  Though I've never posted video, I have seen this sort of thing happen on Cool Verification.  I'd highly recommend folks take a look (and special kudos to Ron - I'm impressed with the quality of the video!).

FYI... As of right now it is possible to subscribe to a comment feed for individual posts.  That way, you can follow any ongoing discussion on a post by post basis from your RSS feed reader.  I was really hoping to set up a comment feed for the entire site, but that doesn't seem to be supported by Typepad yet.  The comment feed feature itself is a new beta feature of Typepad.  I had to send a note to customer support to get them to enable it on my account. 

To subscribe to a feed, open the post you're interested in and click on the link in the comments section where it says "You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post."

If anyone has any issues please let me know.

Some of you may have noticed that it was not possible to access this site via coolverification.com, only www.coolverification.com.  Chalk it up to my ignorance of how to manage domains and the fact that after awhile, I completely forgot that coolverification.com went to a GoDaddy temporary landing page.  Over two years after setting up this site, I've finally fixed the issue by setting up coolverification.com to forward to www.coolverification.com. 

Enjoy!

It's been 9 months in the making, but today we finally unveiled the new Verilab website!  Please take a look and let us know what you think. 

July 24 will mark the one year anniversary of Cool Verification (for a good laugh, check out my slightly tacky first post).  When I started the site I knew very little about blogging, and wasn't sure if anyone would be interested in reading anything I had to say.  It was also quite a challenge getting over the fear of making a fool out of myself (as it turns out, it's really not that bad once you've done it a few times)! 

Several months ago I switched from providing full posts in my RSS feed to excerpts - primarily because I didn't have any way to track if anyone was actually reading the posts.  In readers such as Thunderbird it really doesn't make too much difference since Thunderbird went out and automatically fetched the web page each time someone wanted to read a particular post.  However, other web-based readers such as the Google Reader just show the summary text and require the user to click on a link to see the full site.  That seems like a pain. Plus, people reading the blog through the email subscription service were only receiving a snippet of the text of any given article.  Both of these issues should be resolved.

The only drawbacks to the new approach seem to be it's possible someone may miss an update I make to a post after it's already been read out of the feed and it's not possible to see comments without clicking through to the site.  Though there are at least 30 subscribers to my feed and almost a couple thousand page hits per month these days y'all don't seem to be a very talkative bunch, so I'm not going to stress about it too much!  Let me know if anyone has thoughts one way or the other. 

FYI... for those of you who subscribe to my RSS feed, you may notice a few changes.  Typepad has recently added support for integration with Feedburner.  The URL shouldn't change, but the way the feed shows up in your browser/mail reader/etc might.  Based on my testing this evening, there may be some bizarre behavior if you've subscribed to the feed using the auto-discovery method (using www.coolverification.com instead of www.coolverification.com/index.rdf)... if you have trouble accessing individual articles in the feed please let me know ASAP!

Also, for those of you who aren't impressed by the whole Web 2.0 concept, I've added the ability for folks to subscribe to Cool Verification via email.  The subscription service is managed by Feedburner.  You'll only receive mail when I post a new article to Cool Verification, and you can unsubscribe at any time.