UEFI News and Commentary

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Teach What You Know

A really interesting book I picked up a few months ago is called "Teach What You Know" by Steve Trautman. It is designed for technical experts who have to educate their peers while still getting their day job done. Sounds like me, since I am the only one at my office, am the chief architect for my product and the conduit for a lot of knowledge coming from other companies. It covers topics such as e-mail for efficiency (how to really get my attetion NOW or can it wait 24 hours), phone contact and meeting plans designed for efficiency, so that it doesn't take over your whole work schedule. Particularly useful was maintenance plans for different types of people, based on how easily they get stuck. There are separate chapters for remote communication, setting clear goals, explaining the "big picture" and even the basics of office life (air, food & water). For me, this was a great book, but I could only take it in small doses, just because it has a lot to say. The stories are great and certainly felt like home, esp. the story about Microsoft engineers getting a foreign team of engineers dumped on them for training. Tim

Friday, December 15, 2006

UEFI Plug Fest Follow-Up

There was a pretty good turn-out. The Intel site looks like it was set up for this sort of thing...five years ago. There are about 20 individual large cubes with high walls and lockable doors. Not perfectly secure, but enough to deter. The event ended up filling not only those 20 cubes but also overflowing into neighboring areas. There are no bathrooms right nearby. The conference rooms are behind heavy doors. The sign-in process is typical Intel: search your bags, sign-in for a red sticker, wear the sticker everywhere. From there, nobody seemed to mind where you went. AMI and Insyde where there, along with Byosoft (see previous post on China BIOS). Saw Zimmer & Rothman of Beyond BIOS fame. Both the SMST (SMM vs. VM sub-team) and the UTWG had face-to-face and some of us in the PIWG did follow-up regarding security, PCI and SMM face-to-face, although I was generally glued to the ICE most of the time trying to debug hangs. Turns out the hangs were not really hang, just really slow because of cache issues. Can you image 3KB taking 3 minutes to move on a 2GHz processor? Neither can I, but its true when coming from the flash and the flash is uncached :-) Tim

Sunday, December 03, 2006

UEFI Test Event

Well, there are no press releases (UEFI is notably stingy on funds), but a big UEFI Test Event is taking place 11-15 December in Dupont, WA. Why Dupont? Well, primarily because Intel has a big facility with lots of open space and they were willing to help foot the bill. And, not to be outdone, AMD kicked in some money and UEFI itself covered the rest. The test group in UEFI is sponsoring this as part of its beta roll-out of the UEFI System Compatibility Tests. I'll be there the entire week. More later.