James W. Hanlon

Personal data and self hosting

James W. Hanlon — Mon, 26 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Details of how I how self host services to maintain a degree of digital privacy and freedom.

Discrete-event simulation

James W. Hanlon — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0200

How to build a simple discrete-event simulation with an example in Rust

Review of heat pump use and performance

James W. Hanlon — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0200

A review of one year’s worth of data from my home heat pump.

Silicon infrastructure

James W. Hanlon — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Thoughts on the requirements of software infrastructure to support chip design.

Building a Python processor

James W. Hanlon — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0200

A rationale and strawman for a processor to accelerate dynamic-language workloads.

Cornish Unit House retrofit insulation

James W. Hanlon — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0100

Retrofitting insulation in a timber-framed top floor.

From logic gates to a programming language using the Hex architecture

James W. Hanlon — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0100

A hardware implementation of a Hex processor with some basic tooling, including a complete compiler for a simple programming language.

Seeding parallel xoroshiro128+ generators

James W. Hanlon — Sat, 01 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0200

Choosing seeds for parallel xoroshiro128+ generators using fixed offsets produces correlated outputs.

The hardware pseudorandom number generator of the Graphcore IPU

James W. Hanlon — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0200

A short summary of an investigation into the statisitical quality and implementation cost in hardware of the xoroshiro128aox PRNG.

Garden workshop

James W. Hanlon — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0200

Design and construction of a office and workshop.

Home thermal-imaging survey

James W. Hanlon — Wed, 31 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0200

Investigation of thermal faults using a thermal-imaging camera.

Reflections on the state of nature

James W. Hanlon — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0100

A review of human impacts on nature as a way to reflect and navigate environmental bad news.

Error-correcting codes

James W. Hanlon — Sat, 02 May 2020 00:00:00 +0200

Using Hamming Codes for single error correction and double error detection.

Recycled allotment shed

James W. Hanlon — Sun, 10 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0100

Low-cost construction of a shed out of reclaimed materials.

New chips for machine intelligence

James W. Hanlon — Fri, 04 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0200

Details of new chips that have been built recently to accelerate machine intelligence workloads.

Testing silicon logic with scan structures

James W. Hanlon — Thu, 18 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0200

A description of how digital circuits are modified to allow scan testing to be performed.

RGB lightbox stacks

James W. Hanlon — Mon, 31 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0100

Experimental lighting using high-power LEDs in generous volumes and behind translucent acrylic plastic to create big blocks of colour.

Three-channel high-power LED driver

James W. Hanlon — Sun, 30 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0100

An LED driver module controlled by a PIC12F1572 and with CAT4101 drivers, deployable in an array via a RS485 interface.

Querying logical paths in a Verilog design

James W. Hanlon — Tue, 20 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0100

A description of a command-line tool I created for tracing timing paths from a flattened netlist back through the RTL.

Retrofit shed insulation

James W. Hanlon — Sun, 30 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0200

Retrofitting an existing shed/workshop with insulation to improve its energy efficiency and make it a usable space throughout the year.

Vim command composition

James W. Hanlon — Thu, 23 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0200

The rules for composing Vim’s motions and operators.

Writing synthesizable Verilog

James W. Hanlon — Fri, 04 May 2018 00:00:00 +0200

Coding style for RTL design using Verilog / SystemVerilog. Updated 2024.

Notes on testing random number generators

James W. Hanlon — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0200

Using empirical statistical tests to determine the quality of PRNGs.

A convolutional neural network from scratch

James W. Hanlon — Fri, 10 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0100

A C++ implementation of a convoluational neural network building on the explanation in Michael Nielsen’s book ‘Neural Networks and Deep Learning’.

Reducing memory use in deep neural networks

James W. Hanlon — Sun, 05 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0100

A review of state-of-the-art techniques used.

Machine learning challenges for computer architecture

James W. Hanlon — Fri, 04 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0100

Neural networks have become a hot topic in computing and their development is progressing rapidly. They have a long history with some of the first …

The XC Programming Language

James W. Hanlon — Sat, 13 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0100

An overview of the key features of the language, many of which derive from occam.

The XMOS XMP-64

James W. Hanlon — Thu, 04 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0100

The XMP-64 is an experimental single-board distributed-memory parallel computer with 512 hardware threads and is programmable with a C-like language. It was developed by …

Scalable abstractions for general-purpose parallel computation

James W. Hanlon — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0200

An overview of my PhD thesis.