To Hell and Back

To Hell and Back Review: Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

The Road to Hell

My concern in this paper is a distinction most commonly associated with the Doctrine of the Double Effect (DDE). Elizabeth Anscombe claims that the denial of the DDE "has been the corruption of non-Catholic thought, and its abuse the corruption of Catholic thought." Many other philosophers, on the other hand, regard the DDE as not just wrong, but also wildly implausible. Some would even say tha...

FPGA synthesis on the XC6200 using IRIS and Trianus/Hades (or from heaven to hell and back again)

The implementation of a number of FIR filter structures in the Xilinx XC6200 technology is presented. The designs have been implemented using a combination of IRIS, an architectural synthesis tool and Trianus/Hades a set of integrated tools for implementing algorithms on Custom Computing Machines. The main attraction of this approach is that it allows algorithms to be compiled quickly allowing ...

Spreadsheet Hell

This management paper looks at the real world issues faced by practitioners managing spreadsheets through the production phase of their life cycle. It draws on the commercial experience of several developers working with large corporations, either as employees or consultants or contractors. It provides commercial examples of some of the practicalities involved with spreadsheet use around the en...

Seven Digital Steps to Avoid Utter Hell

I n the July 2010 essay for this column's tenth anniversary, I explored how the computing profession might prosper institutionally, a topic central to this column and the IEEE Computer Society's planning. As a follow-up I wanted to look at where the profes-sion's technology might be made useful, reviewing some of the technical suggestions I've made here over the years. One idea was to echo my s...