SVFIG
Saturday, September 26th
at
Stanford University
Terman Engineering Center
Room 556

Terman Engineering Center can be found on these maps - just search for Terman: Google map or Searchable Stanford Campus Map

There is open parking on weekends. Park in any A or C or metered space.

Take the elevator to the 5th floor. Walk across the foyer and up the ramp just to the left of the glassed-in office. Room 556 is at the top of the ramp - entrance on the left.

Wireless Internet access is anticipated (though not guaranteed) at Stanford, so bring your wi-fi enabled laptop.

If you would like to have meeting announcements e-mailed to you, send the message Subscribe SVFIG Meeting Agenda to: George Perry

Meeting Agenda for September 2009

09:00 --- Halted / HSC Parking Lot Sale
SVFIG members are encouraged to attend Halted's annual parking lot sale in Santa Clara. There are always interesting things to see and purchase.

11:30 --- Lunch
We'll convene for lunch up the street at St. John's Bar and Grill on Lawrence Expressway.

12:45 --- Introductions, Announcements, Rumors, and Random Access
At Stanford - Terman 556

13:00 --- eForth in C - CH Ting
"I finally figured out how to force C to speak Forth. What I did was first design a Forth virtual machine in C, which has 64 Forth primitives as its machine instructions. While it was very easy to code this virtual machine, it was difficult to implement a Forth dictionary structure that contained both the primitive instructions as well as high level instructions. To get C to construct this dictionary, I used my old eP32 metacompiler to build the dictionary and shoved it down in the throat of the gcc compiler. I think this is by far the simplest implementation of Forth in C ever."

14:30 --- Beagle Board - John Slater
John will present a walk-through of the Beagle Board features. "I will bring my Beagle Board on Saturday and show pieces of two videos. I will also spend a few minutes talking about my desires for a Forth Integrated Development Environment (IDE). I am just beginning to understand people's discussion of Object Oriented (OO) Forth."

15:00 --- Ray-tracing in Forth - Brad Nelson
Brad will demonstrate a ray-tracing renderer written in Forth. Ray-tracing is a computer graphics technique for producing realistic looking 3D images containing shadows, reflection, and refraction. Traditionally, ray-tracers parse a scene description file, build up complex data structures in memory, then traverse the scene graph while performing floating point matrix calculations. In Forth these are replaced with: scene description words, an executable scene graph, and fixed point vector operations.

16:00 --- Adjourn

How you can help SVFIG:

Bring your speaker and topic suggestions to every meeting!
Your input for and participation in next year's Forth Day is always welcomed.

Coming to SVFIG in October

Sam Falvo - "boring details of my website's new blog implementation" - tentative

Examples from the Forth Foundation Library - John E. Harbold
John will demonstrate some code which makes use of the Forth equivalent of a C++ Class Library. The Forth Foundation Library (FFL) is a general purpose Forth library whose main purpose is to make it easier to develop applications. Examples to be presented will include using the Finite State Machine (FSM) and Dynamic Strings.

Forth Day 2009

Call for Participation

Coming to SVFIG:

Engineering TV
Fifty engineering topic channels, four new episodes per week.

Botbash 2000 Video
A cheapie video of a May 2000 robot rumble in Mesa, AZ.

Prototyping with QFP Parts - Kevin Appert
This presentation will be based on an article in the September 2008 issue of Circuit Cellar entitled "Prototyping with QFP Parts".

WAV File and Soundcard I/O Software Using Win32Forth - Andy Korsak
This software was written for amateur radio applications. Andy has suggested that it might be useful to look at his code in advance of his talk. Contributions to this work-in-progress would be welcomed. You can download and view his sound card software on the Win32Forth group (membership required), or here.

Solicitations for presentations and assistance:

Mitch Bradley's Forth in C
A volunteer is needed to present and demonstrate this software.

PowerMOPS Demo
SVFIG is looking for a volunteer to demonstrate PowerMOPS.

PACE FIG-Forth
Kevin Appert: "The implementor of the PACE FIG-Forth responded to my email. I think he got the idea that my invitation to present was 'one-time' rather than 'any time'. Hopefully when there is something else PACE-related on the program, he'll join us and present."

Meet the Mac - Kevin Appert
Kevin Appert: "I'm having trouble emailing Ward McFarland, the Carbon MacForth guy. If anybody knows a good way to buy a copy, please fill me in! His email doesn't bounce, but he doesn't reply. The phone number is out of service, but the website is still up. I'm also getting error boxes when I try to start PowerMops under OS-9.1. I'd be grateful for any help."

Please register your interest for these topics:

Viewing of Analog by Design shows hosted by Bob Pease - list of shows
Review and discussion of recent postings on news:comp.lang.forth
Review and discussion of interesting Forth projects and many files at the Yahoo Win32Forth Group

If you have anything you'd like to talk about for the September meeting,
please contact Kevin Appert.

Meeting Notes