January 2010 Meeting Notes

Compiled by Dave Jaffe

Contributions from Kevin Appert and others


09:50

Coffee and a Chat

10:00

Livescribe Pulse Smartpen Computer - CH Ting
"The Pulse was the most impressive product I found at the last Maker Faire. It replaces a CRT with paper, and a pen for mouse/keyboard. It also records speech and can recognize both spoken words and written words. The one I bought is still unopened, but I plan to play with it to give a reasonable demonstration at the meeting."

Speculations on the Genetic Code - CH Ting
"We know that our chromosomes contain all the code necessary for life, from birth to death. We know DNA contains code to make proteins which participate and direct many of the activities in the cells and in the body. We know only about 3% of DNA contains information to make proteins. Other DNA is called junk DNA."

"From a Forth perspective, we can assume that the proteins producing DNA are primitive instructions in the chromosomes, and the junk DNA's are likely to contain high level instructions. In a major Forth application, 3% primitive instructions are a reasonable proportion. It may be possible to analyze junk DNA to find out how the high level instructions are encoded in the chromosomes. We can speculate about this and discuss possible ways of doing it."

Slides

11:48

Lunch
We will walk to The Treehouse by Tresidder Union. Here is the menu.

13:00

Introductions, Announcements, Rumors, and Random Access

13:30

SVFIG Treasurer's Report - John Rible

13:50

Break

14:00

Quantum Computing Preview - Jack J. Woehr
We'll try out some netconferencing technology and if all goes well, Jack will give us a preview of his upcoming talk on Quantum Computing.

Cancelled

14:10

FPGA 1802 CamelForth and/or Makerbot - Eric Smith
Eric has implemented an 1802 on an FPGA and has some success using CamelForth on it. He has also built a MakerBot. He'll talk about one or the other or both efforts.

Slides - 2.7 Kb text file
CHIP-8 programming language
Eric also talked about a SolidWorks-based engineering drawing of a part for the Babbage engine.

15:00

Task Interface in Forth for eCOS - John E. Harbold
"I'm going to present a preliminary design for eCOS tasks under Gforth. I'll compare the tasking C calls with the corresponding proposed Forth words. I would like to get input from everybody at the meeting for this design."

Slides

16:00

Adjourn


Other items:

Forth
Software
Hardware
NanoInk - nanometer-scale manufacturing and applications development
Books
Other

Meeting Announcement

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