January 2016 Meeting Notes

Compiled by Dave Jaffe

Contributions from Kevin Appert and others


SVFIG on Google+ Hangout: long url - tinyurl

Videos: morning (1:34:45) - afternoon (3:06:10)

10:00

Coffee and a Chat

10:20

Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel - CH Ting
"I am now reworking the pictures of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel Frescoes. I had to re-scan all the pictures at 600 dpi and then stitch them together to form two giant photos, one for the ceiling, and the other for the front wall. After that, I slowly pan and zoom through the photos to accompany Bach's B Minor Mass. I will show scanned pictures, the combined photos, and perhaps play a few selected movements of the Mass."

11:30

Lunch
We ate at The Treehouse.

13:00

Introduction, Rumors, Gossip, and New Things

13:15

Intel alpha to omega - James Bowman
James will present a high-fidelity 8080 CPU simulator in a mere 15 screens and compare its capabilities on various ANS Forths, including a sporty new SwapForth port: x86-64.

8080exer exercises all the instructions of an 8080 or simulation or clone, tests accuracy of implementations
Eric Smith's 8080 simulator passes 8080exer
John Cassady's 8080 assembler in 3 screens
STOKE - a stochastic optimizer for x86_64 assembly
Block Editor
NASM assembler
FASM - flat assembler

14:05

Break

14:20

Test Driven Development - Samuel A. Falvo II
"I will demonstrate the application of test-driven development techniques by trying to add a feature to Milestone-2 live, then using Milestone-2 itself to complete the presentation."

15:10

Organizing 2016 with Forth - Brad Nelson
The start of a new year is a good time to take stock, get organized, and plan ahead. Since antiquity, various systems have been devised to document, schedule, and prepare for the future. Unfortunately, the mind is a tricky thing to put in order, and the future a very hard thing indeed for which to plan.

But little mouse, you are not alone,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often askew,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!
- Robert Burns 1785

"Though many task scheduling problems are computationally intractable, and predicting what is best to do harder still, my own attempts to get organized have oft failed solely for want of a daily routine of record and reflection."

"While only time will tell, my latest hope is that proprietorship over the system used to organize my world will reinforce its use. To this end, come witness as I expound upon a planning system of my own devising, crafted from the best tools at hand in 2016: the Web, the Cloud, sketches in sparse hue, and the simplicity of Forth."

Brad Nelson on GitHub

16:00

Clean Up and Adjourn


Other items:

Forth
JForth
Forth for MSP430
Forth Tutorials
Forth CPUs
Forth Articles and Blogs
Forth Programming Books
Forth Jobs - submitted by Dennis Ruffer
Other Jobs
Green Arrays
Forth People
Mark Smiley
Misc Forth Stuff
Gforth interface to the wiringPi GPIO interface library for Raspberry Pi
Computers
Chips
Components
Software Applications
Space Applications
Programming Languages other than Forth
Operating Systems
Utilities
Hardware
Other Books
Manuals & Documentation
Articles
Applications
Stores
Robots
Games
Companies
Lectures
People
Surplus Houses
Meetings
Videos
Forth Programming Language - Jennifer Steadman (10:26)
TED Talk: Software - past and future - Chuck Moore - 12/16/2014 (18:17)
Courses
Trade Shows
Podcasts
Personal Computer History
TRS-80 Model 1
Tutorials
Blogs
Other
Digital Game Museum
'May the Forth be with you' Mug


Meeting Announcement

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