March 2009 Meeting Notes

Compiled by Dave Jaffe

Contributions from Kevin Appert and others

10:00

Coffee and a Chat

10:15

eForth System in C - CH Ting
"I think I can build an eForth system in C using the 'fcode' approach, assuming that memory is addressed only in bytes. Forth words will be compiled in bytes, often used words will be one-byte tokens, and less used words will be preceeded with a extension token from F0-FF. I am not sure that I will be able to demonstrate a working system, but I will present whatever I have finished by the meeting."

Compiled by gcc in cygwin

11:40

Lunch
Lunch on-campus. To avoid the "noon lemming effect", we'll leave a little early.

13:00

Introductions, Announcements, Rumors, Random Access

13:22

Mach2/Forth: The Ultimate Hardware Debugging Tool on the Planet - Rick Miley
"I will talk about how fast I could develop Macintosh videos boards using Mach2/Forth. We were making products at a rate of one a week. We could debug hardware and make scope triggers 100 times faster than C or assembly."

"I also used Mach2/Forth to send my first a fax. It was a picture of a fish. It got us funded. The fax specifications in 1988 were CCITT gibberish. They were so cryptic I had to pound on a horrible Rockwell chip for six months. I must have called my fax machine 1000 times. We had no test equipment."

"The fax company was Global Village which ultimately went public in 1994 with a market cap of $200M."

13:46

Break

14:12

Forth, Solfege, MIDI, and Me - Masa Kasahara
"I will talk about a program which sings solfege from a MIDI signal. This work promotes music education and compliments a book I have recently written. I will also be demonstrating this at Stanford's Cool Product Expo on April 8th,"

14:45

OOP, UML, and Astronomy - John E. Harbold
"I will give a talk, without slides, about the object-oriented paradigm, executable UML, and how I applied it to analyze the requirements of how astronomy is done."

Executable UML

15:15

Engineering TV
Fifty engineering topic channels. Four new episodes per week. It worked last time, and some of the stuff is pretty cool!

Tree Voltage and Forest Fire Prevention

16:00

Adjourn

Other items:

Forth

Nano Forth - A tiny dialect of the Forth programming language

Other

Linode - Linux servers

Refal-5

Galelio and Labview