August 2007 Meeting Notes

Compiled by Dave Jaffe

Contributions from Kevin Appert and others

09:45

Coffee and a chat

10:15

Floating Point Mandelbrot Computation Revisited - CH Ting
"I will show the Mandelbrot plots done with integer math and with floating point math using the Floating Point Unit in the Intel processor. I am learning HTML, and will do the presentation in HTML. Mandelbrot plots are great for the background of HTML webpages. I have also learned how to add background music to the webpages."

12:00

Lunch
Some folks bring their lunch, some folks go to Togos.

13:00

Introductions, announcements, rumors, and random access

13:15

Interesting Items - Volume 8 - Dave Jaffe
Dave will continue his survey of interesting newly-introduced microcontrollers, I/O peripherals, sensors, products, and gadgets that can provide useful and unique capabilities to Forth embedded systems. If anyone has come across anything that fits this category, pass them along to him for inclusion in his presentation.

Slides - 155 Kb pdf file

13:30

Audible Computing - Masa Kasahara
What would happen if we only relied on our hearing when using a computer? Masa will discuss his project that uses Forth to provide an audible interface to a minimal computer, just a motherboard with firmware. He'll describe his thinking and his goals and solicit advice from the group.

Slides - 1.7 Mb pdf file

13:55

Break

14:15

Two-Stack Design from CPU Class - John Rible
"I'll describe the architecture of the SP2 and its "hardware threaded code." It's a 16-bit, two-stack, design following Chuck's uP21 family of chips. Coded in Verilog, it's meant for inclusion in FPGA projects. Bill Muench worked with me to write an eForth compiler for it."

"The sp2-cpu.pdf file in this zip file (104 Kb) describes the instruction set for my long-in-arriving two-stack machine. Promised over ten years ago in my cpu class, it's being licensed currently. It will appear on my website later this Fall."

15:45

Think of something for next month
This means you!

16:00

Adjourn

Other items:

ZoneAlarm may be extremely popular, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the best firewall you can find. Many people believe that Comdo Firewall Pro takes that prize, largely because it was rated as the top firewall by the independent testing site Matousec. - Preston Gralla

The Belarc Advisor builds a detailed profile of your installed software and hardware, missing Microsoft hotfixes, anti-virus status, CIS (Center for Internet Security) benchmarks, and displays the results in your Web browser. All of your PC profile information is kept private on your PC and is not sent to any web server.