September 2010 Meeting Notes
Compiled by Dave Jaffe
Contributions from Kevin Appert and others
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09:50 |
Rendezvous at Starbucks
Kevin Appert will be at
Starbucks for a few minutes at the corner of El Camino Real and Stanford Ave.
in Palo Alto. The address is 2000 El Camino Real. It's far enough away so that
it won't be affected by the Rally crowd. |
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10:00 |
Electric
Car Rally and Show at Palo Alto High School
The 38th Annual EV Rally
will have production and converted electric vehicles on display (some available
for test rides or ride-alongs). They'll also have EV component suppliers, solar
panel vendors, local clean air organizations, and a solar oven display.
- Photos
by Wojciech A. Koszek on Kodak Gallery
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11:45 |
Lunch
We will rendezvous at the
Village Cheese
House across the street in the Town and Country shopping plaza. It will
probably be crowded by noon! There are maps around the shopping center. The
Cheese House is at the far corner of the property, farthest from the two major
cross streets. Some may choose alternative venues (Hobee's or Kirk's
Steakburgers). |
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Make your way to Stanford |
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13:00 |
Introductions, Announcements, Discussions, Rumors, and
Gossip - All Assembled
This month we'll go around the room and
each introduce ourselves. If you've read something interesting, tell us about
it! |
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13:30 |
Preview: Forth Meets SmallTalk - Doug
Hoffman
Doug will try out the Skype link and give us a quick look at
an ANS Forth object extension which he'll present at the October SVFIG
meeting. |
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14:00 |
Interesting Items - Volume 15 -
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 it/them along to him for
inclusion in his presentation.
- Slides - 158 Kb pdf file
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14:20 |
Break |
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14:30 |
Porting Gforth to eCos - John E. Harbold
John
will give us a quick update on his efforts.
eCos is the embedded
configurable operating system. It is open source, POSIX-compliant, real-time,
multi-threaded with your choice of scheduler.
- John wasn't able to present this.
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15:00 |
Microcontroller Peripheral Bus (MPB) -
Samuel A. Falvo
II
Sam will describe a set of challenges involved in having a mix of
slow and fast devices on a bus. The solution he's investigating will support
easy and cheap development of peripherals by hobbyists. It turns out, quite by
accident, the structure of MPB resembles NuBus, and is similarly
CPU-independent, so it has the side-effect of enabling professionals to make
high-bandwidth peripherals too.
- Notes
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15:30 |
Video of "Unsuitable 1.0: The World's First Blog Engine
Written in Forth" - Samuel A. Falvo
II
An orbital overview of Unsuitable presented as a tech-talk at the
Ning, Inc. headquarters in Palo Alto. I also cover the rudiments of Forth for
the benefit of those only familiar with contemporary languages. Some
performance metrics are discussed as well.
- Video
- Slides
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15:55 |
Clean up |
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16:00 |
Adjourn |
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Other items:
- Forth
- Delta
Forth .NET 1.3 - Forth compiler for the .NET platform
- Forth-based
FPGA development environment
- Software
- GNU Fortran
- Watfor 77
Compiler - it is supposed to be on this page
- Open
Watcom
- Jalbum
- Java-based web photo publishing
- Hardware
- Beagle CAN,
SPI, USB bus analyzers
- Marvell's
Plug Computer - Wikipedia -
Gizmodo
- Seagate
FreeAgent Dockstar - Internet-connected storage device - $40
- Books
- Stores
- Surplus
Computers
- Weird Stuff
- Action
Computer & Surplus
- Anchor
Electronics -
History
- Forth Jobs
- Test
Generator Technologies (Santa Clara), Hardware Development Technician
- Other
- Fry's ad in
Mercury News
- How
to PowerPoint Like a Pro
- The Work of
Edward Tufte
- Unique
Security Features for Slot Machine
- Sam Falvo's
blog
- Unsuitable
Performance Metrics
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