I must not be awake yet... I was just making a mad dash out the door to get to my annual hangover hike, when I noticed it was kinda dark out there... wait a minute... it's 6:20; what time is the hike? 7:45? How'd I manage to get going an hour early?
Oh, well... I guess starting the year an hour early is better than starting it an hour late, and it bodes well for getting back into morning-person mode, from which I'd kinda lapsed the past few months.
The last week of the year was a bit slow on the work front, so I found time for some other stuff, though not everything that needs getting around to. I couldn't do much in the yard, what with the rain; the living room remains cluttered, though I did clear enough space on the sewint table to hem up a new pair of pants so I'd have something to wear today (it probably won't be shorts & sandals weather up at Skyline Ridge this morning).
No new set of resolutions for this year, yet. Not public ones, anyway. On the 2005 set: I did all the positive ones early in the year, and made it through to the end of the year without breaking either of the negative ones: I didn't taunt Happy Fun Elephant Seal, nor did I run for Governor of Delaware.
OK, so here are a few for this year (preliminary):
- I will clear the clutter off the kitchen counters.
- This does not include saying it ten times fast.
- I will start drinking.
- No guarantees about keeping it up, but I'll start.
- I will not have sex with Wafah Dufour.
- Not even to annoy her uncle.
- I will not quit smoking.
- In order to quit, I'd have to start first... yuck.
Fun stuff coming up this year:
I'm putting the finishing touches on a new, small robot controller board. It's sort of an exercise in "how much can I cram into this space": it's a business-card form factor (2" by 3.5"), and so far it has four, 5A, full-bridge, PWM, motor drivers (individually reconfigurable in software as dual half-bridges, to drive relays and such), a 32-bit, ~50 MIPS processor (ARM7), half a meg of flash, 40K RAM, 8K EEPROM, USB device interface, a radio header (4 channels of PWM from a standard RC receiver, or power / async serial / I2C / control lines to/from a custom radio board, yet to be designed), an additional I/O + JTAG header, and a little power supply that should run off 6V to 30V or so input, and provides protection against reverse battery connections, without introducing a diode drop.
Once I build the board, I'll have to come up with firmware for it, and this, I think, calls for a new itty-bitty OS; I'm dusting off some concepts from a couple of years ago for an event-driven, network-transparent OS, which seems to be shaping up as object-oriented. It'll be written in C, of course, with a smattering of assembly language at the lowest levels; then I'll have to come up with some set of language bindings for the API.
I had the rather silly thought that perhaps, for the educational market, Smalltalk would be a good language to support. How big is the Smalltalk runtime? Well, let's see, now... how big is the installable package?
16526783 Squeak-3.8-6665-i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.7.7.tar.gz
Gaaaah? Sixteen frinkin' MEGAbytes??? Maybe not....
But then I recall the title of that set of books I haven't gotten around to reading: "Smalltalk-80"... as in, 1980? That would be about right. How much computer could it really need? And, didn't Smalltalk used to run on the Alto? I mean, a NOVA? A 16-bit mini with a 32K word address space?
So I take a quick look in The Big Book of Smalltalk, and it does look like I've got the history right, and also it appears that the underlying concepts of Smalltalk resemble the underlying concepts of my proposed OS, so it could be a good match... gotta do some more studying. Interesting bit of trivia: in Smalltalk, it turns out that non-decimal numbers are represented by writing the radix in decimal, then the letter 'r', then the number to be represented, e.g., 16r3ff7. In the early 1980s, completely ignorant of this, I came up with exactly the same scheme for my own language, GSPL (which was for the 6809; had, at the height of its popularity, three users; and is now believed to be extinct).
Whoops! Now it's after 7; now it really is time to head for the hills.
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