Friday, July 03, 2009

Living my values...

This old blog entry struck a chord. I followed a bunch of links from TED.


Thursday, July 02, 2009

Colorforth as inspiration

I always keep up the best I can with what Chuck Moore (inventor of Forth) is up to. I've always found colorforth to be fascinating.

Mr. Moore has started a couple of blogs. Of particular interest is his recent blog for tracking progress with his latest creation.

This reminds me why playing with hardware is so much fun. I am a bare-metal guy at heart, although there isn't much opportunity for doing this type of work (for me) these days.

How do I make a career out of bare metal progamming? Forth gives me some of this thrill. I like to poke and peek hardware to see it work. Something about batch compiling/loading (C and C++) through an IDE loses that feel.

I don't really want to "roll my own" Forth these days. Language design as a thrill has come and pass.

I got a buzz out of using SwiftX Forth (for the MSP430) at work a while back. Getting an unsupported MSP430 (the MSP430F5XX) working with SwiftX was a blast.

If I can scrape together $395 for a SwiftX MSP430 license (for non-work use), I'd like to kickstart an idea I had for doing a Simpliciti clone in Forth.... but my wife's van needs new tires :-(