As I posted Tuesday, I finished the software for my virtual CPU on Monday, but now I’ve finished the most important part: the project graphic.
Now that I’m done, the project is obsolete, and it’s time to start the next version, cj68 vII. The other protocol would be to bump the number, but cj69 might lead to smirks.
Stay processing, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.
∇
Long distance runners talk about “hitting the wall” — the point where their body runs out of resources, making it almost impossible to continue. I hit an intellectual wall late Monday night. Fortunately, I not only finished the race but went an unexpected extra mile. (And now my brain circuits are fried.)
Not an actual race (beyond a vague self-imposed deadline), but a hobby project like one of those ships in a bottle. A painstaking and challenging task in the name of fun and exercise of acquired skill. But no race, no ship, no bottle. This was a software project.
My inner geek rampant, I built a virtual 32-bit CPU (in Python).
So I finally joined the streaming video generation. I joined Netflix back in November, Hulu in December, and it’s only now that I’m starting to come up for air. It’s true what they say: That shit is addictive!
After several months of my new addiction, I’ve now burned through a number of shows that either I missed when they aired or that are only available on streaming platforms. I never got to watch Burn Notice, for instance. Now I have. All seven seasons!
Another one I missed (and have now seen) was AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire, and I have very mixed feelings about this one. Kind of a love/hate thing…
As a diversion for the weekend: Have you ever wondered why computers run so hot? No? Okay, I’ll tell you. It’s actually kind of a hoot. (We’ll get back to the more serious topic of algorithms and AI, and wrap up that series, next week.)
You kind of have to wonder. Humankind has gone from oil and gas lamps to incandescent copper filaments, then to fluorescent lights, and now to LEDs. The trend here seems towards cooler more efficient light sources. But computers seem to need bigger and bigger fans!
The short answer: It’s all those short circuits!
We started with the idea of code — data consisting of instructions in a special language. Code can express an algorithm, a process consisting of instruction steps. That implies an engine that understands the code language and executes the steps in the code.
Last time we started with Turing Machines, the abstract computers that describe algorithms, and ended with the concrete idea of modern digital computers using stored-programs and built on the Von Neumann architecture.
Today we look into that architecture a bit…
Posts pertaining to programming!
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