[svfig-announce] Meeting Sept. 26, 2009

Wed Sep 23 21:25:56 BST 2009

4 DAYS AWAY!

--- SVFIG Meeting September 26, 2009  ---
AM - Sunnyvale at HSC
PM - Palo Alto at Stanford
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Please note that the times listed below are precise but not
accurate.  We might go a little long or short on any agenda
item.  If you're desperate to see something at a particular
time, please let us know!  Remember that there are bugs in
any non-trivial SVFIG meeting announcement.

We'll be on the fifth floor of Terman Engineering Center --- Room 556
Directions and map links are below.

There are two buildings named Terman on campus so be careful. The
Searchable Map has the one you want as "TERMAN (FREDERICK E) ENGRG
CENTER  (04-700)  380 PANAMA MALL"
The Official SVFIG Announcement Editor's Parking Lot recommendation is
the lot near the intersection of Teresa St and Morris Way.

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AGENDA

09:00 --- Halted / HSC Parking Lot Sale
SVFIG members are encouraged to attend Halted's annual parking lot sale 
in Santa Clara. There are always interesting things to see and purchase.

11:30 --- Lunch
We'll convene for lunch up the street at St. John's Bar and Grill on 
Lawrence Expressway.

12:45 --- Introductions, Announcements, Rumors, and Random Access
At Stanford - Terman 556

13:00 --- eFORTH IN C - CH Ting
"I finally figured out how to force C to speak Forth. What I did was 
first design a Forth virtual machine in C, which has 64 Forth primitives 
as its machine instructions. While it was very easy to code this virtual 
machine, it was difficult to implement a Forth dictionary structure that 
contained both the primitive instructions as well as high level 
instructions. I had trouble getting C to construct this dictionary, so I 
used my old eP32 metacompiler to build the dictionary and shoved it down 
in the throat of the gcc compiler. I think this is by far the simplest 
implementation of Forth in C ever."

14:30 --- BEAGLE BOARD - John Slater
"I will bring my Beagle Board on Saturday and show pieces of 2 videos. 
I should not take more than 20 minutes.  I will also spend a few minutes 
talking about my desires for a Forth IDE.  I am just starting to be able 
to understand people's discussion of OO Forth.  I hope other people are 
able to learn and understand Forth more easily than me."

15:00 --- RAY TRACING IN FORTH - Brad Nelson
Brad will demonstrate a ray-tracing renderer written in Forth. 
Ray-tracing is a computer graphics technique for producing realistic 
looking 3D images containing shadows, reflection, and refraction. 
Traditionally, ray-tracers parse a scene description file, build up 
complex data structures in memory, then traverse the scene graph while 
performing floating point matrix calculations. In Forth these are 
replaced with: scene description words, an executable scene graph, and 
fixed point vector operations.

16:00 --- Adjourn

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The schedule above may be reformatted or line-justified but
please transmit verbatim or not at all.   Any font you like is
alright with me.

No Newsgroup posts or other media distribution this month please!

_______________________________________________

Wireless Internet access is anticipated (though not guaranteed) at
Stanford, so bring your wifi-enabled laptop.

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Coming to SVFIG:
* Bring speaker suggestions TO EVERY MEETING!

* PLANNING FORTH DAY 2009 - EVERY MEETING

* Mitch Bradley's Forth in C (somebody needs to volunteer)

* I've sent an email to the implementer of the PACE FIG-Forth and he
responded.  I think he got the idea that my invitation to present was
'one-time' rather than 'any time'.  Hopefully when there is something
else PACE-related on the program he'll join us and present.

* Furthering the Cause of Forth - John Rible
IntellaSys has imploded, or something.  We'd be pleased to hear about
John's new outreach project when formulated.

* Engineering TV
http://engineeringtv.com/
Fifty engineering topic channels. Four new episodes per week.

* BOTBASH 2000 --- Video
A cheepie video of  a May 2000 robot rumble in Mesa Arizona from these
guys:   http://www.battlebots.com/

* Meet the Mac --- Kevin Appert
I'm having trouble emailing Ward McFarland, the Carbon MacForth guy.  If
anybody knows a good way to buy a copy, fill me in!  The email doesn't
bounce but it doesn't get answered.  The phone number is out of service
but the web site is still up.
I'm also getting error boxes when I try to start PowerMops under OS-9.1,
so if anybody wants to help out there I'd be grateful.

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Check the SVFIG web site at http://www.forth.org/svfig/
for last minute changes to this schedule.
The most up-to-date meeting information is at
http://www.forth.org/svfig/next.html

Many thanks to our wonderful Webmaster, Dave Jaffe.

Preliminary agenda along with schedule updates and
discussion may frequently be found on the SVFIG email list.
To subscribe send email to geoperry_at_gmail.com

Please let us know if this isn't your preferred email address for the
SVFIG-Announce mailing list.  Thanks for your patience.

Please suggest a speaker or present at a SVFIG meeting.

Please do not attempt to reply to svfig-announce at ...
send instead to forther_at_comcast.net
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NAVIGATIONAL ADVICE

Terman Engineering Center can be found on these maps - just search for
Terman: (going to maps.google.com gives an erroneous result)

http://ucomm.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/map/

Searchable Stanford Campus Map:  http://ucomm.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/map/

There is open parking on weekends. Park in any A or C or metered space,
no coins needed even if there's a meter there.The Official SVFIG
Announcement Editor's Parking Lot recommendation is the lot near the
intersection of Teresa St and Morris Way.

Go to the Stanford links, Google maps has no idea where Terman is!

The building's door may be locked, there will be a number to call posted
after the meeting starts and we will come down and check once in a while.

Once you reach Terman, take the elevator to the 5th floor. Walk across
the foyer and up the ramp just to the left of the glassed-in office.
Room 556 is at the top of the ramp - entrance on the left.
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