My Programming Interests

restore from wayback machine: March16/09
added the teaching board: Aug30/11

Demo board for teaching

I am scheduled to teach a programming course at Carleton this fall, and I am designing a MTS2 CPU board to give to each student. Comments are welcome. This board is an Open Source Hardware project. There are also some notes on the orginal version of this project: MTS

Python

Currently, my favourite language; get more done in less time. Here's a couple of utilities.

Mat: A little python script which reads a directory (default=the current dir) and sorts the contents by extension, then prints a summary to stdout. Try it; there's all kinds of uses. Seperates code from backup files, images from html, pngs from bmps.
Pretty Align: Another python app to modify source code to align small clusters of statements. It affects member declarations, member initializers and short assignment statements. It makes a backup of all files before it touches them. Works on Java, C/C++ and Python source, although it's blind to comments and strings, so it may clobber those if they fit the parser rules. Note: Ver 1.1 handles files that have mixed space/tab indents.

Both of these are GNU. To install, drop them into an PATH directory (like /usr/local/bin) and "chmod a+x filename". Help for both is "filename --help"

Linux

My Linux FAQ. This is just supplementary information that some people asked about.
Notes from the Ottawa Linux Symposium 2000, July 21. These slides accompany a lecture on dynamic loading in Linux. I have also written a paper to go with it.

Notes from the Ottawa Linux Symposium, July 23/99
Notes from the Corel internal course
Things about getting Linux to run on my Thinkpad 600x [June 2004] Since then, I've moved on to an X32.

Graphics Programming

Here's a little write-up on Bezier curves in 2D

Integer ratio programming

Here's a web page to help you calculate integer ratios, used to create frations without using floating point. Also used in the design of digital phase locked loops.

Pilot --- old old old

The Generic Conduit System is available. HotSync 1.1 now has its own version of GCM. Hotsync 2.0 has a test version available.
.The FAQ for HotSync is here now.
The MakeDocJ for Java is here now. The DOS version is here as well. This new version does categories.
For developers, here is a .prc/.pdb file dumper.
A viewer for JFile is ready for testing, with its help file. It is 75% done. This is not ready for release, but is ready for testing. Thnx.

Compression

Recently, I've been involved in the PilotDOC project, and developed a tiny-decompressor algorithm. Read about it here.
The ZLIB compression library is a wonderful resource for programmers. I've developed a Visual Basic interface, available here.

JTAG

JTAG programming is described elsewhere, but these descriptions always seem to leave out the extereme detail that one needs to program a JTAG sequence. This detail is summarized here.