Squirrel Piles

FORTH Why isn't FORTH more popular?

2011-08-25T14:57:00.000-07:00

The FORTH programming language (operating system??) was once a fairly popular tool for coding applications on 8-bit PCs like the Apple, PET, Atari. It has also enjoyed a rather long life as a language for embedded applications. (did you know that Sun and Apple boot ROMs use FORTH?)

I used FORTH and really liked it. So did everyone I knew who actually wrote a little FORTH code. It was cool.

Some of the key benefits that I saw in FORTH:

It was cheap/free, pretty easy to port to a new system, and had a reasonable flavor of standardization.
It could interface to hardware, BIOS, other libraries, etc. Easily.
It was fast.
Had a very small memory footprint. Something like 3K on the PET & VIC20.

I wrote several applications for clients using FORTH, notable some games for EPYX and the underlying engine for Math Blaster (Davidson and Associates). It was perhaps the most efficient development tool I ever used.

Developing code in FORTH was very simple, enforced a strictly bottom-up development style, and "limitations" in the editors & tools forced you to really factor your code well.   I recall that there was generally only forward progress on project - once you wrote the code and it worked, you generally did not go back and rework/refactor.

I also remember some negative things about FORTH.   The FORTH community (at least the one I tried to interact with) were kind of zealous. FORTH was religion for too many of them, and they spent a lot of time debating FORTH and too little time actually just writing apps. The few user group meeting I attended (I was like 20) was like a revival meeting, and there were "insiders" and everyone else. I was part of everyone else. I didn't drink the kook-aide, didn't get religion, and thus was sort of isolated. Didn't matter - I probably wrote more production-quality code than most of them, and almost certainly worked on products that generated more revenue than all the copies of FORTH ever sold - Math Blaster & derivatives sold many millions of copies, and every DOS version ran on top of my FORTH clone of the original Mac toolbox. [Davidson was a big fan of FORTH - see wikipedia for more on the Blaster_Learning_System ]

There was also a lot of discussion in the general computing community about the stack/RPN aspect of FORTH and why this was the wrong model. I never got it - seemed just as natural or unnatural as using registers and such.

To summarize, I found FORTH easy to learn, easy to develop with, and highly productive. I am sure others (like Louis S. and the folks at Davidson) had similar experiences. So...

Why isn't FORTH more popular?
I am not sure. Here are some possibilities:

1) Platform Vendors Focused on C
For me, I stopped using FORTH when I went to a game company that was building products for the Philips CD-I platform. This was a 32-bit platform - C worked great on it, so the fast, low-memory footprint of FORTH didn't matter as much. There was no FORTH for the platform (only C and assembler), a lot of system libraries, and there was a huge amount of new technology to understand. The incumbent programmers at the company we somewhat junior and C as a big challenge. So I didn't suggest FORTH, and we didn't use it. Interestingly, I did build a tiny stack-based VM in our game engine that was a subset of FORTH. But it was invisible, i.e. the code for it was generated by tools, not humans.

2) Colleges Taught C
In the early to mid-80s, PC's we really starting to take off and programming for PC-class systems was being taught in colleges. C was the language of choice at the time. So new grads knew C, not FORTH.   This is pre-Internet, so FORTH was not something you would stuble on or download and try. So to programmer's who did NOT start in the 8-bit world, FORTH was invisible.

3) FORTH Vendors Failed to Engage Market
Most FORTH vendors - at the time, all language vendors - were pretty small operations. I think many were focused on competing within the FORTH market, not in the PC market. I recall that the ads from LMI, FORTH Inc., MMS, etc. seemed to be focused on making their FORTH the choice IF you use FORTH. I don't recall anything that said use FORTH because FORTH is better than C.

Perhaps if is that the FORTH "community" failed to engage the market. There is an old article entitled 21st Century Forth. Go read it. I just re-read it and it seems to me it is focused mostly on the implementation of FORTH itself. I don't seem much that speaks to the how to market FORTH so people will consider using it. To me, this is the classic FORTH if we build it they will come. Not.

Can FORTH become more popular? Should it? Do we need to resurrect a nearly dead language?

Next: Does FORTH matter today?

Learning to weld

2011-05-20T13:38:00.000-07:00

I have a car-related project with one of my sons that requires some welding. We found a shop that would do the work for around $600. Seemed like a lot, so I started to look at what it would take to buy and learn to use a welder.

After a lot of reading on blogs for people who build dune buggies, meat smokers, and BBQ grills, I decided that I could buy a good welder, learn how to use it, and do our project. And I would then have a welder for future projects. [ as an aside, I have had dozens of projects around that house that welding would have really helped, but I did the project differently because of lack of a welder ]

To I did my research and decided on the equipment for me:

Hobart MIG Welder
Auto-darkening Welding Helmet
Portable CO2 canister

Total cost was less than the $600 the shop would have charged me for a one-time job.

The stuff is in-transit, I will update when it arrives and I have had a chance to actually do some welding

UPDATE:
Received welder, helmet and CO2 kit. Setup was easy. Got the CO2 canister filled at Sports Chalet for $3.50, and bought a second one there too. Each 20 oz. cylinder is supposed to be good for 40+ minutes of welding.

Got a few welding books (they are ancient) from the Alameda County Library. Sort of useful, but the best thing I found was videos on YouTube. This one is good. There are lots of useful ones too. Really helps to see it being done. BTW, most of the guys that do these are REALLY good, so don't expect to get the same results immediately.

(Almost) Free Development Environment Part 2

2011-05-04T10:07:00.000-07:00

Some months ago I mentioned that it was now possible to build a development environment in the cloud using tools that are free for small number of users (like Fogbugz) or near free for reasonable number of users (like Beanstalk).

The cool development in this sort of model is a company named Atlassian. They have a collection of development tools and collaboration apps that they have been selling for some time. Some you have probably heard of - JIRA - and most you have not:

Here is the "cool" thing - you can purchase a license for all of these tools for $10 each, for up to 10 users. And the annual support cost moving forward is $10. This is a great model for startups. For $70 I get bug tracking, wiki, code review, continuous integration, common user account management, and agile project management. Running on my box, or on EC2 or whatever.

The obvious question is why is Atlassian doing this? Seems simple - startups generally have little cash and avoid costly software purchases. Example: I love Perforce, but I don't see it early in any startups. Too much up front cost.

But Atlassian gets this and is making it really cheap. They know that if my startup is becoming successful and I have 10 people using all of their tools for development, it is highly unlikely that I will change. And since I am being successful, I have a little money now, and I can buy licenses from Atlassian at "real" prices. But the prices are competitive. I figure the tools I use will cost me about $300/person for 25 users. Effectively zero when weighing the cost vs. effectiveness of good tools for your dev team.

And kudos for Atlassian for donating all of the monies from the $10 product fees to Room to Read. They have raised over $1 million dollars to help educate the children of the world.

I have purchased the seven apps for $70. I am installing & configuring for my new venture. I will chronicle the results.

New Magic Books

2011-05-03T12:29:00.000-07:00

I have a stack of new (and used) magic books to read.

The Last Greatest Magician in the World by Jim Steinmeyer
The Art of Astonishment by Paul Harris
Houdini by Brooke Kamin Rapaport
Milt Larsen's Castle Tour by Carole Marie
The Magic of Micah Lasher by Micah Lasher

I love reading about magic. Some day maybe I will resurrect a few old tricks to entertain my friends.

Spreading the Ubuntu Gospel....

2011-05-03T12:20:00.000-07:00

I have been a serious user and fan of Ubuntu for some time now. I have it on my personal laptop, my desktop, and even on a client's laptop - which BTW is used to develop and manage apps in a pure Windows environment. Ubuntu just works, have done a few major distro upgrades (just did 11.04 on all of my systems, and have no issue/complaints.

I can do everything I need to with Ubuntu - and the list is extensive. I manage a Windows production environment, code for Windows, manage AWS resources, rip CD & DVDs, watch movies, word process, diagram, write Perl and C++ code, share files with Windows and Mac users in the house, etc.

But the real test was moving a non-technical user to Ubuntu. My wife Debbie is a long-time Windows user who was frustrated with the long boot time and general sluggishness of her XP-based SONY VAIO. She is mostly a web and email user, but does some word publishing & spreadsheets too. And has a few favorite games.

I backed up here hard disk and we installed Ubuntu. After installation and updates, we copied over here Thunderbird files from the Windows backup and had Thunderbird working quickly. Next we imported her bookmarks for Firefox - again, easy and no issues. We then made a folder and copied all of here documents & files, and her desktop, from the Windows backup into this folder. From here she is organizing and sorting through her old Windows files into her new Ubuntu environment.

Next we installed wine. A quick run of the installer for a coupled of CD-ROM games and we had working launcher icons on the desktop for the few games Debbie enjoys. They are working fine.

Debbie has had her new environment for a few weeks now. She likes the speed/performance improvement, and has had no issues with using Thunderbird, Firefox and Open Office. And occasionally running a Windows game.

Abandoning Windows XP - Update

2011-01-14T19:37:00.000-08:00

OK, it has been almost one year since I abandoned Windows XP on my laptop and primary desktop systems. Upon reflection, it was an excellent move.   I continue to learn more about Ubuntu and now feel I can pretty much do anything on Ubuntu. I love it. I have also installed on my desktop system at work.

For "office" applications, I use Open Office. It sucked a few years ago - not now. It is fast, has the features I want/use, and has good interchangeability with files from MS Office.   Presentations from MS PowerPoint are an issue sometimes, but I don't use it much anyway.

VLC plays my movies and music. k9copy manages my DVD backups. pidgin for IM. All my developer tools - Perforce, svn, Eclipse, perl - work perfectly (better?) on Ubuntu.

Thunderbird for email. Firefox for browsing.    Aardark works   Lightning works. Integrated to Google Calendar and my droid.   All works really well.

Software updates & installs via apt-get and Synaptic Package Manager are smooth and easy.

What is really cool is that I am highly productive on old hardware that sucks running Windows.   My laptop is a Acer 3620 with a Celeron and 1G RAM. Works great.   My desktop is a very ancient HP tower with a PIII and 512M RAM. works great.

Ubuntu (and Linux in general) has come of age and I see no reason to use Windows again. And many reasons NOT to.

Free Development Environment

2010-02-27T20:44:00.000-08:00

Today's development software development environments have a few basic needs: some sort of IDE, a version control system, and a bug-tracking/ticketing systems. The cost of these tools range from free (as in beer) to thousands of dollars. But a common requirement for all of these tools was that you needed a system to run them on. For a single developer, you could run everything on one box - even you r laptop. Add another developer and you have to now be sharing things between systems. As you add more developers, testers, etc., complexity and IT needs increase.

I recently have been helping a startup that has a "no IT department" philosophy. They do not want the cost and overhead of an internal IT department. Everyone uses laptops, and all servers are in the cloud. Google Apps provides email, calendar, and shared documents. And tools like version control and bug tracking are hosted services.

They are using the hosted version of Fogbugz for bug tracking, wiki, and project management. They are using Beanstalk for subversion repositories. What is cool is that Beanstalk and Fogbugz - two products from two different companies - both integrated to each other. It all works - really well.

$25 per month for Beanstalk. This is good for something like 10 users/5 svn repositories/10G of storage - more than enough for a startup. Fogbugz is more money - $25/user/month - but this is cheaper than buying the software and hosting it on your own system; particularly with small numbers of users.

Now what is really cool is if you and 2 of you buddies want to start a new software company, you can use Beanstalk and Fogbugz for free is you have 3 of less users. So you can start with no costs and then slowly grow as your needs increase. Very cool.

Large Databases

2010-02-23T21:52:00.000-08:00

In a meeting the other day, we were discussing our "large" database. I was thinking, are database has a lot in it, but it today's world it certainly cannot be considered large - it is only a tens of gigabytes in size.

A quick search found a fascinating article citing the "Top 10 Largest Databases in the World". It has some fascinating stats on 10 large databases, but since the article is from 2007 it is clearly dated. But interesting none the less.

So I started thinking of "how big is..." and recalled that Cal or some other school produced an annual report in the past about how much stuff is being saved digitally. So I searched again and found the article (from 2003) entitled "How Much Information? 2003".

What is striking is that the volumes of information described in these two "ancient" documents is immense and clearly much, much less than there is today.

In a related site, Matt's Computer Trends has an article that tracks disk capacity growth. According to this article, disk drive capacity has increased by and average of 93% annually for the last 16 years. So basically double capacity each year.

Capacity growing at huge rates. Usage growing at huge rates. How will people manage such large volumes of information. Take a look at "Keeping Found Things Found" by William Jones. An interesting perspective of what, how, and when to keep things so they can be found again.

Magazine: Cinefex

2010-01-26T23:12:00.000-08:00

If you have never seen an issue of Cinefex, you are really missing out on something special. It is THE magazine of special effects. Each issue describes in great detail how the effects of a recent (or old) movie were done. The writing is great, the photos are great. Each issue is really art.

I have been receiving the printed magazine since the early 80s. For many years there were not even ads in the magazine! Now there are ads, but they are actually pretty cool to read too. I still subscribe but now also get with my subscription a digital version that I can read online.

Anyway, it isn't always on newstands but you can probably find it at Borders. Buy an issue and I promise if you like movies you will just fall in love with Cinefex. And check out their web site too. Go look at the back issue covers - it will remind you of how far effects films have come.

Abandoning Windows XP

2010-01-26T22:55:00.000-08:00

Over the last few weeks, I have been slowly - perhaps cautiously - making the transition from Windows to Ubuntu on some of my systems. Why? The Linux folks will say the "why" is obvious, but let me explain my reasons.

It is a practical matter. I find that I spend too much time with weird stuff happening to my Windows boxes. Like an update that changes some network or firewall setting. Or the my virus software configuration changing on its own. Or the nice little dance I did where as soon as I logged in, I was logged out again. And don't forget the nuances of keeping a VPN connection up. Just seems like I spend too much time fixing things I thought I had already fixed.

And then there is the boot time on my laptop. By the time Windows boots, anti-virus and anti-spyware sofware fires up, etc, etc, I have waited perhaps 4 or 5 minutes to use my computer. And shutdown was similar.

So I decided I would give Ubuntu a try. To be honest, I thought that I would have to make a lot of compromises on what apps I used. Things like IM, Office, the apps for my Canon camera, and even simple things like Notepad++. I figured I would just compromise with whatever I found on Ubuntu and just "deal with it". I was (mostly) wrong.

I installed Ubuntu. Painless, simple. It just worked and the system ran fine. I ran the Synaptic Package Manager to load some more things and remove a few I don't need/want. It all just worked and as a veteran of too many Windows installs I will admit that I find the Ubuntu install simpler and easier than Windows.

So here I am a few weeks later using Ubuntu on my laptop and one desktop at home. I still use Firefox. And Thunderbird - all of my data from the Windows version of Thunderbird worked just fine when I copied it over. Open Office is a little different, but not enough to slow me down. I use Perforce, Lightning, VLC, Perl, just like before. I use the Pidgin messenger app and chat with all my buddies on MS Live. I even installed a few simple Windows utilities I like (XMLNotepad and Notepad++) using Wine and they work just fine. And I find myself using the command line again, something I have not done for many years. And I like it!

So far so good. I've caught religion. I now have two systems running Ubuntu. My wife - who is often frustrated with the foibles of Windows - is now ready to move to Ubuntu. She is primarily a user of Thunderbird and Firefox, so the move should be very easy for her. Over time, I suspect I will migrate our other Windows systems over to Linux - except perhaps the one game system we have. For games, I think Windows has a distinct advantage over Ubuntu. But that may change as Wine continues to march forward.

Book: Magic 1400s-1950s

2010-01-25T18:17:00.000-08:00

I have received "Magic 1400s-1950s" from Amazon. As described on Amazon: "This book celebrates more than 500 years of the dazzling visual culture of the world s greatest magicians. Featuring over 1,000 rarely seen vintage posters, photographs, handbills, and engravings in one 650-page volume, it traces the history of magic as a performing art from the 1400s to the 1950s."

This is a HUGE book that weighs in at over 16 pounds! I can hardly wait to sit down and browse through it. I will post a review after I have had some time with it.

There is also a great article about the authors and the process of creating the book in the November 2009 issue of Magic magazine.

Hard Drive Toasters

2010-01-25T18:15:00.001-08:00

I have been using some hard drive "toasters" for several months now and have had no problems.

Basically, they are just a hard drive enclosure that support 2.5-inch & 3.5-inch SATA HDDs up to 2TB. Work with Mac, Windows, Linux, etc.

I have two - one I bought at Best Buy, the other through Tiger Direct. Both work fine and are generally running 24/7. I use them for moving large video files around. I have several 500G and 1T drives that I am working with, and use them basically like large removable storage devices.

Performance is very good, and they are easy to use. Price has gone up a bit since I first bought them - I only paid about $25 for each one. They are worth every penny and are an excellent alternative to the USB/SATA adapters that I used in the past.

Utility Computing

2009-11-05T13:40:00.000-08:00

It's coming. No, it's here. The age of computer resources as a utility. Just like electricity, natural gas, cable television and the phone company, computer resources are now available for purchase on a usage basis.

Amazon's Web Services has CPU, storage, messaging and other services. These services provide basic building blocks for creating distributed applications - queues (Amazon SQS), database (Amazon SimpleDB), storage (Amazon Simple Storage Service), compute (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud), and more. All easily ccessible from your favorite programming language.

Sun Microsystems has similar services for $1/hour. Google has their "apps" platform. Now more "traditional" hosting vendors like Rackspace are jumping on the bandwagon.

Each of these companies has different offerings and different pricing models. The basic premise is this - use other people's hardware and infrastructure, paying only for what you use. Marc Andreessen has a nice description of what he sees as three kinds of platforms.

Time will tell which model is most popular. But one thing is sure - the age of Utility Computing has arrived.

Untangle Internet "Appliance"

2009-11-05T13:32:00.000-08:00

Untangle is a wonderful distro for creating a simple network appliance for various filtering and logging activities. There is a commercial and a free version - I am using the free version at home for over 4 months and the experience has been great.

There are 9 basic "free" apps available - web filtering, spam blocker, virus blocker, spyware blocker, protocol control, firewall, reports, add blocker, and OpenVPN. I mostly use the web filtering and reports. What I really love is that now I just have a single web-based interface to control network access - vs. the past solution with one or more software products installed on each PC in the house.

I am running Untangle on an old micro-ATX system with a 100M NIC to my router, and a 1G NIC to my home network. Operating as a router, Untangle does a great job at filtering web sites to protect the younger members of my family. I get a daily PDF report via email showing me the day's network activities - makes it very easy to monitor my network.

If you are looking for an Internet filtering/monitoring solution, take a look at Untangle. I think you'll like it.

Welcome

2009-11-05T13:30:00.000-08:00

OK. So I am one of the last people on the planet to have their own blog.
What does the name mean? As my family can tell you, I am the master of little piles - "squirrel piles".

I make physical piles - like months of unread mail, sports equipment, unread magazines, computer parts, tools, partially completed models, my entire workshop, etc.

I make digital squirrel piles - things like partially completed programs, incomplete databases of all my books/movies/CDs/whatever, unread PDF files, unvisited (but bookmarked) URLs, etc.

I also have many mental squirrel piles - ideas for stories, ideas for products, for companies, for things to do, things to say, to-do lists, etc.

So this blog will be yet another variety of squirrel piles - thoughts, comments, ideas, and such, whatever is on my mind.