Author Archives: Wyrd Smythe

DataBridge Drivers

07 Friday Feb 2020

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Last time I started the story of my DataBridge application — a Java-based tool for transferring and transforming tabular data, such as TAB, CSV, and XML files. It could also read from and write to ODBC tables.

The app itself was just a framework that implemented a basic IPO model to transfer data. The details were up to the Input, Process (in this case, Mapping), and Output, drivers loaded at run time.

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DataBridge

06 Monday Jan 2020

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The last story was about PF.EXE, a file-processing utility I wrote for my own uses way back when. That one was a combination of C code and 8086 assembler, written for MS-DOS (worked fine in Windows), that read and wrote disc files. It had a toolkit of things it could do to them, depending on command line switches.

Many years later, using Java, I created more capable versions, the culmination of which was a suite called DataBridge. It turned out to be some of the most valuable work I ever did for The Company.

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PF.exe

10 Sunday Nov 2019

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Programmers, like carpenters, are builders — we make things. The work can be for pay, but carpenters, for example, can build their own bookshelves and doghouses. Programmers also make software for themselves, sometimes to amuse, sometimes to provide a useful function.

A few of the apps I created for myself over the years turned out to be major workhorses for me — tools I used frequently. One of the earliest was PF.EXE, my Process File utility.

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OOP versus Imp

25 Tuesday Jun 2019

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This is another note for a friend: a followup to a discussion about how some programmers really hate Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) languages.

Most of those who hate OOP hold up Imperative Programming (IP) as the One True Way to write code. The key difference is the IP is function (or verb) oriented whereas OOP is object (or noun) oriented.

I’ve never really understood that active dislike. It’s just another way to organize the same code you’d write anyway.

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The Eight Queens

23 Sunday Jun 2019

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There’s a fairly simple puzzle, called The Eight Queens, that I’ve long favored as a project for first semester CS students. The problem is simple enough for a beginner to tackle, yet also interesting enough to be engaging. (And just tricky enough to be a nice beginner challenge.)

Due to a discussion on my other blog, I dug out an old Python implementation I had, and, after looking at it, I thought it might be worth writing a post about. If nothing else, as I said, the problem is interesting enough to be engaging.

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Adventures in Address Vector Space

10 Friday May 2019

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Lately I’ve been exploring the idea of a vector space with a large number of dimensions (but few degrees of freedom). A model was presented with five degrees of freedom in 500 dimensions (neurons, as it happens).

The question is, given the axes are bit-level, does normal vector manipulation semantics make sense. My contention is it has severe problems.

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Full Adder Sim V2.0

08 Wednesday May 2019

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This is the third post in the Full Adder series. The first post explored ways to code the abstract model of a full-adder. The second post explored one way to code a simulation of a physical system (where the models are of the components of the system).

This post explores another gate-based model, but one with only one type of gate. This simulation is close to being transistor-level.

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Full Adder Simulation

07 Tuesday May 2019

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In the last post, I explored different ways to model the logic of a full-adder. In this post I’ll explore a model of a physical instance of a full-adder — a model that simulates physical reality.

Because a full-adder is, at root, a mathematical expression, various software models can accomplish the same results. Models are abstractions, so the only thing a model can simulate perfectly is another model.

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