Tcddk

Started working on the DSP. Turns out something is wonky. Trouble with one or more of the knobs in the core. After putting a couple of debug statements into the asm, Looks like one knob is awol and/or tied into another's signal path. At any rate, whatever the cause, one is stuck at 0x400000 permanently, but the GUI for debugging has the knob being moved by another knob. That is not good.

Despite the hurdle, it did cause me to go into investigation mode and have a look at all the source. That was definitely a good thing, and now I'm comfortable digging into it. It's funny how all the texts and stuff on DSP make it sound like it is difficult - something only for people that are not you, etc. When really it's normal everyday programming -- it just happens that eventually your program enters a function which contains some math operations.

So, I guess, at the root of it, that's all "mathematics" really is -- a bunch of data getting passed around between registers... on paper... with a pencil.

(defun go-time ... )

Crisis averted. After reading through error logs and spying on processes, etc., I discovered that the fatal loop / hang in the opening phase of the eclipse startup was due to a missing SBCL_HOME var. After defining that in my .bashrc (I like it there) things went fine. Now able to get to into Eclipse, and also view the REPL view, so it looks like I am good-to-go.

(defun a-good-time ... )

Because of the lack of l33t h4x0rz at my current place of employment, I have taken to reading the books and essays of people who have the same inner need for creativity. I stumbled across an essay called "Teach Youself Programming in Ten Years" and somehow made my way to Hackers and Painters, which I'd skimmed before. (That link is to an essay form, but there is a full fledged book.) The book is also available through Oreilly's Safari bookshelf thing, which rocks.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I put a certain Debian-related (Linux) distro on my laptop a number of weeks ago after feeling like something was missing. A proper JRE, Eclipse, Python(s), MySQL, Apache httpd, Tomcat, hex editor, etc...

I messed around for a while writing a bunch of utils and the like, including some bootstrap-type tools that do the "I'm tired of coding this every time I start a new project" kind of work for me in a way that is more succinct and elegant. When I did this, I noticed that what I was doing was text crunching and parsing and making lots of lists of things. Not really a revolutionary revelation, but that, plus the H&P book in the back of my mind, means the next thing I added was Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) and Cusp (Eclipse SBCL-friendly plugin). I'm trying to get that up and running as I type. After a few false starts with wrong versions, misleading installation instructions, files in the wrong places, etc, I think I am on the right track. About to get to the make-or-break point. Will it make, or break?

It breaks. Hmmm.