Greetings Gents…

I know all of you have been updating your feedreader constantly to see if I had posted anything.  Well to tell you the truth I forgot which button to press on my control board to update my lifestream on the intertubes.  Today I was inspecting my control board and saw this dusty button and wondered what is that for, so like a good scientest I closed my eyes and pressed it and here we are.

I thought I’d share some of the things I’ve been working on.  I’m taking a system archetecture class which is really neat.  It’s interesting learning all of the things you can do with 1s and 0s.  The premise of the class is we are going to learn how to design these circuits and eventually put them all together to make a programmable computer.  We use a program called Logisim to design the circuits.

Here are some of the circuits I’ve designed.

Full adder

This one will take a two 1-bit numbers and add them together and if both numbers are 1 it will have a carry out, which is helpful when adding multi-bit numbers. With Logisim once you design a circuit, you can use it in another circuit.  That helps when designing complex circuits. By using divide and conquer, if you break a complex problem into simple steps it makes problem solving a whole lot easier.  With the adders, I had to eventually design a 16-bit adder, which was easy by first designing a 1-bit adder and then incorporating that chip into a 4-bit adder and then incorporating that chip into a 16-bit adder.

4-bit adder

16-bit adder

I then used the 16-bit adder chip in the design of an Arithmetic Unit, or AU, which is one part of the Arithmetic Logic Unit, or ALU for short, a very important part of a computer.

Arithmetic Unit

This unit can do more than add. It can subtract, increment and transfer.  I won’t go into the complexities of those operations, but if you are interested here’s a tutorial on doing 1s and 2s compliement arithmetic.

I bet you can’t guess what is the other part of the ALU? That’s right it’s the Logic Unit, or LU.

Logic Unit

It was a whole lot easier to design than the AU.

We put these all together and what do we get?

Arithmetic Logic Unit

So that’s what I’ve been working on for the past few weeks and I see that this post has grown rather tall so I’ll end it here. 

Until next time, stay frosty.

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YMMV

Watched Raising Jeffrey Dahmer(2006), I use the word “watched” loosely. I actually watched 15 minutes before going into the other room to write this blog post. I left my wife behind to finish it, which is my usual punishment, as cruel as that may seem, when she picks an awful movie. She snagged this whopper from Redbox, located outside a McDonalds ironically, with a free code that they text to me every Monday. So all in all it wasn’t a big loss. Interestingly enough this movie garnered a 4.9 out of 10 rating with 38 votes on IMDB which makes me think the director has some really goodhearted friends.

In other news, I found the perfect car on Craigslist, that I’ll never get, and I looked at a bunch of motorcycles and determined if I buy one it’ll probably be a Honda Shadow Spirit because there seems to be a bunch for sale, they are not too expensive and they are not so powerful that I might kill myself pulling out of the driveway.

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Now we’re cooking with gas

I’ve moved my blog over to WordPress.com so speeds should increase. I figured out if I can install twitter support and that is killing me. Somehow I shall find a way to persevere.

Moving on over to the east side

I’m thinking of moveing my blog back over to blogger or try out googlepages.  I realize that my bandwitdth is not up to snuff and it’s hurting my loyal followers.

I like using WordPress and the different features it has, so I’m a little leary of changing my blog.

Anyway we’ll see.

War? What’s it Good For?

Watched Moonlight Mile and The Weather Man over the weekend. Both were eeeehh. Moonlight Mile follows a family who have sort of “adopted” a boy who was engaged to their daughter, who was killed recently. The boy lives with the folks and the father goes so far as to partner with boy adding “and Son” to his business name. The movie turned out to be a romantic/comedy in the disguise of an indie film, with the boy torpedoing the murder trial of his dead fiance and riding off into the sunset with another woman, mere weeks after his fiance’s death.

The Weather Man was a different story. It was a sort of non-traditional story, doesn’t really have a happy ending, nothing is resolved by the closing credits. The problem I had with this movie was the fact that I could never feel sympathetic for the main character. He has a pretty good life, but he seems to sabatoge his chances at happiness. I also find it difficult to watch movies with Nicolas Cage, because he seems to be playing the same character in every movie. There are a few exceptions, Raising Arizona, Leaving Las Vegas, Adaptation, but all in all he’s the same guy with the same mannerisms. There was a time when it was my goal to collect every Nicolas Cage movie, but I have since corrected that ploy to sabatoge my happiness.

And now for your regular news broadcast

Finished Angel-A last night. It is a modern remake of It’s a Wonderful Life, except French and Clarence is replaced by a 6 foot blonde woman. The movie was good, which was a surprise to me because lately I have rented movies, thinking they were going to be good and they weren’t.

In other news, I learned that Sheldon Brown, website here, had died earlier in the year. He had a website about all things bicycle and I would frequent it whenever something broke on my bike. He also had a penchant for keeping a daily log of his life, which has inspired me to post more regularly to my blog.

I am going to try to post more regularly, nothing major, probably just a few paragraphs, about the daily goings on in my life.

Oh in other, other news, I’ve rediscovered UT2004 and the many mods that are made for it. Gentoo has very good support for the game making it easy to install new mods.

Yeah for Progress!

I is updated!