djshaw@cpu22:~$ man rtfm

RTFM(I)                   UW Information                   RTFM(I)

Name:
     rtfm - Read The Famous Manual

Description:
     You might see the expression “RTFM” in response to a ques-
     tion or a gripe.

     This means that whatever you asked or complained about is
     already documented in the man page. It usually is intended
     to indicate that you should have read the appropriate manual
     before bothering, and wasting the time of, the person using
     the expression.

See Also:
     man(1), gripe(1), consultant(I), operations(I)

Bugs:
     The “F” doesn’t really stand for “Famous”.

Copyright:
     (c) 1986, MFCF, University of Waterloo.

Formatted 87/05/05              UW                              1

Unfortunately, Waterloo does not have a manual entry for woman.


import com.dt.iTunesController.*;
import java.math.BigInteger;

        System.out.println (hours + ":" + minutes + ":" + seconds);
    }
}


I have listed to 868 hours, 18 minutes, and 40 seconds of music.

I called R Brothers earlier today. A secretary connected me with accounting. As soon as I identified myself as Derek Shaw, the man on the other end recognized the name and started to describe the state of the project. Interrupting him I told him that I was Derek Shaw, but not the one he thought I was. I could hear the confusion. It took a few minutes, but I eventually convinced him that there were more than one Derek Shaws in North America. Personally, I was supprised that this is not spam.

To get gnu’s core utils in your path, add the following to your .bashrc file:

if [ `uname -s` = "Linux" ]; then
        PATH=$PATH:~/bin

        alias ll='ls -l --color=auto'
        alias dir='ls -ba --color=auto'
        alias lla='ls -la --color=auto'
        alias ls='ls --color=auto'
elif [ `uname -s` = "SunOS" ]; then
        PATH=`/bin/showpath gnu current standard man $HOME/bin`

        alias ll='ls -l --color=auto'
        alias dir='ls -ba --color=auto'
        alias lla='ls -la --color=auto'
        alias ls='ls --color=auto'
elif [ `uname -s` = "Darwin" ]; then
        alias ll='ls -lG'
        alias dir='ls -baG'
        alias lla='ls -laG'
        alias ls='ls -G'
else
        PATH=`/bin/showpath current standard man $HOME/bin`
        alias ll='ls -l'
        alias dir='ls -ba'
        alias lla='ls -la'
fi

Back in 2007, I was looking at the script. There were a few notes that I needed to look at; I noticed that ihcp1d.exe generated an ini file and invoked sub.exe (an undocumented program that was installed at the same time as ihcp1d). I also noticed that ihcp1d only generated a configuration file. So I quickly wrote my own ihcp1d, something more friendly to scripting. It wasn’t very pretty. I took five minutes to make it just as a proof of concept which I then promptly forgot about.

I was going through some old code today and thought that it might be useful to someone else, so I have decided to post it here.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;

namespace NewIhcp
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            if (args.Length < 3)
            {
                Console.Error.WriteLine("NewIhcp.exe OutputFileName InputFileName <Directory of Sub.exe>");
                return;
            }

            String outputFileName = args[0];
            String inputFileName = args[1];
            String subDir = args[2];

            try
            {
                FileInfo f = new FileInfo(outputFileName);
                StreamWriter w = f.CreateText();
                w.WriteLine("");
                w.WriteLine("Beck Engineering Consultants Company");
                w.WriteLine("1935 Danbury West");
                w.WriteLine("Okemos, MI 48864");
                w.WriteLine("");
                w.WriteLine("Program output file name:");
                w.WriteLine(f.FullName);
                w.WriteLine("");
                w.WriteLine("Temperature measurement input file name:");
                w.WriteLine((new FileInfo (inputFileName)).FullName);
                w.WriteLine("");
                w.WriteLine("Date: 09/11/2007 ");
                w.WriteLine("Time: 12:48:54 PM ");
                w.WriteLine("");
                w.WriteLine("Heading: ");
                w.WriteLine("This is example problem number 1.");
                w.WriteLine("");
                w.WriteLine("**** Step1: Define the GEOMETRY of the experiment. *******************");
                w.WriteLine("Main Geometry");
                w.WriteLine("Flat plate     Cylindrical radial     Spherical radial");
                w.WriteLine("         (*)                ( )                   ( )");
                w.WriteLine("Units");
                w.WriteLine("     W-kg-m-sec-°C     cal-gm-cm-sec-°C     BTU-lb-ft-hr-°F");
                w.WriteLine("         (*)               ( )                   ( )");
                w.WriteLine("Number of regions");
                w.WriteLine(" 1 ");
                w.WriteLine("Region material number");
                w.WriteLine(" 1       ");
                w.WriteLine("Thickness of region (m)");
                w.WriteLine(" 1       ");
                w.WriteLine("Number of nodes per region");
                w.WriteLine(" 50      ");
                w.WriteLine("");
                w.WriteLine("**** Step 2: Define QUANTITIES for time steps and regions. ***********");
                w.WriteLine("Number of calculated time steps per measured time step");
                w.WriteLine(" 10 ");
                w.WriteLine("Number of time intervals with various future time steps");
                w.WriteLine(" 1 ");
                w.WriteLine("Time at end of interval");
                w.WriteLine(" 1.32    ");
                w.WriteLine("Number of future time steps");
                w.WriteLine(" 2       ");
                w.WriteLine("");
                w.WriteLine("**** Step 3: Define BOUNDARY conditions. *****************************");
                w.WriteLine("Unknown boundary location");
                w.WriteLine("   x=0             x=L        Both x=0 and x=L");
                w.WriteLine("   (*)             ( )             ( )");
                w.WriteLine("Known boundary type");
                w.WriteLine(" Insulated   Prescribed non-zero heat flux   Prescribed temperature history");
                w.WriteLine("   (*)                      ( )                        ( )");
                w.WriteLine("");
                w.WriteLine("**** Step 4: Describe input DATA file structure. *********************");
                w.WriteLine("Number of columns of data");
                w.WriteLine(" 1 ");
                w.WriteLine("( ) Print the data for each sensor");
                w.WriteLine("Interface number for input file column");
                w.WriteLine(" 1       ");
                w.WriteLine("");
                w.WriteLine("**** Step 5: Define temperature-dependent thermal PROPERTIES. *******");
                w.WriteLine("");
                w.WriteLine("        MATERIAL NUMBER 1 ");
                w.WriteLine("Number of components of the thermal conductivity table");
                w.WriteLine(" 1 ");
                w.WriteLine("Number of components of the volumetric heat capacity");
                w.WriteLine(" 1 ");
                w.WriteLine("Thermal conductivity table");
                w.WriteLine("Temperatures for thermal conductivity (°C)");
                w.WriteLine(" 0       ");
                w.WriteLine("Components of thermal conductivity (W/m-°C)");
                w.WriteLine(" 1       ");
                w.WriteLine("Volumetric heat capacity table");
                w.WriteLine("Temperatures for volumetric heat capacity (°C)");
                w.WriteLine(" 0       ");
                w.WriteLine("Components of volumetric heat capacity (J/m³-°C)");
                w.WriteLine(" 1       ");
                w.WriteLine("**** Step 6: Define ADVANCED features. ******************************");
                w.WriteLine("( ) Calculate unknown heat transfer coefficient");
                w.WriteLine("Fin effect");
                w.WriteLine(" Insulated sides    Side heat loss/gain");
                w.WriteLine("       (*)                ( )");
                w.WriteLine("");
                w.Flush();
                w.Close();
            }
            catch (System.IO.IOException e)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(e.Message);
                Console.WriteLine();
                Console.WriteLine(e.Source);
            }

            try
            {
                FileInfo f = new FileInfo(subDir + "\ihcp_temporaryfile.ini");
                StreamWriter w = f.CreateText();

                w.WriteLine((new FileInfo(outputFileName)).FullName);
                w.WriteLine();
                w.Flush();
                w.Close();
            }
            catch (System.IO.IOException e)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(e.Message);
                Console.WriteLine();
                Console.WriteLine(e.Source);
            }
        }
    }
}

Happy coding!

Prof. Berry has introduced us only a small set of temporal connectives:

Eventually
Henceforth
Unless
Until
Next state

It is interesting to all of these connectives deal with the current state, or the future. What about the past? Certainly, someone could construct an example where information about a certain point in time is discovered only after that point in time has pasted.

The full specification for linear temporal logic adds history based connectives:

Some time in the past
Always in the past
Always in the past back to
Always in the past since
Previous state

Now we can say something like meaning “ did hold in some past state”.

A better way would be to use a union to represent the register

// Timer Mode Register (TMRn) (p. 13-4)
typedef struct
{
    unsigned ps : 8; // prescaler value

    unsigned ce : 2; // capture edge and enable interrupt
    unsigned om : 1; // output mode
    unsigned ori : 1; // output reference interrupt enable

    unsigned frr : 1; // free run/restart
    unsigned clk : 2; // input clock source for the timer

    unsigned rst : 1; // reset timer; 0 - reset timer (software reset), 1 - enable timer
} TMRData;

typedef union
{
    TMRData bit;
    UINT16 value;
} TMR;

Using this union, we can configure the TMR register with the same setting as described above:

TMR tmr;
tmr.value = 0;
tmr.bit.ps = 0xFF;
tmr.bit.ori = 1;
tmr.bit.frr = 1;
tmr.bit.clk = 1;
tmr.bit.rst = 1;

TIMER0_TMR = tmr.value;

The full set of registers I used can be downloaded here.

cfcp rtx.s19 djshaw.s19
telnet cf-server
1
tftp -f djshaw.s19

Granted, this is only four lines, but it gets really annoying to type them in again and again. Early in the development cycle, I tryed to automate the loading by compressing the 4 lines into 1 line that I could copy and paste

$ cfcp rtx.s19 djshaw.s19 && echo "1tftp -f djshaw.s19" | telnet cf-server

While cfcp worked properly, telnet did not:

Trying 129.97.56.37...
Connected to cf-server.uwaterloo.ca.
Escape character is '^]'.
Connection closed by foreign host.

I assume that telnet was sending “1tftp -f djshaw.19″ before the board was ready.

Unfortunately, only after the demo did I find an affective way to automate the load: expect. The following script launches telnet, loads the janusROM, then tftps the object file into memory (object file name is specified by a command line parameter).

#!/software/.admin/bins/bin/expect -f

proc rx {rx} {
    expect {
        timeout {puts "FAIL"; exit -1}
        $rx
    }
}

set timeout 10
spawn telnet cf-server
sleep 1

# todo:
# capture the port of the second serial port for easy reading

# wait for the "Please Pick [1-3]: " line
# dont know how to properly escape "[1-3]" in tcl
rx "Please Pick"
rx ": "

send "1"

# wait for the first instance of the prompt
rx "janusROM>"

send "tftp -f $argv.s19\r"
# wait for the file to load

rx "RAM Address:"
rx "Processing S-Record Data..."
rx "Finished. Start Address is 0x10100000."

# let the user interact with the coldfire board
interact

Using a bash script to perform cfcp and start the expect script, the whole process can be started with just one line

#!/bin/bash

me=`whoami`
# ftp the binary to the coldfire server

cfcp rtx.s19 $me.s19
#launch the expect script

./tcfs $me

As a good CS prof. ought to do, she presented a naive O(n³). Followed by an improvement to the O(n³) algorithm to make an O(n²) solution. Then, she blew all of our minds and showed us how to turn the convex hull problem into a sorting problem and gave us a O(n log n) solution.

But just as the lecture was about to conclude, she did what all great professors do. She just very quickly mentioned that there is a better solution. She simply stated the name of the paper that it was presented in: “The ultimate Planar Conve Hull Algorithm?“; and she mentioned the run time O(n log h). Giving something so mysterious, I felt the need to seek out this paper and see if I could make heads or tails of it.

The algorithm is easy to find: a quick Google search will send you in the direction of the ACM’s portal. Unfortunately, I was unable to find a free copy of the paper, but I was able to access it through Waterloo’s library’s proxy.

The algorithm isn’t difficult to read, but it is longer than what I expected.

Procedure UPPER-HULL(S)
1. Initialization
Let min and max be the indicies of two points in S that form the left and right endpoint of the upper hull of S respectively, i.e.
x(p_min) <= x(p_i) <= x(p_max) and
y(p_min) >= y(p_i) if x(p_min) = x(p_i),
y(p_max) >= y(p_i) if x(p_max) = x(p_i) for i = 1, …, n.
If min = max then print min and stop.
Let T:= {p_min,p_max} {p S | x(p_min) < x(p) < x(p_max)}.
2. CONNECT (min, max, T)
where CONNECT (k, m, S)is
begin

2.1 Find a real number a such that
x(p_i) <= a for |s|/2 points in S and
x(p_i) >= a for |s|/2 points in S.

2.2 Find the “bridge” over the vertical line L = {(x,y) | x = a}, i.e.
(i, j) := BRIDGE (S, a).
2.3 Let S_left := {p_i} {p S | x(p) < x(pi)}.
Let S_right := {p_j} {p S | x(p) > x(p_j)}.
2.4 If i = k then print (i)
else CONNECT (k, i, S_left).
If j = m then print (j)
else CONNECT (j, m, S_right).
end

Obviously, there is a little more to the algorithm (the definition of CONNECT and BRIDGE, for instance), and there is a big proof to go with it too.