The Computer Graphics Library

Back in the 90s, one book was ubiquitous in the world of Computer Graphics. Commonly called "The CG Bible", Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice gathered a huge part of the knowledge of the time. It was commonly referenced by the best programmers of that era in interviews and articles. By 1998, the book popularity had been acknowledged with a Front Line Award.
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Hacking on your TI calculator

I’ve built the KnightOS kernel, an open-source OS that runs on several TI calculator models, including the popular TI-83+ family, and recently the new TI-84+ Color Silver Edition. I have published some information on how to build your own operating sytsems for these devices, but I’ve learned a lot since then and I’m writing this blog post to include the lessons I’ve learned from other attempts.

Coming into this, you should be comforable with z80 assembly. It’s possible to write an OS for these devices in C (and perhaps other high-level languages), but proficiency in z80 assembly is still required. Additionally, I don’t consider C a viable...

Algorithms and Data structures books: One size doesn't fit them all

Over the years running this moderately popular website, I have been asked many times what is the best book about Algorithms and Data Structures. The answer is always "It depends" ! It depends on how the programmer's brain works and what kind of notation he is comfortable with. There are many flavors of mindset out there but it usually comes down to Mathematics and Illustrations...

Welcome, 2014

So 2013 is finally over and it's been an energy-sapping year, business-, baby-, and building wise. Business. The stagnation that was present for pretty much the first half of the year and which forced us to downsize a bit, had been replaced by too many projects all at once in the 2nd half of the year. And while it was welcome since it saved us from closing doors, it prevented working on our private projects, i.e. our apps in the store, but also personal pet projects – let alone anything open source. Baby. After 7 horrible months between Lara Marie's...

The bug that hides from breakpoints

This is the story of the most difficult bug I ever had to solve. See if you can figure it out before the conclusion.

For some years now, I’ve worked on a kernel for Texas Instruments calculators called KnightOS. This kernel is written entirely in assembly, and targets the old-school z80 processor from back in 1976. This classic processor was built without any concept of protection rings. It’s an 8-bit processor, with 150-some instructions and (in this application) 32K of RAM and 32K of Flash. This stuff is so old, I ended up writing most of the KnightOS toolchain from scratch rather than try to get archaic assemblers and...

2014-01-21

tabbed 0.6 released: download

Forth и шейдеры

Речь у нас пойдёт о поэзии. Минимализм языка программирования Forth и красота образов демосцены подтолкнули программиста Брэда Нельсона к идее Forth Haiku. Подражая японским хайку, Брэд писал свои первые программы из трёх строк, состояли они из пяти, семи, и снова пяти слов. Но в отличии от традиционного японского жанра, поэзия на языке Forth порождала картины не в воображении читателя, а зримо, на экране компьютера. Эта затея могла бы остаться причудой одинокого фаната компьютерного ретро (Forth прочно ассоциируется со старыми добрыми семидесятыми), если бы Брэд не воплотил её на самой что ни на есть современной платформе (WebGL) и не сделал бы...

Brainfind a Stranger in the Alps

In which is described an Inferno program that generates Linux/x86 executables, the design of a simple VM, and programs that generate programs (but all of it will be horribly disappointing).

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Dropping Feedburner

Just a quick note to mention that I’m dropping the Feedburner RSS feed in favor of a regular RSS feed. I’ll leave it around for some undecided amount of time, but you’ll want to update your RSS readers to point to http://debu.gs/blog/feed.rss when you can. The URL has been fixed in the nav bar and in the rel="alternate" link in the head tag.

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Learning Legendary Hardware

If you love software, you also try to understand the hardware to the deep down. It is not an easy task : There are many great programming books but few that explains hardware very well (as Michael Abrash once wrote: the Intel Documentation is "slightly more fun to read than the phone book"). In my quest for knowledge, I found two hardware books to be outstanding:
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software.
Computer Organization and Design.
Those books are good for "current" hardware but there is a lot to learn from previous generations. The cult machine That Wouldn't Die,...