Steve Jenson's blog

Last night, I was writing some code when I got caught up in watching old western tv series. First was the Guns of William Sonnet. This particular episode guest starred Charles Grodin as a superb bad guy. The second was the old Chuck Connors show Branded in which, after Connors and another guy beat the hell out of some trouble makers in a bar, Other Guy says to Connors "How 'bout I buy you a sasparilla?" Connors replied "Make it a double". That made me laugh out loud. After beating the crap out of half the bar, all I really thirst for is a good, cold Root Beer. Also heard in that episode, was a bad guy to the Other Guy: "yeah, that goes for you too, Mr. Butt-in-ski". Ah, the good ol' days.

I guess Quintin Tarantino's trying to make his big comeback tonight on ABC's Alias. Looks like vintage high-violence Tarantino. Too bad it's network television...

Also, I started working on a command parser for Momoko tonight. I realized that I've forgotten alot about Metsker's parser framework... I'll have to rectify that.

Lastly, I think I may have solved a few problems regarding my toy virtual machine; make all instructions 16-bit and their arguments 16 bits as well. If the argument needs more memory then a bit is flipped in the opcode field identifing how many more 32-bit fields (opcode+arg) are required.

Of course, I can jibber jabber all I want about special identifers making pcode verification possible but it won't really matter until I code and test it.

Oh yes, Darius recommended what's turning out to be an excellent book (no surprise there): Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Wisdom, a collection of 19 papers from the implementors of early smalltalk-80 systems.

sasparilla was still root beer back in the old west, wasn't it?

# — 20 January, 2002