At 10:29 PM Wednesday 3/22/2006, Julia Thompson wrote:
Ronn!Blankenship wrote:
At 06:24 PM Wednesday 3/22/2006, Julia Thompson wrote:
The Fool wrote:
You don't do it because it is easy. You do it because it is hard. If
you are really looking for some hardcore programmming to do as a hobby
try starting here:
<<http://romhacking.net>>
or
<<http://www.rpgone.net>>
or
<<http://agtp.romhack.net/>>
None of that sissy c++. All hardcore ASM.
ASM?
Julia
ASseMbly language . . .
Thanks, I thought that might be it.
Yeah, assembly is kick-ass. (I have no idea how
to program in it, but I've seen some pretty
sweet performance enhancements just by tweaking
in assembly for crucial bits. Seen benchmarks and stuff. Cool.)
Julia
Being pretty much in 1-1 correspondence with
machine language, it also offers you the
opportunity to get into places you probably
shouldn't be and mess things up royally, even (in
fact, usually) unintentionally . . .
I may have told this story before, but bear with
me: when I was a freshman, the university had
rather recently gone to a 4-1-4 schedule, making
the month of January a mini-term during which
they intended to offer classes not offered during
the regular fall, spring, or summer terms. (By
the time a couple of more years had passed, it
turned out that what most students wanted from
the January mini-term was an opportunity to take
one of the courses that the university required
everybody to take outside their majors and get it
out of the way instead of taking something to
broaden one's horizons.) Many of the freshman
math majors took a course in constructing
synthetic proofs. Of course, as a double major,
only one of which was math, and a polygonal peg
of some order from the beginning, I took the
course on molecular orbital theory offered by the
chemistry department. (I may have mentioned at
some time in the past that until I was I think
about a sophomore in high school I was
considering majoring in chemistry.) The idea of
MO theory in a nutshell is that although we
cannot get an exact solution to the Schrödinger
equation in the general case (for the same reason
we cannot get an exact solution to the general
3-body problem, much less the general n-body
problem, in celestial mechanics), we can use
algebra to get approximate solutions which allow
us to the electrons in the various orbitals in
the individual atoms interact when the atoms bond
together to make a molecule. Part of the process
involves finding the eigenvalues and eigenvectors
of a matrix. The dimensions of the matrix
increase as the number of atoms in the molecule
increases, and even though the matrices tend to
be rather sparse (almost, but not quite, in the
case of many molecules tridiagonal), doing the
eigenanalysis by hand gets old pretty fast. At
the time (Jan 72), I had never touched a
computer. So, although it wasn't required for
that class, I learned enough FORTRAN to make some
attempt to do calculations for some larger, more
"interesting" molecules than we had covered in
class. Some of the others in that class already
knew more about programming, and one guy in
particular came up with a pretty good program
(better than anything I came up with).
A year or so later, and I had been learning a bit
more about programming on my own (including going
to an off-campus source to get the standard book
on assembly language programming for the machine
we had and going through it on my own), and so I
was one of the lab assistants qualified to have a
key to the campus computer room and sit down
there in the evenings and answer any questions
anyone taking any computer course might
have. :P The guy I mentioned who had written
the program during that mini-term MO class was
taking the assembly language class that
semester. Every time he came in to run his
solution to one of the assigned projects, the
first thing I did was to I open the desk drawer
and get out the so-called "cold-start" card (the
punched card which when run through the card
reader would re-boot the computer) and have it
ready, because every time he ran his attempted
solution, the machine died an unnatural
death. The really strange thing was that I could
never figure out what he had in his program which
caused it, no matter how much I looked at his
listing, the console display of no-longer
blinking lights that told where it had stopped,
etc., and neither could anyone else. To cause
the problem he must have been telling it to
access something he shouldn't or to overwrite
some location he shouldn't have been in or
something of that nature, but as I said afaik no
one was ever able to figure out just where he was
going astray. I dunno if he ever got that
program to run, although apparently no one else
in the class had problems, or at least their
problems did not cause the machine to lock up
_every_ time they tried their program . . .
--Ronn! :)
"Since I was a small boy, two states have been
added to our country and two words have been
added to the pledge of Allegiance... UNDER
GOD. Wouldn't it be a pity if someone said that
is a prayer and that would be eliminated from schools too?"
-- Red Skelton
(Someone asked me to change my .sig quote back, so I did.)
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