I found working my way through "Nasm Tutorial" very enjoyable. I got to the point in reading through the Intel Software Developer Manual where I realized I couldn't really proceed without getting some hands on experience. (I still feel like I may have to go back and go through things again in order to learn it better by writing assembly programs ( Read more... )

I decided to resume my assembly studies last night and I actually made some progress. I changed my tactic. I decided to search "nasm assembler" on Google and follow the first tutorial that I found. I found this, which I'm still going through but has already proven fruitful. The triangle printing program was great to go through. I converted it from ( Read more... )

Turns out just because you can read code and get the gist, doesn't necessarily mean you understand it fully! I am spending a lot of time this evening just making sure I understand the Intel 64 Linux Assembly hello world implementation that I found online for use with NASM.

First, it looks like my original system call reference definitely wasn't ( Read more... )

There are tool libraries. There are tool collectives. I believe this. I have not researched it, but I know it must be the case.

Kate and I are becoming more and more a fan of the idea of creating a small house community with others. The idea of having a relatively sizable piece of land and building tiny or small houses in some kind of artful ( Read more... )

I finally got through the first few chapters of the Intel Software Developer's guide. I got to the chapter where there are giant tables of processor instructions and it dawned on me: In order to learn assembly, there will be a point where I simply have to dive in. This means I need to start thinking about assembly programming projects.

I've had a ( Read more... )

I decided to do a deep dive on floating point representation, specifically the IEEE 754 standard, as far as I know it. This resulted in producing this guide. It even has a calculator component at the end that allows you to play around with a decimal and it's corresponding IEEE 754 bit-field encoding. You can edit either and the other updates. It ( Read more... )

I am getting frustrated reading the Software Developer Manual for my processor. The trouble is that there is a lot of information to take in and I don't have a practical application for it. Furthermore, when I'm learning programming things, I at least like to be able to open up an editor and come up with some basic test code to try things out to ( Read more... )

Am going through Chapter 3 of "Intel 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer's Manual - Vol 1: Basic Architecture" which is titled "Basic Execution Environment". I always like to know names for things in software. Even if the terms are no longer quite as meaningful, it helps me remember. To that end, this link was useful in giving hits at ( Read more... )

I have over the course of my life struggled with ups and downs. However, it hasn't been but in the last few years that some people have suggested to me that these might be episodes of Mania and Depression... Some kind of manic/depressive cycle. This certainly makes sense to me, observing myself. It seems like I'm on the upswing right now. But on ( Read more... )

Test cases can be used for many purposes. In essence a test is simply a program that makes an assertion. That makes testing a rather unbounded discipline, and both an art and a science. Automated testing of software is as conceptually complex as writing software and comes with all the same maintenance concerns.

There is a kind of test that I've ( Read more... )