Author Archives: R.P. Churchill

Are We Entering a New Era of Computing?

I wrote last Wednesday’s piece to provide a beginning context to show how developers should be aware of the underlying activities in their target environments. I plan to do a couple of posts discussing how much duty cycle (CPU activity) … Continue reading

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System and Enterprise Architecture

The figure below shows a notional representation of an integrated, plant-wide control system for a type of modern strip mill. I installed one- and two-line tunnel furnace Level 2 control systems in several plants just like this. I’ve highlighted the … Continue reading

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The End of Moore’s Law, Code Bloat, and the True Nature of Efficiency

It has been suggested that the improvements in semiconductor and processor technology are approaching their natural limits in terms of how far the size of each feature can be reduced. Since quantum computing has not ready for widespread use, and … Continue reading

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Automatically Generating Code

A programmer’s efforts to create code can be greatly enhanced by automating as many operations as possible. This process reaches its zenith when the code itself can be generated automatically. I’ve done this on a handful of occasions in both … Continue reading

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Methods of Inter-Process Communication I’ve Employed

A while ago someone asked me how I’d go about making two processes communicate. My answer was to figure out what data needed to be communicated, what communication type was to be used, what protocol was to be used, and … Continue reading

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Controlling the Animation

One way to pause a running animation is simply to inhibit the action as shown in the first example below, and based on the following code. As you can see, the window.requestAnimationFrame is still called, but setting the value of … Continue reading

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More Basic Animation

Today I continued experimenting with the techniques I started using yesterday. I tried the exercise with filled circles and also after having placed additional objects on the screen. The only drawing modes that came close to supporting what I was … Continue reading

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Beginnings of an Animation

I wrote various two- and three-dimensional animations for years and am looking into various aspects of the practice beginning here. I took a course in computer graphics during my senior year in college using Microsoft Pascal on first-generation IBM PCs … Continue reading

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The Steam Table Form… Finally!

About two months ago I started making a web form that allowed a user to calculate thermodynamic values for saturated water as functions of either temperature and pressure. I got sidetracked for quite a while working on the graphing capability … Continue reading

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Extending the Thermodynamic Functions To Their Full Range: Functions vs. Pressure

While finishing up the process of generating the plots of the thermodynamic functions vs. pressure I found an issue with how plots are drawn on the x-axis when the x-axis has a logarithmic scale. I calculated numeric values for every … Continue reading

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