A Portland Oregon users group primarily for languages that compile to machine native format such as C, C++, and Assembly.

5:30pm Doors open, unstructured time.

6:30pm The MOS 6502 might be the most historically significant processor for one reason: It fueled the PC revolution. You have probably used a device with a 6502, and maybe even programmed one, but do you know the historical context for it and what made it successful? This talk briefly covers the following aspects of the 6502: the events that lead to its creation, the elegance of the design, and the lessons we can learn from its success.

Speaker Bio: Jason Dagit is a research engineer at Galois. He received a M.S. in Computer Science from Oregon State University in 2009. He has been active in the Haskell community since 2005 and he is currently a member of the Haskell.org committee. His areas of interest include functional programming, computer graphics, and most recently hardware design. He enjoys working in the space between pure research and industrial practice.

7:30pm Popcount as an Example Of Microbenchmarking in C

Quickly determining the number of 1 bits in a binary machine word, the so-called "popcount", has always been an interesting problem for developers. Popcount is useful in applications ranging from cryptography to games, so it is worth trying to optimize. In this talk, I will report on a number of different popcount algorithms and their C implementation performance, in the context of a "microbenchmarking" framework custom-built in C for this purpose. I will also explore the pitfalls of C in microbenchmarking and the issues, problems and relevance of microbenchmarking in general.

Speaker Bio: Bart Massey got his B.A. in Physics from Reed in 1987, having learned C while he was there. After a couple of years writing C code at Tektronix, Inc. Bart attended University of Oregon, where he received his MSCS in 1992 and his Ph.D. in 1999. For the past 14 years, he has been a Computer Science Professor at Portland State University. He still writes more C than he cares to admit.

8:30ish pm Head to an elevator. People might go someplace to continue chatting.

ARRIVING BY BIKE?

Cyclists are welcome to park their bikes in the New Relic office. Bikes are not allowed in the building lobby, however, and must use the freight elevator. To get your bike up to the 28th floor, enter the building's parking lot by going down the ramp at 5th and Pine. Go past the booth -- no need to pick up a ticket -- and turn right. Go straight until you almost run into the elevator lobby, then go right again. On the back side of the elevator block you'll see a beat up pair of double doors marked "freight elevator." You can get up by buzzing in with the intercom, and saying you're here for New Relic. Ride on up to the 28th floor, you'll easily find the bike parking.

A Huge thanks to New Relic for providing the venue and food.

Thanks to O'Reilly for sending books.

First talk at 7PM, come early to hack, or network

• 7pm Title: Restoration of a simulator of one great machine on another.

Abstract: Gordon Bell described Seymour Cray as the greatest computer builder that he knew of as demonstrated by his designs and their successors that operated at the highest performance for over 30 years. Bell was from DEC, Cray from CDC, two routine producers of beautiful architectures. I programmed both. In this talk I will review the restoration of my work based on the patterns widely used in assembler of the time. This itself is an innovation in restoration and well suited to the modern web.

Bio: Ward Cunningham has worked for and consulted to daring startups and huge corporations. He has served as CTO, Director, Fellow, Principle Engineer and Inventor. He is best known for creating wiki. He leads an open-source project rebuilding wiki to solve more complex sharing situations addressing some of societies toughest problems. Ward founded movements in object-oriented, agile software, extreme programming and pattern languages. Ward lives in Portland, Oregon and works for New Relic, Inc.

• 7:30pm Title: Building Things With SDL" (Simple DirectMedia Layer) http://www.libsdl.org/

Abstract: An overview of the Simple DirectMedia Layer and some of the things you can do with it and basic howto bits.

Bio: Jason ChampionJason Champion, Software Mad Scientist.

First talk at 7PM, come early for networking, or hacking.

Introduction to Splay Trees

What, why and how they can be used. I'll go over how splaying works, how we use it in OlegDB, why it can be a better choice than binary trees for certain situations and how the splaying algorithm can/can't be applied to other kinds of trees.

Quinlan Pfiffer: OlegDB coauthor

x86 machine language programming in the bash shell

Compilers, and assemblers are seemingly magical programs that turn text into something the CPU can process directly. I decided the best way to demystify things was to implement my own solution.

Daniel Johnson: pdxbyte founder, and full stack technology generalist

Title "A walk through the design process of a modern chip".

Speaker : Rohit Nadig

Rohit Nadig currently works as a Senior CAD Engineer at NVIDIA developing software that is used to design NVIDIA's latest generation of Graphics and Mobile chips. Prior to NVIDIA, Rohit worked at Synopsys and Intel, also developing on CAD software. While at Intel in Hillsboro, Oregon, Rohit was part of the Pentium-4 CPU design team and developed software for Power Estimation and Layout Convergence.

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Lightning Talk:

Title: Anti-Social Social Networking

Speaker: Vagrant Cascadian

Vagrant Cascadian develops and integrates free software as part of the Debian project, focusing on network booted and installation systems, and support for low-power ARM devices. Away from computers, you can find Vagrant happily getting thrown around at an Aikido dojo.

Main Talk:

Title: “Firmware: why hiding it behind the curtain and telling no one to look is doomed to failure in the advent of IoT”

Speaker: John Hawley

Open Hardware Technical Evangelist, Intel

John 'Warthog9' Hawley led the system administration team on kernel.org for nearly a decade, leading a team including four other administrators. His other exploits include working on Syslinux, OpenSSI, a caching Gitweb, and patches to bind to enable GeoDNS. He's the author of PXE Knife, a set of interfaces around common utilities and diagnostics tools needed by an average systems administrator, as well as SyncDiff(erent) a state-full file synchronizer and file transfer mechanism. He currently works for Intel working on Open Hardware, and the Minnowboard. In his free time he enjoys cooking extravagant meals and watching bad movies.

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Darrick Wong is a principal filesystem engineer at Oracle, in charge of ext4 and xfs. He will discuss new developments in the Linux storage and ext4/xfs space in 2015

Doors food networking 6PM Talk 7PM

Thanks to New Relic for sponsoring venue, food, and drinks!

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Title: Bluetooth Devices – Development, Audio Quality, and Testing

Speaker: Ken Ostrin

Ken Ostrin has 20 years of experience delivering professional software products to the market. He has worked at Audio Precision for the past 11 years building world class audio testing gear. Ken earned his degree in Computer Engineering from UC Santa Cruz.

Talk begins at 7, get there early for socializing, pizza and refreshments!

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“Reinventing black boxes”

Description: Open source has a long history of reimplementing, and reverse engineering proprietary tools. This talk will integrate the tools needed to reverse engineer into stories of how it has been done before.

Abstract: There is a constant need to provide open source glue, and alternatives to new technology. Learning how to analyze black boxes frees you from having to wait for someone else to do it. When you solve the puzzle yourself you will really understand how it works.

Reverse engineering is a lot like debugging. There are open source full development stacks including debugging for almost every operating system, and architecture. There are a few other tools you need, but with decades of reinvention the toolbox will usually have everything you need.

Since black boxes aren’t documented it’s impossible to know for sure if you will have the skills you need ahead of time. They are puzzles which might be easy, or hard. Chances are you won’t have to go it alone for long as other people, and whole communities often want the same thing that you do.

Bio: Daniel Johnson is a full stack developer who has been programming since 1990, and focused on Open Source technologies since 2003. Jobs have ranged from telephone tech support to systems administration, and freelance software development. He has spent the most time in the last few years working with Rails, AngularJS, Android, and Arduino. He was the first person to document how to use the intel real sense 3d camera with Linux.

Talk begins at 7, get there early for socializing, pizza and refreshments!

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Ricochet Robot! Do AI In C

Alex Randolph's wonderful game Ricochet Robot (Rasende Roboter) depends on a player's ability to quickly find a path through a large maze. In this talk, I describe the game, and then describe my solution to the game (the first solution I am aware of): a table that allows instant lookup of the solution to any given game position. The table is almost 1 TB uncompressed, and required around 30 CPU-days to generate.

This application is a good demonstration of why and how much AI is still done in C. I will show some techniques for clean yet highly efficient coding, demonstrate some infrastructure building and use, and discuss tradeoffs between memory use, speed optimization and easily verifiable correctness.

Bart Massey is a 15th year Assoc. Prof. of Computer Science at Portland State University. Bart has a CS PhD from University of Oregon's Computational Intelligence Research Lab. He has been programming in C for more than 30 years, and is a regular contributor to the open source community.

The meeting host for May is Crowd Compass The leading mobile app provider for conferences and meetings.

Talk begins at 7, get there early for socializing.

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