Progress Tonight

I left my Laptop's power cord at home today, the first time ever that I've done that. I do have a work computer, but I'm used to "double-fisting" my computers. Not having a mouse in my left hand made me feel a little bit naked.

As any prudent student should do, I make multiple regular backup copies of my thesis. I maintain copies here on my home computer, and one copy each on both of the HDDs in my work computer. I used to make a fourth copy on a networked "My Backpack" storage location too, but the interface for that changed and I can't access it using my normal backup script. 3 should be enough, I assume.

Without my laptop, I was able to do some work on my thesis (especially my abstract, which is a big load off my shoulders). Now that I'm home, however, the real work can start in earnest.

I'm working my way through the processor model from left to right, basically. I've built the instruction fetch, instruction decode, register unit, and a basic ALU. I'm only supporting a few instructions right now, but I'll be able to expand this basic skeleton rapidly. Most of the changes happen in the ALU if I want to add more instructions, and I've made it very scalable. Work is going very quickly (as I had hoped and anticipated) because it's all graphical block-based design. Plus, I have a lot of these components half-built already, and I know the designs like the back of my hand. So much of the work was in the interface anyway, the rest of the design is just plugging in blocks where then need to go.