My book is available

[Larry Dickson <tjoccam@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello all,

My Kickstarter book is available on Amazon now, and should be priced in dollars, pounds, or euros. 

http://www.amazon.com/Crawl-Space-Computing-Cooperating-programs-working/dp/0966644018/

You, on this list, are the perfect ones to critique it (and find any warts on my solo effort!). In addition, it is intended to be a helpful resource for educational and other uses. I deliberately pitchforked everything I could think of into it, including three extensions (swap caddy, flip driver, and slider slot) of standard occam-type hardware/software-equivalent copying.

Apology #1: In blurb and book, I use expressions like “lost art of Wide Computing” when of course in present company the art is not lost but well preserved. I’m referring to everyone else out there, especially hacker circles in the United States, the Far East, and the second and third world. For the same reason I use C and offer a toolset, Connel. Another reason is that I want to fling the door wide open to embedded programming using the standard tools that are beeping away in so many hobbyists’ garages.

But I would really like the brains of this list to take a crack at it too. (And I freely admit that I could use the income of a few book sales ;-) It teaches a two-wave design process that should be usable in any project in whatever language. The goal (clearly explained, I think) is to approach the reliability of physical engineering.

Please take a look!

Larry Dickson

On Feb 10, 2014, at 12:16 PM, Larry Dickson <tjoccam@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hello Peter and all,
> 
> I’m putting the finishing touches on my Kickstarter-promised book on “crawl-space computing” (a popularization of Wide computing, i.e. CSP and all its children), and ran across a very relevant reference: Welch, Justo, and Willcock, “High-Level Paradigms for Deadlock-Free High-Performance Systems,” Transputer Applications and Systems '93. The client-server part of it is pretty clear, but I have a couple of questions relating to the I/O-PAR and I/O-SEQ part:
> 
> (1a) You say “I/O-SEQ is usually applied in systems where the component interaction is not symmetric (e.g. logic circuits and control laws)”. Are there examples floating around of such an application?
> 
> (1b) The I/O-SPnet restriction “no closed loop or path from external input to external output consisting only of I/O-SEQ normal forms” sounds like a killer, especially the no path part - seems to exclude FIFOs - so how is it clear in (1a) that we can use I/O-SPnets for most applications?
> 
> (2) How do the two special cases(client/server and I/O-PAR-I/O-SEQ) combine to prove deadlock freedom for the hybrid? If you draw a line around all the ropes in Figure 17, you don’t get a pure client/server, because of the two channels labeled p and connecting with user interface.
> 
> The paper says “maintain a separate view of the different types of network as intact sub-systems, even though the same processes may be part" of both. I suspect I’m missing something obvious, but it sounds like interference would be possible.
> 
> Any help would be appreciated!
> 
> Larry