I gave Chen Xiaohui and her classmates another two welcomed lessons last Sunday. Wang Yongbin joined us, thus I had a boy student from then on. In the first class I decided to teach them English, especially its pronunciation, and I continued to use English on the blackboard in my second class on Database. All the four students were listening very carefully throughout the two and a half hour. They often raised very good questions.
Prompted by the lessons on Database, I restarted the Thief project last Saturday night and developed a web client tool named pinginfo.pl that could detect the distribution of student IDs, based on trials. It could extract the personal info from the web tables as well.
In contrast with the previous version of Thief, I decided no longer to save the HTML contents sent from the server to the local discs but to extract interesting info from the web pages and save them in a compact form at run-time. Experiments showed that we could consequently save 92~95% storage, which was pretty remarkable.
I intend to design and build a database using the student info provided by the Educational Administration System via Thief, in order to practice the concepts and techniques of database, which can be extremely attractive.
I also found it rather straightforward to extend the existing Tesla simulator developed last term to real-time applications. The only problem is how to synchronize the simulation clock and the real-world clock (or CPU clock). I thought the simplest solution to this is "pushing" simulation clock if and only if the time-stamp of the next simulation event is equal to or earlier than the current real-world time. In other words, we should raise the next event if and only if it's just up-to-date or already out-of-date.
All we discussed above mainly concern the back-end of Tesla. At the front-end, say, the Tesla HDL level, the matter of introducing bus signals has been under consideration. Borrowing the array structure from the implementation language can make our work minimal, just as what we did when we implemented the circuit component structure for Tesla HDL a few months ago.
That's what for the last few days; see you tomorrow!