Day 2 Reflection

Day 2

Date: January 10, 2020

This was the day where the deep dive into the course content began. The overall theme of this class was data representation with a bit of a intro to the 6502 assembler syntax. We started with a review on what a bit is as well as how to convert from binary numbers to integer ones. When this segment started I was pretty confused as the last time I dealt with binary numbers was back in ULI101 in 2017. But after a tiny bit of practice I think got the hang of it pretty okay. We then looked at floating point numbers and the difference between unsigned and signed integers as well as how they are represented in binary. The lesson then moved to the data representation of letters and in this case the difference between ASCII and Unicode. The main takeaway I got from this section is that ASCII is great for English but does not have enough capacity for other languages. As of which Unicode is great for multiple languages as it's number capacity is much higher, it even supports emojis. After the lesson on letters we then moved onto sound representation. One of the things I learned is that at regular intervals sound waves are time sliced and a value between -1 and 1 is retrieved. As well as that 44Khz is the highest frequency the human ear can hear and that if you want to add stereo you multiply that frequency by 2 and if you want surround sound you multiply that value by 5 or greater. Finally on the topic of data representation we covered graphics. What I got from that section was that each pixel is comprised of three colours red, green, blue. And that the amount of bytes per pixel affects how much colour range is available. Overall these were my main takeaways from the data representation segment of the class.

The last thing we covered for the day was a introduction to the 6502 assembler syntax. What really stuck out too me was that there was very little english built into the language as a lot of it were three letter abbreviations of commands. Another thing that stuck out was the heavy use of hexadecimals and the '$' sign. Overall this section seemed quite intimidating but I'll do what I can to get the hang of it.