Pleas for help from clueless students?

Still it does say Beta at the top so maybe this is just a practice and they are going to roll out the real, well thought out, interface in a few weeks. :-)

There's not many prepared to take on the task. That's a lot of data.

Crikey, you ruined the story! I hoped you'd proposed to her there and then :)

I had an interesting experience when I was studying. We were supposed to control an LSI-11. The setup was a terminal connected to the LSI-11 and the LSI-11 was connected to a PDP-11. At boot, the LSI11 monitor would just bridge between the terminal and the PDP-11. The code was developed on the PDP-11 and downloaded into the LSI-11 and then the program was started

Me and a friend was supposed to develop a program which read input from various sources including the terminal, a keypad and a few other things. Data was then sent to different output devices including an LCD and the PDP-11.

The program was mainly developed at home and fed into the PDP11 and downloaded/run. To our dismay, the program immediately aborted and we were returned to the PDP-11 prompt. We tried downloading again, and got a major crash during download. Strange character all over the screen. Reset the LSI-11 and got the PDP-11 prompt again. Tried downloading again and this time it worked, but when we ran the program, again we were returned to the PDP-11 prompt.

After testing a few times, we could see the pattern. First time we download and run we are returned to the prompt. Second time we download we get the crash.

Called the teacher, which could not explain the strange phenomena and scratched his head...

Suddenly I realized what was going wrong...

The first time we downloaded our application it was written to the memory of the LSI-11. When we ran the program it started sending characters from the terminal to the PDP-11 which returned a prompt every time it got a return character.

We were not "returned to the prompt", our program just worked as it was supposed to...

The second time we downloaded, we overwrote the rtunning application, no surprise that the crash occurs...

So you can be both clueless and bright at the same time...

They make money from advertising on those useless pages, right?

Not necessarily; the useless hits are from pages which link to pages which have the search terms and in general these useless pages don't seem to be paid Google Ads. I just wish that there was a way to turn this off. To get an example of one of these 'referring hits' just access the cached copy and it will state in the cached-page banner "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: ". The hits aren't even ordered by relevance to the search criteria, just by Google's absurd popularity ranking scheme which is nuts for technical searches.

Regards,

Michael

Did I forget to mention how she 'thanked' me? ;) Just kidding!!!!

Regards,

LOL! It's always a pleasant surprise when, after scratching your head over a puzzling 'bug', you suddenly realise that it's actually

Of course, the aforementioned girl in my case had simply obtained a copy of someone else's source code.

Regards,

Hope you did not underestimate her. We had another lab, where we were supposed to program a stepper motor in Basic. We should be able to start and stop and run in both directions.

Unfortunately, the lab assistant replied when asked, that there were no manuals available for the Basic interpreter and then he left.

When he returned, we had a nice interrupt driven program which would go right on '>', left on '

My company uses Yahoo IM, Microsoft Messenger, Google Talk, IRC, Microsoft Outlook, cell phones, email, a Wiki, and an VOIP phone system. We let geographically distant employees VPN into the corp network. This is the most communication tool-centric environment I've ever worked in, and we still can't communicate worth a damn.

Today I had enough of the interrupts and simply closed all of my running applications except my editor. It's the only way to get any work done. Anyone who wanted to speak to me was forced to actually walk to my cube.

Kelly

Definitely not. It was patently obvious that she didn't know her way around a computer keyboard, let alone be capable of coding a couple of Minix 'interrupt' service routines for a custom piece of hardware and have it compile and run first time with ZERO errors.

It's good to have someone in the know around. During my uni days I was more interested in hanging out in the canteen/bar between (and sometimes during) lectures than spending spare time in the computer lab. However, a good friend much preferred the latter.

Early on in the course we got an assignment that had to be run in batch mode on a Honeywell mini. Trouble is, we'd been given JCL code that put the job in a queue which meant it would only get run every 4-8 hours. It was painful having to spend half an hour or so in the lab, trying to make sure you got your next run as correct as possible, then submit the job, check back in later that afternoon, etc over the course of a week or so.

The aforementioned friend grabbed a copy of the Honeywell JCL manuals and worked out which line of JCL to change to have it run almost immmediately. We each had our entire assignments finished in the time it took everyone else to do a single run!

Later on in the course they shut down a computer lab for a whole day to interactively assess Cobol programming assignments - so people scheduled for later in the day wouldn't unfairly have more time than others to complete the assignment. Again my friend simply ushered us into the little-used computer lab on the opposite side of the building and proceeded to connect remotely into the mini. We got about 6 more hours to finish our assignment.

Ultimately his diligent hacking never paid off - he never could beat me at Xevious or Juno First (video games we had in the bar)! ;)

Regards,