"Matlab to Scilab for Dummies" anywhere?

I like Wasp and Hornet Killer. The guys who developed that stuff should win a Nobel prize, IMHO.

Michael

I always seem to pick up an empty can of Wasp spray when I need it, but there is almost always a can of starting fluid handy.

Hello Michael,

All this chemical stuff seems to create resistant mutations of the bugs. Once I held this spray in the black cans onto a nest, one hornet buzzed out, remained right in the stream for several seconds and then came after me. I hid inside and that thing did not die. Amazing.

I am not sure we are doing us any good in the long term. Also, this stuff generally is nerve gas and who knows what it'll do to us humans.

The one I use is simply freeze spray... works great on annoying flies in the house as well.

...Jim Thompson

Where do you get the freeze spray? Or do you have to spray a random pressurized bottle upside-down?

I'd like to see a fly develop a mutation against freezing...

Michael

Hello Jim,

Sure, but freeze mist and stuff like that for electronics work is usually mail order. Also, you have to get close up. With hornets you have exactly one shot and then they'll come after you. The hornet killer cans can cover about 20ft distance with a pretty good aim. But I always clean up the drippings before kids or pets enter the area again.

Some of the production techs at Microdyne were doing that. It surprised the hell out of them when they thawed out and took off.

We have some that nest underground in FLorida. The starting fluid (Ether) flows into every tunnel and kills all of them.

Hello Michael,

Now imagine a hornet waking up and remembering who dunnit...

I don't have any right now, so I can't read off the label, but it's a standard item at Ace Hardware... insect freeze spray.

My "bug man" (Arizona Exterminating) uses something similar, but he's more gutsey than I, He just walks right up to the nest, spraying as he walks ;-)

...Jim Thompson

I assume he's got a canister straped to his back. How big are the DIY things? As Terrell says, it could be a real bear if you got in the middle of the operation and ran out of juice.

An Actual sign of progress in the software world, In my father's day all there was was Fortran and linpack in batch (overnight). Not quite the same.

This thread reminded of the day (LA area) i put my book bag down, in my employers lab, and unzipped it and a cockroach came out; i grabbed a can of flux remover (the nastiest {most toxic} stuff handy) and sprayed it down good. Most of the lab crew was quite surprised, they had not (at least recently) seen any spray that could drop a 'roach on the run. It stayed dead, cause i crushed it.

Hello Joseph,

Progress? Back at the university we had to program in Fortran on punch cards. That was a heck of a lot easier than these "modern" math programs. Much less learning curve.

After finally dumping Scilab yesterday I tried Octave and dumped it as well. Wouldn't read Matlab files properly. All you had was an archaic command line screen that wouldn't even behave like DOS and spit out all kinds of cryptic error messages. These programs might be very powerful and practical for a student who has all day long but not for busy engineers.

Maybe I write my own program to calculate wave digital filters some day. One that actually works.

I think the big difference (what I think is the bad guy, (or what i will harp on)) is/are symbol manipulators. I hate them, because they never work... i.e. I spent one to many times learning the syntax and typing in (either Mathmatica or Maple,) a hard integral, symbolic linear algebra problem or anything. EVERY SINGLE TIME I could have done it better than the above mentioned symbol manipulators... I always got an answer that was way way more complicated (took 3-10 pages to display) than I eventualy came up with myself (either by just using an integral table or just doing it by hand.) or i got something with a command prompt, saying ...>answer. it just couldn't do ANYTHING i wanted. I haven't used them in a while, (a few years) have they gotten any better?

My big argument against symbol manipulators is that if you want an answer that doesn't rely on a closed form solution... why not just do it numericaly in the first place? (with more control over errors due to step size, method used for a DE etc.)

The only reason I like matlab, (other than I'm used to it) is its ability to save you several (many) lines of code, vs. something like C or FORTRAN, when your computing a numerical integral, or the solution or a linear or nonlinear(?) DE, or etc. it's also quite good for DSP, yet I agree it is way overpriced/expensive.

john

engineers.

I too have found all of them clumsy in one respect or another, but do not ask me to do the equivalent of SPICE with only linpack, the laughter will blow you out of the building / park.