Ping John Larkin

If you really want to impress people you could hook up a GPS device and have VBA read your own position into the program.

I'm having deja vu here. ;-) My first paid C program was an airplane charter calculator. The guy I was doing it for lent me a book with the formula, so the calc was pretty straightforward - I just now did a search, and Zowie!

For mine, the secretary had to enter lat/long of all the airports the client serviced, out of a little handbook. I was in their office when she started entering these numbers, and she asked, "Feet and inches too?" I explained, "That's minutes and seconds, but yes, enter them too." Oddly, she wasn't blonde. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

Yes, DOS wins hands-dwon when it comes to reliable reaction times. To me it seems Windows will never get there anymore.

Where Windows does win is integrated test environments. Things like where a technician scans the bar code of an engine, hits "Test", the program alerts him that he forgot to turn on the VME box this morning, spools up the engine, measures, shuts down, stores results on LAN and prints out a traveler sheet.

Well, there's always spam. If you send out 100,000,000 emails, and 0.001% of the people respond, that's 1,000 suckers. ;-)

Good Luck! Rich

But: Yesterday it was reported that a kid has hacked it, using 500 hours of brain time and a soldering iron.

He didn't hack the interface or the apps though, dipshit. He hacked the baseband (you should have read it, idiot). He allowed for a different carrier to be used. He did NOTHING about the applets running on the phone.

Sheesh.

Read on:

http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:O-NDCIDS9nUJ:

Quote: "This method has the distinct advantage of automatically placing Installer.app on your iPhone, making it much easier to re-install third-party applications, especially over a Wi-Fi connection. ..."

VBA is not quite the same thing as Visual Basic, but pretty close. VB "Express" is available, as said, as well as free "Express" versions of the other MS Programming Languages.

These describe some of the differences (not that much for your usage Joerg) between VBA and VB.

Though they are old enough to have had things change since then.

Robert H.

It's been all over the TeeVee Nooz - one of the talking heads said, "Aren't they like five hundred dollars? Who wants to break that open and start soldering on it?"

;-)

Cheers! Rich

Only the hardcore guys. However, this brings attention to the other "modders" some of whom seem to have succeeded in bringing foreign apps onto this phone. I don't have one, and I don't need one, but while initially frowned upon that can offer new markets for the manufacturer. Sometimes the mfg embraces it, other times not. Like in the case of the Icom R1500 PC-controlled scanner. It could make for a nice pre-compliance EMI analyzer but Icom refuses to release the access codes and effectively blocks itself out of a potentially large market. Makes no sense. Then again not all corporate decisions in life make sense.

Nice and concise comparisons. Thanks.

Possibly because *they* want to be the ones that sell such a device? And they've been slow about doing so.

Robert H.

That's not Windows, per se. Its the test application. Sure, you can use Windows for that. But then you might wind up with a scenario like:

Idiot test app. programmer writes code stubs that just return 'pass' because he can't actually figure out how to talk to a particular instrument.

Months later, after he quits (or is fired), the next programmer manages to untangle his VBA code and finds the test stubs. Now, fearing that he'll catch hell for the current situation, he hacks together a fix. But instead of informing management and the QA department of the current compliance situation, he sneaks on to the development server, dumps the Source Safe data, inserts his patch and replaces it, undetected (thank goodness nothing runs in Windows without everyone having admin. rights). The next update to the ATE system incorporates this patch for all subsequent UUT.

A few months (or years) pass. A conscientious QA inspector discovers the original fault, the patch and cover-up. Unable to get satisfaction from management, he grabs copies of supporting data with the intent of taking it to federal regulators and the press. Police arrest him and charge him with theft of company intellectual property.

Nah. It could never happen.

Yikes! Anything that's used in our manufacturing dept comes off the company library server, and only two people have write priviliges to that! If it's not formally released, with all sources and a sensible README file, it's not going to be used. And if it's released, it's backed up off-site.

John

No, I doubt they'll ever be in the spectrum analyzer biz. They could have years ago with their PCR1000 but they didn't. Opening the interface spec could greatly boost their sales but that doesn't seem to sink in.

Yup. That's how it works in med devices as well. Unauthorized hacks and bypasses of version control are next to impossible. Also, VBA portions can be locked with a password. Of course that can be hacked as well but then the goons will really come after whoever dunnit.

Oh, I didn't mean be in the business for "real". Just some Management type thinking that's a possible future "asset" to be exploited and why should they give that away for free?

Ignoring all the reasons why that makes sense in a business but we're not talking about real rational types anyway.

Robert

Except that in this case it is so easy to sniff out the command set with a logic analyzer or some port logger that it really doesn't make any sense to keep it a secret. But it makes it tedious enough that most people don't bother and just move on and buy a low cost Chinese analyzer.

The "arrest" part does seem pretty iffy to me, assuming the QA inspector really was employed by the company in the first place. However, I have a co-worker who once worked as a test engineer and found almost exactly the initial set-up you describe: An automated test was being done on a product manufactured by the company, and while there was lots of convoluted code performing measurements and calculations, he went through them all, analyzed them, and found that the way the code was written every unit *always* passed, even if it truly was out of spec. He doesn't know whether or not this was done knowingly or if, after his code failed "too many" units, he was made to put in so many additional tests/special cases/exceptions/etc. that it just eventually ended up that way... but he suspect the former.

---Joel