Somewhat inspired by Dave Platt's efforts to scan Laport's "Radio Antenna Engineering" book (available at
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I decided to scan a couple a few books that are no longer available as well. First up is Robert Chipman's "Theory and Problems of Transmission Lines," at
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as "Transmission Lines (Chipman).pdf".
By next week, I should have a copy of Dostal's "Operational Amplifiers" there as well (...since Terry Givens didn't want to sell me his copy! :-) ).
In all cases I'm assuming the copyrights have long since; if I hear otherwise I'll pull the copies.
I used to be able to do that with books. But now they are disk files and there are too many:)
Besides, when you are looking for info on a tone control circuit, you automatically know it will be in the thick, short red book called "Radiotron Designer's Handbook". Filter stuff will be in the huge medium thickness book by Zvrev, perhaps also with a red cover. So the associations are easy to make.
But it gets much more difficult when you have hundreds of thousands of files scattered through thousands of directories. They have no color or weight, and each one basically looks exactly the same as the others until you open them and start browsing.
So I wrote a special operating system that runs in dos and attaches a descriptive phrase to each file. Yes, hundreds of thousands of them. Fortunately, the software can sift through html, c, pascal, and plain text and extract some meaningful information about the contents. But I can override that whenever I wish.
The description goes with the file when it is moved or copied to another directory. I then generate an index that contains all the descriptions, and can search for a key word or phrase that appears in the index. It takes just under two seconds to find all the files on my hard disk that match the search terms. I can hilite a file with the cursor and scroll through the list.
When I find a file that looks interesting, a single keystroke takes me to the drive and directory where the file is located, and places the cursor of the main program on the file. Then I can read it with any of a number of different programs, depending on the file type.
The program keeps the files separate by naming them with a hexadecimal representation of the current date and time. Since this never repeats, I can copy or move files anywhere without worrying about overwriting another file with the same name. Except, of course, if it's app notes by different companies that happen to have the same name. The program warns me this is about to happen so I can check if I really want to do the operation.
But I end up never having to type in a directory or filename. And the system is hundreds of times faster than any gui OS - Windows or Linux!
Sneaky. I'm using Win 3.1, so there's no way I could get broadband. The necessary api's won't run on my machine, and there is only one person in the world still using it so nobody is going to write anything for it. Including viruses. Yea! And Trojans. Yea! And popups. Yea!
Yes - let's hear it for Flash! It won't even run on my machine:)
I am still astonished at the way people will make 350k gif files that could be shrunk to 10k if they knew how. Or 2 page pdf files that are mostly text but take up 3 megs. These people should be given a DOS machine and floppies for a year until they figure out how much this costs the other people who have to download and store it.
Sounds a lot like 4DOS (the "describe" command)! In the prehistoric days when files names were limited to 8.3 it was a lifesaver. (What is VGTslSm4.exe?)
Sure you could, if you use a cable or DSL modem with an Ethernet connection. The first machine I ever ran Mosaic (ancient web browser) on was under Win
3.1.
I have an acquaintance that I do computer maintenance for from time to time and one of his stated intentions was "to become the eBay of the fruit brokering business" (yeah, I know, but...). Unfortunately the firm (out of India, no less! -- somehow he hooked up with their representative here in the US) built him a web site that, IMO, sucks rocks. Not only does it require flash but it immediately maximizes your browser window as soon as it opens... arrggh! (The site is
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in case anyone cares...) At this point I think his aspirations remain a little far from fruition (ha, ha).
I went to a talk by Scott Meyers something over a year ago and he mentioned that Amazon is really quite good with achieving "high functionality" with no fancy plug-ins required. It really is impressive compared to the likes of foodguys...
Because they don't know how and it doesn't pay to teach them?
Here in the US broadband Internet connectivity is in the ballpark of $35-$50/mo and is available to (I'm guessing) over 90% of the population (and
100% free-to-you wireless access is becoming increasingly common as well). That price isn't onerous when you consider how many people pay comparable amounts for their cable TV, cell phones, etc. That's no excuse for this pathetic web pages we're discussing, but you can understand why people aren't out staging riots in the street over it.
Mine disappeared some time ago. Someone borrowed it and didn't tell me. But I have been able to reconstruct some of the graphs from appendixes in other articles, and I found some of the tabulated data on the web. I'm still missing the Gaussian stuff, but I got most of the rest.
I've heard lots of good stuff on Pease's book - what do you think of it?
[...]
Just for fun, I did a search on "Widlar". The search uses Boyer-Moore in optimized assembly and does a little over 100,000 files per second. That's 10uS per file.
Here's the results. It found five references in 167,000 files in 1.6 seconds:
This is on a 200MHz Pentium with a 5400 rpm drive. I would expect a bit better performance with a 2GHz machine like the rest of you are running:) [...]
It may be difficult just telling them to write better code. If you have to tell them, they have no clue what you are talking about.
What you need to do is encourage them to waste as much ram as possible.
Then when the s**t hits the fan, you can be the high-priced hero that bails them out of a tough spot:)
its a scanned image PDF. I use a neural net to do my searching of books (I read them, then remember whats in them and roughly where).
I am not lucky, I am sneaky. I contract to a company in Auckland, NZ (1 week per month), and that contract specifically allows me to bill them the NZ$90/month for my broadband internet connection. Otherwise, it'd be dial-up for me too :)
on a related note, few things are more annoying than boneheads who think giant images are necessary for websites. Or worse still, animations.
~~~~~~~~ Maybe I should ask Radio Shack. They claim they've got answers; but frankly, if Radio Shack were our provider, we'd _really_ be in trouble now, wouldn't we? ~~~~~~~~
yay for Anatol and FLS. Actually, my copy of Zverev only turned up last week. US$135, ouch. But I have used him before, to great effect.
OTOH I got motchenbacher (pristine) for about $10, and Pease for about $15.
fantastic. I have contemplated doing this with .html attachments, and a self-compiling intranet. lack of round-to-its, coupled with a distinct unwillingness to write code of any form, have hampered my efforts to date.
hear hear. I have been having a discussion with a company in NZ about code space issues - they have used most of the available 8kb "rom" (ram really), and a big chunk of the 128 + 128 bytes RAM. I just keep telling them to harden up, and write better code. real men only need 1 bit.
Nice. When I've figured out how to hook up my camera, I'll post a shot of me, Ruth and Holly the brainless, floppy-eared-yet-pedigree Alsatian. And perhaps the dinner we cooked on an open fire a couple of nights ago.
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