Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[factory]

Update on the CPC order with the shorted PP3 batteries, a while ago, today, I received an email from them saying that they are arranging for another box of 10 PP3's to be sent to me. I have another order that I placed with them over the weekend, so I replied to them suggesting that they combine the order and the replacements in the same delivery and save on carriage costs. They replied and thanked me for the suggestion but declined as they said the replacements were coming from a different dept, and they could not therefore combine the two. Oh well, at least the thought was there.

They are pretty good at sorting things like that out, they once sent me some mains Halogen lamps instead of the CFL ones that had been ordered, after contacting them they promptly sent the correct items and didn't even want me to return the unwanted lamps (which are still abandoned in a cupboard), I guess it would have cost them more than they were worth to send back & put back into stock.

David

[mnementh]

And I'm confused. Apparently this is confusion Sunday.

NOW i read "Three-letter abbreviation for month" not "day". My point stands. It is easier, and essentially locale-independent to sort numbers. And there's bound to be locale collisions, not to mention the small detail that already in German, an Umlaut is sneaking in. The part of the world that insist on 7-bit ASCII in everything as they sit in front of their  UTF-8 capable computers are clearly challenged here.

NMFP. The whole point of computers is to do this stoopit shit so we meat-bags don't have to. It is a programming problem which literally need only be solved once per language, which code then becomes a globally applicable library.

Allowing the machine to dictate to us on such a fundamental level as how we think aboot time is how we wound up with the Corporate Machine literally burning the world as fuel to keep it cool from the atmospheric damage caused by burning the world for fuel.

Fuck that noize.

mnem
Machine, adapt or DIE!

In Mandarin, the three last months are, FSVO translitteration,

shiyue, “ten months” [shr-yu-eh] (October)
shiyiyue, “eleven months” [shr-ee-yu-eh] (November)
shieryue, “twelve months” [shr-urr-yu-eh] (December)

Three-letter is unambigous, my ass. (apart from the fact that most people-with-a-computer in the alleged western hemisphere don't even know how to display the actual glyphs that are Latinised above. Hell, most of them can't even type my name properly. And that's 4 letters, the 2nd being "å". I once had a manager whose family stems from Estonia. We had some issues with typing his name, so I'm, mostly, lucky.)

A large part of what I do is parsing logs. If they're in proper ISO 8601 format, my work is easier. Seconds since the Epoch is also OK, but a bit boring to display.

That has nothing to do with human correspondence. Like I give a rat's ass how the computer organises it for its own use, as long as it returns a civilized response.

Again... it is already doing that translation on a lower level... from hex to usable decimal numbers. There is no reason in the world that simple text representing a month's name in whatever language cannot be part of how the OS parses that part of any date, except stubborn need to reduce it all to numbers and make people think like a machine so the machine doesn't have to.

What you're saying is that the whole world should have to propagate this same argument til the end of time so that a statistically insignificant portion of the population can have a supposedly easier time parsing regexes. 

mnem
 

[mansaxel]

Did a survey on the to me visible -hp- / Harrison 62XX series dual/triple voltage supplies, and concluded that the one I posted about on Friday, eBay auction: #154301072413 was the "cheapest" available. As usual, shipping is a dealbreaker most of the time for us Europeans. Nevertheless, did some offer / counteroffer to and fro and ended up at a price that does not take the shipping pain away, but at least is a tiny bit lower. It'll do its time in Erlanger, and then come here. Some time.

I've done the usual manual studies, and it seems it's got an internal mains voltage selector! (came as early as 6236A and this is a pretty late 6237B, so.)

Did we ever find a good source for the knob caps? 0370-1099 is the complete knob, as far as I can tell.

[mansaxel]

Again... it is already doing that translation on a lower level... from hex to usable decimal numbers. There is no reason in the world that simple text representing a month's name in whatever language cannot be part of how the OS parses that part of any date, except stubborn need to reduce it all to numbers and make people think like a machine so the machine doesn't have to.

What you're saying is that the whole world should have to propagate this same argument til the end of time so that a statistically insignificant portion of the population can have a supposedly easier time parsing regexes. 

mnem
 

Well, yes. You have a point. But: Have you ever tried locale-dependent programming? Like, for real?

And, this side-discussion on "how to talk to your computer" sort of took over my simple empirical observation that what you propose as completely unambiguous is not. Not even in the constrained case when we agree which language we're dealing with.

Your move.

[mnementh]

And I'm confused. Apparently this is confusion Sunday.

NOW i read "Three-letter abbreviation for month" not "day". My point stands. It is easier, and essentially locale-independent to sort numbers. And there's bound to be locale collisions, not to mention the small detail that already in German, an Umlaut is sneaking in. The part of the world that insist on 7-bit ASCII in everything as they sit in front of their  UTF-8 capable computers are clearly challenged here.

NMFP. The whole point of computers is to do this stoopit shit so we meat-bags don't have to. It is a programming problem which literally need only be solved once per language, which code then becomes a globally applicable library.

So, problem statement for libnmfp-date: parse any (day, month, year) tuple ever devised by a human, in any order, with numbered or named months or days or both, in any natural language, possibly abbreviated in arbitrary ways, into an unambiguous calendar date.  You really think this is feasible?

Allowing the machine to dictate to us on such a fundamental level as how we think aboot time is how we wound up with the Corporate Machine literally burning the world as fuel to keep it cool from the atmospheric damage caused by burning the world for fuel.

Or, you know, accept that "how humans think about X" and "how humans communicate X to other humans" aren't necessarily the same thing - then the "how humans type X into a computer constructed by other humans" case is a natural extension of that idea.  There's nothing fundamental or universal in the way you think about time (and possibly many other things).

Both of these things are why we have an OS. That kind of sh...tuff is literally its job, and the job of those people tasked with making a specific language version thereof. As I've mentioned; the places where the OS deals with dates are already being translated from binary to hex to decimal numbers; no reason that cannot instead return a TEXT NAME whenever the month field of a date is encountered, and translate it back exactly the same way. I literally could not care less how the computer organizes this stuff for its own use.

mnem
 

[mnementh]

Again... it is already doing that translation on a lower level... from hex to usable decimal numbers. There is no reason in the world that simple text representing a month's name in whatever language cannot be part of how the OS parses that part of any date, except stubborn need to reduce it all to numbers and make people think like a machine so the machine doesn't have to.

What you're saying is that the whole world should have to propagate this same argument til the end of time so that a statistically insignificant portion of the population can have a supposedly easier time parsing regexes. 

mnem
 

Well, yes. You have a point. But: Have you ever tried locale-dependent programming? Like, for real?

And, this side-discussion on "how to talk to your computer" sort of took over my simple empirical observation that what you propose as completely unambiguous is not. Not even in the constrained case when we agree which language we're dealing with.

Your move.

With all the money spent developing OSes with blinkenlights and every imaginable gewgaw, maybe something this basic and human-thought-oriented should get some time. The OS is the natural place for this to occur, as they already have teams of devs working on every language version anyways. And for those locales where nobody can be arsed, then use the Latin-derived names that most of the world uses as an alt anyways. 

Again; once the translation standard is developed, it becomes pretty much a code jellybean that can be dropped in anywhere, just like the code MS uses during setup to define these things and all other programs refer back to it thereafter.

In all honesty... this is just another aspect of the "I am a person, not a number!" debate.

mnem
 

[mansaxel]

In all honesty... this is just another aspect of the "I am a person, not a number!" debate.

mnem
 

You still only read half the post, and avoid the part where your proposed "solution" isn't one.

And, I am a number. 19XXXXXX-XXXX <- a Swedish Personal Identity Number, like US SSN, but not "secret".

[factory]

Did a survey on the to me visible -hp- / Harrison 62XX series dual/triple voltage supplies, and concluded that the one I posted about on Friday, eBay auction: #154301072413 was the "cheapest" available. As usual, shipping is a dealbreaker most of the time for us Europeans. Nevertheless, did some offer / counteroffer to and fro and ended up at a price that does not take the shipping pain away, but at least is a tiny bit lower. It'll do its time in Erlanger, and then come here. Some time.

I've done the usual manual studies, and it seems it's got an internal mains voltage selector! (came as early as 6236A and this is a pretty late 6237B, so.)

Did we ever find a good source for the knob caps? 0370-1099 is the complete knob, as far as I can tell.

That's a slightly newer HP 6237B than the one I posted about recently, yes it has a mains voltage slide switch inside plus the hidden RIFA  , but yours lacks the power indicator.
The older ones have wire links for the mains voltage selection, unless it's one of the much bigger PSU's that are one voltage only.

David

[BU508A]

Anybody interested in this beast (NAWTS)?

A Yokogawa VB2000 digital IQ signal generator, which can also be used as a four channel arbitrary function generator.

Front- and backside of this beast:



https://www.ebay.com/itm/114495304900

I got a price offer from the seller of about 300 Euro.

[mansaxel]

plus the hidden RIFA  ,

Looking at the part number (RIFA PME271-M-610 a.k.a -hp- 0160-4065), Kemet still makes it, but it is not possible to determine lead spacing from the -hp- parts list information. There seem to be three spacings; viz 15,5mm, 20,3mm, 22,5mm. Does anyone know which one it is?

[Kosmic]

Anyone got some spare pocket money to spend?

https://page.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/x712051877

I'll check down the back of the sofa for some spare change...

Pah! There's another one really cheap:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/284157359616

...you just have to get rid off a tiny fatal failure to get it working again.. (for parts).       

I think I need to re-calibrate my "really cheap" standard, it seems to be way off what other peoples "really cheap" standards are.

McBryce.

It would have been nice if they gave a little more detail other than "Fatal failure" especially since you are dealing with radioactive material. My suspicion the problem IS the radioactive material. 

The lifespan of the old HP cesium tubes was about 5 to 7 years (http://www.ke5fx.com/cs_life.pdf). Now the HP 5071 is a little bit newer, so maybe the tube lasted a bit longer ?

Even if you can find an old one with a working tube, it's probably not going to last.

[Cerebus]

OK, so having got shiny new (well old) terminals on the HP 66312A I thought I'd give it a little exercise. As said before, this is a measurement supply where the emphasis is on the measuring rather than the supplying.

So, I slapped a 1N4007 diode across the newly fitted terminals and set about trying to characterise it (manually - this really ought to be done over GPIB). Voila, one characteristic curve from 0.4V with 11uA flowing to 0.9V with 400mA flowing.

So, here's the result (with a log scale for current so you can see the low end):



Pretty cool, results good enough to give a nice straight line on a log graph, which proves that both the supply and the diode both work as expected. Now I just have to finally, after much avoiding it, get into GPIB and go down that rabbithole.

[vk6zgo]

Ok, now I'm confused because that is not how I've been taught how to write the date down and almost everyone I know do it the same way as I do and is DD-MM-YYYY, so todays date becomes 24/01/2021 which normally will be shortened to 24/1/21 YMMV.

Oh, interesting. As I wrote above; That's basically the non-ISO common style here in Germany, too.
Ok, we use dots instead of slashes, but that's a minor detail. 

This "little detail" is exactly what pisses me off. We Germans always wrote dates in the form dd.mm.yyyy. But the some stupid asses found out that merkins wrote their dates with slashes. Wanting to be stylish, they exchanged the dots with dashes.
Now, when you see a date like 04/08/2021, what does it mean? The slashes suggest it might be in U.S. format, but then ...

The other alternative is, it might be in Australian format, which traditionally was dd/mm/yyyy.

Humans, however didn't use such nonsense as "08" in the old days, & often also dropped the century, assuming people knew which one it was, so the date would appear as 4/8/21.

That got messy around the turn of the century!

Something that freaks me out is the way the French put huge long tails on their "ones", when they handwrite them.
Other  Europeans don't seem to do that.

They look much more like "7s" to any one brought up in countries that don't write the latter number with a crossbar.

[Specmaster]

I'm not a programmer but to me it seems perfectly logical that as already stated, versions of a program would be developed for each locale, so there will subtle changes in coding for say the USA, to the UK and both could well be different to say Spain and then again all be different to the requirements for China and Africa. I'm not talking about the various national languages, but different in the respect that each country might phrase certain things, such as the date format, post codes for instance vary greatly in both structures and length between countries.

Generally speaking data is inputted manually in the first instance, either by the person who owns the data / information that is being inputted or by an operator, say a shop assistant entering a customers order etc, so it becomes their responsibility to input the data correctly. Secondly the software being used should be error trapped to flag up an unexpected format being entered in a data field that expects a certain style of input and flag up the error to the inputter.

Surely these blocks of code do this sort of thing are as has been mentioned jelly bean blocks of code, or as I remember them from my early attempts at programming many years ago for a personal use, sub routines, that the main code can call up as required.

It surely is not an impossible task either for when huge blocks of data from many locales have to be brought together, in something like law enforcement databases that many countries share, the software on the main database, can instantly recognise data from China or France etc and instantly seek out the locale formats and rearrange it into a format suitable to be merged and when data flows back in the reverse direction, the software in that country does the same thing in reverse to suit the locale.??

I always thought that computers were meant to make life easier for us, not to make us all think alike and format everything in the same fashion a computer wants it to be?

This is why skilled programmers can earn such huge amounts, because they can develop the code and to test rigorously to make things happen seamlessly in the background, bad programmers will take shortcuts and hence why we have so many glitches happen because they don't take the care that they should do.

As I said, I'm not a coder/programmer, and I'm not taking sides here but commenting as I see things as a bystander, in much the same way as, wouldn't it be far better to make everyone in the world all speak the same language so there are no communication barriers? That would make coding far simpler, wouldn't it?

[Cerebus]

Something that freaks me out is the way the French put huge long tails on their "ones", when they handwrite them.
Other  Europeans don't seem to do that.

They look much more like "7s" to any one brought up in countries that don't write the latter number with a crossbar.

It's not just the French, I've seen Germans do it too. In fact I've seen ones written with such a large uptick that they look like an inverted capital V, sometimes with the uptick sloping, but the downstroke vertical so it can be mistaken for a 4 if you've careless or unlucky. The whole thing is why you'll commonly see a 7 with a bar though it 7 sur le continent to avoid those being mistaken for ones.

[Cerebus]

Both of these things are why we have an OS. That kind of sh...tuff is literally its job, and the job of those people tasked with making a specific language version thereof. As I've mentioned; the places where the OS deals with dates are already being translated from binary to hex to decimal numbers; no reason that cannot instead return a TEXT NAME whenever the month field of a date is encountered, and translate it back exactly the same way. I literally could not care less how the computer organizes this stuff for its own use.

mnem
 

I know how these arguments with you go, so I'm not gonna get into the details. I'm just gonna point out that the bit I've quoted in bold above screams to any actual programmer reading it that you're in "doesn't have clue territory". You might want to consider that before you press on arguing with the others.

[mansaxel]

Surely these blocks of code do this sort of thing are as has been mentioned jelly bean blocks of code, or as I remember them from my early attempts at programming many years ago for a personal use, sub routines, that the main code can call up as required.

Yes, that's the basic idea. It mostly works, if you're lucky and on Linux, or some of the commercial Unixen, AND the author did things correctly, and, mostly, bothered. Windows fucks it up, somewhat, especially relating to runtime locale selection. Ideally you set an environment variable pointing out your locale and programs obey the conventions set out in that locale:

Code: [Select]

treize:~ mansaxel$ LC_ALL=C date
Mon Jan 25 01:40:19 CET 2021
treize:~ mansaxel$ set | grep LANG
LANG=sv_SE.UTF-8
treize:~ mansaxel$ date
Mån 25 Jan 2021 01:40:26 CET
treize:~ mansaxel$ LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 date
Mo 25 Jan 2021 01:42:54 CET
treize:~ mansaxel$ LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8 date
Lun 25 jan 2021 01:43:06 CET
treize:~ mansaxel$
(This is MacOS X, which for things like this is a well behaved and polished FreeBSD)

As I said, I'm not a coder/programmer, and I'm not taking sides here but commenting as I see things as a bystander, in much the same way as, wouldn't it be far better to make everyone in the world all speak the same language so there are no communication barriers? That would make coding far simpler, wouldn't it?

Well, like many other fields of work, there are things that look easy from the outside, and then aren't once you've put your head to it.

Famous first words: "How hard can it be to get it right?

[bd139]

Well fuck. In hospital. Bowel obstruction. Not sure if it’s serious or not. Rate this day 0/10 do not recommend

[GreyWoolfe]

Tell me, please, how does the average US American react to dates written like 2021-01-24? Having spent far too much of my life using computers to sort and otherwise disentangle dates, I now write it everywhere I'm not specifically required t use another format. Everyone (i.e. ordinary folk) seems to accept it without comment here

Yep, I really don't understand how we started using format month/day/year as apposed to most others year/day/month. If you are involved in international activities you're used to it....like airline pilots for example. But the average Joe Dirt can be very much confused by it and show up for an appointment in the wrong month. 

It's easy to confuse us.  I make the slash through the 7 and Z and have gotten looks for it.  I tried to do the year, day, date and it was usually an epic fail.  I stopped pretty quick.

[med6753]

Well fuck. In hospital. Bowel obstruction. Not sure if it’s serious or not. Rate this day 0/10 do not recommend

WTH? Hope you're OK. 

[tautech]

Well fuck. In hospital. Bowel obstruction. Not sure if it’s serious or not. Rate this day 0/10 do not recommend

GWS.

Bugger, when what's going on in the world normally gives you the shits but then it don't ! 

[Cerebus]

Well fuck. In hospital. Bowel obstruction. Not sure if it’s serious or not. Rate this day 0/10 do not recommend

I would say that we've always known you were full of shit, but at the moment you'd probably throw your bedpan at me. At least it would be empty. 

But seriously, get well soon.

[Cerebus]

Well, like many other fields of work, there are things that look easy from the outside, and then aren't once you've put your head to it.

Famous first words: "How hard can it be to get it right?

Task: "Calculate the number of days between 1st Jan 1701 and 1st Jan 2019." Sounds pretty easy, yes? If your first question is not "In what country(s)?" you have failed. 

[TERRA Operative]

Not until a black marker pen does it’s job. 

HP are really odd in that regard. Some supplies have red for both terminals of an output, some have black and red. If there's a scheme as to when and why they choose to do it one way or another I've never managed to figure it out.

It so happens that the 66312A is one of the ones that uses two red terminals, so Robert's "parts draw" donations have restored it to it's original state. Actually, they've upgraded it slightly as the old posts were nickel plated, the ones Robert sent me are full copper low thermal EMF ones.

I have a bunch of HP E36xx PSU's that came with a mix of red-red-green and red-black-green.

They are now all red-black-green as God intended.

I have no idea why the random difference beyond customer preference. I haven't found any mention of it in the manuals etc.

[BU508A]

Well fuck. In hospital. Bowel obstruction. Not sure if it’s serious or not. Rate this day 0/10 do not recommend

Ungh!   

Oh no! Get well soon. And take this serious. My Granny had similar problems and I can't really recommend it.