The Sorcerer's Progress (Page 51 of 62)

Status: badly dislocated.

Before I try picking up loose threads, I'm going to catch up a bit on reviews.  I've lost count of how many I owe, but I'll try to do six today.  After that, I have about four hours of physical design work to do ... and some hope that it will work out.  If not, it's a big delay while I think more things out.  If it does work, then I can move on to the next part--about 700 parts on twelve copies of a circuit board.  I'm planning how to order the work so I can test it section by section.

I've got three boxes inside my front door with expensive shelf parts.  Wire shelves, the kind you put together with a rubber mallet.  It's too noisy to do at night, so I have to figure out when to do it.  And this is a too-clever splice job, for space for all the boxes and bins of resistors and capacitors and diodes ... and badly needed.  Actually, I need about sixty feet of shelf space.  This will get me about twelve--and not all of it within easy reach.

My little constant-current circuit works so well that I can try reversing it to operate off the Vcc rail, skipping the current mirror.  It will drop only about 400 mV more,  and I can spare that.  That is, if it works using the complementary transistors I've got.   Worst case is that it works, but barely well enough.  That's one more thing to breadboard and test.

I lost most of Monday and Tuesday to that mystery contest.  I've got an entry that could have used more editing--but I got it in just under the wire.  If anybody cares to have a look at it, I'd be grateful, even though it's too late to put changes in.

It's 57 parts times twelve.  The point is to find ways to do it in parts so that I can be sure with each one that the sections completed are working, rather than trying to debug each one whole.

The original model 747 had over a million rivets.  That's a million rivets flying in close formation.  And the paperwork documenting the plane's construction was heavier than the plane.

Arthur Anderson was great at producing documents. Software, not so much. They were supposed to build telephony switch configuration software to deploy across NYNEX switches in New York. It was a distributed system with lots of parts that barely came together. They eventually fired Anderson's huge team and built a small one of independent consultants to rewrite the monster.

I initially got to develop a series of shell files to wrap around Anderson's cumbersome file management and build tools. I eventually automated the entire process forwards and backwards. If the business customer wanted some broken new feature yanked out of production, I had to be able to roll back both source and object files. We couldn't simply recompile old source files and expect the object file to be the same as what Anderson had abandoned in the build tree/production. Ah, the memories.

Which does what?

What's the real-world application?

Also good as Rudolph's nose. :-)

I owe reviews up the wazoo.  (Actually, up about 2+1/2 wazoon.)  Please don''t be offended by the order I do them in.

I have a new idea on how to get Pausonallie and Merran out of the porn-spell theater.

Still working on how characters will link the skipped chapter and the nrxt sequence for Merran and Company.

Trying to think how paint Pausonallie's knowing-without-understanding.  I also have to strip the scenes down a bit.

The trick is not shopworn. It is a classic bait and switch dut done in space. Clues were good.

The 'forget I'm blind but only tell blind guy after the fact what people look like? He should be letting the boss know as
Much as possible before encountering the people. Like the room description and dimensions maybe?