Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Saskia]

Truth be known - it's probably a bureaucratic contribution towards natural selection.   

Tis a real shame the bureaucrats aren't top of the list of those falling to natural selection !
Fucktards, the vast majority of them !

No, you are wrong here. Bureaucrats as well as politicians, privileged Hollywood actors, activists, are absolutely required for humankind's survival. As the planet is doomed we need to build a space ship to evacuate them into the next adjacent solar system.

Obviously space is limited so we cannot afford to send any engineers along, but they will start building a second spaceship immediately and follow as soon as it is finalized. We promise.

[tautech]

Truth be known - it's probably a bureaucratic contribution towards natural selection.   

Tis a real shame the bureaucrats aren't top of the list of those falling to natural selection !
Fucktards, the vast majority of them !

No, you are wrong here. Bureaucrats as well as politicians, privileged Hollywood actors, activists, are absolutely required for humankind's survival. As the planet is doomed we need to build a space ship to evacuate them into the next adjacent solar system.

Way too close, send them further with a one way ticket....second thoughts pack some cee four in with them all. 

Obviously space is limited so we cannot afford to send any engineers along, but they will start building a second spaceship immediately and follow as soon as it is finalized. We promise.

 

[McBryce]

I just used for the first time a

Code: [Select]

lambda *args, ... : 
in Python. It works but I do not fully understand why, was a copy&paste try from the web... 

Because Python is a copy & paste programming language ... 

... provided the copied source is indented to the same extent as the destination.

I hate languages where the amount of whitespace is semantically important. It is too easy to introduce subtle problems, and a prettyprinter cannot - by design - help.

Ditto type of whitespace, e.g. tab vs space in makefiles 

So, therefore you are not a fan of this language?   

My current software project is written in whitespace... Or to be more exact, I still haven't got around to writing any code so it's still a blank page.

McBryce.

[beanflying]

Seems Parks Victoria is looking after the Drop Bears Summer food supply. Shiny new signs to direct the unsuspecting under their path. Lucky I am aware of the dangers and noticed the stealthy bugga pretending to sleep while waiting.

On TEA for those wanting a 3458A feel free to search this area. Currently one is somewhere in this 1000km area 

[tautech]

Bush ? Only red dust on the Nullabor ! 

[bd139]

I just used for the first time a

Code: [Select]

lambda *args, ... : 
in Python. It works but I do not fully understand why, was a copy&paste try from the web... 

Because Python is a copy & paste programming language ... 

... provided the copied source is indented to the same extent as the destination.

I hate languages where the amount of whitespace is semantically important. It is too easy to introduce subtle problems, and a prettyprinter cannot - by design - help.

Ditto type of whitespace, e.g. tab vs space in makefiles 

So, therefore you are not a fan of this language?   

My current software project is written in whitespace... Or to be more exact, I still haven't got around to writing any code so it's still a blank page.

McBryce.

That reminds me of a nefarious bastard who decided to use space as a control code specifier in a protocol I had to parse. He had dropped dead a few years before and I had to write the new parser for it. His documentation had spaces in it, which you couldn’t see as he hadn’t bothered to specify it using BNF or anything. Took me a few cans of red bull to work that out.

[nfmax]

Oh yes. A project with its own, unique communication protocol is a warning to flee in terror. As is a project that has its own memory allocator

[McBryce]

I had a project a few years back to expand on an existing design, where the original creator had swapped some of the data pins on an EPROM to supposedly protect the data  So I had to bit swap the bin file every time I needed to rewrite the EPROM 

McBryce.

[med6753]

Seems Parks Victoria is looking after the Drop Bears Summer food supply. Shiny new signs to direct the unsuspecting under their path. Lucky I am aware of the dangers and noticed the stealthy bugga pretending to sleep while waiting.

On TEA for those wanting a 3458A feel free to search this area. Currently one is somewhere in this 1000km area 

I heard koala's can be quite nasty. Not your cuddly "teddy bear" everyone thinks they are.   

[bd139]

I had a project a few years back to expand on an existing design, where the original creator had swapped some of the data pins on an EPROM to supposedly protect the data  So I had to bit swap the bin file every time I needed to rewrite the EPROM 

McBryce.

Hahaha that's awful. I can see why someone would do it though.

[Robert763]

I had a project a few years back to expand on an existing design, where the original creator had swapped some of the data pins on an EPROM to supposedly protect the data  So I had to bit swap the bin file every time I needed to rewrite the EPROM 

McBryce.

I've done something like that before for different reasons (long story). Rather than manipulate the files, I just built an adaptor for the programmer that swapped the pins. I'm a hardware kind of guy 

[Saskia]

reminds me of those days when I wrote my cleanup scripts in make. The calling script set some initialization variables and the targets redefined themselves using sed/awk during runtime.

The script had 67 lines and cleaned/archived a whole day of futures settlement transactions. They also needed 1.5 years to replace the script after I had left the bank.

[Cerebus]

I had a project a few years back to expand on an existing design, where the original creator had swapped some of the data pins on an EPROM to supposedly protect the data  So I had to bit swap the bin file every time I needed to rewrite the EPROM 

McBryce.

I've done something like that before for different reasons (long story). Rather than manipulate the files, I just built an adaptor for the programmer that swapped the pins. I'm a hardware kind of guy 

It's not uncommon to see address and data pins scrambled to make for an easy, or even possible, PCB layout on a 1 or 2 layer board. If it's static RAM, who cares. If it's dynamic RAM, who cares as long as refresh still works. If it's a PROM or any variety, woe betide anyone who doesn't read the documentation first. If there is no documentation, then the perpetrator deserves to be sent for eternity to a hell designed by MBAs.

[bd139]

I just thought of something you could do to be even more horrible. If you have a few banked ROMs in a system (think sideways ROMS in BBC style modularity), rotate the address lines by one bit for each ROM. That'd mean that they have to both be programmed correctly for the position and go in the correct sockets to work  

[tggzzz]

I had a project a few years back to expand on an existing design, where the original creator had swapped some of the data pins on an EPROM to supposedly protect the data  So I had to bit swap the bin file every time I needed to rewrite the EPROM 

McBryce.

I've done something like that before for different reasons (long story). Rather than manipulate the files, I just built an adaptor for the programmer that swapped the pins. I'm a hardware kind of guy 

It's not uncommon to see address and data pins scrambled to make for an easy, or even possible, PCB layout on a 1 or 2 layer board. If it's static RAM, who cares. If it's dynamic RAM, who cares as long as refresh still works. If it's a PROM or any variety, woe betide anyone who doesn't read the documentation first. If there is no documentation, then the perpetrator deserves to be sent for eternity to a hell designed by MBAs.

With modern DRAM, you probably do care. You store/retrieve entire cache lines in one fell swoop, and compilers/JITers lay things out in memory so as to make best use of that.

[Cerebus]

I had a project a few years back to expand on an existing design, where the original creator had swapped some of the data pins on an EPROM to supposedly protect the data  So I had to bit swap the bin file every time I needed to rewrite the EPROM 

McBryce.

I've done something like that before for different reasons (long story). Rather than manipulate the files, I just built an adaptor for the programmer that swapped the pins. I'm a hardware kind of guy 

It's not uncommon to see address and data pins scrambled to make for an easy, or even possible, PCB layout on a 1 or 2 layer board. If it's static RAM, who cares. If it's dynamic RAM, who cares as long as refresh still works. If it's a PROM or any variety, woe betide anyone who doesn't read the documentation first. If there is no documentation, then the perpetrator deserves to be sent for eternity to a hell designed by MBAs.

With modern DRAM, you probably do care. You store/retrieve entire cache lines in one fell swoop, and compilers/JITers lay things out in memory so as to make best use of that.

Yeah, but once you're at that level of complexity you're onto at least 6 layer boards (and probably impedance controlled with matched length traces at that) so you've no real motive to rearrange lines for easy routing.

That of course doesn't preclude rearranging them out of shear perversity because you want to give one of the other teams working on the project a persistent, throbbing headache. 

[Wolfgang]

Truth be known - it's probably a bureaucratic contribution towards natural selection.   

Tis a real shame the bureaucrats aren't top of the list of those falling to natural selection !
Fucktards, the vast majority of them !

No, you are wrong here. Bureaucrats as well as politicians, privileged Hollywood actors, activists, are absolutely required for humankind's survival. As the planet is doomed we need to build a space ship to evacuate them into the next adjacent solar system.

Obviously space is limited so we cannot afford to send any engineers along, but they will start building a second spaceship immediately and follow as soon as it is finalized. We promise.

Hey, whats bad about that ? All mission without engineers will fail, the bureaucracts will vanish somewhere in space and the number of them on earth will decrease. Sounds like a success recipe. 

[McBryce]

I had a project a few years back to expand on an existing design, where the original creator had swapped some of the data pins on an EPROM to supposedly protect the data  So I had to bit swap the bin file every time I needed to rewrite the EPROM 

McBryce.

I've done something like that before for different reasons (long story). Rather than manipulate the files, I just built an adaptor for the programmer that swapped the pins. I'm a hardware kind of guy 

It's not uncommon to see address and data pins scrambled to make for an easy, or even possible, PCB layout on a 1 or 2 layer board. If it's static RAM, who cares. If it's dynamic RAM, who cares as long as refresh still works. If it's a PROM or any variety, woe betide anyone who doesn't read the documentation first. If there is no documentation, then the perpetrator deserves to be sent for eternity to a hell designed by MBAs.

With modern DRAM, you probably do care. You store/retrieve entire cache lines in one fell swoop, and compilers/JITers lay things out in memory so as to make best use of that.

Yeah, but once you're at that level of complexity you're onto at least 6 layer boards (and probably impedance controlled with matched length traces at that) so you've no real motive to rearrange lines for easy routing.

That of course doesn't preclude rearranging them out of shear perversity because you want to give one of the other teams working on the project a persistent, throbbing headache. 

It wasn't for layout reasons, in fact he had to swap layers to cross the data lines. Without his swapping it was a straight 1 to 1 connection on a single layer. It was his security feature.

McBryce.

[Saskia]

I just thought of something you could do to be even more horrible. If you have a few banked ROMs in a system (think sideways ROMS in BBC style modularity), rotate the address lines by one bit for each ROM. That'd mean that they have to both be programmed correctly for the position and go in the correct sockets to work  

Sneak in some AES encryption into an FPGA built memory controller and store the key for decryption of the boot prom in the DRAM's config data chip. Actually that could be Apple engineering.

[med6753]

Nah, put all your encryption codes here. Good for protecting passwords too. 

[Robert763]

More ebay madness a badly stored and corroded Tek 7603 bid up to over £200 dead spiders free. 
/www.ebay.co.uk/itm/tektronix-7603-Oscilloscope/333811431519
Seller is 0 feedback but been a member for a year. Normally tht would indicate a stolen account but hs start prices are low and it cash on collection so not likely to be a scam.

[mnementh]

I just thought of something you could do to be even more horrible. If you have a few banked ROMs in a system (think sideways ROMS in BBC style modularity), rotate the address lines by one bit for each ROM. That'd mean that they have to both be programmed correctly for the position and go in the correct sockets to work  

And bd once again passes his biannual Brutal Bastard certification with flying colors bullshit.

mnem
"If you can't bedazzle 'em with brilliance, bedaffle 'em with bullshit." ~rgrand-dad

[med6753]

More ebay madness a badly stored and corroded Tek 7603 bid up to over £200 dead spiders free. 
/www.ebay.co.uk/itm/tektronix-7603-Oscilloscope/333811431519
Seller is 0 feedback but been a member for a year. Normally tht would indicate a stolen account but hs start prices are low and it cash on collection so not likely to be a scam.

It looked decent until I zoomed in......Yikes! 

[mnementh]

I had a project a few years back to expand on an existing design, where the original creator had swapped some of the data pins on an EPROM to supposedly protect the data  So I had to bit swap the bin file every time I needed to rewrite the EPROM 

McBryce.

I've done something like that before for different reasons (long story). Rather than manipulate the files, I just built an adaptor for the programmer that swapped the pins. I'm a hardware kind of guy 

It's not uncommon to see address and data pins scrambled to make for an easy, or even possible, PCB layout on a 1 or 2 layer board. If it's static RAM, who cares. If it's dynamic RAM, who cares as long as refresh still works. If it's a PROM or any variety, woe betide anyone who doesn't read the documentation first. If there is no documentation, then the perpetrator deserves to be sent for eternity to a hell designed by MBAs.

With modern DRAM, you probably do care. You store/retrieve entire cache lines in one fell swoop, and compilers/JITers lay things out in memory so as to make best use of that.

Yeah, but once you're at that level of complexity you're onto at least 6 layer boards (and probably impedance controlled with matched length traces at that) so you've no real motive to rearrange lines for easy routing.

That of course doesn't preclude rearranging them out of shear perversity because you want to give one of the other teams working on the project a persistent, throbbing headache. 

"Shear perversity"...? I'm guessing you expect your conversational cutlery to be involved, then...? 

mnem
"Nobody expects the... aardvark with a sharpy thing...?"

[mnementh]

Shit just got real. Now I have to actually do the repair... not just putter around with the tools. That is 0.8mm solder for comparison...

mnem
*wibble*