..yes, it means you too...

I have a bit of a whinge now and again about people on my floor doing what I consider to be pretty stupid things. This notice put up by Rod the technician on my floor shows perfectly the steps that have to be taken for people to pay attention to things!

Now, on another work related note. Finally got a piece of equipment working, I shall kindly refer to it as 'legacy equipment'. The VNA (that's a vector network analyser for anyone who isn't so into their RF testing ) is a HP8510 and while it is old (it was the cutting edge of technology back in 1991!), it's still a very desirable piece of kit, with a frequency range of 45MHz up to 50GHz. It's not the VNA that's been giving me grief, it's the computer that it's attached to that I've been wanting to hit with sticks.

The computer was originally a Viglen III and it boasts a whole 600k of RAM and runs on MS DOS. The software that interacts with the VNA was written in the early '90s in HP Basic by someone in-house. So there's no documentation and half of the functions in the code either don't work, or cause the program to crash, wiping the data file it was working with as an added bonus.

So sadly it really isn't very Tron even if the text is a rather attractive green on a black background. On the bright side I have learnt how to work MS DOS to a very basic getting on level, and I haven't used MS DOS since when I was little on a Commodore 64 PC