computoman

Gantt chart is a type of bar chart, developed by Henry Gantt in the 1910s, that illustrates a project schedule. Gantt charts illustrate the start and finish dates of the terminal elements and summary elements of a project. Terminal elements and summary elements comprise the work breakdown structure of the project. Here is some code to play with: [code] rem n - number of steps including start and stopping points. READ N DATA 7 rem get data DIM J$(N), L(N), S(N) FOR J = 1 TO N     READ J$(J), L(J), S(J) NEXT J rem process, length ,start time rem start DATA Begin,1,0  rem processes DATA Shop,12,1 DATA Prep,6,14 DATA Salad,7,14 DATA Cook,8,19 DATA Serve,2,27 rem stop DATA End,0,29 rem report CLS PRINT PRINT PRINT TAB(30); "Time (in minutes)" PRINT "Job"; TAB(11); "0         50       100       150       2...

Not many people are aware unless you are an old timer, but you could and still can access the world wide web from a DOS (freedos or etc) machine. Myself first access was with Mosaic and Netscape from MSWindows. To access the internet you had to have a network card. Everyone knew about a modem card, but the ethernet network card was something magical. But also back in those days to any anything up you had to deal with jumper switches (possible nightmare) until plug-n-play came along. Notice the coaxial cable connector. Yes the ethernet cables were not popular yet. You set up your network in a bus rather than the star configuration we use today, If one link of the bus network was not connected right the whole network would be down. Anyway, just like today you have to have special software aka drivers for your computer to talk to the network cards. The network drivers were sometimes known as packet drivers. You sent packets of data on the network is where that idea came from. One of t...

Translating from one batch file system to another can be interesting. As a former admin, I had to do that with Novell scripts and convert them to MSWindows batch files when we were changing systems. Someone wrote a batch file for emulate a menu to launch the browser to go to different sites that could of been a bit more precise for dos, but I decided to translate it to bash. Dos: @echo off color 0e Title Website Starter (by Prof. Pickle) :Menu cls echo --------------------------------------------------------------------- echo This is the Website starter echo. echo Select the number of the website you wish to select echo Or press E to exit. echo --------------------------------------------------------------------- echo. echo. echo 1. facebook echo 2. youtube echo 3. google echo 4. redtube echo 5. other set /p web= If %web% EQU 1 start www.facebook.com If %web% EQU 1 goto Menu If %web% EQU 2 start www.youtube.com If %web% EQU 2 goto Menu If %web% EQU 3 start www.google.com If %web% EQ...

Sharks Cove board with Intel Atom CPU targeted at Windows developers. One really thinks this is aimed at the Raspberry Pi/Arduino market. But at $300 dollars, who is really going to choose it. Microsoft  has a tradition of not supporting speciality products for any period of time. Zune and etc etc etc. Even if it was worth it I would shy away from it. Ironically you can take a pico motherboard and dc-dc power supply and in effect have the same thing for a fraction of the cost. Now if you really want to get inane on this, I will take my old 486 laptop and add all kinds of breakout cables to do quite a bit. Parallel, serial,  vga, and etc. The 486 laptop was free. Cables did have some cost to them, but no where near $300. If you know anything about electronics, a "1" is plus five volts and a "0" is near zero volts. That is true for the Raspberry Pi, Arduino, personal computers, and a zillion developer boards. Not all interfaces will be using digital, but you ge...

Game of thrones author George RR Martin has explained why he does all his writing on an obsolete disk operating system (DOS) computer - "because it does not correct his spelling" and other errors. He also said he feels more secure since the dos system is not connected to the internet. He does have a more modern computer to do the internet email, twitter and etc. More information at: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27407502 For most writers, the internet provides them with virtually every tool they could ever need to write their respective narrative pieces. Word processors, screenwriting applications, even outlining programs exist (and with features ad infinitum) to make life easier, but  Game of Thrones   writer George R.R. Martin  takes a much, much,  much  simpler, old-fashioned approach to completing his work. In fact, it's downright ancient. No, I'm not talking "quill, ink, and a scroll of papyrus" ancient. I'm talking "Wo...

Lets play with assembly language programming one last time.  This time let’s use dos assembly language programming. A program is a set of instructions much like a recipe. With this recipe, we will have to use commands like you might use stir in a recipe.To make this recipe, we will use debug.com which is sort of a simple interactive assembler/disassembler. Our goal with the program is to print out the letter A. Now that seems a bit simple, but you have to start somewhere. So fire up debug from the command prompt. We are going to use dosbox (dos simulator) to make it easy to capture images. Thall shalt document. But first let us look at the letter A. If we went to an ascii  (american standard code for information interchange) table we can see the letter A is 65. So far so good.. But the computer does not recognize that nunber as the letter A. You remember base 10 arithmetic. where you have ten fingers to work with to do math. Well the computer in this case has 16 fingers or ba...

Some stories I will never tell. But, I think this one is ok: IT (Information Technology) departments have an awesome responsibility to make sure the commercial software they are in charge of does not get abused at least in terms of software piracy (illegally copied). Sometimes it can go too far. Let me say that I did work in IT for more than ten years and it is really hard for me to tell this story. Since I have been on both sides of the fence so to speak. One semester, I had to teach a class where I was unfamiliar with the software applications to be used in the class I was supposed to teach. I asked the head of the department whether I could get a copy to use at home. She said it would be alright, but just get the IT lab people to do it for me. So far so good. I went to the IT people and asked them for the software. For what ever reason, they would or could not get it for me. I asked if I could get it myself and they said no and that it was so secured that I could not get...

One of my special projects is to help keep older computer equipment viable. This can be especially important for those who are less privileged.  Most people have heard of the "Iron Chef" TV shows where chefs are challenged with ingredients and limited equipment to prepare a meal for the guests. Thinking in that vein, why not sort of combine the two, but without a time limit per se. Your goal is to make a networkable pentium one computer act as a home automation controller. You will be using and Intel Pentium I system that has a floppy drive, 3com network interface card, and a two gig hard drive. You will get to use a monitor just long enough to set up the system. You also get a bootable dos disk with the system plus, bootable dos wattcp disk (with the tcpip stack), and two blank floppies.. You will also have free access to the internet from another system (using Linux of course or another os if you must). You get no other software. (Hint. Hint. internet access.) We nee...