Tell. Us. What. You. Want.
It's a good thing the guys from the research facility aren't around because I'd be shaking them by their necks.
Ratso finally completed his file formatter software. The researchers provided us a little program for analyzing the formatted files so that we could be sure that we were getting them in the right format. We couldn't just send them the software without testing it, after all. (We really wanted to. We want to get this over with.)
So we tested it and found that, while the waveform we graphed was recognizable as the waveform data we collected, it was seriously distorted. After cursing and trying some stuff that didn't work, it was back to asking questions that no one knows the answer to. The information about formatting that we had finally managed to extract from them didn't mention that the data had to be in a certain format. 16 bit integers are not all created equal.
The first answer we got was, naturally, "try some stuff."
I have learned not to take that for an answer.
I asked again, we tracked down the person who knows, and got a real answer. All we had to do was add a certain number to the values we collected to get an integer compatible with their software. And that took much less time than "trying stuff."
228 words | March 23, 2005 11:14 PM | Ivory tower