Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Help me help myself

[Marcus D. Leech]

On 12/22/2014 06:59 PM, Richard Bell wrote:

Actually, your replies helped. I was not aware or in the mindset that branchless_clip was a generally used method for clamping fixed or floating point values. Because of that, I was limiting my searches to gnuradio related stuff (googling "gnuradio branchless_clip"). Now I know it is a general method of doing something.

Helping people who are getting comfortable is a good thing to do. It will ensure they use the tools. There is a limit to this of course. No one wants to see basic level questions being asked all day.

I've been on this mailing list for, gosh, a decade?

In that time, what I've noticed is that in the last couple of years, there's a significant fraction of folks who are encountering not only Gnu Radio and
  SDR/DSP for the first time, but *software development in general*.   I'm not sure why that is, but I'm pretty sure that the list isn't, in
  general, well-equipped to deal with that kind of thing.

My own patience for that type of thing varies considerably, and I try to avoid giving any answers at all when my patience is perhaps not as
  generous as it should be, and try to give cheerful answers when possible.

I certainly don't want people to leave with the impression that we're unhelpful here, but on the other hand, I don't think it would be good for
 the list (and the community) if we became a "free CS101 course" for the huddled masses.  Just my opinion....

...funny anecdote time.

I once helped run an internal help-desk doing Unix technical support within the Nortel empire.  We'd assembled a team of
  pretty-darned-competent people to do front-line support.  *Vastly* better than your typical help-desk.  Like, could debug shell scripts
  for customers while waiting on the phone. So, we got a bit of a reputation of being pretty-much the best at what we did.  To the extent
  that our phone number leaked out into the greater world, and we started getting support calls from random not-Nortel places, which
  we obviously couldn't support, since it wasn't our mandate.

Sometimes, I think we do that here...

On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 3:47 PM, Marcus D. Leech <address@hidden> wrote:

On 12/22/2014 06:45 PM, Philip Balister wrote:

On 12/22/2014 06:42 PM, Marcus D. Leech wrote:

I'm not as smart as Marcus, so I googled "branchless clip",

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/427477/fastest-way-to-clamp-a-real-fixed-floating-point-value

Philip

I think that at the end of the day, questions like this boil down to "how do I get comfortable with the tools of the trade in software development".

That's not something that the Gnu Radio community can economically address.




--
Marcus Leech
Principal Investigator
Shirleys Bay Radio Astronomy Consortium
http://www.sbrac.org

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-- 
Marcus Leech
Principal Investigator
Shirleys Bay Radio Astronomy Consortium
http://www.sbrac.org