标签: manual

I recently blogged about the worst oscilloscope manual of all time .. I've particularly enjoyed the feedback quoting from real-world manuals, such as "...the on-screen lathy rectangle shapes represent the front panel keys..." and "...turn the 'Universal' knob when holdoff time have been to max or min value, now the system will clew this information."   It's hard to argue with statements and instructions like this (how can you argue with something if you don’t know what it means?). And then another reader shared as follows:   I work in Switzerland and lately I've been dealing with a number of manuals/datasheets written by German companies. At first I despaired at understanding their statements and my coworkers asked me to stop my cursing, when I hit upon the secret. The trick is to read the manuals with English vocabulary but with the grammar rules of the original language! Now the sentences actually make a lot of sense. Of course, I don't speak Chinese or Japanese so most manuals still don't make sense but it's something...   In turn, this reminded me as to how different countries employ different writing styles in their English-language user manuals based on the rules of grammar associated with their native tongue.     In the case of user manuals written in English by native German speakers, for example, one tends to see things like "You will plug the probes into the analog inputs. Then you will set the vertical scale to the correct value. Then you will …" The reason I've put the "wills" in italics here is that recollect the emphasis in my German friends' voices when I've arrived at parties to be greeted with expressions like: "You have arrived! You will enjoy yourself!"   By comparison, I always find manuals written in English by the folks in Israel to have a very Shakespearian quality. You can almost read them like a play:   Character 1: "But where are the variables?" you ask. Character 2: "Ha! The variables are over here!" {Actor throws curtains apart to reveal the variables}   Some of the more interesting manuals I've run across in my time are those that have been created by Japanese and German companies working in concert to provide products to an English-speaking audience. The way this often works is that the native Japanese speakers in Japan create the first pass of the manual in German. Then they ship the product and the manual to their German counterparts, who proceed to translate the poor little scamp from Japanese-German into English.   How about you? Have you noticed any interesting "speech patterns" in manuals based on the grammar rules from their country of origin? Also, have you come across any multi-step translations like the "Japanese German English" path I discussed above?

PR and marketing groups at oscilloscope manufacturers around the globe seeing the title to this column must be thinking, "Please, please, please, let this be about our competitors and not us."   Well, if you happen to be a member of one of those PR or marketing teams, you can settle down and relax. I'm talking about a hypothetical oscilloscope user manual.   Do you recall the classic line "It was a dark and stormy night," made famous by the Peanuts cartoon character, Snoopy? As fate would have it, this actually was the opening sentence to an 1830 book by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton. A legend in his own lunchtime, Bulwer-Lytton became renowned for penning exceptionally bad prose. The opening sentence to his book Paul Clifford set the standard for others to follow.   "It was a dark and stormy night" is now generally understood to represent an extravagantly florid style with redundancies and run-on sentences. In fact, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest was formed in 1982 to celebrate the worst extremes of this general style of writing. Contestants write a single sentence representing the worst-possible (though grammatically correct) opening sentence for a novel. Actually, I submitted the following entry for the 2008 competition.   As the hours passed, the expressions on the partygoers' faces became increasingly bemused and bewildered as my mother -- having grabbed the conversational reins with gusto and abandon using one of her classic opening gambits of "I bumped into Mrs. Forteskew-Smythe at the fishmongers the other day..." -- proceeded to inundate the gathered throng with a myriad of seemingly innocuous and unrelated details "...you remember, she was the oldest of three sisters; the youngest, Beryl, was a slut, while the middle girl eloped with a transsexual Australian taxidermist and they had two sons who couldn't bring themselves to touch any form of fruit, and..." and I could see the question forming in everyone's minds: "Can she possibly tie all of these tidbits of trivia together and somehow bring this tortuous tale to a meaningful close?"... and I cowered against the wall wearing a tight, grim smile because I knew, to my cost, that she could.   Sad to relate, I never heard anything back from the contest organizers, apart from a brief email message informing me that I could be assured that my offering would be "given the consideration it deserves." Maybe they are still mulling it over.   But I digress. All this was brought to my mind recently as I was skimming through a user manual for a piece of old electronic equipment. (No, I'm not going to tell you which one.) It wasn't long before I started to wonder if I had mistakenly gotten hold of an entry to a Bulwer-Lytton-esque competition for the worst user manual of all time.   This led me to start ruminating about possible opening sentences for a user manual. I started bouncing ideas for the worst oscilloscope user manual of all time. But before I bore delight you with my meandering musings, I'd really like to hear what you have to say. Remember that this has to be a single sentence that sets the stage for the horrors to come. Do you have any suggestions?

When we bought the used signs online, it seemed like a good deal until we realised there were no instructions included. Anyone like me working in an operations centre knows that we'll never be given the resources required to truly do our jobs well. In a real sense, we are the redheaded stepchildren of technology, although perhaps I should rephrase that out of deference to my own family members with red hair. What I will say is that with extremely limited budgets, those of us who work in operations centres are constantly forced to find new ways to do things as cheaply as possible. That was certainly the case with a request to set up "wallboards" in our area. Management wanted to use these small, LED dot-matrix signs to display concise, "state of the company" messages so that people walking through our area would know they were on hallowed ground. At the very least, the hope was that the signs would give people the warm fuzzy feeling that they were truly in an operations centre. Cue the circus. A colleague found some used signs on eBay for a screaming deal, which in retrospect should have immediately thrown up a red flag. We got the signs and opened them up, only to discover that they could only be programmed through the use of an infrared remote, which wasn't included. We immediately flipped one over to look up the information on the back of the sign and found a nice, wonderful... complete void of programming code. The manufacturer had merely listed specifications for a communication protocol. We had no code, and we had no tools. Knowing that engineers are more likely to figure something out when they are told a task is impossible, we made it into a competition. Whoever figured out how to reprogram the signs would get to take one home. The gauntlet was thrown down, a lot of tries were made, but no forward progress was seen. And then the big revelation came: We let all of the smoke out of one of the signs. Someone referred to it as the sign getting "fried," but everyone knows that electronics run on smoke, and when you let all of the smoke out the electronics quit. Suddenly, things were looking up—who wouldn't want a broken sign? We cracked it open and determined that the chips used for communications were okay. We threw in some replacement inductors, after cracking open a second sign to see what values to use. Some tools would have been really handy here. The broken sign was operational again, but we quickly realised the maximum length of the message was limited compared to the other signs. Thinking this was a result of fried EEPROM, we cracked the sign open again and gave it a visual inspection. The black circuit boards were all on the RS232 end of things. It looked like we didn't let the smoke out of the EEPROMS. We had something else happening, and we didn't yet know what. This forced us to revisit the manufacturer's manual, which turned out to be not much more than a nice RS232 communication specification sheet. Luckily, we happened across someone who had written a limited Perl script, but it was more than we'd seen up until then. A few quick hacks later, and we had some clean C code to communicate with the sign. I personally like C because I can port it into a few different services. A few test runs and trials, and the broken sign looked to be up and running. The next step was to program ('programme' for plan) the other signs, and things looked golden over there, too. So for the cost of a screaming deal on eBay, our troubleshooting time, a few inductors, some coding time, and the remaining shreds of sanity that I lost, we now have it all: a warm, fuzzy-feeling-inducing work area that has become the "show off" place to bring new employees, members of the board, partners, and vendors. We have graduated from being stepchildren to core members of the nuclear family. The downside to all of this is that more people are now hovering around my desk, and it means I have to talk to some of them. Perhaps if the signs disappeared, that problem could be solved. Anyone want to buy some used wallboard signs? I'll give you a good deal, code included! Joe Lewis, a Linux engineer at overstock.com, shared this story as a submission to Frankenstein's fix, a design contest hosted by EE Times (US).  

We thought buying used signs online was a good deal until we figured there were no instructions included. Anyone like me working in an operations centre knows that we'll never be given the resources required to truly do our jobs well. In a real sense, we are the redheaded stepchildren of technology, although perhaps I should rephrase that out of deference to my own family members with red hair. What I will say is that with extremely limited budgets, those of us who work in operations centres are constantly forced to find new ways to do things as cheaply as possible. That was certainly the case with a request to set up "wallboards" in our area. Management wanted to use these small, LED dot-matrix signs to display concise, "state of the company" messages so that people walking through our area would know they were on hallowed ground. At the very least, the hope was that the signs would give people the warm fuzzy feeling that they were truly in an operations centre. Cue the circus. A colleague found some used signs on eBay for a screaming deal, which in retrospect should have immediately thrown up a red flag. We got the signs and opened them up, only to discover that they could only be programmed through the use of an infrared remote, which wasn't included. We immediately flipped one over to look up the information on the back of the sign and found a nice, wonderful... complete void of programming code. The manufacturer had merely listed specifications for a communication protocol. We had no code, and we had no tools. Knowing that engineers are more likely to figure something out when they are told a task is impossible, we made it into a competition. Whoever figured out how to reprogram the signs would get to take one home. The gauntlet was thrown down, a lot of tries were made, but no forward progress was seen. And then the big revelation came: We let all of the smoke out of one of the signs. Someone referred to it as the sign getting "fried," but everyone knows that electronics run on smoke, and when you let all of the smoke out the electronics quit. Suddenly, things were looking up—who wouldn't want a broken sign? We cracked it open and determined that the chips used for communications were okay. We threw in some replacement inductors, after cracking open a second sign to see what values to use. Some tools would have been really handy here. The broken sign was operational again, but we quickly realised the maximum length of the message was limited compared to the other signs. Thinking this was a result of fried EEPROM, we cracked the sign open again and gave it a visual inspection. The black circuit boards were all on the RS232 end of things. It looked like we didn't let the smoke out of the EEPROMS. We had something else happening, and we didn't yet know what. This forced us to revisit the manufacturer's manual, which turned out to be not much more than a nice RS232 communication specification sheet. Luckily, we happened across someone who had written a limited Perl script, but it was more than we'd seen up until then. A few quick hacks later, and we had some clean C code to communicate with the sign. I personally like C because I can port it into a few different services. A few test runs and trials, and the broken sign looked to be up and running. The next step was to program ('programme' for plan) the other signs, and things looked golden over there, too. So for the cost of a screaming deal on eBay, our troubleshooting time, a few inductors, some coding time, and the remaining shreds of sanity that I lost, we now have it all: a warm, fuzzy-feeling-inducing work area that has become the "show off" place to bring new employees, members of the board, partners, and vendors. We have graduated from being stepchildren to core members of the nuclear family. The downside to all of this is that more people are now hovering around my desk, and it means I have to talk to some of them. Perhaps if the signs disappeared, that problem could be solved. Anyone want to buy some used wallboard signs? I'll give you a good deal, code included! Joe Lewis, a Linux engineer at overstock.com, shared this story as a submission to Frankenstein's fix, a design contest hosted by EE Times (US).

As written in Ogilvy On Advertising, David Ogilvy says there are three magic words in the ad world. Put one in the headline of your ad and people will read it. The magic words are new, free, and sex. But the one sure way to get my attention when flipping through a magazine is to have a schematic diagram. Any kind. A radio. Vacuum tube circuits. Logic. Piles of op amps. For some reason I find schematics arresting and always stop and take a closer look. Clicking around the web recently I stumbled across some vacuum tube sites, which brought back fond high school memories of building tube ham radio transmitters. Everyone relied on the RCA Vacuum Tube Handbook as the bible for specs on the parts. Wouldn't it be cool to find an old copy? And wouldn't that be utterly pointless? That thought morphed to memories of the other indispensable tome of the time: The GE Transistor Manual. Not too many clicks later and one was on its way here. I ordered the 1964 version ( below ). What's astonishing is how much was known about transistor theory by that date; transistors had been in common use for just a handful of years at the time. And this is the seventh edition!   Yet it explains transistor theory in a level of detail that my college classes almost a decade later never approached. Read – and understand – the first 170 pages and you'll be a transistor expert. But no attempt is made to make the subject easy. The price on the cover is $2, though it cost me, used, $6.98. Alas, the one that arrived is the "light-weight edition," a 594 page subset of the full-blown one I remembered. The light-weight version is missing all of the detailed specs of the transistors GE once made. The GE Transistor Manual was, and still is even though it has been out of print for generations, one of the best compendiums of information about designing transistor-based circuits. Part of its appeal was that it's just stuffed with schematics of every conceivable kind of circuit ( figure ).   One can get lost for hours and days studying the cool ways the authors crafted designs with an astonishing economy of parts. It's engineer porn, graphic illustrations that makes one's heart beat a little faster as one furtively flips from page to page, mostly not reading the "story" but gazing deeply at the pictures. Old timers will remember the unijunction transistor. There's an entire chapter dedicated to its use. These were used in timer circuits in the pre-555 days. UJTs are still available, though it has been a very long time since I've seen one in use. But there's no discussion at all about FETs, which today represent, to a first approximation, 100% of all of the quadzillion or so transistors made every year. Though FETs existed at the time, they enjoyed little commercial success, and even into the 70s were seen as niche products. Its exclusion from this book suggests that GE did not make any at the time. Some of the components discussed are obsolete. Or, at least I thought they were till checking the web. Stabistors, for instance were low-voltage zener diodes, but it seems these are still available, and one can even get them in modern SOT packages. Are SNAP diodes still around? There's a good description of them in the book. Those who enjoy tech nostalgia – or schematics – will get a kick out of the book. If you want a deep look into transistor theory and use, this is a great resource. Copies can be found on Amazon.