标签: notebook

For engineers and scientists, notebooks are a reliable means to document their ideas, inventions, progress, and even their missteps. Some of the most notable engineers and scientists who used notebooks include Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, and Leonardo da Vinci. In fact, mankind would know very little of da Vinci’s discoveries had he not written them down in a notebook. One problem facing engineers today is that the paper-bound notebook is an inefficient means for recording information in a society driven by computer technology. It's time to upgrade the engineering notebook for the 21st century.   So what does a modern engineering notebook look like?   A modern engineering notebook, whether for an individual or a team, must be capable of synchronization through the cloud. Engineers today don’t just use PCs; they rely on mobile devices such as tablets or cell phones to document their work. An engineer must be able to track and record notes on any of these devices and have the notes seamlessly synchronize with one another. The notebook medium must also be capable of potentially having multiple engineers working within the same notebook simultaneously in order to prevent synchronization issues.     Paper- bound notebooks are great for writing in but whenever an image or graph needs to be recorded, engineers need to pull out the scissors, tape, and glue to meticulously insert the image into the notebook. Not only is inserting images into a paper notebook time consuming, it can potentially be dangerous for a software engineer working in dimly lit conditions (scissors are sharp and pointy). The use of a modern electronic notebook to add images or graphs is trivial! Many software packages have built in snipping or screen-grabber tools that allow images to be captured in seconds with only digital scissors being required!     So far an electronic engineering notebook sounds promising, but what happens when an engineer needs to insert a hand drawing? In a paperbound notebook an engineer would simply draw out the diagram, and many software packages designed to work as a notebook include manual drawing tools, but drawing on a PC can seem uncomfortable and inefficient. The use of a tablet and stylus can give an engineer the same efficiency and feel of a paper notebook while taking advantage of the digital tools available to modern engineers. The main caveat in hand drawing on a tablet is to make sure the stylus being used has a narrow tip. Otherwise, drawing feels awkward.   An electronic notebook also has the ability to attach or link ancillary materials such as spreadsheets, drawings, PDFs, or power point presentations, to name a few. The attached files can be embedded in the notebook, if one wishes, so that a page in the notebook always contains the most up to date information. Or the attached file can remain a snapshot in time. The modern notebook's electronic nature allows any type of digital medium -- whether it be camera images or even CAD data -- to be seamlessly inserted into the notebook. The capabilities of an electronic engineering notebook make it critical to engineers and scientists.   Given all these capabilities of an electronic engineering notebook, one might expect that they are already being used and wonder what software packages are available. A first thought might be to use something similar to Microsoft Word. The problem with Word, while it is very capable, is that it lacks many of the synchronization and multi-user capabilities that are required for a truly modern engineering notebook. So what else is available?   There are three different software packages that immediately come to mind that would make great first attempts for an electronic notebook; Evernote, OneNote, and Wikis. Evernote and OneNote provide an engineer with very similar capabilities although those capabilities are provided through different user interfaces and price points. Both provide PC, Web, and mobile device interfaces and allow different notebooks to be created with notes, drawings, and other useful tools. The software is setup for multiple users and integrates many of the must-have features discussed above, such as synchronization.   Wikis don’t provide the synchronization features or many of the mobile device features that are available through Evernote or OneNote but they can still be a great way to create a modern engineering notebook. A wiki can be installed on a team server and act as a body of knowledge for a project. Adding images and drawing are slightly more challenging, though. Still, a wiki can be a good solution for teams that don’t want their data streaming through the cloud or lurking on developers’ mobile devices.   One thing is certain, engineers and scientists need notebooks to keep their thoughts straight, monitor progress, collect relevant information about a project, and to share ideas. Paper notebooks no longer fit many of these needs efficiently. But an electronic notebook can prove to be exactly what engineers need to effectively track their thoughts in a digital age.   How do you manage your modern-day engineering notebook?   Jacob Beningo is principal consultant at Beningo Engineering, an embedded software consulting company. Jacob has experience developing, reviewing and critiquing drivers, frameworks and application code for companies requiring robust and scalable firmware. Jacob is actively involved in improving the general understanding of embedded software development through workshops, webinars and blogging.

When I attended college, it was the mainframe days. The school had one computer for its 40,000 students, a huge dual-processor Univac 1108. Eight or ten tape drives whirred; a handful of disk drives hummed, and two drum storage units spun their six-foot-long cylinders. After 3:00 AM the machine was given over to the systems staff for maintenance of the various utilities. We’d sometimes take over the entire machine to play Space Wars; the university’s sole graphic display showed a circle representing a planet and another representing the spaceship, which the players could maneuver. Part of the game’s attraction was that, with the $10 million dollars of computational power fully engaged, it could even model gravitational force in real time.     There was some access to the machine via ASR-33 teletypes (properly called ‘teletypewriters’). But most folks submitted jobs in decks of punched cards. A box held 2000 cards – a 2000 line program. It wasn’t unusual to see grad students struggling along with a stack of five or more boxes of cards holding a single program. Data, too, was on the cards. And, how one felt after dropping a stack of cards and seeing them scrambled all over the floor! A user would walk up to the counter in the computer science building with the stack of cards. The High Priest of Computing gravely intoned turn-around times, typically 24 hours. That meant the entire edit, compile, test cycle was a full day and night. Stupid errors cost days, weeks, and months. But stupid errors abounded. If a FORTRAN program had more than 50 compile-time flaws the compiler printed a picture of Alfred E. Neumann with the caption “this man never worries, but from the look of your code, you should.” Something was invented to find the most egregious mistakes: playing computer. You’d get a listing and execute the code absolutely literally in your head. That technique has evolved into the modern process of inspections, which too few of us use. Instead, the typical developer quickly writes some code, goes through the build, and starts debugging. Encountering a bug he may quickly change that “=” to a “”, rebuild, and resume testing. The tools are so good the iterations happen at light-speed, but, unfortunately, there’s little incentive to really think through the implications of the change. Subtle bugs sneak in. In maneuvering vessels in orbit one slows down in order to speed up, and I think we need a similar strategy while debugging code. A bug may mean there’s a lot of poorly-understood stuff going on that demands careful thought. I recommend that developers use engineering notebooks or their electronic equivalent. When you run into a bug take your hands off the keyboard and record the symptom in the notebook. Write down everything you know about it. Some debugging might be needed – single stepping, traces, and breakpoints. Log the results of each step. When you come up with a solution, don’t implement it. Instead, write that down, too, and only then fix the code.   But maybe this is not the best model... The result is that instead of spending two seconds not really thinking things through, you’ve devoted half a minute or so to really noodling out what is going on. The odds of getting a correct fix go up. But wait, there’s more. Go over your engineering notebook every 6 to 12 months. The patterns it will reveal are surprising. When I started doing this it became embarrassingly clear that I’m always mixing up “==” and “=”. So now I’m quite careful when typing those operators, so never make that mistake. This is a feedback loop that improves our abilities. But there’s even more! Have you ever watched (or participated in) a debugging session that lasts days or weeks? There’s a bug that’s just impossible to find. We run all sorts of tests. Almost inevitably we’ll forget what tests we ran and repeat work done a day or a week ago. The engineering notebook is a complete record of those tests. It gives us a more scientific way to guide our debugging efforts and speeds up the process by reminding us of what we’ve already done. The engineering notebook is top secret. No boss should have access to it. This is a tool designed for personal improvement only. What’s your take? Do you use any sorts of tools to guide your debugging efforts (outside of normal troubleshooting tools)?

More unwelcome news for the struggling PC industry: According to IHS iSuppli, consumers will continue to favour lower-end desktop PCs and notebook computers over high-performance models for the rest of this year and beyond. Top-end systems, priced at $1,000 and up, will account for only 6 per cent of the PC market in 2012, according to an IHS report. So-called "performance" systems are expected to account for 6 per cent of desktop PCs sold this year and 9 per cent of notebooks, according to the firm. In desktops, IHS expects both "mainstream" and "value" PCs to each take about 47 per cent of the market. In notebooks, the firm expects low-end systems—priced at below $500—to take about 47 per cent of the market, with midrange notebooks—priced at between $500 and $1,000—expected to account for about 44 per cent of the market. To recap, last month IHS forecast that PC sales would decline this year for the first time since 2001. Intel Corp. and OEMs are hoping to revive the market with compelling new ultra-thin, ultra-light notebooks that have thus far not caught on in a big way, largely due to their comparably high prices. IHS's latest report can't bode well for the Intel camp. The chip giant is banking on consumers being willing to pay higher prices for systems that bring many of the features that have been a hit in tablets to a form factor that more closely resembles a traditional PC. But the IHS data suggests that consumers are very willing to accept what's available in a low-end or mid-range as long as it costs them less. "For the desktop as well as the notebook PC market, the continuing domination of lower-end computers is due to the rising performance overall of PCs and their greater affordability to the purchasing public," said Peter Lin, senior analyst for compute platforms at IHS, in a statement. According to Lin, PCs now categorised in the mainstream or value segments—while not as powerful or feature rich as the high-end systems—are powerful enough in their own right. "These more affordable systems feature current-generation technologies that prove adequate for most uses, or boast increased microprocessor power that raises the performance bar even for seemingly rudimentary machines," Lin said. As processors become more powerful, IHS expects more computers to ship with increased computing capability. Quad-core processors, for example, will be found in 179 million notebook PCs by 2016—about 59 per cent of all notebooks expected to be in the market by then, according to IHS. Much has been said and written about the dawn of the post PC era. Consumers are proving willing to forgo new PC purchases in favour of tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices that are more convenient to use and offer some but not all of the capabilities of PCs. For those customers who are buying new PCs, the top of the line is not worth the extra money. With mid- and low-end PCs sporting more powerful processors, the overwhelming majority of people simply don't feel like digging deeper in their wallets for bleeding edge technology.