Today's work project was a fun bit of learning. My coworker pulled a waveform off an oscilloscope. Not a picture of the screen, but the actual digitized data. Neither of us had any idea just how many points modern oscilloscopes can generate. He put the waveform in Excel, which promptly truncated it because Excel can only hold a million rows. So he showed up at my door.
I wrote something in C, and refamiliarized myself with malloc(). By some weird coincidence, what he wanted was half something I wrote yesterday (look for discontinuities) and half something I wrote a year ago (and stick them all in a specific dense format) so I managed to build him something pretty quickly, that with a bit of adjustment, could handle his four million line long text files and smash them down into 10,000 lines of relevant information. He was thrilled by it. (Now to see if I can somehow get that appreciation advertised upwards...)
I also thought of a possibly patentable idea. It's not a money maker, but it's the kind of thing my company would like to have locked up, so I'm going to try to find someone who appreciates weird ideas and see what it would take to have the company pursue this.
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