Brian Taylor's Home Page

Brian Taylor - Shareware Home Page

I am an Electronic Engineer who has migrated into embedded software (firmware if you prefer). I have always had an interest in computers and first learned how to program by taking an evening course whilst still at school. In those days my programs where punched onto cards then sent away for compiling and running and I didn't get to see the outcome until a week later. I like to think that this experience has resulted in a determination to design my programs carefully and get them right first time, however I'm still human!

My CV for anyone who might be interested.

Here are three programs which I consider suitable for publication on the Internet. RVal and MailUtil have been the result of my own needs - often the best reason to write a program. But first, RColours which I have published as an unashamed advert for RVal:

RColours

Yes, I'm joining the hoards of people that have written Resistor colour code convertors - there are even Java convertors for use on-line! What makes mine different? Firstly it will convert either way; from the colours to the value (as all of my rivals do) and from the value to the colours. Secondly it's small, both in terms of program size and in the screen area occupied (neither of these can be said of some of my rivals!). It supports 3-band and 4-band representations of the value as well as providing a comprehensive list of tolerance band colours as well as (the rarer) temperature coefficient band colours.

Like most of my rivals it's also FREE!

RVal - Version 2.00 now available!

This owes its origins to a program I wrote to run on a CP/M machine back in about 1979 when I was designing some 600 ohm attenuators and needed many values that were not included in the preferred resistor value ranges commonly available. Later I created an adapted version of this original program to find pairs of preferred values with given ratios in order to get the exact gain I wanted from amplifier circuits. From these original programs, having ported them to a variety of different machines and re-written them in a variety of different languages, I finally combined them into a single program with the form of user interface that it always needed. The result is what you see here.

MailUtil

This second program came about because I didn't run away fast enough when someone was needed to take care of a newly set-up MSmail postoffice where I worked. When one of the remote users of this postoffice complained that he couldn't see SMTP addresses in his remote view of the global address list, I discovered that it was not possible to add them to this remote view. I set about producing a utility (initially written using LabWindows/CVI - a National Instruments product aimed at the computer-based data acquisition market) to extract these addresses from the appropriate files on the postoffice into a text file that I could then e-mail to him. As my understanding of the inner working of MSmail grew, so did my utility.

I came to realise that I was producing something which could be useful to other administrators of MSmail postoffices. I decided to re-write the program using Visual Basic since far more people have the run-time engine for this (VBrun300.dll) than have the run-time engine for LabWindows/CVI, so I set about doing this in my spare time. This was also the point at which I added the detection of "Stranded Mail" having suffered from the postoffice disc becoming full due to vast quantities of such mail. Several refinements were added to improve the presentation and content of the reports generated and this is final result.