Parsing CHN files from MAESTRO.

The default spectrum file format saved by the MAESTRO software (made by ORTEC/Ametek Inc) is called an "integer spectrum data file" that is is saved in a file with the CHN extension to the file name. Documentation of the CHN file format can be found in the ORTEC Software File Structure Manual.

For your convenience, I wrote a C++ class to parse the content of such a file which you can find below. Below the C++ class, there is a small test program to read a CHN spectrum and print out the channel data.

Do you have suggestions for improvements or bugs to report? Then please comment below.

Questions for an interview with potential internship students

Today, I had to perform av interview of a potential foreign internship student. The student is supposed to do a project in engineering science for two or three months, in a field related to his or her studies in their second year. We have a project related to applied nuclear physics that one student from another country had shown an interest in performing. So, the following questions came to my mind for the interview. Do you have a suggestion for more questions to be asked the next time? Then comment below.

• What is your motivation to come here and do this work?
• What are your expectations from your stay here and on us?
• What are the demands from your school regarding the internship?
• Do you have any experience with similar work?
• Do you have any knowledge in radiation protection?
• How will you finance your internship?
• Questions for me/us?

Getting Things Done

Are you interested in improving your productivity without increasing your stress level? This might seem like magic at first sight but after reading the book "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity" by David Allen and after implementing the basic steps involved in GTD I must say, it's no magic.

BLOB handling in SQLite

I was reading up on how to store and retrieve a BLOB in a SQLite database. A BLOB is simply an array of bytes, it is usually used to store files directly into the database. While reading, I created two very simple C++ programs. One to save a file into a BLOB and one to read a BLOB and save it to a file.

You can find the source codes to the two programs below. They are relatively well commented so that you should be able to follow what is going on.

Use them to your needs.

Tutorial series: Building wxWidgets apps with SSH capability on Windows using MinGW: 6. wxWidgets SSH application

This is the last post in the series about how to install and use libraries needed to do SSH communication from a wxWidgets application, on Windows, using the MinGW compiler system.

In previous posts, we have looked at:

1. Introduction

2. Installing MinGW

3. zlib and OpenSSL

4. libssh2

5. wxWidgets

In this post, we will learn how to combine the components that we have built so far. We will build on the Hello World example in the previous post to develop a simple application to read the response from a remote machine given a command through SSH.