|
|
General HydroStatics
Ship Stability Software |
|
Command of the Week
(New or interesting aspects of GHS that you may not know about) |
|
It's a SET up
|
|
It is always a welcome surprise to hear from old friends after time and events have brought separation. Sometimes it's surprising how quickly you'll rekindle the old days with a newfound understanding. And so it was on a recent evening that I received an unexpected call:
"Hello?" "Hey! It's Emilio." I immediately recalled my old college sailing friend who regularly showed up late to the dock, took the last boat that was always missing a drain plug, and casually sat farther forward to keep water off the transom while he single-handed out the harbor to meet us on the lake. Emilio was also studying naval architecture, but here was a person whose fast learning perfectly complemented his late arrivals and unabashed will to ask how I solved a particular problem in that week's assignment. "Emilio, hey! How are you? I didn't recognize this number." The inflection in my voice communicated my surprise in his reaching out. I always assumed he had found himself on a boat cruising the coast somewhere with little thought for the outside world. Buoyed by his characteristic enthusiasm, he proceeded to explain how he had ended up working overseas for a small outfit, that the water there is frozen half the year, and that he has taken to ice sailing since ice "boats" don't require a drain plug. "I suppose some things just never change," he said, the glimmer of humility in his humor surprising me, until he continued: "...and, oh, so I have this run file where I need to access heel and trim as variables, but ensure that the value is absolute, and then plug that into... Any ideas?" Indeed, some things stay the same, I thought. Don't get me wrong--I probably like to talk about GHS more than anybody--but I resolved to assume that he still called just to chat. "Ah", I said, perhaps with less liveliness, "well, what you're looking for is called the SET command. It's actually one of the most useful commands in GHS, but a lot of people never really explore its capabilities. I can't write a run file without it." While my good friend only needed to take an absolute value, I sent him this run file which contains SET implementations of a few common mathematical formulas as examples. Would he even look at it? Who knows. But I made sure to include support for complex roots in the quadratic formula implementation just to obfuscate things a little. |
|
Questions, comments, or requests?
Contact Creative Systems, Inc. USA phone: 360-385-6212 Fax: 360-385-6213 Office hours: 7:00 am - 4:00 pm Pacific Time, Monday - Friday Mailing address: PO Box 1910 Port Townsend, WA 98368 USA Click here for an index to this and previous COWs |