Robert G. Schaffrath

Prior to this, I was a Senior Staff Consultant with the Kraft Foods Information Technology department based in White Plains, New York until January 1997. I was with the company for 8 years, 8 months and 25 days (most of it in Maxwell House) and I was involved with many areas of computing science including Unix, OpenVMS, DOS/Windows, Windows-NT, TCP/IP networking and its related applications including Intranet Projects, Wireless Messaging, Systems Management, Oracle DBA, systems programming and computer hardware construction and repair. I program in BASIC, FORTRAN, Pascal, C, C#, SQL and Perl (plus other scripting languages such as DCL, JCL, Korn Shell, POSIX Shell and Bourne Shell). However, I have to say that, so far, Perl and C# are my favorite languages!

In my "spare" time, I dabble in Amateur Radio (my FCC callsign is N2JTX), Electronics, Baking, Beer Brewing, Bicycling, Botany, Geology, Numismatics, Philatily, Reading and Computer Programming. Also, church functions occassionally take up my time!

On Saturday, April 28th, 2001 I became the proud owner of a Silver 2000 Honda Insight (number 4581). It replaces my 1988 Honda CRX with 168,300 miles (that still gets 44mpg!). So far it has been alot of fun to drive and the stares from people as I drive it are priceless. On a typical day I will have at least one person come up to me and ask me about it and how it works. This picture shows a "typical" mileage of 75.2 MPG for a 19.6 mile trip on the Insight's Fuel Consumption Display (the car was going 45 MPH at the time the picture was taken - don't ask). A photo of my all-time best recorded mileage is available here.

I recently discovered that "Nixie Tubes" (numerical indicators in use before seven segment LED displays) have been making a comeback in the form of digital clocks. Having built one myself back in 1979, I can say that they are very interesting. I am now hoping to build a few other types of clocks using various different types of Nixie tubes.

For owners of the Radio Shack® Weatheradio® with NWR-SAME model 12-249, information on its EAS event code support is available here. For owners of the model 12-250, information on its EAS event code support is available here.

For owners of the Heath® Most Accurate Clock II (model GCW-1001), information on programming the RS-232 port and undocumented commands is available here.

COMPASS

My C# and .NET Articles on CodeProject.com:

• TreeView C# .Net Multiselect using TVS_EX_MULTISELECT
• Transferring Virtual Files to Windows Explorer in C#

Winamp Plugins:

• gen_autoclose.dll v2.1 binary and source. Gen_Autoclose is a plug-in that will shut down Winamp at a specified time and as an option, will shut down the computer or put it into standby mode. This is useful in situations where Winamp is running on system that must remain running such as a server.
• gen_whatsplaying.dll v2.5 binary and source. Gen_WhatsPlaying is a general purpose Winamp plug-in that is designed to create a file containing information about the currently playing Winamp track based upon a template file. This is most useful in situations where Winamp is running on a server and the player screen is inaccessible. This latest version includes a user configurable speech interface to Microsoft Speech API v5.0 and higher. This allows the plug-in to speak the track title and other information as configured by the user.

If you use xname.org for free DNS hosting, this Perl script will allow you to make changes to your zones using XMLRPC.

This page contains pictures of the two AN/PDR-27 series Geiger Counters I own. One is an AN/PDR-27G that I have had since 1978 and the other is an AN/PDR-27R that I recently acquired.

Last modified March 1, 2008