Dirty jobs in IT

Hey, it’s great when your professional vocation is attached to the dirtiest job in IT.

 

But few IT gigs get earthier than Dan King’s job as a process control engineer for a Texas sewage treatment facility in the mid-1990s.

“Among other things,” King says, “I was responsible for crawling around the sludge dryer — that’s where the poo goes after it’s extracted from the water — trying to figure out how to program the computers to run the conveyors at speeds that would get the sludge dry enough so that it’s not a sloppy muddy mess, yet not so dry and dusty that it would catch on fire.”
A particularly smelly fire was the reason King was assigned to the project in the first place, he adds pungently.
To keep the “sludge” at the right consistency, King used an ’80s-era programming language called CL, made by Honeywell Industrial Control Systems, to move the conveyor belts at precisely the right speed and send the right amount of electricity to the dryers. That was the easy part.
“Then I had to crawl around the belt and reach in with my glove to check the consistency of this muddy, slushy mess while watching the temperature.”

After that formative experience, King went to grad school. He’s now an SAP consultant and NetWeaver Integration specialist for CapGemini in Houston. He says even that job can get dirty sometimes, especially when he needs to convince clients to give his people access to the things they need to get their work done.
“Some days, I’m still up to my hips in poo, but it’s bull poo,” King says.

 

from The 7 dirtiest jobs in IT

Denver Water’s Marketing Campaign

Check it out, here.

Out of his ear

Okay, so it’s not rocket science but it is still science.
I think that some of the early key words are “Saturday night”, “lab”, and “I started cracking up”. As someone plaqued by the LDL/HDL ratio, I’m curious to follow one commentors theory too.

Sometimes a cartoon says more

cartoon ahead

An Inconvenient Truth staring Al Gore

Cars staring Disney Pixar

corrosion inhibition by organisms and regenerative biofilms.

Experiments suggest a new form of living protection for copper and other metallic surfaces.
This story presents some interesting ideas on using baterium to protect metals. I’ve heard of bacterium actually using metals as part of their sustenance but not to protect metals.

Engineering Cancon cool

UBC Engineers Create Vehicle that Travels from Vancouver to Halifax on a Gallon of Gas

Full story here in the Physorg.com web site.

Binary Search Revisited

Anything that mentions Jon Bentley is worth pointing to.

“In Programming Pearls Bentley says that the analogous line “sets
m to the average of l and u, truncated down to the nearest integer.” On
the face of it, this assertion might appear correct, but it fails for
large values of the int variables low and high. Specifically, it fails if the sum of low and high is greater than the maximum positive int value (2³¹
- 1). The sum overflows to a negative value, and the value stays
negative when divided by two. In C this causes an array index out of
bounds with unpredictable results. In Java, it throws ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException.”

Tim Bray was on this very topic too, here and here.

If someone ever asks you why does this computer thing have to be so complicated, review this little piece of math niceness with them. I find that encapsulates in a nice single story the simplicity of a mathematic idea with the complexity of a complete solution. Of course once you mention the words math and binary in the same sentence you’ve probably lost 95% of your audience.

signal vs. Noise

» On Sunspots: The Feng Shui edition

Mark Ostroth 29 Mar 06
Don’t glaze over Don Norman’s point about writing. This is right out of
a 1960 essay by Loren Eisley, titled The Long Loneliness:

“Man without writing cannot long retain his history in his head. His
intelligence permits him to grasp some kind of succession of
generations; but without writing, the tale of the past rapidly
degenerates into fumbling myth and fable. Man’s greatest epic, his four
long battles with the advancing ice of the great continental glaciers,
has vanished from human memory without a trace.�

“Writing, and later printing, is the product of our adaptable
many-purposed hands. It is thus, through writing, with no increase in
genetic, inborn capacity since the last ice advance, that modern man
carries in his mind the intellectual triumphs of all his predecessors
who were able to inscribe their thoughts for posterity.�

Get Smart not lost in transmission

Nice Globe and Mail article on electricity transmission losses. The basic idea? Use intelligent networks to reduce losses. Which is a pretty good idea and one that can equally apply to water systems.

Hey, wake up, everybody!

In a nutshell, there are four big reasons why we shouldn’t be buying bottled water.

Full story published London Free Press around March 10th.