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

Homeland Security hacked

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) suffered more than 800 hacker
break-ins, virus outbreaks, and other computer security problems over
two years, senior officials told Congress.
Story here.

CAD standard watermarks

Corporate Montage reports that it plans to focus on its CADConfirm
standards management software, which I saw in action on the exhibit
floor. The server-based product presents MicroStation users with a
drafting environment through which they access design elements that
conform to the company’s CAD standards. Users can work in standard
MicroStation, if they choose, but what they create won’t adhere to the
standards. A Check and Fit tool enables the CAD manager to find and fix
nonconforming items in a process similar to spell-checking. A digital
watermark can be attached to files that pass the standards audit — the
watermark invalidates itself if any change is then made to the
document. To facilitate the process, CADConfirm supports the import of
a company’s existing standards in a variety of formats, including DGN
and DWG files, templates, PDF files and more. Corporate Montage
estimates that it takes three to four days to build a comprehensive set
of standards in the product and that the average cost is $500 per user.
from Sara Ferris @ Cadalyst reporting on Bentley’s user conference.

I like the idea of a watermark on a design that has conformed to a CAD standard test. It’s a nice simple way of saying that this print out or view has been validated to conform with a requirement.

Japan to get RFID-equipped manhole covers

Cool story by Engadget, March 29th, 2006

The deepness of syndication technology yet to come.

“What I said to Paul about Atom is true. Many of us see blogs as just the first driver for everyone to be able to read syndicated feeds on their computers. The next major wave of syndication will be one-way business communications, some of them personalized. Do you want ads from legitimate dealers of some hobby you have? No problem. Do you want notices from your bank when your online statement is ready? No problem, and the feed will be fully legitimate. If we’re lucky, it will even be digitally signed, and possibly encrypted (although that will probably take years to get right). There is lots of room for creative growth for syndication, and having a standard like Atom will help lay the foundation for it.”

- Paul Hoffman, Lookit.

Sage advice

I’ve got Data. You’ve got Data. Tim Bray drops the low down on how to hang on to your data.
Protecting Your Data, Tim Bray, January 31, 2006

Cheap burnable CDs have a 2 to 5 year lifespan

Kurt Gerecke, a physicist and storage expert at IBM Deutschland GmbH, takes this view: If you want to avoid having to burn new CDs every few years, use magnetic tapes to store all your pictures, videos and songs for a lifetime.

“Companies, in particular, need to be constantly looking at new storage technologies and have an archiving strategy that allows them to automatically migrate to new technologies,” he said. “Otherwise, they’re going to wind up in a dead end. And for those sitting on terabytes of crucial data, that could be a colossal problem.”

Full Story here.

I originally believed that CDs were a good way to preserve data but as this story illustrates it is pressed CDs that have longevity and not your cheap writable CDs. Which causes me some concern to think about the pictures, videos and other valuable electronic files I’ve accumulated and fear losing. I have been using a hard disk backup strategy but I may have to go and look at what my tape options are.

Software as a Service outage

Salesforce.com outage is a warning to the enterprise. The outage at Salesforce.com earlier this week should serve as a reminder of why the enterprise should and usually does take a conservative approach when it comes to going live with new technologies and more importantly to working with fledgling startups. To call Salesforce a startup might be a bit over the top but certainly they are new enough that they are just now building a second mirror-image data center on the east coast, as reported by Stacy Cowley in her story “Week of crashes highlights on-demand peril.” What’s the lesson here? Look for SaaS [Software as a Service] providers… [InfoWorld TechWatch]

Accessing remote servers for mission critical applications just isn’t a good idea without multiple forms of network redundancy plus mirrored servers in distinct physical sites. Is your SaaS providing that?

No? then it is time to bring that application in house. But you still need to think about mission critical access and what the term high availability really means.

Whither shall the newspaper goeth?

Scott Rosenburg has some ideas and chiming in to the dialog are a few other voices. One that says newspapers are like mainframes in the 1970s which were then displaced by Personal Computers. When one draws an analogy does it matter to be accurate? Firstly mainframes didn’t go away in 1970 simply because there was a rise in PC purchases.

There are some observations to like in Scott’s piece.

One. Yes, newspapers are toast but mostly because readership has been on the decline for decades and the NET as an info source is simply the last spike being driven in to the displacement problem faced by news print. The problem? Young people don’t go to newspapers to find out what’s going on. They go to the TV or they go to the NET or both. The money for the news business is simply going to track the readership into other venues out of the newspaper business. Newspapers will not dissappear completely any more than mainframes dissappeared but massive consolidation is likely. I agree with Scott that there will be a few national news organizations that go to print but there will also be a large number of weeklies that meet local needs for advertising and supply local stories. This is pretty much the landscape for news orgs in the GTA now.
Two, bundling information to provide to others will be a competitive space to pursue. That competition should make the resulting product better. What I don’t think is known yet is what the replacement will actually look like. Nor if it has arrived yet or is yet to arrive but I suspect that it hasn’t.

Engineers, IT and robustness

From Spit and Bailing Wire comes a very nice little observation on why it is so tough to introduce IT frameworks to engineers.

Gotta love that title, eh. I have to say that I’ve seen this more than a few times in my own engineering career and it has lead to a great dislike of spreadsheets as a technique for problem solving. Spreadsheets lead to quick and dirty analysis that is almost impossible to check. The spreadsheet, I suspect, is a leading cause in the decline of peer review amongst engineers. When I began my engineering career, (now about 20 years ago), peer review of ones calculations was a common practice. The problem analysis was formulated on paper, you cited the problem statement and used references to specific texts for the empirical formulae being used in your solution. Anyone could follow your solution to its conclusion. Not so with a spreadsheet.

Yes, I have solutions to the spreadsheet problem and I have used them myself but “Try to get them to use one…I dare you.”