Doing an instrumentation experiment with our water consumption. Over the years I have put in a number of underground pipes, and I do the winter shutdown later and later every year. There is no meter on my well so I can’t really tell if the well pump is on or off for long periods of time. I also have no idea how much water we use. I am considering a computer controlled shutoff valve, or maybe a remote controlled power switch for the well pump to turn it off when there is abnormal usage. I picked up a Clark Model CLXC-20D-C-S and I am going to connect it today. I have not looked into the details of the output signal and how to interface it to some type of computer, something small like a Basic Stamp or maybe just get a board or USB device for one of the servers. If I were to buy a new house I would actually ask if you can get one with a built in web server with local instrumentation.
The pool pump was making quite a bit of noise. I started the replacement process and decided to buy one at Leslie’s to avoid the shipping. I went to the store and provided the information. They had an open box so I took that one. The price was great, more on that later. I did that in April I got around to installing the pump in June. I replaced the pump and started the pump. Trouble — I was not able to get 10-30 PSI across the filter. I started to get concerned that I had not winterized and I had a leak. I happened to look at the pool pump labels and saw that it was 1 HP. I knew I had asked for 1.5 HP. I looked at the receipt and it was for 1 HP. No wonder it was so much less. I put the old noisy pump back on and it all worked but it was noisy. I tried to find parts or someone to replace it, not possible. Seems like they want you to buy a new one. I thought the world was getting greener and we were going to try to fix things instead of make new things. I gave up on the parts although the idea of taking parts from the 1hp and putting them in the 1.5 HP did cross my mind. I went to the Leslie’s store and spoke to one of the employees, who happened to be going into Aerospace, that made me very happy and he suggested I talk to the manager about it. I actually sent email to the customer support line and they were very helpful. The District Manager call me and she arranged for me to replace the pump. I paid the difference in price for .5 more HP and I am going to install it today. I know some of you are wondering about the other pump, I am sure they will honor the full warranty and make the buyer aware that it had been used for about 1 hour. One of the great things about Sears is that they always keep parts for some amount of time, It would be nice if Home Depot and other chains paid more attention to this and used companies that maintained parts. Often you have to buy a new one because they don’t have anyway of getting the part. I guess my time is cheap enough that I can spend time on this kind of stuff and not pay someone. I actually like doing these type of things.I guess I traded 100s LOC for my personal projects and extra LOCs for my employer in order to do the above tasks.
I watched an interview of Bernard L. Schwartz on CNN. Very few recent hits on Google or Bing about him. The basic point he was making was that we need to spend about 1 trillion dollars to get the economy to recover, something about 40k jobs for every billion. I am not going to do the math because I find so many of these while positive, providing no details on what type of jobs to fund. Take for example building and repairing of roads, ok we get new roads, they ride better and often look better and bridges designed in the 50s are fixed and not rebuilt. The real issue is why are we investing in the past instead of possibly thinking about having the center lane on all highways become a conduit for super conducting cables as part of a national grid plan. Yes it is risky but I don’t see how repairing roads will cause the change we need. I also don’t understand why we wouldn’t invest in rail as the primary way to move goods, figure out how to do it twice as fast as any truck and ten times cheaper when operating. I will refrain from Sci-Fi and not suggest that the interstate highway systems and rail networks be merged. We need to take risks and we may fail or have a tremendous success. The possibility of an economy where there aren’t enough jobs as a permanent state is not something I think we are ready for as a society. I do appreciate smooth roads, and bridges that don’t fail.
If I were creative I would make a movie about the nosql people trying to convince you that approximate and different answers are ok. Or maybe we should bet everything on one platform because it is just too hard to have something that runs on lots of platforms with some effort. Forget the platforms just do it all from the big server and use the browser — that’s it — the browser and AJAX is answer to all questions.
Recently my cable company, Cablevision, stopped broadcasting signals that did not require a cable tuner. I was thinking of dropping them without considering how much worse some of the others may or may not be but it does not matter, I do not have a choice, only one provider. It does seem unfair that cable companies are not forced to share wires like the phone company and energy companies are forced to. There is one nifty thing about Cablevision the Internet service is OK on the download but quite slow on the upload, I do not believe the upload number below. This website digiorgio.com hosted on the Cablevision service is dreadfully slow.
Download Speed: 16960 kbps (2120 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 3874 kbps (484.3 KB/sec transfer rate) ( The usual asymmetric performance on cable)
Latency/Ping: 45 ms Tue Jun 22 20:01:02 2010
I tried it again from my work connection VPN, it becomes average going to miss this great networking.
Download Speed: 11480 kbps (1435 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 3130 kbps (391.3 KB/sec transfer rate)
Latency/Ping: 77 ms
Tue Jun 22 20:59:02 2010
One of the most enjoyable environments I worked in, was Sun Labs around 1996-2000. During that short period of time I worked on a few projects that are still not ubiquitous or routinely available, JavaPanel ( carry compute with you and plug into a flat panel), Screen Scraping, Tini boards/iButtons and Payment Authentication/Devices (phones that are credit cards, plastic credit cards yuk), smart appliances/homes (mapping you entire house into a url address space). Some of the projects however did become mainstream and had the “The Simultaneity of Invention” property. The two projects I want to discuss are the URL Programming Interface (UPI) and in another post, the Unstructured Data Extraction supported by the Brazil/Naws advanced web server. UPI was very similar to REST. At the time we were not aware of the work going on in REST. If is not even clear to me that this is an invention but rather an application, invention doesn’t map well to software for me, I prefer new application, or simplification over invention. We were more interested in using UPI so we did little to document or describe it. Roy Feilding, gave the topic the careful thought and analysis it required in http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm. We built and wrote alot of code interfacing devices, mounting web sites into one address space for a year or two. It just made sense to map things like devices, smartcards, phone numbers, refrigerators, weather stations and meeting rooms and people, etc. into urls. A surviving presentation can be found here. An article in JavaWorld from 1999, describes what we had been doing for a year or two prior to the article. Someone took the time to explain what it was, in this paper, upi-eng. A short quote from R. L. Heilbroner found in “Does Technology Drive History?”
The phenomenon of simultaneous discovery is well known[1]. From our view, it argues that the process of discovery takes place along a well-defined frontier of knowledge rather than in grab-bag fashion. Admittedly the concept of “simultaneity” is “impressionistic”[2], but the related phenomenon of technological “clustering” again suggests that technical evolution follows a sequential and determinate rather than random course[3].
References
[1] Robert K. Metorn, “Singletons and Mutiples in Scientific Discovery”
[2] John Jewkes, David Sawers and Richard Stillerman, The Sources of Invention
[3] One can count 21 basically different means of flying. Current Sociology 1 (1952)
I just read a short article, Space Sticker Shock in Scientific American about several projects at NASA having greater than factor of two cost overruns.
The Mars Science Laboratory starting estimate .65 billion, 2 billion and going
James Webb Telescope starting estimate 1 billion, 4.5 billion and going
In the article they mention a very interesting fact, that NASA no longer has labs and standalone projects for people to experiment in so that they have no off the shelf ideas or places to go to. They like so many companies are in the waterfall world, where plans get created and then get thrown over the wall for engineers and assembler to execute on. How many software projects have you seen stretch from months to years and then you see another team that does it in a few months with a totally different management approach. It is my belief that those types of teams should be blown up and reorganized, it is cheaper than using what they have done so far. These types of plans are great when everything is understood and you don’t need or want innovation. Clearly designing some of these device like software systems has many unknowns and complex interactions that no plan can account for. An Agile approach to building a Space product may reduce costs and produce better products or at least products where the over run will be detected early. Funding agencies should expect to have vaguer ideas of how much something will cost and instead change to an approach where you definitely get something that works but possibly terminate the program because it is too much to go further. One of the problems with Agile is estimating the total cost, perhaps that is the wrong problem to solve. Think of it as wanting a house that had 100 features but you only get 30, and the most important ones safety from the elements is non negotiable.
A few weeks ago a friend sent me the top ten pictures from Hubble. I do not know how the pictures were selected. The Hubble pictures look like artist renditions but are real. Here is the winner. Today on Yahoo there was an article about art as seen through a microscope. Yahoo moves articles off so quickly and then their search engine doesn’t find them, CNN/CNBC has this problem too. So I just found other sources. I decided to compare them to a book I bought a long time ago, called “Power of Ten”. The book was published in 1982 and the physical distance for which the image was discernible was 10^25 meters or about a billion light-years. Going in the opposite direction, an image could be produced for something at .1 fermi or 10^-16 meters. (Sorry for the crude math syntax, have to look for an equation plugin.
A more macro scale, Another Java Applet providing real value, pan and zoom at various scales. I have yet to see anything this good in the RIA/Web 2.0 world when you exclude the social semantics.
We think we are done with renovations for at least a year or two. We have been working on the house since we bought it in 1999. There were several projects.
Patio and Pool upgrade from bricks to bluestone
Cabana
New Kitchen and Bathrooms
New Master Bedroom
Addition of Front Foyer
Gut and redo ground level floor ( due to May2007 storms), with state of the art water removal system.
Regrade and install 80 feet of buried drains
Decorative Arches
Oil and Stone driveway
It took about 9 years with 1 or 2 years of no activity. I am glad it is over. The following pictures show the completed arches, driveway and the front foyer addition.
We need one more week of good weather to complete the masonry work. It is taking more time than we thought. We are part of the problem we keep adding things like built in flower pots and recessed lighting and side drains. We need to get the brick part of the drive way done soon, so that we can get the hot oil driveway done before it is too cold. Latest site pictures can be found here.
Doing an instrumentation experiment with our water consumption. Over the years I have put in a number of underground pipes, and I do the winter shutdown later and later every year. There is no meter on my well so I can’t really tell if the well pump is on or off for long periods of time. I also have no idea how much water we use. I am considering a computer controlled shutoff valve, or maybe a remote controlled power switch for the well pump to turn it off when there is abnormal usage. I picked up a Clark Model CLXC-20D-C-S and I am going to connect it today. I have not looked into the details of the output signal and how to interface it to some type of computer, something small like a Basic Stamp or maybe just get a board or USB device for one of the servers. If I were to buy a new house I would actually ask if you can get one with a built in web server with local instrumentation.
