Blast from the Past
I happened to be scrounging through the supply cabinet at work and found this relic of the computing world, a 5.25″ floppy disk. Putting them in the cabinet may have just been someone’s idea of a joke, but it brings up the very real point of dealing with legacy data and compatibility. If there was anything on the floppy, it was probably so old that it couldn’t possibly be important to us anymore, but if it was, the chances of finding a computer on the premises that could read it would be slim to nil. Now as a mechanical engineer, I don’t typically encounter legacy operating systems (COBOL, anyone?), but I have had to dig up some very old technical drawings. I was working on a radar system upgrade and had to pull up technical drawings from the radar’s original construction in the 1960’s. The drawings were stored on microfiche, and…
Finishing Projects
As a naturally curious person, I find I’m often researching new subjects, learning new skills, and trying new things. (I’m sure you can relate, but Wikipedia is like a big giant black hole of time.) This typically means I have a lot of half-developed talents and unfinished projects. I actually did finish a (small) project lately, and it got me thinking about what the difference in motivation is between projects I start and finish and those I abandon. In this instance, the small project happened to be an engagement website (for myself and my new fiance! I guess this is what happens when engineers get married…) Now I wrote an article a while ago about the difference between academic vs. “real” programming, and I’d been meaning to learn some web development lately. Learning to program “real code” was sort of a vague, ephemeral goal, but the engagement website and server was a tangible, defined thing,…
Open Source and Community Support
One of the reasons I became a blogger was to become more involved in a community which could offer me advice and support on the problems I face in graduate school and as a woman in STEM. In many cases, others have faced the same types of problems I’m encountering and have found possible solutions. So what does this have to do with open source software? In many cases, there are communities of users that will offer beginners advice and support on starting out with a new software package or help troubleshoot problems. One of the open source software packages I use pretty much daily is LAMMPS (Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator), developed and maintained by a team at Sandia. While it’s a very well-documented code, the error messages can be vague. This is where the support community comes in. The lammps-user mailing list archive is usually my first stop, to…
Theory vs. Practice
“I know how to code,” I said, “but I don’t know how to Code.” “Umm. You just said the same thing twice and said there was a difference.” “Yes,” I said, “but I said it with different emphasis each time.” “Please explain.” So this was how I explained my frustrations to a sympathetic ear. See, I had dabbled and learned all sorts of programming languages: Basic, C, a little Java, Javascript, Scheme, a bit of 8086 assembly and even Zilog-80 assembly so I could try to make calculator games for my old TI. I’d also managed to learn enough HTML and CSS to hack up my personal blogger site. I mean, I know about For loops, If/Then statements, functions, objects, quick sorts, and so on. Despite all that, I was completely flummoxed if I wanted to make anything substantial or real. I didn’t know how to make standalone Windows executables, or set…
Seeing the code in the machines – Indestructible software.
For many people they just except that software exist as some form of stuff that allows you do do things on computers or is hidden inside machines. In a way software can be as hard to physically get hold of as it is to see the flow of electronics in a wire or see the flow of air particles generating a vortex off a wing tip. However software is a important components in nearly everything you touch, from the mouse your scroll around the page with to the hundreds of servers that send you search results when looking for that next holiday. Software engineers are a massive part of the industry but what does software really do and can software really break? It would be difficult to explain software and how the flow of code works in a modern computer as they have become very complex machine. Instead its possibly…
ProE Etiquette
How well you get along with your coworkers can have a huge impact on how effective an engineer you can be. I’m not just talking about meetings, but how well you can collaborate on projects. People generally know you don’t pass off shoddy work or incomplete projects to the next person who has to work on it for you. But sometimes I’ve seen exactly that in the design world. Even though most CAD programs track everyone who touched that part or drawing, people seem to think they can get away with things they generally wouldn’t try in a report or presentation. A couple months ago Peter J Francis asked whether MCAD or ECAD was more trouble than it was worth. GEARS discussed his love hate relationship with it but admitted that the skills he learned with ProEngineer allowed him to really kickstart his career. Skills with a particular CAD or…
Google+
Few have escaped the news that there is a new shinny social media network launch underway – Google+ is here but what are we the engineering community making of it? Over the last few years I have become a convert when it comes to social media. If you had told me that facebook and twitter were good engineering tools then I would have laughed at you. However just over a year ago when I joined DesignSpark as a blogger for ebmpapst I started the slippy slope into online networking. So Google+ is here in Beta phase at the time of writing this and I got an invite from a fellow engineer about a week ago. The community is still growing all under the control of Google but is slowly starting to show how it can be used. So early on I wanted to capture the first views of other engineers…
Keeping Track of Work – Gantt Charts
Last week I talked about keeping track of your work in lab notebooks. There were some great comments on alternative systems, such as PowerPoint slide decks, simple memory, README files or digital scripts, or cataloged data in folders on the laptop. So that’s all well and good for writing down what you do – but how about keeping track of WHEN you need to do things, as well as what you’ve done? For scheduling meetings and events, I still like using a paper calendar. But I think I’m in the minority in that regard – most of my colleagues use Outlook, or Google Calendar, or some other online system. I’ve tried to go online (as with so many things these days, to the cloud!), but it’s just not my preference. I’ve used Tungle with classmates before, which is a group calendar that can coordinate between lots of different online calendaring…
She’s got the look.
When I began writing my master’s thesis, I had a big decision to make: Microsoft Word or LaTeX. I didn’t like the equation formatting in Word, but I could live with it. However, I was at the tail end of a campus thesis editor who HATED LaTeX, and so I was told that I would save myself a lot of heartache if I just went with Word. I also figured that the learning curve was significantly less steep for Word. I was wrong on both counts, and the equation formatting ended up being the least of my concerns. As it turns out, writing a large document in Microsoft Word required me to learn to use settings I wasn’t familiar with. For instance, I had to learn to put pictures in such that they would be recognized by the program as a figure. Then, I had to make a table giving…