Posts by Dafyd Colquhoun 54 publicly visible posts • joined 3 May 2013
But if you steal a phone from Apple they'll kill it and make it blare an alarm. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/global-trends/return-the-phones-apple-sends-warning-to-thieves-who-looted-iphones-during-los-angeles-riots/articleshow/121796553.cms?from=mdr
I was involved in a "rapid site relocation" because of impending flooding. That meant all the computers, phones and MFC were powered off, unplugged, put in a truck and taken to a higher ground site where there was a network connection. When we got unpacked and I plugged it all in the printer didn't work. The printer was very important because that's how requests for help due to the flood were given to field teams.
IT helpdesk swore black and blue that I shouldn't have moved the printer and I'd broken something. Turns out that over the evening that we moved someone stuffed up the print server and _no_ printers in the organisation worked. I pointed out that if I'd waited for IT to do the move the printer would have been completely submerged in flood water, and I guessed that wasn't good for it. Never got an apology for the threats to "report an unauthorised IT move".
Lucky they didn't know about the "extra network kit" from home that let all the laptops, phones and the printer share the one working network outlet, or how personal laptops and USB sticks were used to transfer PDFs and then print using a USB cable to the MFC.
I wrote a tool for a utility that showed where outages were. It started off as something that ran on my desktop PC (only managers had laptops) but if I real work that needed all resources then I'd shut it down. Control room people would then ring up and want it started up if bad weather was coming. The manager eventually purloined a spare PC and the software ran happily in the control room.
Until it didn't. The software was hardcoded with my username to access a database and after I left the business and a year passed they finally cleaned up the database users. That killed the software.
It was only CxO discussions that got "my" account rehydrated while a fix was prepared, after IT swore black and blue that it wasn't possible to reactivate an account. Apparently the software was now deemed so important it was then ported to a redundant VM host with hot restart and all the fruit. The skunkworks project that ran in the background sure grew up!
Fortunately all this software is now well retired and real software to do the job is making the maps.
Don't forget the failure of the Intelsat 29e satellite in 2019 due to propulsion problems (https://www.intelsat.com/newsroom/intelsat-29e-satellite-failure/). Same family from Boeing. 29e and 33e are both in the EpicNG family of high throughput satellites (#1 and #2).
Had a similar "please stop reporting" missive when I worked in oil & gas. Safety was drummed in to us, but dodgy contractors that building owner would use didn't care and would work on 5 story roof with no fall protection and were generally idiots. And we reported each time, but after a few days manglement had heard enough.
Yep, the tyres that are black because the rubber has lots of carbon in it, and have steel belts for reinforcing.
One place you do _not_ stand in a thunderstorm is anywhere near a large truck in an open cut mine. If/when lightning hits those tyres can explode and gut you. It's common enough that mine safety bods put out alerts: https://www.rshq.qld.gov.au/safety-notices/mines/lightning-strikes-on-rubber-tyred-vehicles
I worked at a substation that had a particularly peculiar NTP server. For some reason, known only to the clowns the "designed" the SCADA they made NTP report local time instead of UTC. Broke every standard, but somehow the numpties managed it in an RTU.
All was "fine" until New Years Day (and yay, working a public holiday for no compensation, because of crappy industrial law in the country). Turns out the fudge code to apply UTC offset from localtime had a hard coded year.
Standards - they are there for a reason!
Who is still using encoders on variable speed induction motor drives? Back EMF is more than enough to precisely control the motor. I've seen demos where a scoop on an arm is connected to the shaft of an induction motor and it can throw a ball into a basket.
Back EMF sensor-less drive tech is more than 20 years old. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/955655
Decent battery systems monitor each cell. I developed analytics for a stationary grid battery system that had lots of cells in a module, multiple modules in a string, and several strings in the overall battery. Voltages and temperatures were monitored at cell, module and string levels. Yes, that's a lot of cells (784 in this system). But a good module-level BMS talking to a system-level BMS can manage it.
In one job I worked I needed to run VNC to control an industrial PC. It had been built with a "home" version of Windows and so there was no RDP (yes, "industrial" and "Windows" shouldn't in the same sentence). The telecoms people were able to patch up fibre from the control centre to the remote site, and some high power SFPs for the media converters at each end. All up it was a 100km patch cord.
I know of a power company that lost microwave SCADA every now and again, and it turned out their 'line of sight' was blocked by modern huge cruise ships in the river. Ships were smaller when the link was established.
Inlaws "acquired" a pool table that required coins to release the balls once sunk. I was asked to install a little hidden switch that bridged the coin contact. I'm guessing the Burrows crowd were more mechie than elecie.
My somewhat thrifty in-law decided to keep the coin action for parties, and it was a nice little earner. No need to reveal the little switch tucked up under the table ;-)
There are spectrum analysers from last millenium that can only write to 3.5" floppies, and do so in a proprietary binary format. The converter software was designed for Win95 and won't run under 64 b windows. My colleague uses a Win XP VM, but I found the software worked fine under WINE in a Debian VM. USB floppy drives are finally useful for something.
That's what happens when a cheap manager buys test equipment that was end-of-life 25 years ago. And it's still in use now.
Pager messages get through when SMS get backed up. I worked for a power company and one of the managers was being chewed out about not responding to a major storm. He had a work phone, so they used SMS for him. Us plebs on call played pass the parcel with a pager. While getting chewed out the storm alert/call in arrived. After that all the people that needed to respond got pagers.
At one stage I had two phones of doom for volunteer emergency services (one for a leadership position and one as duty officer) and a pager (for the power company). Don't miss being on call, but the double time on a Sunday for storm was quite nice.
Technically illegal in some countries to monitor pagers, but I've -- heard from a friend -- that certain software is available and can be fed with a scanner or SDR and messages flow in pure text. With private contact info for all sorts of people. So I've heard.
Sounds like your accountant went to the same school a manager of mine did.
I was asked to specify a UPS for a substation control computer (oopsie, somehow was left out of the build spec), so I did what was asked. This was a big 132/33 kV substation feeding a large industrial plant, so not small change if things didn't work. Came up with an economical APC solution (SmartUPS) that would fit nicely and be supportable for years. Idiot boss went and bought a BackUPS instead because it had the same VA rating and was under half the price. Also well under half the battery capacity, and it didn't keep the server up long enough to safely shut down.
Been there, done that, was that user.
Whipped up a quick'n'dirty mapping application for emergency response planning @ previous employer. Operators liked it, and it was implemented on a spare PC. PC had its own user account, but the backend DB access relied on my account.
All worked fine until 6 months after I left the company and the DB account was cleaned up. "Nothing can be done" said IT. Operations Manager spoke to IT Director in a firm manner. Account was reinstated that afternoon and then something was figured out.
Last I heard the Q'n'D afternoon bodge system had moved to be a hot-failover VM because it was that useful. Until an IT upgrade rendered it unnecessary and the features were rolled into the main system.
Brisbane is a bit special because of the speed the wasps can block things up. At many airports there is a minimum "parking time" before covers are fitted (ranges from 2h to 24h), but for Brisbane it's "always" for most airlines.
There have been a few cases of pitot covers being left on. And if the aircraft does take off then the pitot heaters will be turned on and that melts the covers onto the probes.
Wasn't a crew member that spotted it. It was a guy refuelling an aircraft at the next gate, and he notified the ground crew that working the aircraft (and had missed things).
A warning placard was put in the cockpit, but the ground boss removed it assuming that the pitot covers were removed. There's the flaw -- the walk-around wasn't done.
From reading the ATSB report it seems that the ground contractors were new to the job and were dealing with multiple aircraft. So this is a system accident caused by cost-cutting and under-resourcing of a critical function.
Back in my uni days a grad student found out the hard way about choosing the wrong printer. Sending to the department secretary's printer in a locked office was not good (in the Link Building -- if you studied EE in the 1990s in the city that shines then you'll remember). Made the local paper too.
The problem was that Samsung promoted the phones with activities that were specifically excluded in the fine print. Bit like showing how tough it was by driving over it with a steam roller and then having "* cannot be driven over" in the fine print. Sea water and chlorinated water were excluded, but were the only water shown. It's about as black and white as you can get here. Hence a few million reasons for them to think about their ad campaigns
When I worked for the local power board after the retail side of the business was sold off we got a threatening letter from the default retailer for the area. The letter said there was no payment of the bill for a particular location, which happened to be a substation and so there is no retail meter (energy costs all part of the network chargers). Unless it was paid that the power would be disconnected by the electricity supplier. Which was us. Nup, that wasn't going to happen!
I had lots of interesting experience as a student employee of the uni computer centre doing cable fixes. Got to drag a hefty TDR around campus to find the inevitable cable faults.
Two stand out more than 25y later.
1. The cable "installer" for the forestry school used metal stables to affix the RG58 to the wall. The crushing wasn't great, but the times they missed and put a staple through the coax were worse. The staple was pulled out, dragging braid onto the centre conductor. The replacement staple went over the top hiding the evidence. Fix was to chop a section out, terminate with two new BNCs and put in a barrel joiner. Don't recall why I didn't put on a cable jack on one side and skip the barrel.
2. One lab had bayonet style make/break connectors (AMP?) that avoided T pieces on each computer. Unfortunately the cover was held in place with sink plug chain. The ones with lots of little ball bearings. Some would always fall out, roll around and go into the floor mounted sockets. That shorted the coax. It was quicker to get a grunty vac and just go over each outlet than it was to use the TDR.
We moved to 10BASE-T while I was there and I was the cable factory. The pattern is burnt into my brain and it's still satisfying to whip up a cable from memory and have it pass all the tests (maintaining the twists is critical) to the amazement of graduate engineers.
A paramedic that I knew through volunteer emergency services told us about the time he was doing CPR on a young woman. He had removed the necessary clothes and was doing CPR and partner was setting up the Lifepack (fancy defib). Some old 'lady' came by and started hitting him around the head with her bag as she thought (if you can call it that) they were molesting the woman. They were in full uniform and had the ambulance there with lights on!
The stuff doesn't even have to fit in a garden. I witnessed 10 GHz moonbounce between Queensland and Texas at a ham radio conference. VERY shallow angles, but a 30cm antenna has good gain, and when driven with a 50W amplifier put out a big signal.
Lora over that distance is impressive. Getting up there with Joe Taylor (K1JT) work using Arecibo. 61dBi gain at 433 MHz is massive, and that allowed one other party to use a handheld radio with a rubber ducky (or so is claimed). Believable since the spot size of the beam was 1/2 the diameter of the moon. https://physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/k1jt/Moonbounce_at_Arecibo.pdf
Great to hear about all the people from the civilised world that are allowed to install their own network cabling. Over-regulated Australia decided that was far too dangerous, and so Registered Cablers are a thing. You can run the Cat5/Cat6 around the skirting all you like, but going into the wall or roof cavity is a big no-no without the right ticket.
Bit like DIY electrical. Queensland Government is looking to ban the sale of plugs, sockets, light switches etc in hardware stores. New Zealand Government publishes a guide on safe DIY electrical. Both places have the same wiring rules (AS/NZS 3000)!
Many years ago when I worked for the local power company we checked clearances from the >100kV power lines to ground with a laser survey. Turns out there were quite a few places where the stringing calculations done in the 1950s to 1970s weren't so good and the mandatory clearances weren't there, so there was a big program to fix it up, and to get more clearance (and hence more power capacity) for critical spans. All costly especially as the power couldn't be turned off until other lines had been upgraded.
One of the property offices had the realisation that the reason the clearance on one site wasn't good enough wasn't helped by a farmer building an illegal dam on the transmission easement. The farmer was 'encouraged' to remove the dam, and then to remove a bit more of the hill. Just shows that line clearance can be achieved by raising lines or lowering ground.
Had that one when we first returned to the office in Australia last year. Meeting rooms were too small to hold the whole team (one person per 4 sq.m limit) so we all sat at our desks (1.5 m spacing maintained) and met via Webex, along with 1 or 2 people that were in other offices. Nothing annoying at all hearing the people around you and then the same voice 300 ms later.
I love the free ITU-R, ITU-T and ETSI standards. It's pretty f-ing rude for ISO to start pressuring ITU-T to stop releasing standards. IEEE standards are not too bad as they are mostly self-contained. The "choose your own adventure" journey through ISO and IEC standards is bonkers.
The New Zealand government made a good step in this area. Many (maybe most) NZ Standards that are required by legislation are available for free.
https://www.standards.govt.nz/get-standards/sponsored-standards/building-related-standards/
<blockquote>"The Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (Building System Performance) has funded the following building standards, used for Building Code compliance, for free download. This initiative fits within Standards New Zealand’s strategy of working with regulators and industry to get more standards pre-funded, as well as enabling better access to standards that make a difference to the wellbeing of New Zealanders. This, in turn, helps grow New Zealand for all." </blockquote>
It helps that Standards New Zealand is a part of MBIE. https://www.standards.govt.nz/about/
Standards Australia is an independent organisation and so we get to pay stupid amounts of money to figure out how we should build pool fences etc. Queensland has duplicated some of the standards which is good.
Pretty much the same situation in New Zealand. If meet the business rules and notify the government of your fare structure then you can run a taxi company. I guess surge pricing breaks those rules, so Uber skirts them and trots out the old 'scarcity' argument (which is valid in Australia and other countries) regardless.
https://www.nzta.govt.nz/commercial-driving/taxis-shuttles-buses-and-other-passenger-services/becoming-an-approved-taxi-organisation/
BZZT! Lithium ion is not Lithium metal, just as Sodium ions in salt are not dangerous like Sodium metal.
The flammable aspect of a Li-ion battery is the organic electrolyte. Lots of heat from a short, especially when the separator is punctured, can set the organic goodness on fire. This is not a combustible metal fire.
Had a day's worth of fault finding with a TDR (an old CRT Tektronix one that weighed a tonne) because some dopey 'leccy had installed a new 10BASE-2 coax run using a staple gun in the Forestry Dept of the uni I went to.
The problem was that the numpty had missed quite a few times and put the staple through the coax. So he pulled the staple out and redid the job over the top. Problem was that withdrawing the staple dragged the shield through the centre conductor and shorted out the cable. TDR found each short, and since laying new cable wasn't an option it was a matter of cutting back just enough cable to fit two new BNC plugs and then join them with a barrel connector.
Had a weird one in the electronics lab too. This lab had 10BASE-2, but with the fancy floor connectors that allowed a cable to be plugged in that broke the circuit, diverted up to the PC, and then went back down again (totally superseded by 10BASE-10). The floor ports had little covers secured by a chain. Someone had used sink plug chain, the one with lots of little ball bearings. The balls would fall out, roll across the floor and down into a port, shorting out the special connector. Apparently took AGES to figure out the fault, but then all it needed was a strong vacuum cleaner to 'fix' it.
I don't miss 10BASE-2 in the slightest. The best part of going to 10BASE-10 was the part time work I had making patch leads for the computer centre (they were too cheap to buy them). I still have the wiring pattern burnt into my brain!
If you really want machines to be secure then the only bit of wire/cable in common should be the power (and avoid that if you can). Connecting a USB (or even PS/2) device to two computers breaks the barrier.
The stupid things people will do (not calling the researchers stupid, just those that do use a KVM to in this way) in the name of convenience. Much like hooking the SCADA system of a factory to the corporate LAN so executives can look at the pretty graphs...
I'm surprised that Redflow haven't mentioned that flow batteries (including theirs) are different to all other batteries. The prefer to be empty, not charged. Not so good for a backup application, but OK for solar load shifting. And they need pumps to circulate electrolyte, and those pumps use power.
I've never considered lead-acid charging to be complex. They float charge with a constant voltage source quite nicely, and don't have the thermal runaway problems of more complex chemistry. They might have a low energy density, but how often do you pick up and move a battery bank that is not installed in a car?
100Mb/s download speeds -- whoopdie-doo! I'm sick of being subject to <1Mb/s upload speeds as this stuffs up VPN to home, video conferencing and video uploads. Time for the HFC providers to allocate more channels towards the node for the end users to use. If HFC cannot provide a minimum of 10Mb/s upload speeds then there is no way in hell it can be considered equivalent to GPON NBN.
I've had a couple of corporate cards, both as a graduate engineer and as a senior engineer. The days as a graduate were a lot more fun: lots of travel, buying electronics etc. All good. One day-trip up north took a turn for the worse when we missed the last flight out of Rockhampton. Trying to find accommodation at short notice in Beef Week took considerable effort. I swear that most of the room in the establishment were rented by the hour (as happens when cashed up country boys arrive in town) ... Anyway, the only way to get home the following morning was business class on the first flight, which left before the corporate travel agent opened. We had surprisingly few restrictions on the corporate cards: no booking travel. The travel rules were: no domestic business class travel. So when the team leader said to us: book the business class flight on your card and we'll sort it out later I don't think he appreciated the quantum of faeces in the ventilation. It was all justified (compared to accommodation for another night and flying out the next day). The reaction of the guy in row 2 of the plane was priceless. He was a board member of an associated company (common shareholders), and was very interested to know why slightly smelly people in trade clothes were sitting in front of him.
At another place the corporate card was a Diners. Biggest piece of shit I've ever used. Companies love it because the cardholder is jointly liable for expenses, so if the company refuses to pay the bill you're on the hook. The problem is that in rural areas nobody accepts the bloody thing, even petrol stations, so you need to have some spare $ on your personal card.
Still beats the risk of using a personal card to buy stuff for the company and hope to get reimbursed. It was nice scoring the points for $20000 worth of GSM modems, but the boss wised up. When I went to spend $15000 on a new oscilloscope I was told that he'd pay for it through the company accounts since it was a capital purchase. When the scope was delivered it included the credit card receipt on the invoice which showed he'd paid with his personal card and scored the points. Out bastarded!
Flashes are not a good thing around power electronics that use light triggered semiconductors (for voltage isolation). I've heard of one model of static AFLC (ripple control) generator that blew up when someone took a photo in the factory. The flash trigged ALL the transistors, resulting in a DC bus fault.
Flashes are also not good around switchboards with arc detectors. Flash, then black. Not good if that panel controls a 400MW steam turbine generators ...
I worked on a substation SCADA system that was infected with viruses. One of the reasons is that the SCADA vendors bastardise Windows (XP in this case, installed in 2013!) to do things it isn't meant to. They then do not guarantee it will work if ANY anti-virus software is installed. The mods included blocking Ctrl-Alt-Del until an Admin user was logged in. That isn't mean to be possible, but somehow they managed!
The only way we got to clean things up was AV boot CDs, and taking one server down at a time (thank goodness for redundancy). I was ready to chew out our technicians for sloppy behaviour, but then found viruses on a server fresh from being supplied.
The functional spec required vendors include AV and provide a certificate of cleanliness. When the Contract Dept was challenged they shrugged and said 'so what?' With an attitude like that is it any wonder that crap gets delivered, accepted and paid for?
Fibre optic cable can be tapped by bending it in a serpentine manner. You clamp a pick up device around the individual cores and the photons that 'escape' are used to recover the message. THIS IS BLOODY DIFFICULT, it would be easier to 'encourage' the backhaul provider to make space for a special box in their data centre.
Tapping fibre:
http://www.thefoa.org/tech/ref/appln/tap-fiber.html
http://defensetech.org/2005/02/21/jimmy-carter-super-spy/
The reason we use AC is that voltage transformation is easier, so the changes needed to get from power stations to homes is easier. For long distance efficient transport of power we use DC in the form of HVDC. This is 80kV or more (800kV in china). These converters are expensive, so only used when the power transfer justifies it or where AC just doesn't work (e.g. underground cables more than 100km long).
AC is good for spinny things too. Not everyone has nice variable reluctance motors in their appliances (thanks F&P), so single phase induction motors are going to be around for some time.
A standard home DC bus of 48V or so would be nice. ELV, so no licence required for DIY work here in Australia at least.
If you're happy with your old phone (my Sony W880i is going strong, and it is basically a skinny W800i) then another option is to keep the phone and ditch Telstra. They're trying to get out of GSM anyway, so it won't be long before 2G phones won't work at all.
My Motorola 3200 International still works with Vodafone, and you can't get an older GSM handheld phone than that!!!
Part of the 'value' that journals provide is taking perfectly reasonable English sentences and mangling them into American 'English'. It isn't enough that 's' becomes 'z' at the end of many words. Oh noes, there is a LOT of effort required to change the comma after 'however' into a semi colon and to make double quotes into single quotes. This all takes effort and must be recovered by extorting libraries.
Societies like IEEE and ASCE at lease use their publishing revenue to sponsor conferences and are generally 'non profit'. The likes of Elsevier are there to make dividends for their shareholders. That's why I am prepared to write papers, review papers and be an editor for IEEE journals at no charge, but I WILL not submit papers or review for the 'for profit'.
The open access journals are not exactly free for the author to submit too either (since someone has to pay and it isn't the reader), and the review times can be LONG. The IEEE has a goal of it being no more than 13 weeks from submission to first decision, and in my experience it can be as short as 8 weeks.
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