Article on Test Proficiency

While looking up some LabVIEW details I came across this article about skills a test engineer should have. This dovetails nicely with quite a few blogs I've written. It will make you think.

Geeky humor

So I heard a joke from the CEO of my company yesterday that was told to him by a very rich, well-known engineer. Not to drop names, but he's on the same order as the guy who invented the mouse. They were discussing a startup company that's designing hydrogen fuel-cell technology:

A hydrogen atom walks into a bar, walks up to the bartender and says, "I've lost my electron. Have you seen him?"

The bartender replies, "Nope. Are you sure you lost him?"

Says the hydrogen, "Yes, I'm positive."

That joke was so bad, I came up with two others this morning. They're also bad, so naturally I had to share.

After the hydrogen atom has been at the bar a few minutes he looks at the clock on the wall in surprise. "Is it really that late?"

"Yeah," replies the bartender. "You have to leave already?"

The hydrogen atom nods. "I've gotta split."

And this one:

Before the hydrogen atom leaves the bar he sees an oxygen atom walk in with two blonde bombshells, one on each arm. He groans and says, "Now that's just not fair."

"What isn't?" replies the bartender.

The hydrogen atom points to the three and says, "There should only be one of those blondes per oxide."

I'm sure the job offers for joke writer at SNL will start any minute now.

Happy New Year

Happy Holidays, and I hope 2010 treats you better than the last. Heck, I hope the next DECADE treats you better than the last.

JMP 8.0

I upgraded to JMP 8.0 this fall, and it's great.

I'm in danger of being redundant, since I've mentioned this software package FOUR separate times over the past couple years: here and here in 2007, briefly in 2008, and again this past summer. But I've used the software regularly since 2005 for data analysis and presentation material. I really like it.

Anyway, I wanted to give props to SAS for the latest version of JMP. There are a few big things they added (I liked the animated graphs) and several smaller additions, but the best feature for me has been the graph builder. In the past when I was trying to see a trend in data I would graph some things as linear plots, try them as contour plots, maybe add histograms. In other words, I would play around with it.

Graph builder sort of automates that process. You can interactively add data to the x-axis, multiple sets of data to the y-axis, separate plots with the same x-axis, separate sets of data on the same plot, etc. If you don't like what you see, remove a set of data, or graph it differently. It's helped me out with two specific problems already, which makes it worthwhile in time savings alone.

I don't work for SAS, I don't get any compensation from them. I just really like the software.

Instrumentation Finder website

There's a relatively new website called Instrumentation Finder. To quote from their intro page:

This site aims to provide a one stop shop for any and all Instrumentation requirements whilst providing all users with the option to source equipment from overseas suppliers outside their normal purchasing reach.

I've tried it out some and it is a) heavily biased towards UK and Europe suppliers (they say that is changing), and b) still a work in progress. But I certainly like the idea of a website specifically for finding instrumentation manufacturers and their products.

FIRST robotics

I posted over a year ago about FIRST Lego League and how my oldest son liked it. Well, now my second son is in middle school and decided to join the robotics club as well. They had their regional competition a few weeks ago and just barely missed the cutoff for the state championship.

He was disappointed about it, but I know he had a lot of fun. From an engineering point of view, I thought the best part was the night before the regional competition. I stopped by for the last half hour of their planning session and got to see them toss ideas back and forth, debug code, and try out different ideas for solving a tough challenge. In other words, it was a lot like a group of engineers solving a problem. Cool.

Spam

Well, today I had to implement word verification for comments to my blog. Up until a couple months ago I'd never had this problem. Test engineering is not exactly a hot button topic, so this blog never gets more than a couple dozen hits a day. I probably flew below the radar.

But starting early this fall, and accelerating the past couple weeks, have been a lot of badly-phrased comments advertising drugs and websites of the usual varieties you see in spam. I guess the auto-generating junk-mail code out there is starting to expand.

So now I've implemented captchas for anyone who wants to add comments. Hopefully that will cut down on the comments I have to delete.