The Chemistry of Engineering

In my last post regarding using a HTPC and fileserver for home entertainment, I was referring to Ubuntu Server Edition to use as operating system for the fileserver. Till that moment it seemed reasonable because a server edition was the best choice for a server.

However during installation a couple of annoyances came across. For example it does not come with a desktop environment. Since I am used to work on a desktop most of the time and do text based commands on a terminal window, I wanted some graphical eye candy in front of me. And because I normally rely heavily on the web to find out about problems, Firefox had to be available all the time.

So I decided to start using Ubuntu Desktop Edition. continue reading…

Today I am playing around with Geo Mashup, a WordPress Plugin that combines geo information on this blog with Google maps. A Mashup in internet terms is a combination of different services or applications to create a new one.

My goal is to create an overall map with puns on places that I visited. Sort of ego-wall travel style.

To be continued, for now the result can be seen on travel.

Featuring in CBS 60 minutes, Bloom Energy a Silicon Valley based technology company was showing their latest technology the Bloom Box. Brought as the home power generator device that is going to change the world, it was showing a small fuel cell technology unit. Able to generate power on an extreme high efficiency and small scale basis, the possibilities are endless.

Imagine every house to have its own power generator in the basement. No power outages because the power plant went down. Tribes in Africa that have lived close to nature for ages can have access to electronic devices, mobile phones, internet and irrigation without having to rely on a power grid that will never reach their village.

This all sounds too good to be true, isn’t it? continue reading…

I had to create a new password to log into my work computer. The mail system in use is Lotus Notes, and there is a option to choose the same password for Notes and Xp. Some simple rules are applied to ensure everybody is using a strong enough password.

This requirement brought me to rethink something that hit me recently, the RockYou.com hack. It happened in December 2009 by a very simple technique, but the impact was disastrous. Over 32 million user account details were aquired and brought into the public. Later on Imperva issued an analysis of the passwords in use and the outcome was shocking. continue reading…

Last weekend I spend some good hours testing and digging out a hard disk that -I thought- had crashed. It turned out that Windows XP had some real problems with the disk, but Ubuntu was reading it correctly. Nevertheless I followed some guides on data recovery with Ubuntu and tried it on this disk.

The Windows XP filesystem is NTFS, which uses a table with all information about the files on the disk. If this table gets corrupted, Windows is not able to properly read the files anymore, but the files themselves are mostly still intact. There are some programs that ignore the table and look on the disk itself for the files.

Ubuntu has these programs in its software repository so I installed the required software with Synaptic which went easy. I tried Foremost and Scalpel, both read the disk entirely and check on header information. Foremost was originally developed by the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations continue reading…

While surfing the internet for some work related info, I came across the term click chemistry. First I thought it had to do with mouse clicks or some other digital phenomena. Surprisingly it is a rather new term in chemistry.

Click chemistry is about synthesis of rather complex molecules in small steps. The main purpose is to quickly examine the pool of drug candiates. Drug testing nowadays is done by creating a molecule and testing its effects on living creatures. By ruling out all non-active substances new drugs are found.

Based on a set of criteria which are based on natural environment properties, the pool of drug candidates is drastically lowered. This will hopefully speed up the discovery of new drugs. Only question remains is what to do when all substances are tested…

http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/chemistry/chemical-synthesis/technology-spotlights/click.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_chemistry

http://curlyarrow.blogspot.com/2008/11/what-is-click-chemistry.html

Since a couple of weeks I am the proud owner of a Nexus One Google Android phone. My old -prehistoric- phone was the HTC TyTN which has served me for 3.5 years. One of the pains everybody has to go through after buying a new phone is to move all contact information from the old device to the new one.

The HTC TYTN is running Windows Mobile, some old version and the Nexus One runs on Android 2.1. As I am lazy by nature, I was looking for ways to automate this process.

One problem was that I only could use Ubuntu as a midlle man and I was not sure syncing the TYTN was possible. Luckily there is a program that is able to do this available for Ubuntu; Synce.

To do this follow these steps:

continue reading…

Last week I bought a Philips 42″ LCD TV. It is capable of showing Full HD content. Taken into account my ever growing collection of Full HD movies, and the growing use of Blue-Ray, we will be fully up to standards for the next years.

However my nature does not allow the purchace of a TV alone. There has to be more intelligence in such a step to be fully satisfactory. Therefore I planned to buy the components for a HTPC and fileserver along with the TV. Plans are to connect them together to get a full media network at home where every device shares its content with the others.

As always this turned out to be a quite ambitious plan, but it can be done. Others did it before me isn’t it?

continue reading…

Right now I am typing this on my Nexus One using the WordPress app.

The other night I was reading my corporate emails and found out that coming months are going to be more exciting than expected.

There is an upstream project about to start, which will be in the FEED phase. The project comprises development of three sets of P&ID’s, for three phases of construction. Not realy a technological challenge, but there is enough to learn and it leaves room for other activities to be done.

One of my roles in the project will be Process Systems Engineer. I will look after the overall quality of the P&ID’s, keep an eye on the consistency and I will be involved in SmartPlant activities.

Another role is that of Process Engineer. I will be doing regular process activities like calculations and dealing with design issues.

Finally I will be coordinating the conversion of Excel tools from version 2003 to 2007. This will be a tedious task whith a lot of uncertainties. A real challenge thus.