The Chemistry of Engineering

My company finally changed from MS Excel 2003 to 2007. Part of this late change is compatibility with other programs and of course the natural drive of some engineers to hack their own macros into a worksheet. If such a file proves useful to other engineers, suddenly a tool is born. This gets checked against a number of hand calculated situations and if the outcome pleases everybody the tool is ‘verified’.

Well if everybody has the skills and the will to write proper macro’s there is not so much of a problem. However hitting the record macro button and save whatever comes out is not a good practice in my humble opinion. But that happens a lot. continue reading…

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…

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