Cool Projects
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That's cool. I worked in real estate before.
And as for my earlier comment, it was just clearly too early. 🙂
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I've rolled out a refactor of our wind tunnel metrics database system, which was partitioned tables with row compression and is now partitioned views across separate databases with page compression. This makes it considerably easier to move data from live to archive (was scary sliding partitions!) and reduces the backup considerably (as the data is essentially a heap, no need to daily backup the old databases every day). The data is created at a remote site on the WAN and is replicated back to HQ live in seconds, billions of rows of data in a year. Also got a performance boost as part of the deal - which was an unexpected bonus. The system is used to design the car for an F1 team.
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Peter Schott (8/23/2013)
Personally - we're prepping for a newborn within the month. That has led to painting, purchasing, and fixing stuff around the house as we get ready. Not necessarily cool in the things I'm doing, but excited about the reason behind those projects. 🙂Now, that's an awesome project!
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I don't know if this qualifies, but I have just launched a website where you can generate railroad diagrams from the grammar in the Transact-SQL Reference. The resulting diagrams look this:
.Please check it out at http://translator.colindaley.com.
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>>Please check it out at http://translator.colindaley.com
Is down
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Again! If this keeps up I am going to have to find a new hosting provider.
It works for me here, and it was working when I posted. Please try again.
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Well my recent past DOS batch script was to come up with a system to get all the logins from over a 100+ individual domains and then load it into a SQL DB to evaluate them.
The most recent I just finished today was to setup a backup of an Interbase DB with 7-Zip to a directory on the 100+ individual domains/servers. And that includes a rolling seven day zip with e-mails daily to the pertinent users.
Basically the right people get an e-mail with an attached Excel file. If you don't see a backup for this morning in the Excel file that means you need to look at the server.
I did the same with a different app several months ago. Since then it has dropped the recovery time from days to about 25 minutes.
And I'm over five years late to the party. I think it's cool.
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Jim P.A little bit of this and a little byte of that can cause bloatware.
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At work we started using RabbitMQ for our messaging backbone about 12 months ago, we are going to start using more and more as new projects are developed. So I thought why not see if I could build a custom component for SSIS to read from a RabbitMQ queue.
It turned out to very interesting, so I wrote 5 blog posts about it here: http://kzhendev.wordpress.com/2013/07/31/custom-ssis-components/[/url]
It was a really great learning experience, as I learnt a lot about how to build custom components, but also more about the internal working of SSIS 🙂
With that all wrapped up, I have now moved onto looking into StreamInsight, I managed to create my first real-time application which reads events from RabbitMQ, does some processing then outputs via SignalR to update a chart on a webpage in real-time: http://kzhendev.wordpress.com/2013/08/22/real-time-analytics-for-twilio/[/url]
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I actually can't talk about some of the projects that I've worked on recently or am working on because of NDAs and personal ethics concerning perceived company secrets whether they're actual "secrets" or not. I can talk about the very interesting partitioning project that I'm working on and am looking forward to writing an article about it. That will be a bit of a project itself.
On the outside world, my Dad, Brother, and I are submitting the paper work to (hopefully) win a Phase III contract (final testing and implementation phase) with the U.S. Navy on "Moden Fuel". We have 3 different versions depending on the application. MF1, MF2, and MFX. I can't talk too much about the characteristics of the fuel because many of the characteristics are considered to be "classified", but I can tell you that it's a mono-propellant (burns in an anaerobic environment because it carries it's own oxygen in the fuel itself) and is so environmentally benign that if you water it down a bit, you can brush your teeth with it.
It's designed to replace a really nasty fuel known as OTTO Fuel II which has a huge number of highly undesirable attributes including the release of a rather large quantity of a member of the Cyanide family during a single torpedo run. Not good stuff for littoral waters. Moden Fuel also costs about 5 times less than OTTO Fuel II. With "sequestering" going on in the government, that's a good thing. Moden Fuel also has several extreme tactical military advantages over OTTO Fuel II but I can't say more on that subject.
No... Moden Fuel isn't something that you'd want to use in a car because oxygen is "free" in the air. There's no sense in chemically building oxygen into the fuel for such a thing.
I also designed and built another prototype magnetic motor that was meant to run itself and a generator. As with the attempts of so many other folks, the attempt failed. Not giving up on that... Edison's team didn't come up with the light-bulb on the first hundred tries, either. 😀
And, finally, we've been looking for a commercially available motor to continue tests of Moden Fuel with. It has to be an external combustion motor and it's not as easy to find one as you think. The only motors that we've found that actually work are the same motors that OTTO Fuel uses in torpedo's. Those are damned expensive and they actually leak a lot. OTTO Fuel burns so dirty that it actually clogs up those leaks. Moden Fuel burns ultra clean and won't clog such leaks. We can't use COTS turbines for two reasons... the exhaust/workinng "fluid" of Moden Fuel is too "wet" for standard turbines and most turbines require too high a speed to operate efficiently which would also require a fairly hefty gear reduction system. The closest we've come so far is a 2 piston steam driven motor but they make the damned things too heavy. So, we've been looking at some really weird alternatives including a vane motor, a "flexible piston" motor, several different renditions of Stirling Engines (really disappointed in the state of the art there... way too expensive for something so simple if you can find one that actually works), and an odd invention by my favorite inventor of all time, the Tesla Turbine. I might just have to build one of those myself with a couple of modifications thrown in to make it a whole lot more torquey than the current SOA would have it.
--Jeff Moden
RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally) -
CGSJohnson (8/23/2013)
Is the dearth of responses an indication that we are all just working on mundane projects?! Or is it too early?!Nope... I can't speak for others but it's because I've been attacked by a terrorist on all fronts. I'll bet you know him. His name is "Bin Buzy". 😀 To coin a phrase, "It's no longer a matter of how many sticks I have in the fire... it's now a matter of how many fires I have sticks in." 😛
--Jeff Moden
RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally) -
One of the cooler projects I got to work on was a PayPal competitor from 2 large competitors. The project ended up failing because PayPal was already BIG but it was intellectually very challenging.
A way less technical one but very satisfying was one I did without management approval (they just turned a blind eye). I created a system that replaced over 30 spreadsheets into a series of tables with a .Net maintenance screen. Tasks that used to take 8 hours went down to 15 minutes not to mention the data was now self correcting.
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John Hanrahan (8/26/2013)
One of the cooler projects I got to work on was a PayPal competitor from 2 large competitors. The project ended up failing because PayPal was already BIG but it was intellectually very challenging.A way less technical one but very satisfying was one I did without management approval (they just turned a blind eye). I created a system that replaced over 30 spreadsheets into a series of tables with a .Net maintenance screen. Tasks that used to take 8 hours went down to 15 minutes not to mention the data was now self correcting.
PayPal won't play with me so I would love to see a competitor arise. Too bad it didn't work:crying:
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Yep...I know him well, Jeff. 🙂
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We're adding a new A&E system at work. But we need this system to also update our existing hospital PAS. So, the project is to intercept HL7 messages from the A&E system, parse them and put the data into SQL Server, and then trigger scripting software that puts that data into the PAS. The scripting software asks like a human typing into the system in effect. We have to do it this way because the PAS won't accept HL7 messages and process them.
The project involves Ensemble (integration engine, parsing/routing HL7 messages etc), Summit Healthcare's SST, SQL Server, and a VB.NET exe. I'm involved in all of it bar the Ensemble stuff. This is a live, 24/7 transactional system, something we've not developed before as we are data monkeys.
But the exciting project is that I've just finished my second iOS game, Discbord, and I'm working on my third game at the moment. Not sure what that game is going to be yet as I am working on a number of ideas before selecting the one I really want to make.
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I think my cool project days are over. Some interesting stuff with cars, radar and other control software. Most of my projects now are Data warehouse and BI. That used to light my candle but most of the work seems to be unpicking someone elses mess and getting it to work.
Think I need a new challenge
E.
:crying:
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