August 29, 2013 at 7:19 am
The latest "cool" project I worked on was an "integration" between SQL Server and ElasticSearch[/url].
The full text engine in SQL Server is just not good enough, so we wanted to use something else, but without losing the real-time update of the full text index when changing data in the tables. We ended up with ElasticSearch because it is very easy to work with (REST and JSON based), and very easy to manage and expand.
The "integration" is based on Service Broker, triggers on the tables that is responsible for sending messages, and a Windows service (written in .NET) that listens for new messages and writing updates to ElasticSearch.
July 14, 2017 at 1:18 am
Colin Daley - Friday, August 23, 2013 5:02 PMAgain! 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.
Just tried, not working.
:-PManie Verster
Developer
Johannesburg
South Africa
I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. - Holy Bible
I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times. - Everett Mckinley Dirkson (Well, I am trying. - Manie Verster)
July 14, 2017 at 2:39 am
I was working on a project to track and manage bull semen. Is that cool? Anyone? Anyone? :hehe:
My coolest project was probably mundane but valuable in that it optimised inventory with fewest lorry visits. It doesn't sound exciting I know but that has really saved a lot of petrol and distribution costs, I'm kind of proud to have saved my client a lot of money and done the planet a favour too, in a smallish but significant way. If you have millions spent on direct distribution costs then saving 20% - 30% is a big deal and I think their investment has really worked out.
July 14, 2017 at 5:39 am
Jeff Moden - Saturday, August 24, 2013 4:08 PMOn 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.
That does sound pretty cool, Jeff! I really wish you luck on it as it sounds like a much better choice than the alternative.
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July 14, 2017 at 5:49 am
The work that I've been doing the past 10 years involves the use of clinical data to perform various sorts of clinical quality and utilization measures that monitor the quality care of patients, uncover inefficiencies in healthcare, and highlight areas that need attention to improve patient care. Through these efforts, patient care is improved and life-saving solutions are identified. I get to work with large volumes of data, innovate some pretty cool set-based procedures and perform all sorts of analytics, This is how data geeks get to save lives!
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July 14, 2017 at 5:59 am
Jeff Moden - Saturday, August 24, 2013 4:08 PMI 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.
Funnily enough, I read all about Otto fuel and those funny little waggle plate engines in Western torpedoes a few months ago so I could relate to this, four years after the fact (missed it first time around). I guess the question is, why don't we use rocket motors like the Russkies and have our torpedoes scoot beneath the waves at hundreds of k's per hour? Or perhaps we do now...
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Understanding and using APPLY, (I) and (II) Paul White
Hidden RBAR: Triangular Joins / The "Numbers" or "Tally" Table: What it is and how it replaces a loop Jeff Moden
July 14, 2017 at 6:40 am
Aaron N. Cutshall - Friday, July 14, 2017 5:39 AMJeff Moden - Saturday, August 24, 2013 4:08 PMOn 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.That does sound pretty cool, Jeff! I really wish you luck on it as it sounds like a much better choice than the alternative.
It hasn't worked out and the inventor of the fuel, my Dad, has passed away. The reason why it didn't work out is because we were aiming at propulsion improvements (using the fuel) of certain torpedoes for the U.S. Navy and their FMS (Foreign Military Sales) and the Navy didn't reveal that they already had a major improvement project going on (although it had nothing to do with propulsion methods) . The problem, it appears, is that there was big money involved with modifying the torpedo sensors, electronics, and programming to do something that, as a major side effect, Moden Fuel would have made such a modification totally unnecessary and would have cost a whole lot less. We even designed the relatively inexpensive engine modification they would need to do to burn MFX and extend the range of the torpedoes but it was their engine and so we were at their mercy. They played us like a fiddle.
Once we finally realized what was going on, we shifted gears to UUVs (Unmanned Underwater Vehicles) and MUVs (Manned Underwater Vehicles) and ran into a similar problem. It seems that people selling batteries and battery powered propulsion systems also have powerful lobbyists that we don't have. It's a real shame... instead of having to remove a vehicle from the water, charge it for 16 to 24 hours (and maybe have the damned thing melt down or explode as Lithium based batteries have earned the reputation of doing), and then return it to the water, it could have been "Gas'n'Go" while in the water and the duration between refuelings would have been a fair bit less than the duration between battery charges meaning that the vehicle could have done its job longer instead of spending so much time in transit for recharges.
Heh... it's almost as bad as trying to convince Microsoft that there's a need for a high performance, built in "Tally" sequence generator.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
July 14, 2017 at 6:52 am
http://www.colindaley.com/translator/translator.php
Colin Daley's Grammar Translator URL
July 14, 2017 at 6:52 am
http://www.colindaley.com/translator/translator.php
Colin Daley's Grammar Translator URL
(Sorry for the double post. I failed to find a 'delete post' option.)
July 14, 2017 at 7:07 am
Jeff Moden - Friday, July 14, 2017 6:40 AMThe problem, it appears, is that there was big money involved with modifying the torpedo sensors, electronics, and programming to do something that, as a major side effect, Moden Fuel would have made such a modification totally unnecessary and would have cost a whole lot less.
It's all about making the money now as opposed what's best in the long run. That's why our highways are so terrible and so expensive because no one wants to put money into doing it right the first time but seem to have no problem in putting money into it constantly. If more people had their focus on the long-term goal and not worry about making big bucks right now, our society would be much better off. If not for oil companies worrying about today's profits, we'd all be driving cost-effective, efficient electric cars today.
Unfortunately, software development isn't much different. Whatever is easiest to patch now, not rewrite bad code, and quickest and most profitable to ship out the door today is always considered over long-term benefits. (sigh)
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July 14, 2017 at 7:12 am
Aaron N. Cutshall - Friday, July 14, 2017 5:49 AMThe work that I've been doing the past 10 years involves the use of clinical data to perform various sorts of clinical quality and utilization measures that monitor the quality care of patients, uncover inefficiencies in healthcare, and highlight areas that need attention to improve patient care. Through these efforts, patient care is improved and life-saving solutions are identified. I get to work with large volumes of data, innovate some pretty cool set-based procedures and perform all sorts of analytics, This is how data geeks get to save lives!
Sounds very similar to what I was doing in my last role (audit and trials on critical care patients). Very interesting on a variety of levels including data validation, security/data protection, ethics, etc. Luckily did not have to do any statistical modelling or analysis as that is far beyond my 2nd year Stats 😀 Most interesting to me was how decisions regarding care & treatment come down to money rather than patient outcomes a lot more often than one would hope.
July 14, 2017 at 7:35 am
funbi - Friday, July 14, 2017 7:12 AMMost interesting to me was how decisions regarding care & treatment come down to money rather than patient outcomes a lot more often than one would hope.
Yeah, that unfortunately happens way too often. One program I worked on attempted to show that investing in proper health care up front saved money in the long run. Unfortunately, because circumstances vary among patients, insurers and hospitals opt for the "let's wait and see" approach ignoring evidence to the contrary. While it's intuitive to understand that proper care now will prevent future problems, it's difficult to put a monetary amount on "savings" from future issues that may or may not happen. After all, it's not like you can calculate a failure rate and MTBF (mean-time between failures) for people like you do for machines!
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July 14, 2017 at 7:40 am
I've been working on a couple of fun things:
I converted my first ebook to a wiki format: https://sterbalssundrystudies.miraheze.org/wiki/Category:ZTD
I've been working on changing the fill colors of a svg county map of the U.S.
The actual change is done with a command line text search and replace.
412-977-3526 call/text
July 14, 2017 at 8:44 am
The most interesting project I've worked on recently was building up a dynamic OData web server. You give it the database name and it grabs all of the tables and views dynamically for you and presents odata for it. It doesn't do all of the normal OData tasks, but does the basic ones like $filter, $top, $skip, $select. It also only returns data in JSON format, but it was still a fun little project and the output can easily be consumed in Excel. It can be viewed in a web browser, but reading JSON strings with no new line characters in a web browser makes my eyes burn.
The above is all just my opinion on what you should do.
As with all advice you find on a random internet forum - you shouldn't blindly follow it. Always test on a test server to see if there is negative side effects before making changes to live!
I recommend you NEVER run "random code" you found online on any system you care about UNLESS you understand and can verify the code OR you don't care if the code trashes your system.
July 14, 2017 at 1:03 pm
Relatively speaking these are the more interesting things I'm working on right now.
1) Finishing a PoSh based solution for running DBCC CheckDB against all of our backups each night. This runs from a single instance and restores them individually, nothing real fancy but I don't get to use PoSh very much in solutions.
2) I have a .NET app that certain developer admins use to create temporary SYSADMIN accounts in production when needed but it only works with SQL Logins, they want it to work with Windows accounts too. Just starting that.
3) I have some procs and functions I'm stringing together so we can do long term space analysis at the enterprise level for our SQL Instances (Idera and Quest tools don't have the detail and comprehensive trending we want). These will plugged into a couple of SSRS reports I'm also building (one macro level, one micro) with some pretty indicators.
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