Engineer Honoris Causa

We always think of an engineer as a guy who has a college degree. But, in the case o William Kamkwamba, who build an windmill from scrap in his village on Malawi (Africa) we just got back to what really powers engineering: Inspiration, Motivation, Information and Dedication.
He had the Information available at a library, on how a windmill works, he had the Inspiration to see the windmill would fulfill the necessity of electric power his village had and those factors gave him the Motivation and with Dedication he did accomplish his windmill.

William Kamkwamba spoke at TED

And has a blog now.

This is a good example of a talented engineer.

College degrees give us Information, but if we don't have the Inspiration, Motivation and Dedication, we will never be a real engineer. The College degree also legitimates the engineer but in William's case, his windmill legitimates his engineering skills.

Comments

uSleep on windows (win32)

I am facing a terrible issue regarding timing on windows. Googling arround, I've found those infos: Using QueryPerformanceCounter and QueryPerformanceFrequency APIs in Dev-C++ ( http://yeohhs.blogspot.com/2005/08/using -queryperformancecounter-and_13.html ) QueryPerformanceCounter() vs. GetTickCount() http://www.delphifaq.com/faq/delphi_windows_API/f345.shtml How to time a block of code http://www.cryer.co.uk/brian/delphi/howto_time_code.htm And Results of some quick research on timing in Win32 http://www.geisswerks.com/ryan/FAQS/timing.html With that I'm trying to write something like a uSleep function for windows: # include<windows.h> void uSleep ( int waitTime){ __int64 time1 = 0, time2 = 0, sysFreq = 0; QueryPerformanceCounter((LARGE_INTEGER *)&time1); QueryPerformanceFrequency((LARGE_INTEGER *)&freq); do { QueryPerformanceCounter((LARGE_INTEGER *)&time2); // }while((((time2-time1)*1.0)/sysFreq)<waitTime); } while ( (time2-time1) <waitTime); } T

More trickery with gnuplot dumb terminal

In my post " Plotting memory usage on console " the chart doesn't pan the data. Now, using a named pipe, the effect got a little bit nicer. First, we have to run the memUsage.sh script to get a file filled with memory usage info: ./memUsage.sh > memUsage.dat & Then we have to create a named pipe: mkfifo pipe Now we have to run another process to tail only the last 64 lines from the memUsage.dat while [ 1 ]; do tail -64 memUsage.dat> pipe; done & And now we just have to plot the data from the pipe: watch -n 1 'gnuplot -e "set terminal dumb;p \"pipe\" with lines"' And that is it!

The prefuse visualization toolkit

Navigating on the silk icons web site , I've found an interesting use of the Prefuse Visualization Tool Kit. “Prefuse is a set of software tools for creating rich interactive data visualizations. The original prefuse toolkit provides a visualization framework for the Java programming language. The prefuse flare toolkit provides visualization and animation tools for ActionScript and the Adobe Flash Player.” They have some nice visualizations on their gallery. I hope to soon use this tool kit on some projects on my job. Bellow is the screenshot of one of the projects which had used Prefuse: This particular screenshot is from the project: Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Asynchronous Collaborative Information Visualization by ( Jeffrey Heer , Fernanda B. Viégas , Martin Wattenberg ) . Following Fernanda B. Viégas and Martin Wattenberg web sites, I've discovered that both worked on the Many Eyes project for IBM . Perhaps, Prefuse is the ancestral of Many Eyes... ;-) As is i

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