First off apologies for my extended absence lately, it has been very crazy and busy here. So I thought I would take a quick minute and give you recap. Well a week ago Friday I was out of the office for a day walking, sweating and getting a tan at the PGA Championship at Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa. If you would have told me even two years ago that I would go out and watch golf I would have laughed at you. But no, I went and watched golf in 102 degree heat with no wind, and had a blast. I am not really a golfer, that is I don’t golf very well, but I have fun trying. It is really nice to see that even the PGA Tour Professionals make bad shots as well.

This brings me to my next subject, Tiger. I am not the biggest Tiger fan out there by any means, in fact I would rather root for somebody else that needs some cheering for. That said I am not trying to discount his abilities, he is a very good golfer. I did however notice that for the most part all of the PGA golfers are very cordial to each other and carry on some conversation while playing, just like regular people. However I also notice that Tiger does not do this, it almost makes the impression that he is arrogant or better that everybody else. I have had this discussion with several of my Coworkers and the general consensus seems to be that, that is just Tiger putting on his “game face” and being so focused on his game. I guess I can accept that and just need to learn how to appreciate it, besides I am a much better golfer that Tiger when playing Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2007, LOL.

However, on the subject of Tiger, I just want to point out that the guy in the green shirt, red hat in the upper right hand corner of this picture is me. Also I don’t know where this picture came from so if anybody knows please let me know, so I can give proper credit and get a better quality copy.

So the other thing that has consumed my time is swapping computers. I have been in computer limbo for the past week as I have been working on getting my new desktop up and running. What kind of desktop you ask? It is a Dell Precision Workstation 390 with a Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz processor, 2GB RAM, two 300 GB Hard Drives in Raid 1, Nvidia Quadro FX 3450 Video Card with Dual Dell Ultra-sharp 17″ Displays. This is the result of some budgeting that I have been doing and the fact that I had old computers in my department that needed to be replaced. Also our entire IS department is now running Vista, Yeah!*. I will write more on budgeting for Information Technology in small companies later.

The recent ruling by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has affects on Wireles LAN (WLAN) equipment operation in the 5Ghz spectrum. This ruling is only applicable to users operating under the FCC 5Ghz frequencies in the US and other countries utilizing 5GHz operating frequencies. This does not apply to other regulatory domains.

 The new ruling is based around Dynamic Frequency Selection (DFS2) and is being required to allow the coexistence of military and weather radar systems in the 5GHz band. The new ruling requires that Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure (UNII) devices operating in the 5.25 - 5.35 GHz and 5.47 - 5.725 GHz bands shall employ a DFS radar detection mechanism to detect the presence of radar systems and to avoid co-channel operation with radar systems. This regulation mandates that equipment operating in these spectrum’s must now use DFS to avoid in-use spectrum, and transmit power control (TPC) which throttles power to the minimum necessary for given communication.

About 18 months ago the FCC quietly added a new frequency band, UNII-3, which operates in the 5.47 - 5.725 GHz frequencies. This is an additional 255 MHz that will allow for approximately 8 more channels in the 5GHz spectrum for WLAN devices.  This comes as a result of compromise between the Department of Defense and the “industry”. This will be advantageous as the 5GHz spectrum is likely to be used in the early profiles for WiMax.

What this means to us is that most of our WLAN equipment vendors are going to have to do some changes to accommodate this new regulation. Some older equipment will be exempt from this ruling but I would expect most vendors to offer software upgrades. My vendor, Extreme Networks, has already begun developing software to fix this issue and will be providing upgrades to that software in the near future. This ruling became effective July, 20 2007.References

FCC Documentation 

Extreme Networks Notification

Tonight I am going to write a short review on a nice little product that we use company wide on a daily basis. The product I am speaking of is called CONNX. So you are now wondering what is CONNX? CONNX provides connection to data sources and legacy applications through open standards across all major platforms. We use CONNX extensively to get data in and out of an RMS database on a VMS server into SQL Server 2005. I will not go into detail on this process to much during this post, I am saving this for later. CONNX can take data out of relational and non relations database systems, transaction systems and legacy applications. Some examples of the compatible systems are ADABAS, DB2, IMS, VSAM-MVS, Informix, Oracle, SYBASE, RMS, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server.

 Installation of CONNX is fairly straighforward and the wizard walks you through most everything. Starting with CONNX 1o, you will need to also have a server or box on the network that can act as the CONNX license server. CONNX also installs a nice little configuration management tool in Windows and comes with a powerful query application called InfoNaut.

I have only had a few issues with putting data back into RMS through CONNX, most of this has been configuration issues on my SQL Server box that seem to be resolved now. There are multiple licensing schemes available through CONNX to fit almost any need. So if you get into a project where you need data in and out of systems that you are not familiar with, look at CONNX and maybe you’ll be surprised.

A few weeks ago we started working on a statistical analysis piece of our produciton managment application. If you don’t know, I am the Information Services Director for a small manufacturing company, but I will write more on that later.

We recently started accumulating quality assurance information digitally inside our software, which begs the age old question: “What good is data if you can’t get to it?”. Enter statistical analysis, what we want to do is be able to take all of the possible issues that can happen and cross reference it against one or more manufacturing jobs. So this would be a piece of cake in excel, but wait we are not using excel for this and discourage our users from doing so.

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This is the thrid and final post in a series of three that I am writing about the basics and understanding of Object Oriented programming and thinking.   

Why Objects?

Simply put, because objects are so easy! I hope by now you are beginning to think objects are as easy as I do. The reason objects are so easy is because when you start thinking about your program or problem you can easily define business objects out of requirements and use cases defined from the business model. You can also follow these guidelines while you are programming. If you find yourself stuck wondering how an object should behave in the program all you have to do is find out how the object works in the real world and write the code to mimic that.

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