Wednesday, June 28, 2006

How high is your IQ?

I'm fan of Detective Conan and Einstein. As usual as an engineer, we need to have high IQ to avoid from getting into problem, that what first principle told us.

Try this quiz, it's Einstein quiz. He claim that 98% if people are unable to solve this problem, so are you the 2% :)

Facts:

  1. There are 5 houses in 5 different colours
  2. In each house lives a person with a different nationality..
  3. These 5 owners drink a certain beverage, smoke a certain brand of cigar and keep a certain pet.
  4. No owners have the same pet, smoke the same brand of cigar or drink the same drink.

Hints:

  1. The Brit lives in a red house.
  2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
  3. The Dane drinks tea.
  4. The green house is on the left of the white house.
  5. The green house owner drinks coffee.
  6. The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds.
  7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.
  8. The man living in the house right in the centre drinks milk.
  9. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
  10. The man who smokes Blend lives next to the one who keeps cats.
  11. The man who keeps horses lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.
  12. The owner who smokes Blue Master drinks beer.
  13. The German smokes Prince.
  14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
  15. The man who smokes Blend has a neighbour who drinks water.

The question is Who keeps the fish?

Good luck and hope you are among the 2%.

========== Added on 6/7 =============
You can check your answer here.

If you read carefully the question, the correct answer is none. None of them keep fish because there is not fact / statement tell us this, however we get the answer by induction / deduction. The beauty of this quiz is that most of us will try to solve the question using the hard way instead of a simple answer.

So, are you the 2%?


Saturday, June 17, 2006

Is engineer = poor man?


In many professional jobs, engineer never related to rich or $. Lawyer, doctor, architect and many other professional are always giving image of rich and wellness.

The definition of poor is not really well defined. How much money that someone own that can be consider rich? $1000? Maybe not. How about $1000m? Or maybe $1000b?

For me, I don't think myself is a rich man since I need to think few time before I use my money. But I also not a poor man since I still able to buy something that I want.

I'm stay at Puchong, and everyone knows that we need to pay toll to get in and out from Puchong to other places.

But as an engineer, we are good problem solver; therefore we create a road before the toll.

As you can see, there is an illegal U-turn before the toll and lead to resident area. Buy using the resident area small road, we don't need to pay toll to get in/out from where we stay.

Believe it or not, the small road at the resident area is named "Jalan Jurutera", which mean engineer road.

I think it’s telling something :)

Friday, June 16, 2006

It's mid of June. Time is moving faster and faster until you didn't realize that it's gone.

Einstein say that if you stay beside a person that you like, the time is faster than when you sit beside a person that you don't like.

Look like I like my job so much :)

What actually is my job function? Most of the people don't know, even my boss don't know what is my role in the company :(. What a failure me.

I'm working as an engineer in an engineering company dealing with air conditioning and energy management. My main job function is to taking care the instrumentation and control system. Lots of company in Malaysia thinks that control system is a luxury item in a project. It's expensive and unreliable. As a control engineer, we disagreed this statement.

This is true for ten to twenty year back, where the computer industry is still at stage of evolving. But today you may install the SCADA on most of the PC. Most of the SCADA nowadays is cheaper, reliable and not hardware dependence.

Any how, to make a control system to work, you need lots of engineering. I had complete 7 control system in 5 years, most of the time, as usual we learn from our mistake and we move forward to improve the quality of the system. And most of the time, human factor is more difficult to solve than the engineering problem :). I think this is common and it happen everyway.


















This photo taken from my latest project in MBSA building. It's an ice storage tank for air conditioning.













The SCADA, after few weeks of hard working.

Sunday, June 04, 2006

It's a holiday for me yesterday.

Staying at home do nothing and sleep for whole day. Once in the blue moon :)



An engineer, a physicist, a mathematician, a statistician and a computer scientist were on a train heading north, and had just crossed the border into Scotland.

* The engineer looked out of the window and said "Look! Scottish sheep are black!"
* The physicist said, "No, no. Some Scottish sheep are black."
* The mathematician looked irritated. "There is at least one field, containing at least one sheep, of which at least one side is black."
* The statistician : "It's not significant. We only know there's one black sheep"
* The computer scientist : "Oh, no! A special case!"

Have fun with your day.


Friday, June 02, 2006

Lot of things happen last week.

First my PC spoiled. The PC keep on restart itself. After checking the motherboard, it seen that the capacitor is giving problem. Three big capacitor near the ATX connector are leaking. So, go Farnell and puchase a similar capasitor. Most of the Taiwan motherboard use very slim type of capasitor, I had repaired 4 motherboards so far and there have same problem and I can't find the correct packing size, thus, I alway use same rating but bigger size capasitor.

OK, after 30 minute of operation on the matherboard (first time I had used almost 2 hour to replace 2 pieces of capasitor), the motherboard is as good as new. However, when I install back the motherboard, same problem caming out. OK, this time really a mistery for me.

I check the harddisk, RAM, take out but remain basic hardware, try to reinstall, modify BIOS setting, but all negative. When I want to reinstall the OS, there is alway different error code. The first idea come out from my mind is that maybe I should disable the L1 and L2 cache memory.

After disable the L1 cache, the PC can start without problem but with very slow speed. OK, the cache is dead. That mean the CPU is burned. It's a AMD Athlon. Maybe I had open it 24 hours non-stop and causing the CPU overheat. Too bad, have to look for a replacement.

The second thing is my car air-cond. Problem for me since my first day using that car. I had change the compressor and the condenser coil. But still leaking. I need to go workshop every month to check the air-cond.

So this time, I went to a shop, and they found then condenser hose is leaking. Due to too late, they can't get me the spare part. So they just seal my compressor and leave the spoiled hose there and ask me to go back tomorrow morning.

The next day, when I go there, they install back a new hose for me and try to refil the gas. Unfortunately they can do that and they told me, the magnetic coil is broken that why they can pump in the refrigerent. OK, I let them change the coil. After changing, they come back to me say that they still can't pump in the refrigerent and ask me to change the compressor. I ask them to put back all parts and I'm leaving.

Somehow, the compressor really spoiled. It's kill me RM400 for that. Too bad.

I think most of the engineer are still applying try-and-error mothod to troubleshoot. When can they learn to solve the problem by analysis? I hope that day will come soon.