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Internet is now a better place

ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is now more independent from one country only, as its control is being decentralized to other countries. As you all know, it was controlled by a US organization.

This are great news to the internet. I’d like to express my congratulations to the U.S. Department of Commerce for recognizing the need to give this baby away. They did a great job with raising this baby, but now it’s time for letting it go. Thanks :)

ETFA 2009 - Advanced Manufacturing Systems

Here’s the agenda for the WIP-5:

Chairs: Joaquín Ezpeleta and Rei Itsuki

Room A-13, 9:00 - 11:00, Friday September 25th

 

Order	ETFA Ref.	Title / Authors
1	MD-001554	Consideration for Efficient RFID Information Retrieval in Traceability System Rei Itsuki, Atsushi Fujita
2	MD-005215	RFID tuning methodology applied on airport baggage tracking Carlos Jacinto, Mário Romano, Ana Montes, Pedro Sousa, Mário Nunes
3	MD-005703	Using CloudRFID middleware for fuel supply control of vehicles fleets Leonardo A. Amaral, Fabiano P. Hessel, Eduardo A. Bezerra, Jerônimo C. Corrêa, Oliver B. Longhi, Thiago F. Dias
4	MD-005029	Exploring an Open-loop RFID Implementation in the Automotive Industry Daniel Hellström, Mathias Wiberg
5	MD-005266	Design and Control of an Intelligent Dual-Arm Manipulator for Fault-Recovery in a Production Scenario Jose de Gea Fernandez, Johannes Lemburg, Thomas M. Roehr, Malte Wirkus, Iliya Gurov, Frank Kirchner
6	MD-005096	High-accuracy automatic system to assemble vehicle headlamps Javier Gamez-Garcia, Juan Gomez-Ortega, Alejandro Sanchez-Garcia, Silvia Satorres-Martinez
7	MD-000329	The Possibilities of and Limits to Detecting Incomplete Fusion via In-Process Monitoring in the Case of Laser Welding Michael Kuhl, Paul-Michael Mickel
8	MD-005177	Business Driven Engineering for Powertrain Industry Robert Harrison, Radmehr Monfared, Les Lee
9	MD-006114	On the development of an Agent Supported e-Manufacturing environment Adriana Giret, Vicente Botti
10	MD-005576	An Agent-Based Approach for Automating The Disturbance Handling for Flexible Manufacturing Systems Iman Badr, Peter Göhner
11	MD-005851	A multiagent-based system to support the decentralized collaborative decision-making process in the automobile supply chain sector Jorge E. Hernandez, Raúl Poler, Josefa Mula, David de La Fuente
12	MD-004871	Three-View-Concept for modeling process or manufacturing plants with AutomationML Miriam Schleipen, Rainer Drath
13	MD-005711	Factory Monitoring and Control with Mixed Hardware/Software, Discrete/Continuous Models Paul Maier, Martin Sachenbacher

After the conference I’ll post the paper (probably here). A deeper article will be presented in Carlos Jacinto’s Master of Science thesis, the work that has influenced most of this WIP paper. This thesis will be presented pretty soon, and will be announced here as soon as possible.

A not-so-usual porting: XDepend

Normally this works the other way: from Java to .NET. But this time it worked the other way around. NDepend, a cool code analysis tool has been ported to the evil brother side as XDepend.

Here’s an old review I posted about NDepend.

Hope this will the start of a bigger trend – except from IDEs, tools and libs normally goes from Java to .NET world.

MEMOVRN: Memory overrun on BizTalk RFID

Oops, we’ve preparing a staging environment for a RFID project and BizTalk 2009 devices stopped responding, claiming a memory overrun error:

  49|  Error|091509 17:53:43|Intermec|Intermec.RFID.Middleware.DSPI.IntermecDeviceException: BRI returned H0C210555555555552202271F 1 MEMOVRN

We finally found out the problem: on the device we changed the server IP address, and it kept changing back to the original one:

Yeap, we changed it over and over again, and it kept restoring the original value. Strangely enough we had to write it directly on the file system on:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk RFID\Providers\Intermec\Devices

MonoTouch

.Net is running on iPhone: MonoTouch. I have to get an iPhone…

But I have to ask: is .Net success on other platforms really helping Microsoft? It really is, not only by maintaining the .NET share but also by helping to remind us how strong this platform is.

ETFA2009 presentation - RFID tuning methodology applied on airport baggage tracking

 

RFID tuning methodology

applied on airport baggage tracking

 

Carlos Jacinto, Mário Romano Ana Montes, Pedro Sousa Link, Av. Duque Ávila 23, 1000 Lisboa carlos.jacinto@link.pt, mario.romano@link.pt ana.montes@link.pt, pedro.sousa@link.pt

Mário Serafim Nunes Instituto Superior Técnico Rua Alves Redol, 1000 Lisboa mario.nunes@ist.utl.pt

 

From Setember 22 to 26 link will be present at the international conference ETFA’2009 - Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation, in Maiorca, Spain. The ETFA conference series is the prime, and largest, IEEE event dedicated to factory automation and emerging technologies in industrial automation. The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners from the industry and academia and provide them with a platform to report on recent advances and developments in the newly emerging areas of technology, as well as actual and potential applications to industrial and factory automation.

 

Figure 1 – Flight Baggage Dashboard

Under the theme “RFID tuning methodology applied on airport baggage tracking”, I will present results taken from the Project “Dumbo” (“Demonstrador Universal de Monitorização de Bagagens e Operações” – “Operations and Baggage Monitoring Universal Demonstrator”). This project uses RFID technology to monitor in real-time baggage and operations between airports, airliners and ground operators, allowing the assessment of the SLAs (Service Level Agreements) agreed upon the intervenient players.

Figure 2 – Service Level Agreements

The project has an end-to-end travel perspective over 3 airports: at the departure airport, monitoring RFID equipment is used from check-in desks along pre-defined baggage circuits up to the airplane cargo entrance; at the arrival airport, RFID equipment is used from airplane cargo doors up to customs exit.

This paper presents an RFID equipment tuning and configuration methodology developed during the project. The lack of adequate tooling on the market presented the opportunity to build the tool used to select the best solutions and to collect the information presented on this paper.

Figure 3 – RFIDAntennaTuner output

Figure 4 – RSSI for different power combinations

Please follow this link for this post in my company’s site.

Tips for your underwater holyday photos

I’m a newbie underwater photographer, so if you googled or binged for tips and landed on this page, I’d advise you to think again and try the next hit. Hopefully google and bing won’t rank me high on the search list so I can write some rubbish about a subject I know so little about.

But I digress. Here are my tips:

• Use a flash. I didn’t, and I regret it.
• Always shoot on raw format, you’ll surely end up correcting your photos, and JPEG just kills most of the latitude you have. As Canon RAW drivers doesn’t support 64 bits, I didn’t, and I regret it.
• Always use goggles. I can’t focus and frame a picture under water without them.
• Choose a wide lens. First because water is a natural teleconverter. And above all because it facilitates focusing and framing, and boy this is hard to do under water – at least if you have so little experience as your blogger friend.
• On shallow waters avoid using high ISO. This pictures will need some post-processing, let’s us not make it unnecessary harder.
• update: Use internal focusing lenses. I’ve tried it with my video camera, an external focusing system, and the bag often kept the camera from focusing
• update: protect the flash hot shoe, it can damage the bag. I’m using my wife’s demakeup pads, but simple cotton will work just fine.

Here are some of these pictures (my laptop doesn’t have LightRoom installed, so the post-processing was… well… not too great…):

Windows 7 RTM available for download

As announced, Windows 7 RTM was made available to msdn subscribers. I’m presently downloading an Enterprise version – my previous Vista version was a Business VLK but I couldn’t find such edition. Let’s only hope Microsoft will release VLK key tomorrow for this Enterprise edition.

And now for something completely boring

We often use KB to represent kilo bytes. By doing this, we are making the following mistakes:

1. If we want to represent it on a 10 base form, 10³, we should use kB
2. If we want to represent it on a 2 base form, 2¹⁰, we should use KiB

Here are the 10 base prefixes we learned at school:

Factor	Name	Symbol
1024	yotta	Y
1021	zetta	Z
1018	exa	E
1015	peta	P
1012	tera	T
109	giga	G
106	mega	M
103	kilo	k
102	hecto	h
101	deka	da

And here’s what our children will learn:

Factor	Name	Symbol	Origin	Derivation
210	kibi	Ki	kilobinary: (210)1	kilo: (103)1
220	mebi	Mi	megabinary: (210)2	mega: (103)2
230	gibi	Gi	gigabinary: (210)3	giga: (103)3
240	tebi	Ti	terabinary: (210)4	tera: (103)4
250	pebi	Pi	petabinary: (210)5	peta: (103)5
260	exbi	Ei	exabinary: (210)6	exa: (103)6

 

<update>

Now that I think of it, we should use SI standards to end the English speaking vs. rest of the world billion ambiguity. We should start using SI nomenclature on the financial world, stop talking about 10 billion dollars, and start talking about 10 tera dollars. Or 10 giga dollars, see what I mean? :)

</update>

Jesus evaluated by academics

As we all know, the academic community is highly paper-oriented. And this is good, this is the guarantee that scientific knowledge flows on a global scientific network, but there is more than publishing quantity, and it poses problems to those that don’t publish so often. I was discussing this with a friend, a researcher in an area other than mine, and he referenced something he read on a magazine:

What can an academic say about Jesus work? Well, definitely a great teacher, but he doesn’t have anything published, does he?

Fun !

Recursion definition.. again…

This definition is an old well known geek joke:

What's the correct dictionary definition for recursion? See: recursion.

I’ve already posted about it. But here’s something cooler: try and google recursion, and you’ll end up being corrected with:

Cool :)