Denmark at the techncal forefront

Spoiler warning: This is an unashamed praise of a worldclass danish company.

Its called Vestergaard Company and produces service vehicles for the aviation industry. A visit to the company is at least as exciting as the Discovery series on US Fire fighting vehicles.

Its no coincidence as these truck bodies are supplied with tanks, burners, pumping systems, booms and outriggers controlled from a suspended operator cabin controlling the nozzles that spray deicing fluid on airplanes. not all that different from FFVs

I vent to Vestergaard yesterday for a jobinterview as a control engineer, being met by two very agreeable managers, very experienced about their product and the sub-assemblies going into making it, giving me a complete tour of the premises and showing me high motivation for the products and the company.

I have never been so excited in my life, or almost never, as this was quite my cup of tea (vand på min mølle), combining vehicle technology with mechanical and control engineering.

Even if the job should be offered to somebody else, I am just plain excited about being allowed to visit a danish company with Vestergaards workplace, skilled labour, engineering offices and products. What a friday !!!

How to do Birkebeinerrittet wintertime

How do You get from Rena to Lillehammer on Bike during dead of winter without leaving Denmark ?

Easy.
You take one Peugeot racerbike, one Mediacentre with Sony TV, one TACKX trainer,





The cheap mode bike trainer with no PC simulation added, but it can be fun too.

The trip is 90 kms from Rena to Lillehammer stadion, and last year NRK took a video of the whole cycletrip, which can be downloaded from NRK like the Bergensbanen or Flåmsbanen video.

Its a beatiful trip through nature, and while You dont forget quite where You really are the trip on bike and TV is thrilling enentertaining, even if on a trainer.

And thats probably a very good point keeping You in shape till spring.

Sjusjøen after 2 hours in an aerial view, just beatiful. I stayed on for the remaining 20 kms

Goalll . Mål finally.

Now, where do I go next time. Flåms banen maybe buts thats only one hour... Hmm :-)

Naval engineering and interest

Our media centre shows all our pictures in random selection and quite a lot are about ships large and small. Those pics gave me an idea for todays blog as looking over my old pictures made me think over how many pictures I have relating to my shipbuilding intrest.

My father was a Commander RDN and also a Mechanical engineer through what can be best compared to ROTC, graduating in 1932, so I have a long list of stories and recollections from his telling me about being in the danish navy and studying for engineer.

The Dock behind the mast-crane was filled with MTB s and submarines when I as a kid and my father visited Holmen the Naval Yard- Today the Danish Navy is mainly quartered at Korsør



Fortunately he was retired only when I was a small kid, and then continued working with naval business having agentures for Weinmann and

Secumar, so the trips to danish industry and yards continued. The Secumar life jacket in the picture is onboard Peder Skram and seeing it pleased me quite a lot as my father winning the order of Secumars to the Danish Navy was a celebration event in my family in 1972. I know its standard Nato issue today, but still...

Later I duly studied for naval engineering being able to learn a lot about numerical solutions for shipbuilding as the field was just beginning by 1983 when I graudated, taking lectures with Prof. Harvald and Juncher Jensen. By my graduation the danish shipbuilding industry was sinking fast so I pursued mechanical physics at FLS. But thats another story.

I've tried hard to pass the naval bug to my daughter, I wonder though how much of it will take.

I've some very nice pictures from Peder Skram 2005 , with Maria who for some reason enjoyed the berths and the engine room in particular.

Maria, her best friend Sofie and I two years later visited the Danish Naval Forces Museum during the fall vacation 2007 as they, commemorating the battle of Copenhagen had outdoor theatre with enacted hand to hand combat with sabre and pistol.

Maria and Sofie afterwards took up the battle up on in the kids playground in the basement, arranged with bowspit, part of cannon deck and privateer scuttle 'sailing' on the floor.

Also the Willemoes class mock-up bridge and aa-gun emplacement had them all lively and happy playing navy against warsaw pact.

Watch out for the girls. They are precise, able to handle several tasks, and never forgets a slight.

Christmas 2010

This christmas we had Annettes sister Eva and her family, Michael, Victor and Line as guests

Possibly this was Michaels last performance as Santa!

I have had my last trip as a Bus driver:

Traffic is simply too much and the other guys cant drive...:-)

Lyngby with the nice shopping centre was **completely blocked up 23 rd of december, not so strange but this caused bus delays on the order of hours

This is my last accident so far.

The situation occurred because of a completely iced road, not allowing the silver car to stop before hitting my bus

Still I'll miss the experience a bit even if I really need to work more with my mind. Its not bad to work with other people in a service capacity. Its nice when people respond kindly to your efforts,

Seasons greating to all our friends and family!

Bikers paradise around Slagslunde

The weather today is really heralding the fall season.

Good ide to show how lovely a bicycle ride around Buresø and Bastrup sø in the Farum naturepark was in the now vaning late summer season: (http://www.fnv.dk/)

Starting out from Slagslunde on Bike towards Jørlunde, You turn off at the grain elevator on Københavnsvej.

Turn off 207 towards Krogenlund

The bend at the meadows in Krogenlund. It must be the loveliest palce in Denmark

After the Mølleår golf course comes the lovely view towards Bastrup sø from Nymølle village

The Kalkgården which was a cafe for naturewalkers up to about 2000

The Mølleå (Mill brook), nicely filled up by rains

And my Peugeot bike with Shimano Tiagra details, which by the way required me to modify the frame for the rear brakes which originally was Weinmann in 1993 abt....

An engineer can fix anything, even those he should have left alone

The view from the Ganløse-Søsum road towards Buresø shows the moraine valleys which characterise the landscape and contributes to its beauty.

SQL SAN and the beauty of databases

Now its SQLserver 2008 R2 - Ive just tried it. But how did I get there ?

The engineers who know me like Tam, Rasmus and Lars will know I have a long standing love affair with databases, going back to the linked list RTE-A database of FLS Automation lore.

At AN I worked on many factory database projects with Novo in Hillerød and FLS order handling system
There I invented having state action tables and procedures stored in an Oracle tablespace. I also learned the importance of precompiling and database tuning, because before that was done by FLS expert, the bright system worked in syrup...
One lovely thing in debugging was that the Pro*C data events cold be rolled back before commit enabling a datainput scenario to be replayed as many times as needed.

Later at AN I ws quite fascinated by Arnes DB2 developer interface tables with not just ER descriptions but functional sequence descriptions enabling each developer to understand the dynamic context of each attribute, e.g. reading a barcode from a ingredients bag, triggering a lookup for next serial number to be printed.

Simple, well, Yes but if You compared to the usual terse attribute names You realise that Arnes notation with a functional comment enables one to supplement e.g. 'Serial/Lot Number' with information describing the data update direction.

That is : Is the serial number to be read from the bag or is it to be printed to the bag.
So in this way we could individually adapt SW to the interface tables, and join together ourselves and our code on site. Beautiful engineering.

At Bombardier /Adtranz we worked with off-line databas schemas paralleling the SW structure insofar as the adaptation to the rail autority standard pictures, symbols, user commands and the particular line infrastrure objects, as well the current status for Hot standby operation, enabling seamless failover.
Also this enabled updates from the online 'kangaroo' databases to the Oracle schemas, allowing for precise backup and restore following Oracles standard tools.

Later at H:S working with the Lotus Learing database on Websphere I used a Oracle 9 system. purchasing licenses. definning tablespaces, users and storing the base on SAN for efficiency and safety.
Contrary to the H:S guys way of using KVM switches I decided to use my Bombardier. experience witt X-Windows servers for PCs, finding LabF from Tampere to maintain the DBA job.
When starting trial run with hospitals we had quite some mysterious breakdowns of the DB, which nobody could figure out, until I realised the breakdowns coincided with stand-by events on my PC thus closing the X-session on the AIX machine. Well, In my defense, even if I created the problem by using X on PC, I also was the only one to realise the source of errror.

The SAN proved to be a mixed blessing though, as some will know a IBM SAN provides storage through dedicated interface cards acting as AIX/ volumes. Budgetary reasons prevented me from attending the IBM courses on the connected issues, and when the SAN connection broke down at one time I was unable to reach Hvidovre in person, and could just point out that a 'hard' reset would prevent either accessing either the still online backup files not yet spooled out to tape, as well as the online database setting back learning system configuration one week.

While I was been killed remote over the mobile and probably from the sound of him, in effigium by the manager, I did point out that we should call IBM before deciding.

Could IBM solve the issue ? Of course they had a proper way of reeastablishing the connection, and just as sure good old big blue had made certain You either needed to have taken the SAN courses OR had to call for technical service.
Moral: Even if a SAN is supposed to be better than RAID anything make sure You dont put all You eggs in there...

Lastly I've worked with SQLserver at ITS holding schemas for the EDIFACT systems orders and recognition fields, and while its different to Oracle, Microsoft seems to be building the Technet to a comparable level.

You know what ? Back when I first started to juggle SQLnet connections and using SQL professionally, the logic and mental challenge of designing queries I've found it just as if not more exciting than coding because the dataset could be anything in the world.

That leaves me with associations (smiling) to Mickey Mouse in the Vizards Apprentice.

IHC Work ongoing

You recall the IHC I have been cabling, terminating and working on since we moved in our new House ?

Yippeee !!

Amazingly but not surprising my sense of engineering has enabled me to work on/off with sometimes pauses of three months between work packages, e.g. cabling the alarm/shell integrity circuits last summer with a bit of faultfinding on cut cables where the insulation guy seems to have cut the cable installed by the electrician.

Last fall before beginning the hopefully temp job as a busdriver, I cabled all cores for the downstairs controller, fitting the battery backup and most importantly the smoke/fire indicators, so finally we are legal.

Now after the summers vacation I have the odd mid week day off from driving and I has now tested, verified and put the house alarm on-line.

Remaining work will consist of cabling the upstairs controller, connecting all remaing switches and also connecting all the occasionally used power outlets to a timed switch to save at power expenses for the relay outputs.

We have come a very long way from when we moved into the house in january 2007, where I was to be off for SriLanka with Brodersen, where I had to set up the table PC with the propietary software to enable Annette and Maria to turn on the lights as at that time no inputs had been connected- only the 230V outputs mounted by the licensed electrician. And it was dark scandinavian winter....