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Working at a utility company, a request was made to generate an alert if a lighting strikes occurs within a prescribed distance of a facility. The lightning strike data is received every minute or so and is written in an ASCII format to a network directory.
The strike data contains a timestamp (number of seconds since January 1, 1970), a lat/long pair, parity and kAmps and number of strikes.
A separate list exists of lat/long pairs for facilities and the radius of interest by site.
First challenge: the strike files are on a UNIX server, so derive a method to read the list of files and then their contents
Second challenge: determine distance in miles from strike location to facility
I love my job... something new every day!
What then, have you been assigned that challenges your skill set?
Tim
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Someone knows exactly where lightning strikes?
vbmike
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It can be easily predicted.
Ask Roy Sullivan
[^]
Although you will need to hold a seance.
---------------------------------
Obscurum per obscurius.
Ad astra per alas porci.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
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you have the Latitude and Longitude points of each strike
Microsoft ... the only place where VARIANT_TRUE != true
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The problem is not finding out, it is reporting it to someone once you have been hit.
~RaGE();
I think words like 'destiny' are a way of trying to find order where none exists. - Christian Graus
Do not feed the troll ! - Common proverb
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We receive a satellite feed, but, yes, from the vibrations, they (whoever they are) can detect location, severity and number of strikes.
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Tim Carmichael wrote: Second challenge: determine distance in miles from strike location to facility
Clickety
Microsoft ... the only place where VARIANT_TRUE != true
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Tim Carmichael wrote: determine distance in miles from strike location to facility
Straight line (ie, through the earth), or great circle distance? (or even more accurately?)
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Great circle distance.
I have completed proof-of-concept on each individual piece (get a webpage from a Unix based server for the list of files), read the individual files, calculate distance from strike to site.
Now, it's putting all of the pieces together... and have it working before a presentation to management on Wednesday. The requestor has the presentation and was doing a proof-of-concept presentation. To be able to present a working system... of much greater value, to him and my department.
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Tim Carmichael wrote: What then, have you been assigned that challenges your skill set?
Writing apps in Objective C. 
It was broke, so I fixed it.
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Mores the pity.. mine is at least .NET, albeit in Framework 2.0 due to the third party tools in use.
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We did that a year ago : )
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Tim Carmichael wrote: What then, have you been assigned that challenges your skill set?
Dealing with SASS and SLIM converting an open source crowdfunding program written in Portuguese to something that a company in the US can use. That, and getting the app to run under Rails in Windows rather than Ubuntu.
So far it's going quite well and I've learned a lot of neat things (like how to integrate Google Maps).
Marc
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My current agony - pardon the pun - is to report the system losses in our electrical distribution and transmission networks. Transmission energy delivered to the boundary of our network is reported hourly, but each metering point is reported with a different precision - 1MWH, 100 kWH, kWH - unless I want to wait until the middle of the following month, when the data is renormalized to a consistent precision. At the point of distribution, the meters are read once a month, but not on the same day of the month, nor any particular hour of the day. Retail sales at the distribution level are reported by automated meters, but the meters do not all report on the same day, but are instead spread over up to three days because of the AMR communications limitations.
In an ideal world, I'd be able to poll all meters at more or less the same time, then do a straightforward calculation, but nooooooo.... I haven't access to the meters at all, but must rely on others to read them for me. 
Will Rogers never met me.
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Tim Carmichael wrote: determine distance in mil
I had to do that with taxis and locations -- both recti-linear and as-the-crow-flies, for different purposes.
For the distances that are involved with taxis, I decided that the surface (in Phoenix) is flat enough to forego great-circle and simply use a rectangle.
Then report either the length of the diagonal or half the perimeter, as appropriate.
That was nearly ten years ago now. The hardest part was parsing the GPS values from the taxis.
My recent (last week) challenge involved downloading text files from an intranet site, splitting them into entries, and parsing the entries.
The files are from Unix systems, so there are no (or few) carriage returns (which is fine). Entries can span several lines, so there are several rules to follow. Of course, I had to determine the rules by trial-and-liquor.
We could compare notes. 
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Evolution[^]
---------------------------------
Obscurum per obscurius.
Ad astra per alas porci.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
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just two steps to go then Dave
You cant outrun the world, but there is no harm in getting a head start
Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
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Yippee!
---------------------------------
Obscurum per obscurius.
Ad astra per alas porci.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
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Ah, so DD's one of these[^] overweight Fisher-Price ones!
That explains a lot.
(e.g. why he's happy with the Windows 'ate baby-blocks interface.)
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Where is the outline of the Tardis incarnation as Police Box ?
Google CEO, Erich Schmidt: "I keep asking for a product called Serendipity. This product would have access to everything ever written or recorded, know everything the user ever worked on and saved to his or her personal hard drive, and know a whole lot about the user's tastes, friends and predilections." 2004, USA Today interview
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...but it aint.
"Failed to retrieve directory listing"
I have tried switching from passive to active and clicked on 'Ask your operating system for the external IP Address'
Still no joy.
It is getting late on a Friday.
I refuse to be drawn into a long and complicated problem late on a Friday.
It will eat into my Gin Time.
But it is a bugger and I can see what my weekend is going to be spent doing!
THIS IS WHY[^]
"Of the 21 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 0 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2013-09-17, and suspicious content was never found on this site within the past 90 days."
and
"Over the past 90 days, www.bellcross.co.uk did not appear to function as an intermediary for the infection of any sites."
It is such a churlish embuggerment.
It is on the same network that caused THIS[^]
---------------------------------
Obscurum per obscurius.
Ad astra per alas porci.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
modified 27-Sep-13 10:21am.
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Gin O'clock, hows the Paint Bucket thing going?
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Very well, had £12,000 turn over in less than 6 months.
Slowly growing the customer base and expanding the range.
Hard work though, but as a hobby it is very satisfying.
---------------------------------
Obscurum per obscurius.
Ad astra per alas porci.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
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Dalek Dave wrote: and suspicious content was never found on this site within the past 90 days.
Someone should shoot that wordsmith.
"Never" implies that there haven't been any problems since it's inception; adding a time-frame means promotes that word "never" to a lie.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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It also has evil implication written all over it - a bit like "I never beat my wife on Thursdays" is exactly true but does not lead to the also true "I never beat my wife" but instead manages to imply that beatings occurred on other days - even without a shred of evidence.
I hate the kind of headlines that say things like "Doctor Who refuses to deny that he has been working with the Daleks towards destruction of the Earth." and then the smaller print says, "When The Doctor was contacted via email by this publication he failed to answer."
Guilty By Accusation (GBA) seems to be the way politics and law are doing in the press these days.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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