Working Up

Working Up in Project Management, Systems Engineering, Technology, and Writing

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The iPad – part 0

April 5th, 2010 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Initial impression – I like the iPad. Let’s not forget how far hardware has advanced in two years. I bought an iPad this morning. I have a model with WiFi and 16 Gigabytes of memory. As most people already know, it doesn’t have: a phone 3G a camera (neither video nor still) […]

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Tags: Design · iPad · Linux · Technology

A Blank Sheet of Paper and a Pencil

March 29th, 2010 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips As a designer and writer, two of my favorite tools are the blank sheet of paper and the pencil. I love a blank sheet of paper. I love to have a pencil in my hand when I’m looking at a blank sheet of paper. This is freedom. There are no guidelines, no […]

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Tags: Design · Technology · Writing

Learning Some Java

March 22nd, 2010 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Old guys should keep learning. I like to write computer programs, so one of the things I am (re)learning is programming in Java. I am spending some time each day studying the Java programming language. Some of my background: I have written thousands of lines of FORTRAN code I have written thousands […]

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Tags: Java · Learning · Programming · Technology

Requirements Tracing via a Wiki

March 5th, 2010 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips I experimented with using a wiki to gather and trace requirements. I tried the MediaWiki software. While it works well for building a flow down of requirements, it is not good at placing the individual requirements into a single Word document. A systems engineering project is looming at work. We don’t have […]

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Tags: Systems · Technology · Wiki

Windows 7 and HP Printers

March 2nd, 2010 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips I now have a computer in the kitchen that runs Windows 7 and Fedora. If HP would just update their printer driver… I have finally upgraded my kitchen computer to Windows 7. This machine now is dual boot-able with Windows 7 and Fedora 11 (see this old post for the background). I […]

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Tags: Learning · OS X · Technology

The MoinMoin Wiki

February 25th, 2010 · No Comments

I have the MoinMoin wiki up and running on a Windows XP machine. I am running a local-only version – no server capability. This was pretty easy and took about 15 minutes. The source for all this is the MoinMoin site. I downloaded the 1.9 release from their download page. This docs page explains how […]

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Tags: Systems · Technology · Wiki

Estimating Budgets: Excel and the Slide Rule

January 21st, 2010 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Estimating budgets months and years into the future is difficult. I have yet to meet anyone who does it well enough to risk large amounts of anything valuable. The Excel spreadsheet calculates well enough, but it can provide a false sense of precision. Instead, I use a slide rule. The difficulty of […]

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Tags: Communication · Estimation · Management · Technology

We Lost a Gadget Guy

December 24th, 2009 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips This past week I spent a day at the funeral of my Uncle Lawrence. We always called him L. O. Uncle L. O. was buried in the town of Jennings, Louisiana near Interstate 10 in the southwest corner of the state. He was born and raised there and met and married my […]

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Tags: Family · Technology

Paper Ballots

November 5th, 2009 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips I voted on Tuesday using a paper ballot where I filled an oval with ink to register my vote. This removed one computer from the voting system. I think that was a good thing. I voted on Tuesday. The voting place near my home in Northern Virginia used paper ballots. This felt […]

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Tags: Design · Government · Privacy · Technology · Voting

Input/Output

September 10th, 2009 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Much has changed in computers in the past 30 years. Something that has not changed is that the input/output part of the computer is paramount. See, for example, the iPhone computer. It was in the dark ages of computing back in 1978. I was taking a class in assembly language programming for […]

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Tags: Design · Technology