Making 3D Custom, Solid Robots Video

Steve Fritzinger sent this to me.    It is very cool video from My Robot Nation showing all the steps of additive technology in creating small, solid custom robots using 3D printers using Z Corporations (recently acquired by 3D Systems):

President Obama Is Right on SOPA & PIPA

The White House issued a statement this past weekend stating "we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global internet".  President Obama is right and congress is wrong on this.

SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) are examples of Congress and the Senate trying to do the right thing but not understanding either the law of unintended consequences or the fundamentals of technology.

SOPA and PIPA is analogous to is having a surgeon show up for brain surgery with a chainsaw instead of a scalpel.   The bottom line is that one small infraction of copyright violation would be enough to block out the entire domain (all of the nodes at a given site).

Below is Google's and Wikipedia's homepage today.  Go here to SPEAK up to your representative at Google's End Piracy, Not Liberty page.

Top 12 Resolutions IMTS 2012 Can Help You Keep

Below is the link to a video that has the:

Top 12 Resolutions IMTS (International Manufacturing Show) 2012 Can Help You Keep

 

 

Citizens For A Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow

Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart are the most brilliant satirists of our time.  This video below clearly demonstrates just how much the Citizens United Supreme Court Ruling will change politics for the worse with Super PACs. 

It is interesting to read the disclaimer at the bottom of  Citizens For A Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow Super PAC site.  I highlighted the unlimited contribution aspect of this.

"Contributions to Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow ("ABTT") are not deductible as charitable contributions for federal income tax purposes. ABTT may accept unlimited corporate contributions, unlimited individual contributions, unlimited labor-union contributions, and unlimited PAC contributions. Contributions from foreign nationals and federal-government contractors will not be accepted. *Federal law requires ABTT's best efforts to obtain and report the name, address, occupation, and employer of any individual who contributes more than $200 in a calendar year." 

I do look forward to what Citizens For A Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow Super PAC also known as The Definitely Not Coordinating With Stephen Colbert Super PAC will be coming up with as we get closer to the election :-)   You can donate to Stephen's cause here:

The Colbert Report
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Gardner Publications Announces Additive Manufacturing Publication

Our good friends at Gardner Publications, recently announced their new Additive Manufacturing publication.  This is very cool!

 I was at a Sun Microsystems reunion a few weeks ago ( I worked there for 23 years) and the most popular question I got was, "Dave, is this stuff I am seeing on 3D printing and additive REAL?"  There is so much excitement out there right now around additive it is just amazing.  The open source aspect of additive is particularly exciting and reminds me of the early computer industry when PCs started to take off.  Additive will open up manufacturing to the masses.   

It is great news that the industry thought leaders at Gardner Publications are doing this.  I know it will be absolutely first class!  

The Mythical Man-Month Revisited

The Mythical Man-Month

Jan 11, 2012
By Dave Edstrom
NOTE: This is an article I wrote for the January 2012 IMTS Insider.

In all industries there are seminal books that are in the must-read category as someone is learning their trade. In manufacturing, one of these must-read books is The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldblatt and Jeff Cox.

In the computer industry, there are numerous must-read books and certainly Frederick P. Brooks The Mythical Man-Month, written in 1975, is in that category.

Personally, I prefer the updated version of Brooks’ book as it sheds more light on the topics and he updates his thoughts toward the end of the updated version. My favorite computer book that deals with the challenges of getting a product out the door is the Pulitzer Prize winning book by Tracy Kidder called The Soul of a New Machine.

The lessons from Brooks’ The Mythical Man-Month can also be applied to manufacturing. This is especially true as software becomes more important in manufacturing each and every day. I’d like to discuss “Brooks’ Law,” which is the focus of his book, but the point he brings out is implicit in the other two books as well.

When management makes the decision to throw more people at a software project that is running late, they do so under the firm belief that adding more people is the right and obvious decision to make at that point. The problem is that it is usually the wrong decision. “Brooks’ Law” states “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” At first glance, this may seem counterintuitive. The reasons Brooks’ Law is usually right are multiple. I use the term “usually” here because there are exceptions to Brooks' Law. The reasons Brooks’ Law usually holds up are when you bring new software developers onto a project, there are a number of tasks that simply must be done. These include:

• Bringing new developers up to speed on the project. This typically involves current software developers and project leads investing time with these new developers.
• There might be training for the new developers because the software tools or practices the project is utilizing are different than what they have previously worked on.
• The remaining work must be prioritized so the experienced developers are taking on the most difficult parts of the project.
• There is also dividing the work among the existing and new software developers — often a daunting task.  
• This partitioning of work can be extremely difficult if the initial architecture was not cleanly laid out separating out interfaces from implementations.  

What I mean by an “interface” is how one communicates with a piece of software. This is typically at a high level. For example, let’s say I want to verify that when a prototype part is being created on a specific machine tool, it is being created by one of our very best machinists. I also want to make sure that these machinists are using a cutting tool that meets certain quality requirements my company has determined will be used by for all prototype parts. What is the software interface that I program my client application to in order to make this happen?  Side note - this is where an open and royalty-free protocol such as MTConnect^® provides simple interfaces to get information.

The “implementation” is the low-level set of specifics on what happens when that above request is serviced.

Here’s another way to think about the interface and implementation definition in layman’s terms. The interface for me to get the yard mowed on a Saturday is to yell at one of my three sons, “Get the yard mowed tonight before it gets dark.” If I do not hear anything from them in 14.896 femtoseconds, I then yell, “Are we clear?” If I hear a positive response, then I consider the task done.

The implementation is my son going out to the shed, checking gas in the John Deere tractor and the Honda push mower, then deciding whether they want to mow the front or back yard first and finally getting the yard mowed. I don’t care HOW they mow the yard; just get the yard mowed before it gets dark. If time was tight, I could ask John to mow the back, Michael to mow the front and have Tim trim. However, if I needed my ½ acre mowed in less than three minutes, the partitioning and coordination to make this happen would be an interesting exercise. This partitioning can be easy to do when it comes to a simple task such as mowing the yard when you can simply yell at one of your sons to get it done, but it is very hard for a software project that could require hundreds of thousands of lines (or more) of code to be written.

It also can be a challenge integrating the new software developers into the existing communication framework.  

Brooks also states in his book, “the man-month as a unit for measuring the size of a job is a dangerous and deceptive myth – it implies that men and months are interchangeable.” It is well known that your gifted software developers can literally be 10x as productive as other software developers. This makes the dividing up of work even trickier.

A humorous statement that Brooks would make to drive home this point is, “The bearing of a child takes 9 months, no matter how many women are assigned.” This does drive home the point that some things just take time to make and software is certainly in that category.

Have things changed since 1975 with software development? Absolutely. It used to be that everyone thought software should be developed like a boat going down a gentle waterfall. In other words, one went from planning to coding to component test to system test and finally to deployment in a nice logical fashion. Today all the realists know that software development needs to be agile, lean, a clear partitioning of tasks and most importantly, interactive with the end customers. The type of computer languages have also changed a great deal, enabling more partitioning of tasks. When you think about the time frame of 1975 and computing, it is pretty remarkable to realize that even 37 years later, Brooks’ Law is still true many more times than it is false.

Tim Edstrom Dunking 10 Foot Goal Official Basketball

My 17 year old son Tim (youngest of three) is dunking with ease now on ten foot goal with an official basketball.  Tim is now 6'1"    All three of my sons dunked on ten foot goals before their 18th birthday AND all were selected to the National Honor Society, so now my job as a father is finished :-)

New System Insights Big Data Blog for Manufacturing

Dr. Athulan Vijayaraghavan, CTO and co-founder of System Insights, dropped me a note informing me of their new blog called Manufacturing Big Data.  

System Insights is the company that Will Sobel and Athulan started specifically to provide MTConnect products and services to the market place.  Systems Insights is going great.  Both Athulan and Will are tremendous thought leaders in the MTConnect community and it is very cool that they are sharing their knowledge with this new blog!

Cool NBA Video Released on Christmas Day on TNT

This came out on Christmas Day 2011 and is one of the coolest sports videos I have ever seen:

Great NYC Family Trip - The Book of Mormon

Julie and I took John, Michael and Tim to the funniest play, event you-name-it I have ever been to - The Book of Mormon play at the Eugene O'Neil Play House.  Julie surprised all of us with this great trip.  I happened to mention when Matt Stone and Trey Parker were on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart discussing The Book of Mormon back in the spring that I would love to go to to NYC and see that someday.  Thanks to Julie, we did.

We went up on Amtrak and stayed at the Hilton at Times Square.  Huge thanks to Joy Warfield (and to Cathy Doucette) for her great suggestions on what to do and where to eat.  We carried her list with us throughout NYC.

Above is the list of 9/11 Memorial Board Members.  Notice Jon Stewart's name as the second name on the second column.

Above is Phil Rosenzweig who was a Sun Microsystems employee who lost his life on flight 93.

Above is the 9/11 memorial chopper by Paul Jr. that is being auctioned off for charity.

Inside Ellis Island's main building.

We enjoyed a quick pizza at one of NYC's thousands of great pizza joints.

 Above is Julie and John in front of the apartment building on 93rd street where Julie's dad, Ray and her uncle John crew up in Brooklyn.

The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge was visible from Julie's Grandfather's apartment window.

Above and below is the high school that Julie's dad, uncle as well as Bernard and Albert King went to.

 Above is Lincoln Center.

Above is the Brooklyn Bridge.

Tim, my only son who is into cars, spotted this $150,000 Audi R8 in NYC.

Above is the Guggenheim Museum.

Of course we had to go to Zucotti Park.  NYPD had kicked everyone out.

Above is Julie and I in front of The Dakota at the exact spot that John Lennon was murdered.

Below are the boys in Central Park at night as we walked to the Imagine area.

Above is the famous Apollo Theater in Harlem.

The Book of Mormon was HILARIOUS.  Tickets were not cheap, but well worth it.  .  

 

It was COLD when the 30mph winds and 30 degree temperatures and you are on top of a tour bus.

We were on the 42nd story on 42nd street in Times Square with amazing views from our room. 

Lots of great restaurants!   Immediately above we are at PJ Clarke's which is a very famous NY restaurant.   We also went to John DiCarlo's cousins restaurant Forlini's in Little Italy.

The famous ball at Ti mes Square.

The Complete Myth of Voter Fraud

How completely ironic is it that all of this manufactured nonsense about voter fraud is now biting the Republicans in the VA presidential primary.   In a great article by Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, Ezra Klein brings out a couple of great points:

"But other Republicans — and most of the candidates — have turned their fire on Virginia. Ken Cuccinelli, the state’s attorney general, was particularly unsparing about the access laws. “Virginia won’t be nearly as ‘fought over’ as it should be in the midst of such a wide open nomination contest,” he wrote in an e-mail to supporters. “Our own laws have reduced our relevance. Sad. I hope our new GOP majorities will fix this problem so that neither party confronts it again.”

He hopes, in other words, that Virginia will make it easier for Republican candidates to get on the ballot, so Virginia’s voters are better able to participate in the election. It’s a noble goal, and one many Republicans share. But it runs counter to the efforts Republicans have mounted in dozens of states to make it more difficult for ordinary Americans to participate in the 2012 election."

This manufactured problem by the Republicans is best exemplified by this Ari Berman article in Rolling Stone that Ezra Klein points out in his article:

"As Ari Berman detailed in an article this summer for Rolling Stone, these laws have mostly been introduced by Republicans, who have justified them largely on fraud-prevention grounds. The only problem is that it’s been extremely hard for advocates of more restrictive voting laws to prove that fraud is a problem.

As Berman wrote, “A major probe by the Justice Department between 2002 and 2007 failed to prosecute a single person for going to the polls and impersonating an eligible voter, which the anti-fraud laws are supposedly designed to stop. Out of the 300 million votes cast in that period, federal prosecutors convicted only 86 people for voter fraud — and many of the cases involved immigrants and former felons who were simply unaware of their ineligibility.” 

Stated another way, that is a problem that happens at MOST .0000286666 percent of the time. 

 Perhaps Stephen Colbert said it best as Ezra Klein brings out in his article:

Joked comedian and political satirist Stephen Colbert: “Our democracy is under siege from an enemy so small it could be hiding anywhere.”

John Edstrom Graduates VT With Masters Degree in Computer Science

A week ago on December 16th 2011, John Edstrom, our oldest son, graduated from Virgina Tech with a Masters in Computer Science.  He graduated from Virgina Tech with a BS in Computer Science in May 2010.

John sharing a laugh with the graduate next to him.

This was a close up of John as he was walking up to get his degree.



Above is John receiving his degree.

Above is the conferring of degrees at VT

At John and Michael's favorite restaurant "Home Place Restaurant"

John between his grandpa and grandma Edstrom.  Below, Steve joined the grandparents and John.

    John with his proud and happy parents.  One down, two to go :-)

John and Janet with Steve above.