Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Give Hydro-Engineering A Chance

As with all challenges faced by engineers, these days of record heat should help spur innovation.

The field of geo-engineering, especially because it involves lofty projects that wow visitors and investors alike, gets a lot of press these days. And, I will not belittle its usefulness.

However, the often neglected field of hydro-engineering holds a lot of promise as well as challenges that have yet to be met.

Water, although not the best heat exchanger (hardly anything beats Freon gas) is abundant cheap and safe. I think there is a lot of room for devising systems that combine water and air to cool large spaces effectively, efficiently and perhaps even more cost-effectively that is done nowadays.

In the same way that lakes and rivers help to temper environmental heat, water-based heat exchange technology could be used to boost existing climate control systems.

Another area where hydro-engineering could help improve quality of life on this planet would be through easily deployed light pipelines that would combine flood control with irrigation. It's a fortuitous coincidence and somewhat of an irony that flooded areas are often just a few hundred miles removed from drought-stricken regions.

Imagine if we could move water from the flood-prone Mississippi delta to the scorching Nevada desert, or from Monsoon drenched Bangladesh to the scorched Sahara desert. Water, young man!

Sunday, July 10, 2011

The Shifting Sands Of Social Networking

As Google+ debuted with much fanfare and as it was revealed that Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg pretty much endorsed his competition by both admitting that he had a Googled+ profile and commending the service, I realized that social networking is quite a unique field in which to operate.

Like with the MTV series The Real World where season is likely to bring a new cast and story line, Social Networking's wagons seem not very amenable to longtime commitments. Those who had hitched their wagons to MySpace can easily understand where I am coming from.

I don't think Facebook is going anywhere anytime soon, but I think there is a real possibility that it might be at least partially eclipsed by the big G.

Social networking has a lot in common with cellphones except that, not being physical and not requiring two year contracts (or money for that matter), the players fortunes are a lot less secure that one might presume.

I say this not for Zuckerberg's sake as I am sure his financial advisor's are taking care of that end, but I want to warn developers who might find their Facebook allegiance unfruitful should their target demographic decide to move on.

As I have always warned my colleagues, those who refuse to design and plan independently of platform will find their work becoming irrelevant soon enough —Foxpro developers know this all too well.

A clearly designed game or application can be conceivable ported if its features follow a platform-agnostic design. There is a difference between maximizing the strengths of a port's platform and designing around it.

It also goes without saying, that we should choose our platforms like we chose our tools: the right one for the right circumstance. It doesn't hurt to ask the hypothetical question how could we go about moving our cash cow if we needed to?