It's getting cold in North Pole

I wouldn't be right if I didn't complain about the cold here in Alaska. That is a favorite subject around North Pole this time of year. Last night it got down to -38 F and now it is only -25 F. If you want to see the temperature for North Pole a website with a weather station readings and graphs on it is at wild Alaska

Today I added a new bulletin board to electrician(2).com. I used to have almost the same bulletin board up for years until the gambling and porn sites bombed it with so much spam that I was spending an hour a day editing the stuff out. This new board has some neat security features such as banned word and ip lists. A group calling themselves the nms group has taken several of Matt Wright's Perl scripts and rewrote them to be more secure. Matt Wright was a 17 year old kid in the late 90's that gave away many scripts for guest books, bulletin boards, and form mail processors. He was heavily criticized by the professionals because his scripts had security flaws in them. They were ok in the beginning but as more and more abuses cropped up on the Internet, his scripts became rather useless. Today, the Internet is plagued with abusive users from all over the world that will do mischief just for the fun of doing it.

As the World Turns....

Well here it is Thursday. Judith Miller is out at the NY Times, Al-Qaida has attacked in Jordan, Oil Chiefs are being grilled by Congress and ANWR drilling has been killed in the House, and I have just spent three hard days trying to get water into the house. It seems impossible that everything from the pressure tank to the well went bad. The 1 1/4 inch union at the well even broke. The one inch heat traced line to the house plugged with sand, the 1/2 hp well pump went out. So after $600 in pumps and parts and three days of labor in minus 10 degrees the water is back. I remember the old days in Alaska back in the 50's and 60's when we lived on a homestead where my Mom used to melt snow for three days to get water to wash clothes. I don't know how she survived those first three years with no water, but she lived to be 86.

So now it is back to the electrician.com activities. Now I can continue developing training programs and learning Perl more. I want to write a Perl program that will check the test scores, the notification of completion and the payment records then generate a certificate of completion. On the back burner is writing a program that selects wire size and overload device after reading in the number of conductors, load, insulation temperature, termination temperature, equipment temperature, etc. I wrote a Excel program in 1999 that did a good job at this, but I want write this in JavaScript or Perl. Never again will I try to write a program in Excel.

New feature added to search utilities

At 5 AM this morning....After reading through some 9 books I have on Perl and CGI programming with Perl and reading the online material at cgi 101, I added file locking to the two cgi search scripts used at electrician.com and electrician2.com. Evidently, if a file is opened and not locked and programs from two separate users access the file at the same time the contents can be destroyed. The probability of this happening is slim, but just in case a file can be locked while it is being read or written to. Writing a program to perform a task is only half of the job. The contingency modules that address security, human error, and possible crashes are the other half.

Now to get to that well pump...this should be fun. It is only 9 below zero today.

Plumbing problems at home

Electrician.com comes to you from our home in North Pole, Alaska while the servers are in California, Washington, and Alaska. Actually, we don't live in North Pole but just outside the city limits at the end of a road. There are no other homes within sight and we have a lake and about 500 acres to look at with nothing but birds, moose, and some really big long nose sucker fish in the lake. It is nice living at the end of a road where there is so much privacy and where it is very quite. We are about 1 mile from the one shopping mall in North Pole and about 800 feet from the borough bus route, and about 14 miles from Fairbanks where there are plenty of things to do including the new megastores. Yes, we have a WalMart, Home Depot, and Lowes in Fairbanks. So you could say we have the best of both worlds, country living and a civilization close by. The down side is that we have to take care of our own needs when it comes to water, sewer, and garbage collection. As luck would have it, the temperature has dropped in the last couple of days to 20 below zero (F) and that is when the pump quit pumping water from the well that I drove last summer. Now did the line freeze? I don't think so since it is heat traced using chemelex heat trace. But being a cheap shot, I heat traced it with 3 watts per foot heat trace. Or did the well go dry? We are just several hundred feet from the lake and the water level was at 9 feet last summer. The well is 42 feet down. So I don't think the well went dry. However, when I drove the last 10 feet of pipe using a 90 pound jack hammer the pipe seemed to be too loose. It is possible that the thread broke on one of the upper lengths of well pipe and the pump has only been working while the water level was above that joint and now the water level has dropped below that joint. Tomorrow I will take out the pump and 1 1/4 inch check valve and take them to a qualified plumbing shop to see if they check out. I have a hunch that the pump has gone bad since it has been making some awful noise lately. If the pump is ok and I have to drive a new well that will be interesting to do at 10 to 20 below zero. It will require a shelter and a heater, both expensive items. But that is life in the interior of Alaska where we have six months of continuous freezing weather. At least it is not 40 or 50 below, in which case, you simply don't work outside especially on water wells. In the mean time it is living without water except that which we haul.

Update to search programs

Today I added email validation to four scripts that perform the notification of completion filing and emailing, and to the scripts that find the test results and the notification of completion submittals. The email blocks now have to have some form of valid email address entered or the program kicks back an error and informs users to enter a proper email address format. I had to do this to keep the search utility from listing the entire test score database when a non email word was entered. It took all day using Perl which I am beginning to respect more. In computer languages I would have to say that Perl is the ultimate text processing language. FORTRAN is known as one of the ultimate number crunchers, but FORTRAN is not the language of choice for text processing. So why am I saying this to you all.... Well, if you have kids tell them to learn Perl if they are into computers! Microsoft has VBScript and C#, but anytime Microsoft licenses a product you will pay through the nose for it, and MS will drop the product any time the market conditions determine it isn't a money maker, like they did FoxPro. I and others wasted many hours and dollars learning FoxPro and buying the developer products from Microsoft only to have them drop it entirely without notice.
Perl is a public domain language that can be downloaded and installed in your computer for free. It is an extremely powerful tool that grades tests and records test results among other things. As I recall, the founder of EBay was a Perl programmer.

Historical observations

This winter I plan to finish creating a course on Ampacity. I have gathered some very outstanding papers from Neher-McGrath, Samuel Rosch, Matt Brown, Donald Simmons, Peter Pollack, and John Caloggero dating from 1932 to 1988. I obtained most of these from the Engineering Societies Library that used to exist in New York City where you could order just about any paper you needed using the telephone and a fax machine. Unfortunately this service is no longer in business and now one has to search through the Journals at the nearest University library. Many of the NEC rules come from such papers and it is very interesting to find the actual research and analysis that was done so many years ago. Many times we do not have the time to perform this research and the history of subjects such as ampacity of conductors stays buried in the journals of long ago. The original heat transfer equation used to develop ampacity tables comes from the work of Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768 - 1830).

Fourier was born in Auxerre, France, the ninth of twelve children. He trained for the priesthood, but spent much of his life teaching mathematics at French universities, principally the École Polytechnique. He was active in the French Revolution, and his activity twice resulted in imprisonment and a potential visit to the guillotine. From 1798 to 1801, he acted as Napoleon's scientific adviser and sometime administrator in the Egyptian campaign. From 1804 to 1807, he served as prefect of Grenoble, a post he reluctantly accepted because the appointment was made by Napoleon. He was elected to the Académie des Sciences in 1817, and served as its secretary.

(In 1807, Fourier submitted a paper on heat transfer to the Institute of France.) The paper caused great controversy among the examiners . . . Fourier sent in papers in 1808 and 1809 to meet criticisms, and eventually a prize problem on heat diffusion was proposed by the Institut de France for January 1812, to which he submitted a considerably revised and extended version of the 1807 paper. . . He won the prize; but publication was still delayed. So he began a third version of his work in the form of a book, which eventually appeared as Théorie analytique de la chaleur in 1822. The prize paper also appeared—unchanged—in two parts . . . in 1824 and 1826.

On a more current side....
State of Washington's L and I has issued a special edition of Electrical Currents describing the Class B electrical permitting system. It can be found at by clicking here
If you work in Washington in the electrical trades you should subscribe to the Electrical Currents newsletter that will be sent to you by email at no extra cost.

New Features at electrician.com and electrician2.com

Welcome to my new Blog!
Now, for the first entry.
After several months of programming in PERL and CGI.PM I have built a new search utility and installed it at the main pages for electrician.com and the mirror site electrician2.com. . Many students taking courses have asked for (rightfully so) the ability to review test scores and other information. The new search utility uses the email addresses of users to find their passed tests and searches the file created from the new Notification of Completion Form to tell the users if they have submitted a Notification of Completion for a particular course. This search utility requires the same password and username as provided for taking the final or recorded tests. It is also server unique meaning that electrician.com results are not revealed at electrican2.com and vice versa. This search utility searches a total of 36 files and uses two new PERL scripts. I started writing these programs in September, 2005 and finished on November 2, 2005.There still may be some minor bugs, but it seems to work fine so far. (Test answers marked with an x are the wrong answers.)I have also started this Blog to update you on what is going on at electrician.com and report other interesting related tidbits.