Monthly Archive: October 2011

Oct
19

Warning: FIFO Buffer Underrun!




Grocery stores are full of inefficiencies, but the operators do realize it and try to balance performance with operational expenses. It costs a lot of overhead to have all-lanes-open, and the non-food-value added cost gets added to the price of food items. In a way to improve checkout efficiency, lots of stores employ checkout conveyor belts that allow customers to load the carefully selected items to be checked-out while the attendant is moving items along at the front. This enables the “workload” to be buffered for the checkout attendant (“the processor”). The FIFO buffer approach ensures that the workload is ready for operation when the cashier is able to pull it. If not for the conveyor belt, checkout throughput would be severely limited by the rate at which the customer can directly transfer items up to 2-3 at a time from cart/basket to cashier. See system diagram:

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Oct
15

Unemployed Electronics




We at Engineering A Family are sensitive to today’s challenging environment brought on by the global recession. The financial crisis here in the US and abroad has dampened the economy and has taken unemployment as collateral, presently at ~9.1%. In that stripe, I want to personally assist three fully functional electronic devices get back on their feet, plugged in (or juiced up with Alkaline cells), and earning their worth by contributing their operations as originally designed by their creators. These fine devices are eager to work and aren’t loafing around in the Occupy Waste Bin.






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Oct
11

Requirements vs Design Specification for Instructions




Recently overhearing (or..casually over-shouldering) my wife dictating instructions out to a friend reminded me that in our 3.75ish years of marriage I’ve come to learn that outside of a few exceptions, we each tend to give instructions differently. Not necessarily in regards to amount of detail, but rather the scope of details for the instructions. Its a good thing too, since both the approaches we lean towards serve the right purposes.






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Oct
08

Custom Baby Food Solution




Baby food is an interesting industry in civilized Western First-World society. In this market, prepared food mush is jarred or otherwise packaged in special containers and advertised as food items to feed your baby. The product is shelved in its own aisle separate from the produce and meats that typically perimeter the grocery store as if to say this food is different than anything else. Think about it, we don’t have a separate food aisle for kids, adolescents, adults, or seniors. (but there is a pet food aisle).






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Oct
06

Encrypting Parental Communication

Meow!




Welcome to EngineeringAFamily.com, where our objective is to document the engineering practices used to raise our family based on various requirements and metrics.  The EAF website itself doesn’t serve any sensitive data, and is transmitted “through the air” in plain text without any encryption. Recently, Mom and I (Dad) had a brief experience of trying …

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