Category Archives: Opinion

Engineers engineers

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I was recently linked here, where the guy had made up a list of a few country’s top management and where their respective educations lay.

It is was interesting to note that most of the countries’ (Germany, India, USA & Singapore) top officials were all educated in the arts or law, with a few economics people and the odd science major. China on the other hand is made up purely of engineers, with a lawyer chucked in for good measure.

With the often bad rep that SA’s government is often given, I thought I’d do a quick list of the top brass. Below is the quick list, much like on the linked page, and lower down I give a bit more detail. I took the the president, deputy president and then 7 Ministers, in line with the format of the other posts.

Jacob Zuma – President – No Formal Education
Kgalema Petrus Motlanthe – Deputy President – High School
Mr PJ Gordhan – Finance – Pharmacy
Dr PA Motsoaledi – Health – Medicine
Ms ED Peters – Energy – Social Works & Management
Dr R Davies – Trade & Industry – Economics & Politics
Dr LN Sisulu – Defence – Education & History
Ms GNM Pandor – Science & Technology – Education
Mr JS Ndebele – Transport – Politics

Ignoring the President and Deputy President, they all have several degrees in related fields. Quite a few with honorary degrees and several people with degrees from other countries.

img: republic.org.nz

President – Jacob Zuma
No Formal education, but with an understandable amount of jail time. Three Honorary Doctorares in Literature, Administration and Philosophy respectively.

Deputy President – Kgalema Petrus Motlanthe
Matric (Completed High School), also with some imprisonment during Apartheid.

Minister of Finance – Mr PJ Gordhan
Bachelor of Pharmacy (Natal), detained several times. 3 honorary Doctorates in Commerce, Law and Business Admin respectively.

Minister of Health – Dr PA Motsoaledi
Bachelor of Medicine & Surgery (Natal).

Minister of Energy – Ms ED Peters
Bachelor of Arts: Social Works (University of the North). Certificates in Development and Policy (UWC), Executive Management (UCT) and International Policy Management (Cuba).

Minister of Trade & Industry – Dr R Davies
Honours in Economics, Masters in International Relations (South Hampton), Doctorate in Political Studies (Sussex).

Minister of Defence & Military Veterans – Dr LN Sisulu
BA in Education (Swaziland), Hons in History (York), Masters in Philosophy (York).

Minister of Science & Technology – Ms GNM Pandor
Diploma in Education, MA in Education, Diploma in Higher Education, Administration and Leadership, Diploma in Leadershiop and Development, MA in General Linguistics.

Transport – Mr JS Ndebele
BA International Politics (UNISA), Honours in Development Administration & Politics. Honorary Doctorare (UKZN)

 

 

Almost all the details were taken from the rather informative http://www.info.gov.za.

How does one “Love your SA”?

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Today is voting day in South Africa. We have the opportunity to vote in the 2011 Municipal Elections. Now I hadn’t previously given it much thought. These are only the second elections I’m voting in, the first being the national elections back in 2009. That was easy. 2 votes. One for National Assembly representation, and one for Provincial. But I recently realised that it wouldn’t be as straightforward as that for the Municipal Elections.

img: elections.org.za

After chatting with quite a few people in the area, it’s clear that I was not alone in this state. Everyone knew to an extent who they wanted to vote for, and just assumed they’d go and make their mark, but no one understood that there would be different ballots with different implications. Digging through the IEC’s website, I found this page on voter education, which has some nice pamphlets, which does to an extent explain what’s going on. But again it doesn’t explain the nitty gritty, or how exactly representatives are chosen.

There are 2 scenarios. You either live in a metropolitan area (such as Cape Town Unicity) or you live in a district (such as me in Stellenbosch, other towns in the area would be included in this district). For Metropolitan areas, you get two votes. One for your ward representative, and one for the party you want to run the city, ie be the mayor. For towns in districts, there are 3 votes. One for your ward representative. One for the party to be mayor, and one for the party you want to lead the District.

This is all good and well. The person with the most votes in your ward will get a seat on the local council. Stellenbosch has 37 seats in total, 19 of which are allocated as a result of ward votes. The other 18 are then assigned on a basis of Proportional Representation. But here where things get slightly confusing. There are two possible situations. Either they look at the percentage of votes a party got in the mayoral vote, and assign seats based on that. With 18 seats, it means each party would get a representative for every 5% of the votes they got here. The alternative, and how it looks, is that they include the already occupied seats in the calculation. Meaning that 2.7% of votes would result in a seat. For example, in the 2006 elections, the UDM only received 1.9% of votes. so under the first situation, they wouldn’t really stand a chance of getting one of the 5% seats. Yet they have held a seat the last 5 years.

And this is where the issue comes in. There is so much happening on the IEC’s website at the moment, it’s very difficult to find the information you’re looking for. I’m not even sure if the information I’m looking for is available on their website.

Now for most people this is probably not an issue. They have a party they support, and they are going to vote for them on all their ballots, however lots of community’s have local parties standing for wards. And it makes it tricky when voting mayorally. In Stellenbosch we have the new Studente Stem Party. They are standing for 2 of the wards in Stellenbosch, and then are also standing for the mayoral position. My voting station is located outside of their wards, but I may want to support them with the mayoral vote, but it’s difficult not knowing how exactly the system works.

In any case, I intend to ask some people around the voting station tomorrow and find out how clued up the people there are. Ought to be interesting.

Enjoy your public holiday!

Edit: Another thought. The Student Party don’t stand a chance of winning the mayoral vote, so do I give my vote to them in any case to get another representative on the council, or do I rather give my vote to a party that my vote may have an impact on, thus ensuring my chosen party is the one leading the town?

Busiest & Best

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This last semester has kept me busier academically than I’ve ever been before with the main culprits being our two large design projects as well as skripsie. And when i say busy, I mean spending hour after hour through weekends and public holidays in labs working to ensure that projects are complete. The thing is, is that I was having fun. Well to an extent. There were many times where tiredness and frustrations got the better of me, but the moments of joy when something worked were incredible.

The Mechatronics project was interesting, but not my favourite. In theory it was quite simple, but a bit more tricky in application. In essence we were told we needed to take 2 tanks and then have user inputs allowing one to set the desired water level and temperature in both tanks. We were limited by only being able to pump fresh water into tank 1, and only being allowed to place a heating element in tank 1. Our end setup comprised of a kettle as our first tank which we pumped fresh water into. The second tank was placed at a lower height to allow water to flow from the first tank to the second tank. Water could be pumped into tank 1, and then solenoid valves were used to allow water to flow into the second tank, or allow water to flow from either of the tanks back into the reservoir.

Floats were connected to potentiometers to give us a height/volume reading of the water and supplied thermocouples gave us accurate temperature readings. The entire system is then linked by a Schneider Electric Modicon momentum Soft PLC and Tutorbox. During the term we were given tutorials on how to use Wonderware’s InControl and InTouch software to control the PLC. The project does rather throw one into the deep end though. The training for the PLC doesn’t really explain it’s functionality and very little focus is given on actually programming in the software. Instead we’re taught to make use of RLL programs to control the system.

But the scope of our project was far too complicated to rely on RLL programs. Instead we chose to figure out how to use the other supported Structured Text Language instead. We downloaded some tutorials and beginners guides, but so many of the things we tried gave us compiler errors in the software, so in the end we resorted to a trial and error method, hacking our way through. Till now I’ve only ever really coded in Objected Orientated programming languages, which I don’t really feel STL complies to. This amongst with many other small nuances lead to me hating the programming side of this project. Fortunately one of the group members took to it with vigour.

Our final demo went reasonably well, everything worked to an extent and the “judges” seemed impressed even if the system didn’t run as smoothly as we had hoped.

And onto Digital Design. The basic story is that we were building remote controlled gate units. We had a main board which comprised of a 16 character LCD screen on which we displayed a menu controlled by 5 push buttons. There was a serial->USB converter to communicate with a computer, some EEPROM to store some data a PWM controller to control the “gate” motor, an optical sensor for determining the state of the gate, a triac to turn an AC driven light on/off a buzzer to annoy people and an IR receiver.
We then had a remote with an IR diode for transmitting data, 2 buttons and its own EEPROM for good measure. Both units were based around the Renesas R8/C27 microcontroller programmed in C via Renesas’ HEW software. Fun with that spawned this fan group page. Apart from a few resistor values that had to be calculated, the component design aspect was pretty much handled for us, the big issue was understanding how these components worked, and then getting them to play nice with the rest of the components.

We were given the components every 2nd week or so, and built up our boards slowly as we acquired and programmed each successive piece. In the end we had a board on which each component worked by itself, but then it was time to pull everything together and get the software programmed to work as required. Quite a challenge. This was truly the subject which has taught me the most, or in which I feel I’ve learnt the most. It was work that I hadn’t ever really done, but had always interested me, and although it really is a tough course, and a bit of a trial by fire, I’m glad how it turned out.

As an interesting fact, last year somewhere close to 50% of 4th year Mechatronic Engineers failed the subject. And I can believe that. Although we are given some preparation in the form of a semester of Electronics and 2 semesters of Computer System, the work we do is completely new and requires a different way of thinking and time dedication second to none.

A friend of mine described the subject like this: “Ontwerp n hekmotor en remote. Hier is so 3 bladsye se totally vague instructions, ons sal julle een keer n week kom se presies hoe ver julle agter is. O ja, hier is 6000 bladsye se inligting waardeur jy moet soek vir een pin se default state. Rinse and repeat so 30 miljoen keer. Elke dag”. Roughly translated it is: “Design a gate motor and remote. Here are 3 pages of completely vauge instructions. We’ll come tell you once a week exactly how behind you are. Oh yes, here are 6000 pages of information that you have to search through to find one pins defaults state. Rinse and repeat about 30 million times. Every Day.”

Although a bit dramatic, it quite often feels like. Nothing has frustrated me as much as the unproductive hours spent on this project. We’re busy compiling a report on the project to hand in on Monday, so will post some schematics and pictures then.And then it’s on to exams for 3 weeks, a bit of holiday/skripsie work for 2 weeks, vacation work in East London for 4 weeks and back to Stellenbosch for my last undergrad semester.

Of Cake and Disappointments

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Portal 2, the sequel to one of the most humourous and fun puzzle games ever made, Portal, released this week. This week Tuesday, a few days before planned launch. This was good news for me; see Portal 2 is the first game I’ve ever cared enough about to bother preordering. Quite a while ago in fact, back in February. And as such I preordered it for my PS3, my PC lacking the necessary gusto required to play modern games.

In any case, the early release ensured that I would get the game before the long weekend, giving me plenty of time to sit around and finish it, leaving next week open to work off my backlog of work. And as it sits I played, thoroughly enjoyed, and finished the game. The single player mode in any case, see Portal 2 comes with a bunch of extra co-op missions for you to play with a friend. And I have such a friend, with a PS3 and sharing the enthusiasm for the new game.


Sony and Valve both had to work a bit here, as Steam games had never previously been available on the PS3. As such, a nice overlay was created with the ability to link your PSN (PlayStation Network) account to your Steam account. The PS3 version of the game even comes with a CD key allowing you to activate the PC version of the game on Steam as well.

So it was with much enthusiasm that I tried to connect to PSN and get this process going. But alas it failed, with some obscure error code. Searches online linked only to router options, proxy settings and port forwarding. And so I sat down, sifting through my router settings, one by one, trying to find the source of my problem. Fortunately I was saved too much effort by a message from mentioned friend, informing me that he too can no longer login to PSN.

The joy of this is that if you can’t login to PSN, you can’t multiplay. The obscure error message has since been replaced by a notice informing us that the servers are down for maintenance. The PSN website and twitter feed inform us that it’s probably going to be down for a few days, and they’re not really sure what’s wrong.

As far as I know, this is the first time that something like this has happened to PSN, and I can’t but wonder if the link with Steam has somehow caused this issue. In the mean time I’ve started following the official PSN twitter feed in anticipation of it’s return. I’m also making headway into my work, ensuring time in the future to enjoy the benefits of Portal 2 co-op.


With reference to the SP game itself though. It was as enjoyable as the first, and with the addition of various new game mechanics made for a truly great experience. Excellent casting, especially of Wheatly (Steve Merchant), and an ending equalling the predecessor’s. The story followed on nicely, with constant references to other games and previous events keeping one listening intently to what was happening.

Update: PSN has been haxxored. The official words are: “An external intrusion on our system has affected our PlayStation Network”. So they’ve shut it off while they conduct an investigation. No estimate as to how long it’s going to be off.