George's Blog

A 75-week Journey

GeoKon — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 00:29:00 +0000

The journey of a Senior Technology Executive for 75 weeks is over! If you are about to take the same journey or you are in the midst of it, continue reading. It contains several lessons learned, what to do (and not to do) and other useful hints based on this recent experience. Lessons learned Your ...

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Agile Project Management Tune-up

GeoKon — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 00:37:00 +0000

The last MassTLC meeting in July on “Taking your Agile Development to the Next Level – Best Practices and Methodologies” triggered all kind of thoughts; for example: lingo is different by the substance is the same finally software engineering get’s to adopt practices that have been applied in other practices the real problem of resource ...

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The Battery Crossover Point

GeoKon — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 17:50:00 +0000

I have been monitoring the battery evolution for the past 25 years including primary (disposable) and secondary (re-chargeable) batteries. At Sea Data we were using primary alkaline and lithium stacks of 100’s of ampere hours; and when we had to drive GOES transmitters we were using NiCd booster batteries which were charged very carefully from ...

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Internet of Things: A forever passion

GeoKon — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 16:08:00 +0000

I decided to write this blog to share lifetime experiences in the space of electronics and “the cloud”. But first, let me apologize about bragging myself; this blog contains too many sentences including “I”; nevertheless, it’s helpful to look backwards and see how the art of electronics led to the home automation and finally to ...

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Modify Mikrotik RB-750UP to measure ANY voltage

GeoKon — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 02:37:00 +0000

After the power outage in Boston last month, Brough and I decided to provide battery backup to our new head-ends. A typical head-end includes several gigabit ports (3 x RB-1100 AH2’s or a bunch of RB-750’s), power injectors to the radios and a backhaul fiber connection. So far we have been using off-the-shelf UPSes (see ...

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Development processes: one size does not fit all

GeoKon — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:43:00 +0000

Christine Nolan has been doing an excellent job organizing the Software Cluster of MassTLC. Today’s meeting took place in the VMware facilities in Cambridge and moderated by Brad Meiseles, Director of R&D at VMware. Brad made a couple of excellent references and quotes such as: “Begin with the end in mind” – From Steve Covey’s ...

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Nuclear chamber or what?

GeoKon — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:38:00 +0000

Just take a look at this picture and guess what you are looking at. Notice a pressure chamber with a bunch of electrodes at the top and massive plumbing on the right of the picture; also, lots of colorful wires… Let me help you with one more picture – this is the other side of ...

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Giving birth to a Rack with a View

GeoKon — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 03:15:00 +0000

After months of negotiations, Jim managed to lease space at the 61st floor of the John Hancock’s tower to install netBlazr’s antennas. While Brough was enjoying sunny Florida, George was driving to You-do-it Electronics to buy the missing screws to make “the rack”; and finally she was born: Dec 30th, 2012 at the 14th floor ...

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Creating 1Tera-Ohm divider at 100kV

GeoKon — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 04:19:00 +0000

Creating high voltage components is challenging because of the parasitic capacitances to the surroundings. The electrical field at 10KV requires careful isolation of any conducting surface of about 1”; furthermore, any sharp niches can trigger an arc between the component and the surrounding lower potential items. Goal I needed to measure high voltages around 30KV; ...

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High-performance teams: a lifetime experience

GeoKon — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 06:10:59 +0000

This subject has been the theme of many books and recent meetings. Most recently I attended the Mass Technology Leadership Summit on Rapid Development and Deployment; this meeting was one of the MassTLC Software as a Service & Cloud Software Cluster. Details about the promising world of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS can be found in ...

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