Made By Monkeys

In a survey last year of 2,000 techies by the software maker Maplesoft, the trusty No. 2 pencil trumped all other products as the most freqently used design and analysis tool.

Given the portability of paper-and-pencil, the pervasiveness of the quick scribble on the back of an envelope may not seem all the surprising. But the question is why aren't more engineers embracing software tools like Maple 11, a symbolic math software package that maker Maplesoft says allows engineers to perform calculations and capture technical knowledge in an intuitive way?

We asked engineers to explain the enduring popularity of the pencil - and their answers might well be a software marketer's worst nightmare.

At a Halloween party we threw for MIT students this weekend, the subject of Fortran came up (yeah, I know, nerdy stuff) which pretty much drew blank looks from the more junior witches and warlocks. For those of you who don't know, Fortran is the most widely used general-purpose programming language for numerical applications. Us old-timers learned how to program in it, back in the good old days of punch cards.

The problem is that no one new seems to be learning it anymore. And with so many gray-hairs who originally coded in Fortran now retiring, there's a lot of legacy stuff out there that's quickly destined to become a rather wicked black box.

Who wants to look at 60.45E-3 when they can see 6O.45xl0-3 instead?

While it is one of the most popular tools used by engineers on the planet, Excel's formatting capabilities can leave a lot to be desired. Jon Titus was particularly peeved over the fact that it displays data in scientific format (ie 6.023E23) but that he couldn't get it to produce exponents only in multiples of (E—3 , E—6, E—9, etc.)

Think millivolts, microvolts, and nanovolts, and you get the idea.

Rather than get mad, well at least not any more mad than he already was, Jon wrote a nifty little Excel macro, EngUnits, that not only produces information in an intuitive engineering format, but also allows an engineer to set the desired number of significant figures in the results.

Sister publication EDN presents an engineering who-dunnit in its latest Tales from the Cube, involving two engineers who were asked to investigate why the company's telephone switches were failing to switch activity from one machine to another. As hardware engineer Pierre Renaud relates:

"Everyone thought the culprit was a bad batch of DRAM chips because the older boards had been in the field for years, and this problem had never occurred before. So, my boss assigned me, the hardware guy, to team up with my software buddy to see if we could diagnose the problem....Although this event happened years ago, its lesson still remains as one of the more important laws of the art of debugging: Bugs don’t disappear with time."

Read about their full investigation here.

Anyone who thinks the use of buzzwords is criminal should get immense satisfaction from the fact that software maker SAP is being sued by a customer for falling short on the deliverables on what can only be described as a jargon-filled contract. According to the WSJ:

"SAP AG is being sued for failing to deliver an "out-of-the-box integrated end-to-end solution that increases...effectiveness." Amazingly, the meaning of these buzzwords are at the heart of a claim seeking more than $100 million."

Brad Thompson says that the article calls to mind the venerable "fuzz-phrase generator." He writes: