Skip to main content

Engineering discipline in real life

I had signed up for frymire services who comes and tune up your AC 2 times a year for some $300 bucks.  This time the technician came and did some work on the AC in attic and then he went outside and did some work on compressor.  Then he left. On that day a cold front came and temp never go above 78 so my AC was not on, for last 2 days temp went above 78 so AC went on but instead of decreasing the temp it was increasing it. Whole night yesterday the temp kept on increasing from 78 to 84 and then decreased from 84 to 80(as the outside temp cooled off). There was a smell of mist in the air also. I was puzzled as to why the heck it was increasing instead of decreasing.  There was some thunderstorm 1 day back and there was an electrical outage also so my first suspicion was that it was because of that I went and tripped the power supply but that had no effect. Now being an enginner I didnt wanted to give up easily, I had no idea what an AC compressor is so googled a bit and thought of tripping it.

I went out side and when I looked at the compressor outlet I was pissed, the stupid technician after cleaning the compressors hadnt put the plug back in so for last 2 days AC was running without compressor( no wonder it wont cool).  I was both thrilled on solving the puzzle but I was also pissed on the technician.  Engineering discipline it seems helps in real life also and it saved me some $150 bucks that frymire would have charged for coming to check on the AC.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Haproxy and tomcat JSESSIONID

One of the biggest problems I have been trying to solve at our startup is to put our tomcat nodes in HA mode. Right now if a customer comes, he lands on to a node and remains there forever. This has two major issues: 1) We have to overprovision each node with ability to handle worse case capacity. 2) If two or three high profile customers lands on to same node then we need to move them manually. 3) We need to cut over new nodes and we already have over 100+ nodes.  Its a pain managing these nodes and I waste lot of my time in chasing node specific issues. I loath when I know I have to chase this env issue. I really hate human intervention as if it were up to me I would just automate thing and just enjoy the fruits of automation and spend quality time on major issues rather than mundane task,call me lazy but thats a good quality. So Finally now I am at a stage where I can put nodes behing HAProxy in QA env. today we were testing the HA config and first problem I immediat...
Post a Comment
Read more

Adding Jitter to cache layer

Thundering herd is an issue common to webapp that rely on heavy caching where if lots of items expire at the same time due to a server restart or temporal event, then suddenly lots of calls will go to database at same time. This can even bring down the database in extreme cases. I wont go into much detail but the app need to do two things solve this issue. 1) Add consistent hashing to cache layer : This way when a memcache server is added/removed from the pool, entire cache is not invalidated.  We use memcahe from both python and Java layer and I still have to find a consistent caching solution that is portable across both languages. hash_ring and spymemcached both use different points for server so need to read/test more. 2) Add a jitter to cache or randomise the expiry time: We expire long term cache  records every 8 hours after that key was added and short term cache expiry is 2 hours. As our customers usually comes to work in morning and access the cloud file server it ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Spring 3.2 quartz 2.1 Jobs added with no trigger must be durable.

I am trying to enable HA on nodes and in that process I found that in a two test node setup a job that has a frequency of 10 sec was running into deadlock. So I tried upgrading from Quartz 1.8 to 2.1 by following the migration guide but I ran into an exception that says "Jobs added with no trigger must be durable.". After looking into spring and Quartz code I figured out that now Quartz is more strict and earlier the scheduler.addJob had a replace parameter which if passed to true would skip the durable check, in latest quartz this is fixed but spring hasnt caught up to this. So what do you do, well I jsut inherited the factory and set durability to true and use that public class DurableJobDetailFactoryBean extends JobDetailFactoryBean {     public DurableJobDetailFactoryBean() {         setDurability(true);     } } and used this instead of JobDetailFactoryBean in the spring bean definition     <bean i...
7 comments
Read more