11 February 2006

BBC article on wind turbines

Someone sent me a link to the BBC article on micro wind turbines:
(With energy prices on the up, will city skylines bristle with wind turbines and will back gardens become mini wind farms?
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/1/hi/magazine/4694070.stm )
and scanning down it I saw some readers' comments. I quickly jotted down a reply to answer some of the entirely valid points raised. As of today (24-hours later) my reply has not been printed. I wonder if that is because the BBC doesn't work at weekends, or whether they now consider the story closed, or whether they consider my response unprintable ? In any case a weakness in the BBC system is that it does not email one a copy - in the future I will draft any comment on my own computer and that paste it across to their browser window so that I retain a copy.

Using MYOB for serious manufacturing control

Any serious manufacturing control system relies on various Bill Of Material (BOM).

In MYOB to print out a BOM one has to go REPORTS/STOCK/AUTOBUILD/CUSTOMISE/DISPLAY/PRINT which is rather long winded. More generally they need to get print buttons on all their screens - there are many other screens which are useful but which can only be printed by going through a tortuous report generation process.

Similarly any serious BOM will include all sorts of sub assemblies which typically form a nested hierarchy. When one prints off the BOM to give a technician or storekeeper it would be better if all the nested items were available via a collapse / expand trigger (i.e. a +/- toggle). At the moment MYOB prints only one layer at a time, so the user has to manually create the report for each layer of sub assembly.