Times have changed.  It’s no longer a free-form essay exam but instead, even at Practitioner level, its multichoice, and to reregister you sit a shorter version of the same exam others who are sitting for Practitioner will have, but only do 3 out of the 9 topic areas.  You don’t know which three, so there is just as much work, and less chance to carry a weak section if you don’t know them all, so reregistering is probably harder than the Practitioner exam.  I’ll not tempt fate by commenting on multichoice vs. essays until my results are in.

PRINCE2 has been heavily revised since 2004, with a new major version in 2009, and the book is now a slimmer volume.  Many of the changes recognise normal industry practice, particularly the need to tailor the method to suit the company and project being managed, to which an entire chapter is now devoted.  This is important, because there is a world of difference between small projects and large ones, between projects which are entirely in house and those with outsourced work packages, and the use of Agile methodologies has become much more prominent.  Ultimately, the principles are the same, but roles are split or combined, and documentation can be made simpler in some cases.

The Risk section has been rewritten, and now includes opportunities ie. postive risks which the project may encounter and which can be exploited.  The language is simpler – we no longer mitigate, insure or set up contingencies, but instead accept, reduce, have a fallback, transfer or share.  Opportunities may be shared, rejected, exploited or enhanced.  The introduction of a risk management strategy, developed in the initiation stage is a good addition, and recognises that, for practical purposes, a very large proportion of a project manager’s job is really risk management.

Progress – monitoring, reporting on it and controlling it, is also a huge part of the job, and so its good to see it in a single theme, with all the tolerance levels and different management levels clearly explained.

To some extent, the required paperwork has been reduced.  The idea that documentation produced during initiation might be combined into a single project intitiation document is something that is very practical and common, and means that it is less likely that particular areas will be neglected or lost.  It’s rare to do a full issue or risk report, and so recognising that a log, excuse me, register entry will be enough in most cases is also welcome.  Increasing the prominence of the daily log will work well, particularly for those of us working with agile methods, with daily standups, where a note of anything of interest can be quickly made by the PM/SCRUM master immediately after the standup.

When I decided to re-register, I saw it as a chore that had to be done, but I’m glad I did.  It’s useful to revisit the basic’s of one’s profession every now and again, and a bit of a relief to see that it wasn’t quite as daunting as I’d expected.  The nice folk at SPOCE were very helpful too, and I can certainly recommend their revision day and self-study materials.  They do excellent, free, half day seminars which are well worthwhile for an overview, and might let you have a discount too.

Richard Noon, Managing Enterprise Architect, presented a case study of a client who wanted to move an ecommerce site onto a utility computing model, in the cloud, and to simplify change.   Their solution was to use an enterprise architecture tool (System Architect) as the ITIL configuration management database, with full traceability from the high level analysis and architecture artifacts down to physical software and hardware components.  Where the latter were not accessible, because a service was provided in the cloud, then traceability stops at the service, and the service level agreement, and service quality targets are managed.  A services based representation of the enterprise architecture was key to getting this working in the cloud.

Of course, as Richard Noon admitted, this full traceability is expensive, but not only does it allow a client to be sure that what has been delivered is what was required, it also allows the impact of proposed changes to be easily assessed, and links architecture and project work to the ongoing operation and management of the services implemented.

Linking architecture to the ongoing delivery of the resulting services has got to underpin successful projects, at least if they are to measure up in their benefits reviews and be seen as a success well beyond launch.

The EA special interest group of the BCS are good at getting slides up on their website, so you maybe able to find them here in the next few days.

Google Fusion Tables allow you to keep tables of data in Google’s cloud, manipulate it, visualise it and present it online. If the data have a spatial element, they can be displayed on a Google Map, or, if there is a time element, as a time series or storyline. As Mano Marks put it, it’s an attempt to provide GIS functionality with the ease of use of a spreadsheet.

I had a happy hour or two playing around with some data – a list of theatres and a list of plays I’ve seen recently, with links to my reviews.
Here’s a map of the theatres:

And here’s the storyline, showing when the shows will finish, so you can see if something is still playing It is a bit messy, though might improve with more data. A click on the play title takes you straight to the review.

There are also graphs and other maps to play with, and its very easy to embed them into a site like this (unless you happen to be on wordpress.com, where iframes are a no-no). Everything I’ve done here is quite simple, and needed only the ability to drive a spreadsheet and a little basic html.

But is it really a GIS, or just a simple mapping tool? The ability to include kml in your table, and so produce polygons and lines, takes it beyond the realm of sticking pins in Google Maps and allows more complex features to be built, but to get to the some of the stronger GIS features, you need to use the api, and do a little programming. Using the API, it is simple to do basic spatial queries, looking for the distance between two features or seeing whether a location lies within a polygon (is the customer’s address within the pizza shop’s delivery area). Although the data can be filtered using the standard interface, that is very limited. I can’t, for instance, select only those plays which will close after today, to show a storyline of plays that you could still go to see, without resorting to the API.

While it is not as easy as a spreadsheet, with a little creativity and willingness to delve into kml, this tool can do a lot, and it is certainly easier than Quantum GIS, or even Google Earth on its own. I suspect its main use will be to allow those of us who run small websites, and aren’t too keen to spend a lot of time coding, or learning a more conventional GIS, to incorporate some geospatial features.

And that, dear reader, is how I got to spend Boxing Day restoring my files and getting myself set up on brand new laptop.  Fortunately, its all back, and no harm done.  My backup strategy is going to change a little, but it worked, and this post is to explain some of the things I do, and some of the things I learned.

If you’re a consultant, a student, or anyone else who relies on a computer, having good backups in place is absolutely essential.  It’s not hard to get a new laptop, but it is very very hard to recreate that important document you’ve slaved over for weeks, reconstruct data or get everyone to resend those emails.

What would you need to restore?

Any backup strategy needs to start with thinking about what you will need to restore.  Think about all the software you use, and how you would restore it if something went wrong.  Make a list.  I have Thunderbird email, all my references on Zotero (a Firefox plugin), Word and Excel files and some specialised software.  The documents are easy, but do you know how to backup and restore your emails, data in your browser, or that specialised software?  Which files will you need back first?  If it takes a day or two to get a new machine, do you have another you could use in the meantime, and if so, how will you get your files onto it?

Restoring from a complete failure or loss of a laptop will involve finding or buying a new machine, reinstalling software and then restoring your own custom data – files, emails, settings.

I back up everything in My Documents (and I’m careful to keep files in there), as well as my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles.  Most  software can be downloaded from the internet, but if that’s not possible, make sure you have the CDs and the licences somewhere safe.

It is worthwhile creating a directory with all your software licences in it, and keeping that backed up as well.

Online backups are good, but can be slow to restore

I use a service called JungleDisk, which backs up everything I ask it to onto storage on the internet (at Rackspace). It sits quietly in the background, backing up files as I change them, and, so long as I’m online reasonably often, I can be sure I’m backed up.  It costs $3 per month, plus 15c/GB/month, which works out to about $7 a month for me.

This was my first port of call when I went to try to get my files back, but it was very slow.   Its first step is to download a ‘backup database’ file, which in my case was 300MB.  My broadband wasn’t having it’s best day, and this download took a couple of hours, and had to be restarted twice.    It’s a good reminder that ‘up to 9Mb’ is meaningless in a densely populated area.  In the end, I managed to get the disk out of the old laptop and connect it up to the new, which sped things up greatly, but if I’d had to rely on my JungleDisk backups, it would have been hours, possibly days to restore it all.

JungleDisk, and services like it, provide two forms of backup.  The one I’d been using is the Backup Vault, which is quicker to back up, but, as I found out, quite slow to restore and a little problematic.  The other is to have an online disk that is syncronised with the laptop, where files are automatically copied and appear as a mounted drive on the laptop.  I’m going to keep current files, particularly live projects on a syncronised disk as well as in a Backup Vault, so that if I need them in a hurry, I can get at them from any PC, and save myself  hours of nervousness as I wait for them to restore, or perhaps miss an important deadline.

Back up Music and Pictures

I am going to start backing up music and photos onto Jungledisk.  Very late to adopt a trend, I’ve started buying mp3 downloads lately, and  I would have lost them if I had lost the hard disk on my dead machine.  The bills will go up a bit, but that collection looks worth saving.

Restoring Thunderbird and Firefox is very simple

My biggest worry was whether I’d be able to restore Zotero, a Firefox plugin that allows you to index and make notes about copies of documents, and create bibliographic references.  This is vital for my thesis, but also important for lots of other work I’ve done, and recreating it would take days for my thesis alone.  Fortunately, everything in it is stored in my Firefox profile, and the nice people at Mozilla provide simple instructions for restoring it, which work for Thunderbird as well.

Having another computer helps

I have an old laptop, with a couple of keys missing and a nearly dead battery.  It’s not useful for anything much, but it can connect to the internet and run MS Word.  It was invaluable for checking my backups were safe (and for watching Dr Who on Christmas Day).

If you still have the hard disk, use it.

If a laptop dies, its often possible to extract the harddisk and put it into a caddy (from Maplins or similar) and then get at the files from a new machine.  Much, much faster than downloading off an internet backup.

If you rely on your computer, think carefully about how you would deal with losing it.   Think about it now, before the worst happens, and make sure that you’re backing up everything you need, and know how to restore it all.

The real place for these schemes has been in developing countries – Peru, Kenya, Nepal, Zimbabwe -  where charities like Practical Action work with local people to build and maintain schemes in places where grid access is difficult.   Setting up workshops and training people to manufacture the turbines creates employment and enhances light industrial skills, promoting economic development.

Here in the UK they represent a small, but potentially useful resource which we should not ignore.  It’s pleasing to see that the government has decided to recognise the potential of refurbishing old schemes, and on Friday, Greg Barker, the Energy and Climate Change Minister, announced that refurbished schemes would be eligible for feed-in-tariff support.

A guide for communities and groups considering hydropower schemes suggests that to be eligible, refurbished equipment will need to be remanufactured to an ‘as new’ standard with a warranty, and installed by an MSC accredited installer.  It must not have been used to generate power since 31 March 1990.    The FIT rate for small (<15kW hydro schemes) is currently 19.9p/kWh, guaranteed for 20 years.  It isn’t clear whether exactly the same rate will apply to refurbished equipment.

At the same time, DECC have released a report showing that they believe the total small scale hydropower resource in England and Wales to be 146-248MW, in 1700 sites.   This compares to an estimate of 921kW in 73 sites which BERR made for the entire installed capacity in the UK in 2008.  While the BERR estimate is probably too low there is definitely a good-sized market for micro-hydro in the UK, and FIT support is available for new equipment and refurbishments.  So, if you’ve been thinking about that old Pelton wheel in the barn, now’s the time to do something about it.

With climate change, the rise in gas prices and the increasing uncertainty of supply, its vital that we rethink our approach to heating our homes, particularly in cities.  Piping heat through the streets, as we do our gas and water, is normal in Vienna, Copenhagen, Berlin and Reykjavik but in London, we have only few small schemes, notably in Pimlico

44% of our electricity is generated using natural gas.  Of the fossil-fuel based technologies, its the cleanest and emits the least CO2, but even the best gas power stations only convert about 45% of the energy in the gas to electricity.  The rest goes straight up the cooling towers as wasted heat.   Some of the electricity is lost as it travels through the grid from remote power stations to our homes.  Overall, in 2009, 565TWh was lost on the electricity sytem to heat and transmission /distribution losses, with the loss to heat being by far the largest part of that.  That is MORE than the total amount of electricity supplied to consumers – industrial, domestic and transport combined.  If those losses could somehow be drastically reduced they’d take the  the UK’s carbon emissions down with them. (1)

The technology to do this is well-established and, unlike the pure renewable technologies, works well in virtually any setting, including inner cities.  Gas fired Combined Heat and Power (CHP)  units can be installed in building plant rooms to provide power and heat to the building.  These units achieve efficiencies of 80-90%, and because they can be located close to the users of electricity, transmission and distribution losses are all but eliminated.  Excess power is sold  to the national grid, but excess heat needs to go somewhere.  And so we need district heating schemes.

In London, the London Plan and local planning guidance encourage the installation of CHP in new buildings, and mandate connection to district heating schemes where they exist.    If there’s no local scheme though, they can only prepare for a future possibility.   There’s also a problem with the size of CHP unit they may be willing to put in.  If the building can’t make use of the heat for most of the year, then either the unit will need to be run below its specification, making the cost-benefit case more difficult, or the heat will need to be dumped somehow, probably to the atmosphere via noisy rooftop plant.  This appears to be the rationale behind the rather small 1.8MWe unit proposed for the UKCMRI building which is currently seeking planning permission in Somers Town.    Ideally, a larger unit would be installed, and Section 106 agreements made to start building a district heating scheme connecting the nearby blocks of flats.

Renewables purists will argue that natural gas is a fossil fuel too, and we need to decrease our dependence on it.  That’s true, of course, but if we managed to install enough gas CHP to decommission a large proportion of coal-fired stations, we would greatly reduce our emissions, and its a technology that can be deployed quickly and is well known.  Building the district heating schemes would be a legacy for the future, and could be used by other forms of heating when gas becomes too expensive, or once all the coal-fired stations are replaced.

We need to invest in district heating now, to allow CHP, to make use of industrial waste heat and to provide a better legacy for future generations than climate change.

(1) DUKES 2010

If you’re reading this because I’ve sent you my CV, please feel free to browse and get an idea of who I am and what I can do.  If you’ve landed here for some other reason, please do take a look, and I’d be very grateful if you’d think of me if you hear of any likely roles.

I’ve learned a lot in the last year.  The course is modular, so I’ve had the chance to look at most renewable technologies – solar PV and thermal, wind, hydro, biomass and ground source heat pumps – as well as the way energy works in buildings.  I did a pre-feasibility study for a small wind farm, and another for a run of river hydro scheme.  In my essays, I’ve looked at how feed in tariffs work and whether they’re a cost-effective way of reducing carbon emissions, the potential for algae-based biofuels, how battery-powered devices like laptops might be used to manage load on the national grid and smooth out the variability in power available from wind turbines, and the sustainability of ground source heating and cooling systems.

When I combine that with my existing project management  skills, I feel I can offer a lot to prospective employers or clients.   Some of the roles I’ve been looking at include:

• Managing new product development projects
• Project management of installation projects, working alongside engineers
• Energy consultancy

If strong management and project management skills are a priority and renewable energy knowledge is useful, then I’m the right person to talk to.  Please call!

This heat can affect the underground environment including the geochemistry of the aquifer and microbiological ecosystems.  When there are multiple systems in an area, they may interfere with each other, particularly if there is groundwater involved.  Therefore there are two main policy concerns here – protection of the underground environment, and equitable use of the heat storage resource.   With increasing numbers of these systems being installed in London(1), and their inclusion in the Renewable Heat Incentive, it seems important that someone be responsible for managing it all.  Sadly, noone is.

Earlier this week, I went to a meeting of the UK Groundwater Forum, a hydrogeology group, on ‘Groundwaters Role In Reducing Our Carbon Footprint’.   Among many interesting talks were two that touched on the subject of the way we manage the underground heat resource in our aquifers (2)

Richard Shennan of Mott MacDonald Fulcrum talked about the ground source heating and cooling project which is underway on the 1851 commission lands in Kensington, providing heating and cooling for the V&A, Imperial College and other sites in the area.  As part of the design for that project, maps of underground heat are being produced showing the heat flow through the aquifer as it changes through the seasons.  Of course, they’re restricted to that site only, and it was suggested that it would be useful to see similar maps for all installations.

Anna Hall of the Environment Agency discussed the regulatory environment, and in particular pointed out that the environment agency have no jurisdiction over heat because it is not a ‘substance’ that can be released into the environment.  This means that while open loop systems need to have abstraction and discharge licences, closed loop systems do not.  The EA are apparently encouraging the Ground Source Heat Pump Association to set up a register of systems, but have neither the funding nor the power to do anything themselves.

This needs to change.  It seems that there are a few bodies which could reasonably administer ground source heating systems, given the funding and powers to do so.

The Environment Agency, who are already responsible for water, would be ideally placed.  They have the hydrogeological expertise, are already administering water consents and are charged with protecting the environment and contributing to sustainable development.

Local councils, are already responsible for planning, including the inclusion of renewable energy in new buildings under the Merton Rule which is the motivation for many GSHP installations.  Unfortunately, they probably lack the necessary technical expertise, but perhaps something could be done in specific areas, such as London, with the London Development Agency taking a role alongside its Decentralised Energy and Energy Masterplanning project.  That project, which is mapping heating demand in London, would seem to have a good synergy with managing and mapping heating supply.

Finally, the GSHP association could no doubt administer a register and at least have access to the technical expertise, but they are a trade body, who’s aim is to promote the industry in the UK.  Any regulatory role would give them an unreasonable conflict of interest.

Underground heat capacity will be an important resource in the near future if we are to reduce our carbon footprint and make our cities sustainable.  It needs to be managed for the good of the environment, and the fair use of the resource by those who need it.  The Environment Agency, or perhaps bodies such as the London Development Agency, are best placed to do this.

(1 ) Gropius, M., 2010. Numerical groundwater flow and heat transport modelling of open-loop ground source heat systems in the London Chalk. Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology and Hydrogeology, 43(1), 23-32. Available at: http://qjegh.lyellcollection.org/cgi/content/abstract/43/1/23. 

(2) The talks aren’t available online yet, but should be soon at the conference site http://www.groundwateruk.org/Groundwaters_role_in_reducing_our_carbon_footprint.aspx

You can get a copy of the software at the QGIS website, and there are tutorials and introduction documents around the web.    This post is to pick up a few things that took me a while to figure out.  They’re notes for me, and they might be handy for someone else.

How can I add a new point symbol?

Point symbols are the icons you use to show a point on a map, like this wind turbine on a hill near Machynlleth.  By default, the software doesn’t come with a wind turbine symbol (incredible omission!), so I had to find one.

Point symbols are scaleable vector graphics (svg) files, and they’re kept in the  OSGeo4Wappsqgissvg directory whereever you installed the software.  To find a suitable one, I googled “windmill .svg”, and Google came up with one on Wikimedia Commons, which is available in the public domain, so no licencing issues.  Then I just copied it into one of the folders in that svg directory, and the next time I restarted Quantum GIS, it was available for me to choose.

My computer is grinding to a halt.  What can I do?

I had about a dozen layers, with lots of information from the Countryside Commission for Wales, who had kindly sent me data about all the restricted areas in Wales, and I’d loaded them up.  That was not smart.

There’s a little box on the bottom right hand side of the screen, with a label ‘Render’.  Turn it off, unless you want the system to redraw everything every time you move the view or make any change at all.  And if you must load dozens of layers, be prepared to spend a lot of time waiting.

I want to show a bufferzone around my feature

Working out where you can put turbines in a wind farm is all about figuring out what restrictions apply.  The Horse Riders Association don’t want one within 3 * the turbine tip height of a bridleway.  The Ramblers Assocation want them at least tip height +10% from a walking path.  There are other restrictions on roads, cables, microwave links and the rest.  What you really want to be able to do is draw all your features – paths, bridleways, roads, microwave lengths, and then push a button to show what areas of land this rules out.

To do this, you need to add the ftools plugin, which lets you do all sorts of analysis on your vector layer, and draws buffer zones.  It has a couple of dozen functions, and I’ve not had the chance to explore them yet, but it did make it much easier to draw my bridleway buffers.  If you set up the distance you need as a field when you draw the path, it can automatically use that to draw the right size buffer, allowing me to put my footpaths and bridleways in the same layer.

Doing my first degree back in (ahem..) the eighties, we had the miracle of fiche and, sometimes, computerised catalogues.  I photocopied everything in sight, and threw most of it away when I graduated.  Writing an essay meant piles of books, papers, notes, filing cards and little scraps of paper.

Now, it’s all on my wee laptop.  I search for papers online, through one of the databases provided by the University, or Google Scholar.   Wikipedia’s open in another tab to quickly explain phrases I don’t know, and the Engineering Toolbox is never far away.

All those printouts and filing cards have disappeared and in their place is the miracle that is Zotero.

Zotero is a free addon to Firefox which stores any sort of document, allows you to tag it, indexes,  keeps your notes, and produces a bibliograpy.  Inside MS Word, its a push of a button to insert a reference, and the bibliography is created automatically.

If I’ve got a book, I go straight to Amazon, find the book, click a button and my reference is created.  If the paper is in any one of a number of online databases, ScienceDirect, Wiley InterScience or whatever, I push a button and the reference is there with the paper downloaded.  If its an ordinary webpage, a youtube video, a newspaper article, Zotero will have a go.  At worst, I can type it in.

My entire degree is in Zotero.   It’s an extension of my brain.   In case you were wondering, yes,  it is backed up, automagically and constantly, to JungleDisk, an online backup service that costs me about $5 a month.

And those young people are looking great!