5 items HVAC geothermal contractors need to be doing for business success.

At a recent IGSPHA meeting, tips were shared on how HVAC contractors can become geothermal powerhouses.

Nortek Global HVAC has introduced a new three-phase electric/electric packaged cooling solution. The company said the Model P8SE delivers 14 SEER cooling in capacity ranges from 3 to 5 tons in even tonnages, making it an energy-efficient choice for strip malls, restaurants, and retail stores.

Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors–National Association members from around the country gathered this month for educational sessions, networking, and industry awards.

Daikin Applied’s recently introduced SiteLine Building Controls gives building owners and operators the tools and insights needed to optimize performance, improve IAQ, and trim energy use and carbon emissions.

The market for automated systems in commercial buildings is growing rapidly, driven by increasing energy-efficiency goals, improving technology, and updated standards set by governments and professional associations.

What is the best approach to providing a holistic smart home experience for consumers?

For years, ZoneFirst President Dick Foster has used the light-switches-in-the-home comparison while promoting the benefits of zoning. At their AHR Expo booth, they introduced a product that brought new meaning to that comparison.

“The acquisition of California Economizer and its Zonex Systems brings together the two oldest manufacturers of zoning dampers and zone-control systems,” said Dick Foster, the president of Zonefirst and its parent company, Trolex Corp.

The DOE's new Rooftop Accelerator program encourages manufacturers to develop efficient commercial rooftop heat pumps for cold climates, which could reduce GHG emissions and energy costs by up to 50%.

If contractors in colder climates focus on educating their customers on what new higher-efficiency furnaces bring to the table, often times the furnaces will sell themselves.

Cold climate heat pumps were on full display on the AHR show floor and manufacturers were eager to share their progress reports in the Department of Energy’s CCHP Challenge.

BlocPower, a climate technology company focused on greening America's buildings, announced a fundraising round of $150 million, including more than $24 million of Series B corporate equity led by VoLo Earth Ventures and $130 million of debt financing led by Goldman Sachs.

Manufacturers will have five years, from the date the rule is published in the Federal Register, to ensure that new gas furnaces comply with the new minimum.

Residential gas furnaces must all have a minimum AFUE of 95% beginning in five years. Some in the HVAC industry say the new Department of Energy rule will ultimately hurt homeowners.

Due to a lack of training, time constraints, and numerous other reasons, many HVAC contracting companies are not performing combustion testing, potentially compromising customers’ safety.

Using water to transfer heat energy into the home can minimize or even eliminate the issues of dry air and loud operation.

If contractors don’t have a plan in place to handle red tag furnace second opinions, they can expect some mistakes.

Posted by CISA on Mar 21

Posted by Dave Aitel via Dailydave on Oct 10

In this episode Arno and Alex talk about the basics of software development processes. They discuss why and when software development processes are needed and also why some developers don't like them. They discuss the theories behind different processes and talk about defined vs empiric processes in general. This episode is the first in a row that will later on describe specific processes like eXtreme programming or the unified process.

In this Episode we're talking about Web Services with IBM's Olaf Zimmermann. We mainly focus on the WS-* stack. We also discuss a couple of SOA foundations and architectural decisions that need to be taken when building an SOA using Web Serivces. We also briefly mention the REST vs. WS-* debate.

In this episode we're talking to Jens Coldewey about his experiences in 10 years of introducing agile techniques to project teams. We discuss real-world examples and the lessons learned and strategies derived from them.

Micro services is an emerging trend in software architecture that focuses on small, lightweight applications as a means to avoid large, unmaintainable, monolithic systems. This approach allows for individual technology stacks for each component and more resilient systems. Micro services uses well-known communication schemes such as REST but also require new technologies for the implementation. […]

Johannes Thönes talks to James Lewis, principal consultant at ThoughtWorks, about microservices. They discuss microservices’ recent popularity, architectural styles, deployment, size, technical decisions, and consumer-driven contracts. They also compare microservices to service-oriented architecture and wrap up the episode by talking about key figures in the microservice community and standing on the shoulders of giants. Recording […]

Nathan Marz is the creator of Apache Storm, a real-time streaming application. Storm does for stream processing what Hadoop does for batch processing. The project began when Nathan was working on aggregating Twitter data using a queue-and-worker system he had designed. Many companies use Storm, including Spotify, Yelp, WebMD, and many others. Jeff and Nathan […]

Josh Long talks to Activiti cofounder Joram Barrez about the wide world of (open source) workflow engines, the Activiti BPMN2 engine, and what workflow implies when you’re building process-driven applications and services. Joram was originally a contributor to the jBPM project with jBPM founder Tom Baeyens at Red Hat. He cofounded Activiti in 2010 at […]

Jeff Meyerson talks with Frances Perry about Apache Beam, a unified batch and stream processing model. Topics include a history of batch and stream processing, from MapReduce to the Lambda Architecture to the more recent Dataflow model, originally defined in a Google paper. Dataflow overcomes the problem of event time skew by using watermarks and other methods discussed between Jeff and Frances. Apache Beam defines a way for users to define their pipelines in a way that is agnostic of the underlying execution engine, similar to how SQL provides a unified language for databases. This seeks to solve the churn and repeated work that has occurred in the rapidly evolving stream processing ecosystem.

Neal Ford chats with Kim Carter about the required skills of a Software Architect, creating and maintain them, transition roles. The importance of history, developing soft skills, and dealing with losing technical skills.

Felienne interviews Andreas Stefik about creating programs that are accessible for blind and visually impaired users. How do they consume and create software?

Learn how a business that struggled with outages, performance problems, and an inability to ship overcame their problems by introducing monitoring, docker, continuous integration, and some fresh perspectives.

Bernd Rücker, who has contributed to multiple open source workflow management projects, discusses orchestrating microservices with workflow management.  As distributed systems evolve into a family of microservices that must handle long-running stateful processes with time-dependent actions, events, multiple paths through the system, and complex rollbacks, the workflow management model provides a way to ensure clear modeling, correctness, and separation of concerns.   Rücker recommends a federated model in which each microservice is paired with its own workflow to handle retries and other policies and failure modes around that service.  Robert Blumen spoke with Rücker about microservice architecture, event-driven systems, long-running stateful processes versus synchronous request/response, event handling, time-outs, and handling exceptional conditions with compensating transactions. Rücker compares the choreography versus orchestration models for collaboration and discusses why orchestration provides a better separation of concerns.  The discussion delves into the implementation of workflow management systems including persistence, scaling, event handling, timers and scheduling, and similarities to CQRS.  The discussion wraps up with monitoring and visualization.

Ryan Singer on Basecamp’s “Shape Up” software development process. Basecamp has ditched the backlog and 2-week sprint in favor of solution “shaping” and strategic 6-week projects, using tools like scope mapping, checklists, and hill charts to understand and reduce risk.

Pat Helland talks to host Akshay Manchale about Data Management at scale in a Microservices world. Pat talks about trends in managaging data in a distributed microservices world, immutability, idempotence, inside and outside data, descriptive...

Felienne interviews Karl Hughes about doing tech talks. How to get into conferences and how to design and deliver a great talk.

Yevgeniy Brikman, author of Terraform: Up & Running: Writing Infrastructure as Code and co-founder of Gruntwork talks with host Robert Blumen about how to apply best practices from software engineering to the development of infrastructure as code...

Alexander Pugh discusses why and when to use Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Host Jeremy Jung spoke with Pugh about interacting with systems without APIs like mainframes; the importance of having developers involved when building bots; the difficulty...

Vaughn Vernon, author of the book “Strategic Monoliths and Microservices” discusses his book with host Akshay Manchale about strategies for purposeful architecture from the perspective of both business decision makers and technical leaders.

Gill Hoffer, co-founder and CTO at Salto, talks with SE Radio host Kanchan Shringi about a new persona -- the Business Engineer -- created by the rise of SaaS and adoption of best-of-breed business applications for back office systems. They examine...

Gill Hoffer, co-founder and CTO at Salto, talks with SE Radio host Kanchan Shringi about a new persona -- the Business Engineer -- created by the rise of SaaS and adoption of best-of-breed business applications for back office systems. They examine...

Jon Smart, author of the book Sooner Safer Happier: Patterns and Antipatterns for Business Agility, discusses patterns and anti-patterns for the success of enterprise software projects. Host Brijesh Ammanath speaks with him about the various common...

Ines Montani, co-founder and CEO of Explosion, speaks with host Jeremy Jung about solving problems using natural language processing (NLP). They cover generative vs predictive tasks, creating a pipeline and breaking down problems, labeling examples for training, fine-tuning models, using LLMs to label data and build prototypes, and the spaCy NLP library.

Frances Buontempo, author of the new book Learn C++ by Example, discusses the C++ programming language, a widely used general-purpose programming language. Host Philip Winston spoke with Buontempo about where C++ fits into the landscape of existing programming languages and how recent C++ standards have changed things. They talk about specific language features such as lambdas, templates, concurrency, ranges, concepts along with tips for learning and using C++. Brought to you by IEEE Software and IEEE Computer Society.

Shannon Selbert, co-founder of Soren and developer of Oban, and Parker Selbert, creator of the Oban background job framework, chief architect at dscout, and co-founder of Soren, speak with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about robust job processing in Elixir. They explore the reliability, consistency, and observability in relation to job processing, to understand how Oban, Elixir, and PostgreSQL deliver them.

The Selberts describe why Oban was created, its history, which parts of the Elixir ecosystem they use, and why this would not be possible without PostgreSQL and Elixir. They discuss the lessons learned in the 5 years since the first release, as well as use cases, job throughput, the hardest problem to solve so far, workers, queues, CRON, distributed architectures, retry algorithms, just-once methodologies, the reliability the beam brings, consistency across nodes, how PostgreSQL is vital, telemetry data, best use cases for Oban, and the most common issues that new users face. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

The United States has historically provided hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign aid to Israel. The flow of taxpayer funds to Israel’s military has only increased since Israeli forces

A new database of tribal constitutions tells a more nuanced history of self-governance than the one explained in textbooks.

Politicians in Australia's parliament will vote on the law next week and, if passed, it aims to stop children being allowed social media accounts. But for some kids there will be ways around it.

Digitization Intern (Madison--onsite)

CIMC introduces the next generation of our online catalog, featuring curriculum and assessment products.