Archive for February, 2009

February 25th, 2009

Process Affinity

I just experienced something new – multi threading on a 2 cpu system causing an issue with an application using a serial modem on COM1.

The application threw an error along the lines of ‘noise on line’ which I didn’t quite believe and when I spoke to the software support for this app the solution was to set the process affinity to just one of the two processors in Task Manager.

A more permanent solution is to use affinity.exe which will set the process affinity as it’s launched I think – I never bothered to find out as I just moved the app to a single processor machine.

Interesting though.


By Matt in Systems  .::. (Add your comment)

February 12th, 2009

Manufacturing and BOMs

I’m currently doing some work for a food manufacturing company. During various discussions we’ve been having regarding BOMs for their products it’s become evident that the food industry has to overcome various challenges that are atypical of manufacturing as a whole.

These issues centre around the following observations:

  • the fact that BOMs are likely made up of formula recipes rather than discrete components
  • that recipes tend to have yields when ingredients are cooked together.
  • there is a lot of added complexity regarding use by dates, food perishing, ingredient traceability, ingredient readiness (by which I’m referring to if an ingredient is frozen but needs thawing for it’s next stage of production or something similar).

    • Anyway – I found this short whitepaper to be extremely useful in claryfying some of these ideas and will likely refer to it again – hence it being on my blog.





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