Tell Me (and Others)

Previously, whenever I saw BCD I have always seen it as Binary Coded decimal.

But tonight, during dinner, I now know it really means “Blue Cheese Dressing”. Yep, the salad was great!

John

Recently I was a guest at an oil-gas well frac-ing (Process of fracturing the down-hole rock formations). The location was way out in west Texas not far from a little town of Pyote. This was my first experience at a well during drilling or under development.

I did some preliminary research on what I might see, and that was very helpful in understanding the tour. The tour lasted about one hour, but seemed much shorter. I was amazed at all the infrastructure in place.

If you want to read more on frac-ing, then head on over to frac-ing at Wikipedia. The description there is pretty much spot on.

The well in question is very deep, drilled down about 12,000ft and then out horizontally to about 4,000ft.

The multi step process.

=================

1) a series of explosives located along a special piece of drill pipe are lowered and then pushed (in the horizontal section) to the desired position. This section of drill pipe may be 48ft or longer, and the explosives are grouped in batches along about 12ft. Electric wires to trigger the shots run up to a control center at the surface. Once in place at its lowest position, the lower set of shots are fired, and the drill pipe is raised about 12ft or more to the next target zone. this process continues until all shots are fired, and the pipe is brought back to the surface.

2) a complex plug, about 3ft long, is sent down hole and is locked at the lower point of the area to be fractured.

3) a slurry of water and proppant (tiny balls of Aluminum Oxide – smaller than the ball in a ballpoint pen) is pumped at high pressure down the well. This slurry can contain several other chemicals to improve efficiency (such as surfactant) and measurement (isotope tracers). I don’t think there were any tracers used at the site I visited. The slurry is pumped down at a continuous high pressure. This can be 7,000p.s.i and greater. Once started, it needs to continue until certain flow rates/pressure changes are detected in the elaborate control center at the surface.

The aim of the process is to open up small fissures in the rock formations below, to allow greater flows of hydrocarbons into the well. This can lead to better economies and return on exploration and development investment.

The Site

======

The Equipment

===========

Water Tanks

More Water Tanks

Did I mention Water Tanks?

I would estimate there were 60 or more tanks of different shapes and sizes. Water is critical to the process and must not run out during frac-ing. It is stockpiled in readiness to the commencement and then a steady stream of water trucks will deliver more during the process.

The Proppant

==========

This also is stockpiled and there were several large tanks loaded with the substance. The tanks were very similar to the water tanks, but closer to the slurry mixer and pumper trucks.

This shows one of the trucks that delivers the proppant.

The Pumper Trucks

==============

There were about 10 of these monster trucks, parked 5 abreast in two rows, each row backing up to the other row. This area was out-of-bounds due to running machinery and noise.

Shot Firing

========

This truck is the logging and firing control center.

Here you see the crew arming the explosive charges in the drill pipe, ready to send it down the hole. No cell phones or walkie-talkies in this area!

A partial length of the explosives pipe. It will be more than twice this length when ready for lowering and firing.

Multi Function Pipe Truck

===================

This truck manages a giant spool of 2inch steel piping. The pipe is a single length of about three miles long. One use is to push the bottom plug down the hole and around the bend where the hole heads off horizontally. As mentioned earlier, this horizontal section is about 4000ft long. The well head can be seen to the right of the photo, as well as in the next…

That pretty much ends the tour. There was one other interesting truck which was not photographed. This was the main control center for the mixing and pumping operations. Mounted on another large truck, it housed around four technical operators controlling such things as water transfer pumps, the slurry mixers and ingredient controls, and the ten large pumper trucks. Lots of computers and screens to monitor in the operations room.

Thanks go to David H Arrington Oil and Gas of Midland, Tx and to Halliburton of Houston, Tx and their staff.

John Griffiths

I have travelled the World extensively and have visited the McIlhenny Company factory at Avery Island in Louisiana, USA.

Their product is a favourite of mine.

There is no way that that the one production location in Louisiana could supply the World with Tabasco. Perhaps there are Knock-offs being produced in China or elsewhere. But every bottle I have ever examined says made in Avery Island,Louisiana

Recent reports have been published where China is making copes of some great Australian wines. see WineCopies.

Years ago ( in the 1980s) there were concerns about the real validity of Johnny Walker Scotch. This always proudly announces “Product of Scotland”. An enterprising group purchased several bottles from various locations around the World and ran the samples through a spectrograph. And, you guessed it, only some (about 30%) matched the original product from Scotland. Now, as with the Tabasco product, it all tastes OK, but why do we need to be hoodwinked?

I wish manufacturers, distributors, retailers and governments would be more responsible with their labelling.

We have been in Denver now for our summer break and have been very impressed with the city and surrounding areas. One problem we have noticed is the traffic congestion, but that is pretty much the case in all larger cities these days.

The past couple of weeks we have been entertaining friends from South Carolina. We took a road trip to Moab Ut., Canyon de Chelly Az. and Grand Canyon North Az. We all had a great time but some of the travel distances were more than first thought.

The National Parks around Moab were most fascinating and well worth the visit.

John

RTF Control in Clarionet.

I have a client who has been running a program across a WAN using Clarionet. System was written several years ago in Clarion for Windows 6.1 and has not been modified for several years.

Recently he wanted an additional feature so that the system would generate some documents.
I was apprehensive in making the changes so built a small additional standa alone program to test with Clarionet. The programs are all Legacy template initially.

I needed to add a window with an RTF text window so the system could open a template .RTF document, and replace some tokens, then produce a print preview of the letter at the client side PC.

I knew that the Clarion for Windows RTF control was not going to behave in a Clarionet screen, so this had to be built to run without showing the RTF window and without any Clarionet code. By starting with a generated procedure, I then placed several OMIT statements to exclude any Clarionet generated calls. Next I added all my INIT, Document Open and KILL statements to right after the OPEN(Window) statement. Then I did the token replacements and saved the finished document as an RTF file.

Back in the calling procedure, I then passed the document’s filename to a report procedure, and placed the RTF file into a detail/text (rtf) control. This report then generated and the preview was auto-magically transferred to the client side PC. Done.

Now that I had got it working in a stand alone EXE, and it all worked OK, I then moved it into the trusty DLL written about 6 years ago. This worked fine and nothing got broken.

John Griffiths

Oh Boy this hurts…

As an older computer user, this blows my mind.

And I know from talking with many friends, this deal sounds beyond comprehension.
Makes me wonder where things will be in 5 years.
My first PC was a TRS-80 with 16K of ram and an external cassette sound recorder for more permanent storage. I remember I paid over $2000 for it.

Get the drive at frys.com

John

Where we live in Australia in the southern summer, we got hot with a massive hail storm last Monday.

Our property sustained significant hail damage, as did out neighbours and surrounding area.

The hail was mostly golf-ball in size, with some the size of hen’s eggs. It all happened at about 3:30pm in the afternoon.

We were sitting outside on a pleasant afternoon and could see a bank of wild rolling cloud approaching from the north. I took some video with by standard Canon digital camera.

Then the storm hit! The hail was sporadic at first, then after about 4 minutes, it was a constant hammering of hail for about 45 minutes. We had to retreat to inside as even under an out-door patio area, the hail was bouncing off everything.

Damages: Flooding inside. Smashed roof tile and sky-lights. Significant denting of heavy metal patio roofing. Lead flashing on roof all holed. TV antennae broken. Garden shed roof holed. Luckily our motor vehicle was undercover. Many vehicles in the path of the storm had broken glass and lots of dents.

The State has declared the event a natural disaster.

Trying to get repairs is hopeless, as all services are stressed to the max. I have managed to put temporary fixes on a few things. Today we removed water laden carpets from one room.

But all in all, we are lucky as we survived and still have a home to live in.

John

I have a program I am trying to get ready for potential users to download and test. This is a program developed in Clarion For Windows (6.3). The testing database is a MS-SQL2005 system which is hosted on a shared server at discountasp.net and the server is located in Los Angeles. My users will most likely be located in Australia.

The problem I saw was the initial time it takes to make a connection to the remote database, and then a further delay with each Table I was opening. These turned out to be two separate issues.

Initial Connection:

The time taken to establish the initial connection was in the order of 20+ seconds. The connection was being attempted before the main APPFrame screen was being displayed. So expecting someone to start a program and wait 20+ seconds before the first screen response was not going to work. This lead me to build a separate “Starter” program with just one screen that received staged updates from the main program, and then once the AppFrame opened, the “Starter” program simply closed, or displayed any error applicable. The Starter program also had a Seconds Elapsed display and a notice that they may need to wait 20 seconds to connect to the database.

But why was this initial connection taking so long? I could fire up MS-Studio Express and connect in about 4 seconds. It was only the Clarion program that was very slow to connect. This I would research further and eventually solve. See below.

Slow File Opening:

The time taken to open a Browse/List screen was also slow. It was taking about 5 seconds per table to open. Again, this is just too slow. I solved this by adding the Driver switches /FASTCOLUMNFETCH = TRUE to most tables. That has helped. I also set the program to Keep Files Open and I opened a few of the larger tables (those with more columns, not rows).

Testing:

After spending several days fiddling with the various Driver switches, I was resigned to the fact that it would take 20+ seconds to connect. I started looking for another closed SQL server that would be hosted in Australia. Then, along came Christmas and I took some time off from the development computer. I was relaxing out-doors and just for kicks, decided to try running the program from a 10″ netbook with an Atom processor and on a local wireless network. I started up the program, which worked just fine, and got connected to my Los Angeles database server in about 4 seconds. Could not believe my eyes! Looked at the data and yes, this was indeed coming from the LA database. This little netbook had no database stuff loaded, no MS-SQL and had very few programs installed. Basically it had IE and Firefox for travelling.

So, back to the development PC which could not be 20 seconds slower than the netbook.

I tried several things… Stop all running MS-Servers, Stop a bunch of system services that were running (pretty much anything that looked like a network service). Still I could not get any faster connection from the PC.

Next I remembered someone on the Clarion Database forum had mentioned SQL Native Client. This certainly was not installed on the netbook. But it was on my PC. I had another notebook PC laying around that did have some SQL stuff installed. It was running MSSQL2005 database. I tried running my program on that notebook and it also would connect in 4 seconds. The laptop also had MS SQL Native Client installed, albeit an older version of SQLNCLI.dll. OK, after backing up my newer SQLNCLI.dll I copied the older one from the Laptop to my Development PC. Testing the program again I was still taking 20+ seconds to connect. Then I renamed the file SQLNCLI.dll (located in \windows\system32 ) and tried again. This time I finally managed to connect in about 4 seconds. I put the original SQLNCLI.dll back and connection time again went out to 20+ seconds.

So there was a problem with the SQLNCLI DLL that was causing the problem. I researched this in several places on the internet and found one other report of this problem. But there was no resolution there.

Next I went to Control Panel, and un-installed SQL Native Client. Now I was back to 4 second connect times. OK, Let’s put the Native Client back in. So I downloaded the latest MSSQL2005 version( which turned out to contain the exact same DLL that I was having problems with, and now I was able to connect in about 4 seconds each time the test program started.

MS SQL Native Client (or a related setting) had been the problem all along. By removing and re-installing I had solved the major connection problem. But I had wasted about 4 days getting to that stage! Oh well, that’s computing.

John Griffiths