GALAXY BLOG

Eggs for sale…I had a lady ask about buying eggs from me and wanted to know if I fed my chickens organic feed. When I told her I do not, she said “okay thanks” and was no longer interested in buying eggs. A couple days later, she called me back and said that she wanted to see my chickens despite the fact I don’t use organic feed. Now this is strange for two reasons:  first, why do I need an inspection and who is she to expect one. Second, ‘organic’ is a sham!

So I will cover the first thing first. She came and inspected my hen house and my hens and chose to buy two-dozen eggs to “sample their flavor”. Great. I said good-bye and was thankful when she left as she brought all four of her kids and only two of them were well-behaved. (The younger two, though old enough to behave at six and seven, chose to run around screaming, pound on my piano, throw dirt at my dog, and chase my chickens.)

Second, ‘organic’ is a sham! LOL! I say this because if you look up on the USDA (United State Department of Agriculture) website, they define organic. They say what is allowed and what is not. Now, the marketers for organic want you to believe it is ‘natural’ and ‘wholesome’. Fine. But what you find out is organic foods can be covered in certain pesticides, grown from genetically modified plants, and picked before ripe. So what is the difference between the ‘organic’ label and the regular stuff besides the price?

Anyway, the lady lectured me on the taste of the eggs from feeding non-organic feed. How genetically modified food is not proven safe and how eggs from chickens who eat non-organic feed affects the humans who consume them—though she couldn’t say how the humans were affected. I educated her on the USDA’s definition of organic and she left my home with her “sample” two-dozen eggs.

Just like for the ‘Organic Hen’, that’s what my husband and I affectionately call this lady who is now a regular five-dozen per week customer, sampling can be a very valuable thing to help make decisions. So valuable in fact, your team here at Galaxy has just added a feature to Examinator Pro for customers with a Yield-Man database that allows them to sample every n parts. This is very powerful because it allows the user to evaluate a large dataset with a smaller subset. Here’s a sneak peek!

Until next week, Kate.

This past weekend my friend threw a  birthday party for his 1 year old son. The kids out-numbered the adults at this gathering. This made it almost impossible to talk to anyone over the age of 5 with any clarity. It looked sort of like this:

If I focused intently on what the person in front of me was trying to say while trying to filter out the noise, I could process it, but it was hardly worth the trouble. I wished I had a filter that just gave me “only the good stuff”.

I have been asked on multiple occasions how to filter “only the good stuff ” (bin 1′s) from your data file. Not only can you easily filter only your bin 1′s, but you can filter many other ways as well. To see how to filter your data easily, login/register on our Support Site, then Click Here to see the tutorial on this.

Until next time, peace out from the Blogmeister (who only gives you the good stuff)

Yes, another chicken-related blog…boy are you in for it! So I was outside Saturday shoveling crap…chicken poop…yes, I shovel it into an empty feed bags and throw it out…well I guess I don’t throw it all out, I use some of it for compost and even give some to others for compost…believe it or not, some people actually exchange chicken poop on craigslist…anyway…I was saying…

I was outside shoveling crap. I hadn’t done it in a while because I use a thick bedding method. I put 8 inches of wood shavings on the ground and turn it weekly. The wood shavings absorb things and keep it smelling fresh and prevent flies and other bugs. You only have to change them every four months or so. This time I went six months making my poop-to-shavings ratio rather good for compost.

I had five feed bags full of crap…(LOL so funny in writing!)…and I posted my compost on craigslist. I got a call from a guy who wanted all of it. I told him I wouldn’t hold it past 5pm because, well it’s crap. A lady called and wanted a bag, so I told her that she could come by at 6pm and if that guy hadn’t taken it, she could have it. 5pm comes and goes and the guy doesn’t call. The lady shows up at 6:05pm and takes two bags of crap. The guy shows up at 7pm and asks for the crap and I gave him the three bags. He gets mad and says that he thought there were five and three isn’t enough. I said that I gave two to someone else because I thought he was a no show. He said not to give him “that crap” and that I should have held it for him and I am just a liar. I told him, fine, and I said I wouldn’t give him any crap and if he wanted it he could dig it out of the dumpster…he took the crap and left. The funny thing (yes, the funny thing) is that I was cracking up the whole time. I couldn’t stop laughing at this guy and the way he said “Don’t give me that crap!” Like a bad SNL skit!

The whole situation got me thinking of the crap I shovel working on test data. Subcons like to maximize throughput, which means doing the minimum to get the parts tested and out the door. If that means leaving empty MIR records in the stdf file to avoid making a test program or shell program changes, then that’s what happens. No lot id, no product name, no program name, no tester id. I see missing MRR records, missing PRR records, and more. All can be indications of truncated files, incorrectly terminated test programs, or worse. Although the stdf checker (log into support.galaxysemi.com and Click Here for more info)  in the Examinator Toolbox is helpful, it only tells you about the problems. If you need to fix the problems, what do you do?

Well you are in luck! You can use Examinator Pro’s keys and flat file database to clean up those vital fields and make clean reports. A flat file database is an indexing of your data files. This feature is a part of Examinator Pro and can be used with keys files such that you can query your data back out to make clean reports. Just visit this section of our manual and learn about gexdbkeys for flat file databases. As always, be sure to log in in order to use this link.

Until next time…Kate

This has been an exciting week for me. I have just hatched the first chicks of the season. Although most of the country is covered in snow and won’t be thinking about chicks for a couple months yet, Phoenix is blooming with flowers and the weather is perfect for baby chicks!

I started 3 weeks ago with 10 eggs and after 1 week in the incubator, I held a flashlight up to the eggs and saw embryos were forming in 9 eggs. Last week, I held a flashlight up to the eggs and saw that 7 had shadows that were moving. This week, 7 chicks hatched!

Anyway, it is always fun to hatch a fresh batch of chicks. They are so cute and watching them grow is fascinating because they change so quickly. Only 21 days in the incubator and they are only babies for 14 days. Crazy! After that, they grow fast and get a little wild.

It takes a lot of discipline to get through a hatch. You have to make sure the temperature and humidity are just right but you don’t want to open the incubator too much when making adjustments because that causes temperature fluctuation. Additionally, as the embryos form, the temperature goes up and you have to adjust it back down to about 102 F. It takes constant monitoring and adjusting. Once they hatch, the work really gets going. Feeding, watering, cleaning bedding, and just spending time with them. The more time you spend with the chicks the friendlier they will be as adults.

It’s just like developing a new product. You spend time specifying the details, simulating, testing, tweaking, retesting and finally fabricating. When those wafers are finished and that product is a reality, you have even MORE work. Let’s write that test program and test the wafers and tweak the program and test the wafers and, well hopefully you don’t have too many design changes, but it continues…and you get buried in data. Although lots of data is better than no data, organizing that data can be a challenge as the amount of data increases. And when you get to production, it just means more data; plus, you have to keep driving those yields up.

To organize your data, ask your friendly Galaxy sales team (sales@galaxysemi.com) to set up a Yield-Man demo for you. Yield-Man gives you all the power of Examinator but with the backing of a relational database. The Galaxy relational database schema organizes that data for you! Yield-Man inserts the data into the database, monitors critical parameters and yield, generate automatic reports and so much more! Then you can use Examinator to query that database. It makes organizing that characterization data a breeze…no more hours in Excel using pivot tables…

-Kate

I used to live in southern California near (not on) the coast.   The houses were so close together that most views from your home were either looking into a wooden fence or a wall of ficus trees that separated your tiny patch of land from your neighbors.  Suburban Canyons!     Homes with view lots went for premiums.  My husband and I used to laugh when the real estate ads would say “Partial Ocean” or “Peek-a-Boo Ocean” view.  Most of the time, these statements seemed  generous as you could only see the ocean if you stood on the toilet, squinted a bit and peeked out the small window in an upstairs bathroom- and on a *clear* day.  But hey, definitely worth the premium.  (Not!)

So now, we live in Arizona on a real view lot.   The front of our house has gorgeous, colorful sunsets with a view of Camelback Mountain (the Arizona equivalent of the Pacific Ocean).

Our back view looks out onto the McDowell Mountains.  This is a view from our bedroom.  Every morning, I wake up to this view while I drink my coffee and check my email and Facebook page.   I finally have “A Room with a View” – just like that Merchant/Ivory movie.   I hope I wake up many mornings to this view.   I want to keep it forever in my memories.  :)

You, too, can keep your favorite views in Examinator.   The “Keep viewport” feature allows you to maintain the views of your charts based on prior settings.  By selecting “Keep viewport”, you can still maintain the previously removed outliers and the scaling to keep the portal view of your charts the way you like it.  Hence the name “Keep viewport”!

To learn more about this feature you can register/login to our Support Site, then Click Here. There will be detailed instructions and a link to a video showing you how to use it.

By Diane DuVall

Yes, a lot of people probably remember this famous song of “The Clash” in the 80s.

Two days ago I moved again into my flat, after having spent more than a year and a half remodeling it entirely. And guess what, today, my neighbor upstairs had his hot water tank which started to leak while he was not at home. The water quietly infiltrated into my new ceiling, damaging all my new electrical installation, my new floor, my new painting! Too bad….

That is why I  thought to this excellent song from The Clash: should I stay (in my flat) or should I go (elsewhere)

Anyway, I chose to stay of course (even if it’s the 7th water damage I got in 4 years in this flat) but I don’t know if one day I’ll reach a limit at which these water damages will be driving me crazy….  It’s like that, more than often, in real life you have to choose to take one path or the other, without really knowing where you go and what will be the consequences. It’s all about real life: making important decisions that will definitely change your future in either cases! So, what-if I chose to leave this flat and find another one? Staying in this flat could be the correct option, since perhaps it was the last water damage and there won’t be anymore now. Perhaps not. But of course I can’t predict the future and it would be very helpful if I could do it. Don’t you think so?

Life is different with Examinator , oh yeah! Indeed there is a “What-if” feature which allows you to explore different scenarios on your test data and virtually see the effect on the stats! Isn’t it neat ?! For instance, you can change your test limits on the fly and calculates the new yield that would be issued based on these new values.

Or the other way around, you can fill in a CpK that you’d like and asks Examinator to recalculate the limits that would be required to reach it, based on the samples you initially have. In other words: you don’t need anymore to run your tests again and again to see the impact of your changes. And that’s just the beginning, there are plenty of other cool predictions you can do using the “Guard Banding – What-if / Virtual Retest” tool.

As I’m sure you want to know more on it, just register / login into our support portal here. Then check out this cool and short video tutorial by clicking here.

Aahhh if only Examinator developers could create a tool to let me know if I made the correct choice staying in my flat