Tools of an IT Professional and Computer Scientist

I have been in the full-time work force now in the US for about four years doing information technology and computer science work. There has been a theme throughout those four years that resonates just about every day and it has to do with effectively utilizing tools. There are a lot of factors that can make a computer scientist or IT pro effective, but I really believe a lot of it has to do with the tools you know about and the effectiveness of your utilization of those tools.

By tools, I primarily mean software based tools, but the reasoning also extends to physical tools as well. In my recent article on AV Hardware Troubleshooting I highlighted some major physical tools for situations like CAT5 cabling, and speaker wire. I also did another article a while ago on tools for electronics fabrication.

In my years working in the museum industry I think one of the major tools I have leveraged has been ffmpeg. Ffmpeg is the king of media transcoders and if you know its complex command line syntax you can effectively incorporate it into applications. I have actually ridden in the back of a car before using ffmpeg to transcode HD video on a laptop for a show at a museum while on a critical deadline. (The show was encoded with the wrong bitrate for the hardware playback device).

If you've ever worked in a Linux environment, tools make up a huge part of automating tasks, and drastically speeding up work when used effectively.

I have a few tools I've made over the years that we use in the museum industry.



1. A simple application that recursively examines media files in marked folders to determine how old they are and deletes them once they become a certain number of days old.
2. An application that monitors all hardware present on a Windows OS and logs when hardware goes on or off the system.
3. A simple application for stress testing exhibit email in new deployments.
4. An application that randomly moves the mouse around clicks on the screen. I've used this for limited stress testing under certain situations.
5. A simple application that mimicked database activity of an assembly line for stress testing on a certain project.
6. An application that randomly ran an old telegraph sounder for days on end for stress testing an exhibit and some custom electronics. This drove the poor people that had offices near the test rig insane.
7. An application that randomly rotated a ticket on a servo for stress testing barcode scanners.
8. An application that randomly cycled a massive relay control board on 120V AC power. This one I also utilized a live streaming webcam with Red5 to monitor the relay board and several light bulbs it was controlling. The test setup was in an isolated area of a building and my office was on the other side of the building.

Effective tools can save a lot of time and produce high quality results if utilized properly.