So, PC World Austrialia just published an article on the “Top Ten worst uses of Windows“, but they are quite wrong in one aspect, Locomotive control systems.

Normally I would have just skimmed through the article, but when I hovered over the link to the Locomotive Control System (number 5 in the list) I noticed that it linked to the QES-III system from Qtron-Wabtec.  Which just happens to be the company my Father used to work for and the system he designed for them.

It definitely doesn’t run windows. I remember him telling me about the custom real time operating system/application he programed for that system and about the positively tiny/slow processor in the system. I mean the graphing calculator I had in high school was faster then that processor. But that doesn’t really matter at all when it came to locomotive control systems, as it was plenty fast enough for everything it needed to do.

2-3 years ago my father started his own company, TMV Control Systems, as a partnership with Brookville Equipment Corporation, a railway supplier in Brookville, Pennsylvania. He’s developed a new locomotive control system for them and it’s being integrated into everything from passenger locomotives, rail yard switching locomotives, streetcars, and sweet new multi-engine fuel saving locomotives.

So yeah, it is definetly possible that Microsoft inflitrated other locomotive control systems suppliers but not Qtron-Wabtec (with the QES-III) or TMV Control Systems.

UPDATE:

• Article reposted on network world: http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/29644?ts
• And on slashdot: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/11/003251

Hello Peter Cannon,

As you do not have any easily accessable method of leaving comments on your blog I’ll respond to your post via this post.

In response to your post: Firefox 3 not supporting GoogleSync, I give you this piece of news: Google Browser Sync Discontinued, No Firefox 3 Support.  Sorry, There will never be a FF3 extension.

Lifehacker does give you some recommendations for replacement products.

Hopefully your blog does do linkbacks or this “answer” will just be lost in the blogosphere.

So, as mozilla just DDOS’ed themselves with this whole download day thing, you can’t actually access their site to participate. Unless you bypass their fancy webpages and go straight through their awesome mirror service.

Firefox 3 download link

That link will automatically send you to a local server and allow you to download firefox 3 and contribute to the amazingly huge bandwith bill mozilla is racking up.

Enjoy!

(Of and to be offical you have to download it before 1:00 pm tomorrow. The offical 24 hours started today at 1:00 pm Toronto time)

As a typical north American worker I use e-mail a lot as part of my work. Now if I worked for myself I would be using Google Apps for your domain and enjoying the productivity improving gmail interface, but instead I work for the government, and we use outlook & exchange. blah.

So a while back I noticed that I had several hundred e-mails in my inbox, and I was having a hard time finding past e-mails I needed for reference. I was trying to use categories and search folders to create a gmail like tagging system but I hit the limit of search folders allowed and the adding of categories in outlook is a pain and definitely not a replacement to gmails labels.

I went looking for a better system and found this post by lifehacker: Empty Your Inbox with the Trusted Trio. The article basically states that you try using a three folder organization system: follow-up, hold, and archive, and keep your inbox empty.

Today I emptied my inbox. It’s actually a great feeling.

Now I just need to bring that follow-up folder down to a more manageable level.

$ history | awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a) {print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
153 sudo
59 ls
38 cd
27 python
24 ssh
20 exit
20 cat
15 ln
13 x11vnc
9 prevu

So, what do the construction/building industry and free software development have in common? More then you’d think.

I was thinking again about git, and what an awesome concept it is. (Read everything you can find about it, it’s genius, but it does take a while to wrap your head around) Basically it provides for a common way of referencing content and its history and makes distributed development easy. It blows any previous source code management software out of the water.

I’ve always thought that through the use of computers there are two main stages of any application or “workflow”. First there is 1-to-1 transfer of the pre-computer concept to the computer. This is like Microsoft Word. (It’s really just a fancy typewriter/ sheet of paper) (think about it) Then after a while someone looks at what is really needed for this process and what computers are actually good at and there is a paradigm shift. Suddenly we have wiki’s, and google docs, and other “word-processing” programs which really have no similarity to anything pre-computers.

Git is like this, Linus looked at what was really needed, and what computers can do and came up with a new paradigm shifting application / storage method.

But what is really cool is that almost every problem that the creation of git eliminated also affect the construction industry. The Linux kernel (git’s reason for existence) is developed by many different people in many different parts of the world with different skill sets and allows for seamless, easy collaboration of all the work done. The typical building project is also designed by many different people in many different parts of the world (ok, usually not world wide, but at least across the province) but with the huge difference of the complete and utter lack of true collaboration.

Well, ok. I’m being a little harsh. The construction industry does collaborate, but when you compare their collaboration (hundreds of different copies of everything, long drawn out meetings, hundreds of man hours of checking and rechecking specifications and drawings) to the free software development collaboration (git-pull) it’s seems like the construction industry is from the dark ages.

The first step in solving the construction industries problems is a standard interoperable digital format for building information. (Proprietary Autodesk formats need not apply.) This will be like the programming language for building information. Then we put this information into a git repository and just like magic, your not in the dark ages anymore. Easy collaboration, cryptographically signed releases, full change log, etc.

I really think that a NBIMS (National Building Information Model Standard) implementation on top of a RESTful python + hadoop/couchdb + git backend would turn the construction industry on it’s head and be a major step in the right direction. Lets start claiming back the estimated 25% cost of non-interoperable software/data currently used in every single construction project across the globe.