| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | |||||
| 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 |
| 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 |
| 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
| 31 |
This section:
Blog postings by Operational Dynamics partners and staff
Use the links at top left for a consolidated feed of all the posts made on this
site.
Please note the disclaimer at the bottom of this page.
Fri, 21 Dec 2007
Innovative uses of bobcats
Ordinarily Rail car movers (aka HiRail trucks) are either enormous ugly yellow painted beasts (which are inevitably maintenance nightmares) or are glorified pickup trucks (which, while great for zooming around to fix a remote signal, that haven’t much hope of actually moving anything). This week, though, I came across an unusual approach to dealing with moving small numbers of cars in an private industrial rail yard that might do the trick. A Canadian company called Brandt Equipment markets a vehicle called the “Rail Yard Boss” which is nothing but a John Deere front loader adapted with rail wheels and a coupler. Photos from their website (I don’t live where there is so much grain, you know?):
The interesting part is that it uses its hoist to transfer some of the weight from the car its pushing to itself, thereby increasing the friction between its wheels and the track, improving its traction as a result. That’s smart.
The advantage over a real switcher, of course, is that it can just up the steel wheels, pivot, and drive out of the way.
On the other hand, given that this thing can only push a max of 5 loaded cars, you’ll probably end up needing a real switcher sooner or later anyway (and what yard doesn’t have a spur as a switching lead to get things out of the way?). Still though, pretty neat.
AfC
Longevity
Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, etc has now become the longest-lived monarch since the union, having today surpassed¹ her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria, who lived to 81 years 7 months and 29 days. Congratulations, Ma’am!
Given the legendary determination of our Sovereign, I would imagine the real goal she is aspiring to reach is 10 September 2015. Should she still be alive then the length of her reign will have exceeded those of both King George III and Queen Victoria.
It’s always a bit weird to commend someone for having gotten older. “Congratulations, you’re not dead yet. Well done, there.” seems a bit odd, really, seeing as how there are so many things that just aren’t in our control. Celebrating birthdays remains fun mostly because it’s an opportunity to exchange presents, get sloshed, etc. But birthdays aren’t the only milestones of longevity, and this particular mark is a bit more exclusive than most!
AfC
¹This according to an article at Wikipedia listing British Monarchs by longevity. Hard to know who has time to dig up and collate this sort of data, but hey.
Tue, 18 Dec 2007
On Bridges
Doing some background research for a client I came across a surprisingly comprehensive introductory page about the basics of bridge design. This isn’t Civ Eng stuff by any means, but it’s a great overview of the taxonomy of bridges, with some excellent illustrations:
along with admirably concise descriptions.
The source website is an exhaustive survey of bridges in and around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, maintained by one Bruce Cridlebaugh. Though I am sometimes moved to wonder what drives people to such exhaustive efforts, it’s not like people I hang around with aren’t equally obsessed over obscure interests. :)
As websites go, it’s actually surprisingly well laid out. The intro page has a graphic explaining to visitors how to use their site:
“…To choose from a comprehensive listing of structures, (1) go to List by Location, (2) choose a map area, then (3) select from the list for structures in that area…”
Granted, enthusiasm to use this technique oneself is tempered by the obvious hassle of having to create such a graphic in the first place (not to mention that screenshots have a bad habit of getting out of date the moment you alter your stylesheets), but it is nonetheless impressive information density.
AfC
Fri, 14 Dec 2007
Darth Claus
The town I live in held a family evening of Christmas carols at the local cricket oval last night. At first it had promise of being more than the usual amateurish affair that seems to be the lot of small communities, with a large choir and a proper orchestra.
But as the second half opened, instead of playing carols, they played the theme to Star Wars. Star Wars?!? And then Santa Claus appeared. At first I was a bit annoyed at the lack of musical taste, but then a broader truth became apparent:
Santa Claus is a Sith Lord
Suddenly, everything that drives you nuts about the excesses of the Christmas season makes sense. The endless shopping, tacky decorations, and worst of all the fact that the stores start playing Christmas music in October — it’s all an evil plot. Not to mention the whole flying through the air and visiting several million people an hour thing. Only a master of the Dark Side could manage these feats. Darth Claus, Lord of the Sith.
Image from a blog post a few years ago by Nikolai Ormazablev writing a review (in Spanish) of Revenge of the Sith. How did he know?
:)
AfC
Fri, 07 Dec 2007
Talking about getting involved
I’m giving a talk at foss.in tomorrow, Saturday, at 10am:
I realize that this is only of interest to people in Bangalore this week and reading planet.foss.in, but here’s my abstract:
The essence of open source is not USING free software, but CREATING it. The purpose of this talk is to teach you how to contribute to open source projects.
Admittedly, getting involved isn’t as easy as it could be, but that’s often because you haven’t had an opportunity to learn how to go about participating in a project’s development.
This talk is aimed at people who probably already know something about Linux, already know how to program, and already believe how important free software is… but haven’t yet made the jump to being contributors themselves. And that’s LOTS of people. So, it’s time to become and open source hacker.
It’s easy to talk about “interacting with the community” and “filing bugs” and “submitting a patch”, but until you know how to do this, it can all be a bit daunting. So we are going to be do all these things, TOGETHER, on stage, LIVE. We’re going to file real bugs about real problems in real open source projects, and then we’re going to fix ‘em, right there on the screens in front of you.
How do you contribute? You have to check out source code, learn how to build open source software, run it, test it, and debug it… but it doesn’t stop there! Then comes creating and sending patches, receiving feedback from the upstream project, dealing with rejection, but finally when you’re successful exalting your success.
For the beginners in the audience we’ll be demonstrating what you do to submit to upstream, but we’re also going to show what the upstream people do when you make that contribution. So we’ll see the whole open source process, beginning to end.
Take joy in your work, do your work in the open, and open it to the world. Do that, and you ARE an open source contributor.
Actually, it’s not just me — my good friend Shreyas Srinivasan and I will be doing the demos jointly. So the best part will be watching the two of us making fools of ourselves on stage.
I hope you can make it!
AfC
P.S. 10 am means Ten O’Clock in the morning. People who are late don’t get any free chocolate chip cookies.
Tue, 04 Dec 2007
GNOME Mascot?
It’s the GNOME Project Day at foss.in!
Máirín Duffy talking about getting involved in art, marketing and branding in GNOME … question from the audience: we have the GNOME foot logo, but why doesn’t GNOME have a mascot?
I asked quickly in #gnome-hackers and James Henstridge suggested that the mascot was:
“whatever made the footprint”
It’s a giant invisible beast! :)
AfC
Category Specific Feeds.
Use these links for an RSS or ATOM feed limited to this category and its descendants.
Technorati Profile
