Sun and Rain as I wandered around Harvard Square, taking the T from South Station the morning after the long flight. A week ago now. Tomorrow evening I will begin the long journey home again. I will send the actual postcard back home to Sydney, and have had a request to send postcards back when I get home as well. I remember the oysters and Rapscallion beer. It seemed an excellent combo to shake off the jet-lag.
This blog relates to the challenge of building SCADA systems, and the creative people that have to break through to determine the solution, if a project is to get off the ground. There is an aspect of end to end design in a highly coupled plant system which is broken by the mere existence of the communications and geographical spread of SCADA systems. There are really two degrees of freedom at work here. The first is the existence of communications channels, and the second is the geographical spread of the equipment to be controlled. Careful attention to the architecture and it's arrangement, and protocol settings is needed to make something actually operate effectively.
I am in Foxboro at the moment, and a person on crutches in the breakfast lobby just walked past, on crutches, dislocated kneecap, 3 weeks to go. Last night the police turned up in relation to keeping the peace and guests getting some sleep. Hopefully he like I slept through all the commotion.
My Invensys colleagues from Paris are also in the hotel, their trip to the cape got rained out yesterday. Still it is Sunday and nice weather out there today and Newport is beckoning. My colleagues from Beijing are in the district, and I managed to say Ni Hao and take their photo out at the Foxboro Campus as well. I also met my 'cousin' Mandy who is looking into the whole Modernization approach and has some spectacular photo's of Foxboro's engineering history over the past 104 years.
Yes, so this month at least after Easter, I will be travelling for a variety of reasons. I thought that while 'on the road' so to speak perhaps we could focus on the communications angle and look at stories of communications, protocols and see what happens. I expect to inject some more humour into this, not sure how though. You know how technical blogs are meant to be right ? Kind of technical telling rather than humour filled narrative. Last month I tried a dialog about elephants and turtles, it worked out ok, and people seemed to enjoy the metaphor.
Chris
[Boston, April '12]
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