whart57

Time to get back to the scenics. One thing that is a must have is a temple since that will ground the layout into its Thai setting. There are a couple of temples near the real Thonburi, a small one on a footpath behind the loco shed and a much bigger complex on the other side. There is a nice photo in Ramaer's book of a C56 2-6-0 in front of that large temple taken in the 1980s in the last years of steam and I tried and failed many times to reproduce that shot for myself. Back in 2016 I managed it, sort of. I've posted this pic on another thread but it does no harm to post it here too. That particular temple is way too big for my layout, and the other temple is too small to be the statement I want. In Christian terms it would be a cathedral on one hand and a baptist chapel on the other, when what I want is a small village church. So the search was on for a suitable prototype. After many walks around Bangkok I came across one on the Rama 1 Road that seemed about right. The Wat Chai Mongkol was a small complex that contained what I wanted, namely a "typical" temple, a chedhi, a sort of spire on its own platform and a bell tower, and all in a fairly cramped space. On my last visit to Bangkok I took loads of photographs and with the help of Google's satellite view, was able to produce some sketches to work with. Where we are currently at is that I have the basic temple and schoolroom/monk's dormitory built up in plastikard plus the chedhi and bell tower completed as far as the painting stage. I'll come back to the challenges of building this and ways to meet them - including some home-brewed 3D printing - in the next instalment.

Less easy when they started building the new airport link though.

When you were at Bang Sue did you catch this little gem?

The day (Saturday) I took those pictures was the King's birthday, and the run to Ayudthaya and back was apparently a fixture in the calendar. Whether it still is with the new king, I don't know. However the day was also marked in the hall at Hualamphong station by an exhibition by architecture students at a Bangkok university of railway buildings and other infrastructure they had recorded as part of their course. I bought a tee-shirt with a side view of a C56 and a clutch of post cards they had made from their drawings. I also had a long talk with one of their supervisors, having introduced myself by showing her a couple of my Continental Modeller articles. She was in her forties I guess but her father was one of the mechanics on the steam run, having been a driver on the SRT in the steam days.

My preferred route to Thonburi was BTS (elevated metro) to Saphan Thaksin and then the river boat to Thonburi. On my last visit in 2016 the Thonburi Railway Pier had re-opened which made it a shorter walk. Some poor shots, it was well after dusk and I hadn't figured out all the features on my camera, but these were taken at Hualamphong with the arrival of the steam special that had left for Ayudthaya that morning and had now returned. Several hours late. But it's proof those Thonburi locos do get steamed.

That C56 really needs something to pull though 😁

Same person 😊

In Michael Crichton's Timeline a tech billionaire funds the creation of a time machine with which he hopes to record the great moments and great men of history to replay to the modern generations. It works but the results are disappointing - Washington's crossing of the Delaware doesn't have the great leader standing in the prow of the lead boat, Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address is a guy standing in a field barely audible beyond the first half dozen rows. I wonder whether those expecting to see great feats of steam engine performance will be similarly disappointed by the reality. Does anyone remember the British Rail advert of c1980 which had an aerial view of Flying Scotsman being overtaken by a blue diesel. The point being made was that normal services on the ECML - then diesel hauled - were 20mph faster than they had been in steam days. Beware of the rose-tinted specs.

I'm reporting progress here:

The trouble with digital photography is that you tend to take so many pictures you overlook some nice ones. I came across this one while looking for some pics needed for a modelling project. It's the loco headshunt at Thonburi where the locos pass by with a temple in the background. I'd tried many times to get a decent shot of that but in 2016 I seem to have managed it.

As I'm building my layout based on Thonburi I will look forward to it.

What I would like to be able to do were things I might have done if I'd been aware of them at the time. For example, in the mid-60s I discovered narrow gauge through a book in the school library and some Airfix Pug conversions in Airfix Magazine (remember that?). But I thought only in terms of things like the Talyllyn or Ffestiniog railways, I didn't realise there was a working narrow gauge system twenty minutes drive away from where we lived serving the gravel pits between Faversham and Sittingbourne. I did go and check them out some twenty years later when they had long since closed but it might have been good to see them working.

The difference is that while both Microsoft and Linux expect users to do the testing of new versions only Microsoft expects them to pay for the privilege.

Suppose though if the technology allowed you to go back in time view the world but not actually leave your time machine. If you were to put this into a sci-fi story you'd have it that it was a virtual you travelling in time - and always backwards it seems - but that virtual you has no physical existence so cannot interact with past worlds.

LG TVs seem to be OK. I read somewhere that the LG operating system was developed from Nokia's smartphone opsys, so not Android. Android is a really flakey system though, I shudder to think of Google having anything to do with self-driving cars if Android is their example of reliability.

The motto was "no-one ever got fired for buying IBM". That's why managers bought IBM systems. IBM were clever too, they supported clone manufacturers like Amdahl so managers could "choose". The money wasn't in selling hardware though, it was in software services and as those Amdahl mainframes and FEPs ran IBM software, IBM was still making money. The cheaper Amdahl option on hardware kept the likes of DEC out though. That said, if you had a problem with your IBM stuff they did pull out the stops to get you back up and running. I worked on some of IBM's competitor products of the time before going to work in an IBM shop. I have to say that the build quality of the IBM kit was a lot better as well. IBM wasn't so good outside the machine room though. Their modems were heavy and way over-engineered for the purpose they fulfilled. The printers that churned out thousands of customer letters overnight or furlongs of reports printed on that "pyjama paper" were great, but that high engineering quality was overkill for a remote printer doing a dozen letters an hour. And that was the reason for IBM's downfall in the late 1990s. IBM applied the same business logic as they'd successfully used in the mainframe and midrange markets - high build quality, tolerance of "clones" and profits coming from software - when they developed the PC. Not the original IBM PC, that almost slipped out without the top execs knowing about it, but IBM's follow up of PS/2 with the OS/2 operating system. The ironic thing is that the flaws in the original PC design that IBM tried to fix - the limited ISA bus and the insecurities and single threading of MSDOS - would be fixed ten years later with the PCI bus and Windows XP, but at the time the price of IBM's PS/2 was way too high to compete with cheap clones, and when Bill Gates sold Windows 3.1 (which was still a MSDOS system) at rock bottom prices for hardware manufacturers to pre-install, OS/2 sales fell through the floor too. But "no-one ever got fired for buying IBM" morphed into "no-one ever got fired for choosing Microsoft". Decision making in the IT business has got no better in the last forty years.

Ah well, we were IBM not out of choice. We were an acquisition and we didn't wear suits. IBM's near death experience also taught them a measure of humility. This century I would say the ill-founded arrogance was from Microsoft and Cisco. Google probably now.

I think I could provide a great service to 21st Century Railway Modelling by simply going back to, say, the 1880s and somewhere like the Canterbury stations and photographing something other than the engine of a train. Just getting some good shots of passenger carriages, goods stock - that elusive LCDR brake van - and infrastructure like signals and level crossing gates. Then the next week doing the same thing but in 1905 or 1910. Out of curiosity I'd also shoot back to 1830 and Whitstable, just to see if Invicta ever did pull trains It might also be interesting to go forward forty years to see if HS2 ever gets built, though I fear I will see the Transport minister in the Euan Blair government coming up with a new set of excuses.

We once had a Russian oil company with rigs off Siberia as a customer. According to them the critical app was the TV porn channel. If that failed the men on the rig downed tools. That could cause an oil rig to shutdown.

Strictly speaking they were shipped to Palestine, which was under British control at the time.

I was at a major national telecoms provider working on our stuff when I came across one of those living fossil applications. One that had been written to do a task and continued to do that task year in year out. Trouble was the guy who had written it had retired and he was now getting a nice supplement to his pension through getting called in for a day or two at a nice consultant's rate every couple of months as it needed updating to cope with other changes in the software around it. I'm sorry to say that we put an an end to that. If you get full admin rights to any computer you can sneak anything on, if you give someone the combination to the bank's safe they can open that too. Are the systems in place to detect that? I know how to look for things running that shouldn't be on Linux, I wouldn't know how to do that in present day Windows systems. Going back to the earlier topic of having a government Linux distro. Yes it would have taken a brave minister - and one who had been given assurances they would be allowed to stay in the job to see the project through - to go down that route. The reasons are not the technical qualities of the Linux and Microsoft offerings of the time, but the non-technical issues. Microsoft were very good at making non-technical executives jittery about going down a different path to the one MS were mapping out. If an executive didn't immediately buckle the chances are that they would consult their own strategy people. People who had been on Microsoft funded jollies, had been to breakfast meetings with Microsoft execs - Bill Gates was still doing these at the turn of the century - and had been well supplied with the "why choose Microsoft" arguments. And then there were the techs. Lads who had their MS certificates of competence or wanted to get them for their own career advancement reasons. Yes it would have taken not just a brave minister but one who was tech-savvy and knew how the IT industry worked to get out of that rut. I doubt there was anyone like that in Parliament, certainly not in the Commons.

Windows is easy because the PC manufacturer has done all the hard work. Try taking the disks that come with one PC and using them to install Windows on another from a different manufacturer for evidence. Of course these days you don't get the disks and your copy of Windows is locked to the hardware serial number of the PC it came on so you can't do that. But HP, Dell, Toshiba or whoever have done the necessary tweaks in Windows for you. I would agree that Windows 7 was excellent, I used it at work and found it great. But then Microsoft decided the future for home computing was to share your life on social media. (As an aside, I attended a Bill Gates presentation way back in the early 1990s - Win 3.1 had only just come out - and Gates was already pushing a vision of your computer taking over your life.) The result was Windows 8, a Windows 9 which never made it out of the labs and a Windows 10 that - eventually - became usable. Then there were the insistent demands that you have a Microsoft account and use Outlook for your mail. If ignored you risked getting locked out of your machine. OK, it wasn't a bad idea to encrypt your disk so that your data was safe if someone stole your laptop, but in true Gates style, you had to get Microsoft involved getting it back. The thing that did it for my wife was the change in how Office 365 was licensed. For me it had already been MS changing how you navigated Office. Then of course there was the constant nagging from Norton, McAfee etc for more money. Have you ever tried getting Norton to accept you don't want their stuff any more? Not strictly speaking Microsoft, but it was Microsoft's early vulnerabilities that got those guys up and running. Now I accept that I am in the unusual position of having worked with Linux, both as servers and clients, for some twenty years of my working life. I accept that for most people just taking the Windows that comes pre-installed works for them. But it is a line of least resistance, and not something that should be followed by those making decisions for corporate and government use.

And yet all that Windows stuff gave government systems managers endless security headaches with viruses and hacks. The fact a DOS based system was still running in 2005 suggests a shortage of money more than anything else. Where I worked we had both Windows and UNIX (other flavours as well as Linux) clients and servers. I don't recall the "users have it at home" argument being made. My customers saw it as a work system, the users needed to learn it and the only thing they needed to know from the operating system was how to start the client app. Which you could do on start up anyway on all the systems.

My scanner doesn't do that. Not exactly a mainstream app is it?

A correction - I do run Templot as a WINE app. I have Virtual Box, in which I run a Win7 instance for the Silhouette software. I just find it a faff to fire it up if something works with WINE.