whart57

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.

There's a touch of nostalgia about what we do in railway modelling. Why else would that horrible BR Blue period be so popular as a layout subject or - ugh! - the 1980s diesel depot. Or late BR steam among the septuagenarians. And many of those modellers who don't recreate something from their own past go for something they wish they had experienced. So as a long term seed in the hobby for our grandchildren start by getting them to experience the railways. Not just the heritage railways, the real day to day railway. Here in Sussex we are fortunate in that senior railcards and family tickets make taking grandchildren on the train to London or Brighton quite affordable, certainly once you factor in the eye-watering car parking charges. Other parts of the country might find that more difficult. But speaking personally, I still have a hankering for the railways of the 1960s and 70s, largely because I associate them with holidays and those first steps to adult independence.

Or: https://archive.org/details/railwaysgreatbr00whisgoog/page/n612/mode/2up This is Google books scan of Francis Whishaw's Railways of Great Britain and Ireland written in 1842. It's got some inspiring drawings in pages 600 or so on as well as contemporary reports of all the railways operating or under construction in 1840-42.

Well I took the shunter down to the club where there is an N gauge test track. Unfortunately the club used set track for this and thus the curves are a bit tight for me. OK for the N gauge guys and their RTR, and 009 and H0e is OK, but my 3mm scale mainline sized diesels and carriages won't get round. Pity. However this shunter can, so it got to stretch its legs for a bit. So what did I find? Things started off well, it did about 5-6 laps very smoothly so I left it running and went to do some work on the Chesworth fiddle yard. Ten minutes later it had come to a stop. I found that the back wheels had gone out of gauge, the BTB was about 5mm. Corrected that and it ran for a bit before doing the same thing. Ran it the other way and the wheels went out of gauge faster. I'm guessing that the sharp curves are pushing the wheels over and that is causing friction with the frame, particularly as one wheel wasn't square on the axle. It was also noisier than I remembered from the first tests. Examination of the gearing found that when I soldered the wires for the pick-ups I must have brought the soldering iron to close to the big nylon gear wheel as some of the teeth had melted. So back home, and replacing the wobbly wheel and the big gear. I took the opportunity to do a proper continuity test on electrical pickup while the chassis could roll. I have a little test track for that. The short bit of N gauge track has two cuts in one rail resulting in a section about 15mm long being isolated. A choc block is wired in so that that short section is connected and so is the other rail. The probes from a multimeter can be screwed down on the other side. I make my locos DCC-ready by creating an 8 pin socket wired up to the appropriate standard. This is useful for testing as well as for DCC running. Inserting the legs of a 330Ω resistor into the track-side sockets gives the multi-meter something to measure. I learnt many years ago when I had a job testing long computer cable runs in an eight storey office block that testing to a short can give false results. Testing to a known value resistor is much safer. So a chassis is rolled along the track, and every wheel is tested individually. First one side, and then the other. If any pick-up is not making connection this will, well, pick that up. So, now I just need to put in a new gear wheel - fortunately they are almost literally ten a penny on eBay - and then back down to the club on Wednesday for another spin.

I can use my scanner. Try Skanlite, I've used that with Kodak, HP and Canon scanners. As for "proper software", what is that? I retired from IBM six years ago, but just before that IBM standardised on Red Hat Linux for all new machines and upgrades from Windows 7. (Since then IBM has bought Red Hat the company). I think we can surmise from that that anything you need for business is covered. Your WP, Spreadsheet, Presentation software, browsers, email, and more. I use all of that now at home - Libre Office, Firefox, Inkscape and GIMP for drawing and photo-shopping. Even Templot works though AnyRail requires the WINE emulator The one frustration I have had is that I have never got the Rosegarden MIDI music program to work. At least not with the MIDI hardware in my machine. A 3D CAD program for 3D printing artwork is another missing thing. I, or rather my daughter, has had success with Blender - an open source drawing programme meant for animations and on-line graphics - producing files for Shapeways to print, but frankly, my will to live fades when I try to use a 3D CAD program, so I don't see that as a major shortfall. So, what have I missed?

I sometimes wonder what if an IT-savvy minister in the New Labour governments of the noughties had standardised government systems on Linux, using someone like Red Hat to provide a government-flavoured distro with appropriate security, management and other stuff to use around the civil service, whether we'd have the systems promised for the NHS and the like by now. Instead of being amazed at the PC in the nurses' station still being booted up into Windows XP. Or would MS' lobbyists have got him sacked in the first reshuffle.

Netware? That's a blast from the past.

I found these two photographs that give some idea of the pier structure as they are taken from underneath. These clearly show that the main load bearing structure is two hefty girders close to the outer edges which rest on the supports and regular smaller cross girders. The pier decking goes across the pier though so there must be something between them and the cross girders, presumably wood to allow the decking planks to be screwed down. The screw or nail heads are visible on the 1960s picture above and that suggest the spacing is not that for the rails.

Can you lay things out so that the tracks aren't parallel to the baseboard edge in the scenic section? Also I'm not an expert on track design but which are the up and down platforms? Can a train reach them and leave from them with a minimum of point shifts, and can they do so without a single mistake putting them on the wrong line?

Still a closed system. Apple controls what can be downloaded and I'm pretty certain Apple also controls the interface developers have to use to make their apps work. Linux and Android are open. It is possible to install Android apps without requiring Google Play, users of Huawei phones do it all the time since Donald Trump's decision to start a trade war with China. Linux is open as part of its licensing. Microsoft has to be squared with folding stuff but it's very rare that Microsoft do more than sell the hooks. Apple though is different.

Pick-ups fitted and wired up on the Henschel shunter. Now for a lengthy burst on the club's N gauge test track. Some tweaking is going to be required though.

Apple is a closed system. IOS only runs on Apple hardware and only runs applications sold by Apple. Microsoft software on the other hand is designed for hardware supplied by others. It's an anti-trust issue if Microsoft uses its market dominance to deny that hardware to others. Similarly it's an anti-trust issue if Microsoft uses its dominance to close off opportunities to competitors who might provide an alternative choice to customers. Apple has never achieved the sort of market dominance that would let it assume a monopoly.

True, Windows 98 was the last of the DOS based OS.

I might have some tram pictures from Riga. Unfortunately they are from before my first digital camera so on the loft somewhere. If I find them I'll scan them.

It will call it March 0th

UNIX architectures like Linux were designed from the outset to keep users separated, Windows, which for a long time was really the older DOS with a graphical interface on top, was not. DOS and Windows assumed the "personal" bit of a PC applied and that there would only be one user. Which was fine until people started hooking them up to the internet. UNIX systems however were servers and networked from the outset. That meant Linux offered far fewer vulnerabilities, as did all UNIX systems. As an aside, back in the 1990s, the main competitor to Windows was IBM's OS/2. OS/2 was developed because the engineers at IBM had already twigged that the security holes in MS/DOS were unacceptable for business machines that were networked together. Unfortunately at that time IBM's executives were not very imaginative and wouldn't back the personal computing teams with the funding and marketing they needed to compete with Microsoft's aggressive price points. And if the sales force - and IBM had a much larger sales force than Microsoft - could make more out of one small mainframe software upgrade than out of selling two hundred copies of OS/2 then you know where their focus is going to be.

We've been here before. Microsoft's first run in with monopoly and anti-trust law was when it used bundling to try and kill off Netscape, the most popular browser back in the 1990s. Microsoft lost the legal battle but did manage to strangle Netscape. Microsoft then went on to use its OS dominance to squeeze out rivals in the far more lucrative office productivity suites.

I spent the first three years of my life just a bit further up the Middenweg too. Still got line 9 into the centre when my grandma moved into a new build just outside the Afrikaner-buurt when line 5 was turned into a rush hour only line because of reconstruction of the Weesperstraat around 1960. (That area had been the Jewish ghetto during the Occupation and had been gutted both by the Nazis and by desperate Amsterdammers looking for fuel during the hongerwinter). I remember line 9 mostly for the six wheel trams that were the mainstay up until the early 70s.

I'm a bit puzzled by the picture you have of a tram on line 9. If I didn't know better I'd say it was at the so called "Ajaxlus" or Ajax loop. So-called because until 1996 it was the tram stop for the Ajax football ground before they moved out to the ArenA. The 9 had been extended to Diemen by then but the loop was still in use on match days and for extra services in the rush hours. However I thought that the Ajaxlus has been taken out of service by 2004. I was always fascinated by the Haarlemmermeer station when I was young and we were visiting my grandma in Amsterdam. It was clearly a station but you couldn't catch a train from it. I remember once seeing coal wagons there and if we went to the Amsterdamse Bos then you crossed the line (single track) over an unguarded crossing on the walk from the bus. No electrification either which was unknown to me in Holland. Of course I know now that then, late 1950s/early 60s, the Haarlemmermeer station still handled domestic coal traffic for south Amsterdam and that once a day a diesel would bring a dozen or so coal wagons up the line. Never saw that though.

I wonder if you were aware that the coloured square to the right of the large number on the trams destination screen is an Amsterdam feature that goes right back to the horse tram days. Each line has its own square and there is some logic to it, though re-routings over the years have broken the pattern a bit. Originally a single colour indicated a line that went around the city rather than in and out from the centre. There was a major re-jigging of routes when the North-South metro line opened in 2018 but before that the two lines that had a single square and fitted the pattern were 3 - yellow, and 10 - red. Line 7 was originally a blue square but as that didn't show up in the days when these coloured squares were glasses in lamps on the corners of the roof, the glasses for line 7 were given a white band top and bottom. Line 13 was originally a white square but again, in the early days this did not differentiate from the empty glass of a service vehicle so a blue square was drawn on the white square. Pre-war, line 13 crossed the city, so counted as a perimeter route. Line 9 always had a green square, but it was not a perimeter route. It might be that it inherited this from its horse tram predecessor, which was I believe. Radial routes were given two colour squares. Routes to the West and South West, using the Leidsestraat or the Vijzelstraat, were divided diagonally, routes to the South vertically and routes to the East horizontally. Re-routings over the years broke the patterns but the pics you show of lines 16 and 24 with diagonally divided line colours is right for those lines to the south west of the city. Finally the infill lines were given two colour squares but divided into three horizontally or vertically, the outside two being the same colour. Line 7, as mentioned above, was of this pattern but for a different reason. As I said, originally these colours were in the form of glass lenses on corner lights. The large line number is also a long running feature. Amsterdammers were used to seeing the line numbers carried in the bow collectors and that had to be carried on when the first trams with pantograph collectors came in in 1957 This image from wikimedia has all the colours listed.

Thanks for the PD Marsh link, that is the Tividale kit I have and potentially want more of. I don't know how you are off for books. I found some on the second hand market. David Voice, who lived in Kidderminster back in the day, has done a couple but one that might not be on your radar is J.S. Webb, Black Country Tramways. It's a two volume affair and volume 2 covers the Kidderminster and Stourport in some detail, including some good descriptions of every known item of rolling stock. I got mine second hand a few years ago.