Dave Edstrom: President and Chairman of the Board of MTConnect Institute

Yesterday I officially took over the reigns as the President and Chairman of the Board of MTConnect Institute.  I am filling the huge shoes of John Byrd.  I was elected in March of this year at the MTConnect Board of Directors meeting.

It is a real privilege and honor to have this role.  The MTConnect Board of Directors are the thought leaders in the manufacturing industry and have been instrumental in all aspects of MTConnect.

 My first priorities are to address the MTConnect Tipping Point and Priming The Pump that I blogged about a month ago

Repeal FREAKING Don't Ask Don't Tell!

It is FREAKING insane that we are kicking valuable service people out of military service because they HAPPEN to be gay.   As of today, May 26th, 2010 there have been 13,389 men and women officially discharged from the military who happen to be gay. 

To think that we have men and women putting their lives on the line for the United States of America and we have some IDIOTS in congress who likely NEVER served in the military that believe these patriots should be kicked out is absolutely nuts.   Just one example of this is that we are losing Amercian soldiers lives because we are losing Mideast translators who, again, just happen to be gay.  John McCain's flip flop view on this is the ultimate example of what he will do in order to be elected...

As retired Four Star General John M. Shalikashvili who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1993 to 1997 wrote in The Washington Post over three years ago:

"Last year I held a number of meetings with gay soldiers and marines, including some with combat experience in Iraq, and an openly gay senior sailor who was serving effectively as a member of a nuclear submarine crew. These conversations showed me just how much the military has changed, and that gays and lesbians can be accepted by their peers.

This perception is supported by a new Zogby poll of more than 500 service members returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, three quarters of whom said they were comfortable interacting with gay people. And 24 foreign nations, including Israel, Britain and other allies in the fight against terrorism, let gays serve openly, with none reporting morale or recruitment problems.

I now believe that if gay men and lesbians served openly in the United States military, they would not undermine the efficacy of the armed forces. Our military has been stretched thin by our deployments in the Middle East, and we must welcome the service of any American who is willing and able to do the job."

The Tom Toles' (of the Washington Post and who is a genius) Cartoon below is the perfect summary of how any rationale person should view Don't Ask Don't Tell:

Has The Cyber War Threat Been Exaggerated Debate

Long time friend (I don't say old friend anymore since I turned 50 last year :-)  Steve Fritzinger sent me this link for a fascinating debate on the realities of a Cyber War Threat that will take place June 8th at the Newseum.  My only issue with this is that they are charging $45 for this.  It is not the money that they are charging to attend this, but this is something that is so important to our national security that we should be having this as an open discussion in the United States and in the world.

This is being hosted by Intelligence Squared with John Donovan as the moderator.   Marc Rotenberg and Bruce Schneier are "for the motion" and Jonathan Zittran and Mike McConnel are "against the motion". The motion is The Cyber War Threat Been Exaggerated Debate.

I personally believe that the Cyber War Threat is very real, but having listened and read Bruce Schneier on many occasions, I would pay to hear Bruce's thoughts on this.  Maybe the $45 includes an all you can eat Sushi bar and all you can drink bar :-)

30,000 New CyberSecurity Jobs

There is an ad in today's Washington Post from University of Maryland University College for a BS or MS in CyberSecurity.  UMUC offers both CyberSecurity and CyberSecurity Policy BS and MS degrees.  The ad points out that there will be an estimated 30,000 new jobs in CyberSecurity which I easily believe.

I don't have a clue if this is a quality curriculum or not.  What I do know is that this is sorely needed in the computer industry.  When we have our first major cyber security attack that affects the United States or any other country in a significant fashion, then we will see these CyberSecurity job numbers jump.   This is not something that you take your typical sysadmin and ask them to "worry about security a little more".  I know that many non computer industry individuals were lulled to sleep when we did not see some of the predicted Y2K meltdowns never happened.

I would imagine that some of the nearby government security agencies (hopefully) had a great deal of input to UMUC's new CyberSecurity Programs.   This is where government and industry do need to work together as well as working with other countries.

Federal Times reported on Friday:

The Obama administration plan, to some extent, builds on the Bush administration's Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI). Among items of interest to the federal workforce, a 12-point CNCI summary calls for:

• Continuation of the Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) initiative, meant to reduce the number of connections between government computers and the Internet.

• Deployment of an intrusion detection system of sensors across the government.

• Coordination of research and development across government.

• Development of a pipeline of skilled cybersecurity employees.

• Coordination and cooperation with the private sector to address security matters of common interest.

That last item, public-private cooperation, has drawn considerable attention. There's wide agreement that the expertise of the private sector ought to be aligned with the security needs of government.

"To secure our country from cyber attacks, we must have shared responsibility between the government and the private sector," Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., told the Business Software Alliance Cybersecurity Forum in April.

At the same time, some in the private sector warn that industry may not be ready to work with government and vice versa.

"There has been no effort in terms of ironing out the legalities," said Pat Clawson, CEO of security and vulnerability technologies firm Lumension.

It will be interesting to see what other universities and colleges will follow the CyberSecurity path in the CS curriculums.

Great MTConnect Video

There is a GREAT MTConnect video here that is about  7 1/2  minutes long that is well worth watching.   It does a great job with the history of MTConnect and detailing exactly how we got to the first release.  I uploaded this yesterday to YouTube after viewing it with Paul Warndorf of AMT in his office this past Friday.   Proven Productions created this.

John Edstrom's Graduation Weekend at Virginia Tech

Last weekend John graduated from VT.  I posted last Friday what I knew about his achievements (yes, I am a proud father and bragging, but bear with me for this blog post :-)   I also recorded John receiving his degree and is viewable here.

Above is Dr. Barbara Ryder, head of the CS Department for VT, giving John one of his two awards he received at the College of Engineering's Department of Computer Science's Award Ceremony.  John was awarded the CS Service Award and a CS Scholar Award.  John completed his CS degree with minors in mathematics and business.  While at VT, John served as president of ACM; Social Chair of Upsilon Pi Epsilon   -  CS Honor Society; site coordinator, Vice President, and Treasurer of CS-Squared -   was a member of the VT Programming Team and was in VT Honors.  John interned for Microsoft and Optimal Satcom, worked for Sun Microsystems and was web developer for the Collegiate Times.  He also worked as an undergraduate teaching assistant for the Department of Computer Science. Even with all those extracurriculars, John achieved an overall GPA of 3.96 and in-major of 3.96.  Congratulations to John!

Above is our family at VT's College of Engineering's Computer Science Department's Award Ceremony. From left to right, John's aunt Julie, me, John, my wife Julie, Michael (also at VT), Tim, Ruth Edstrom and John Edstrom (John's grandparents).

 Above is John's VT Summa Cum Laude in Computer Science diploma.

Above is the first award John received.  It is the Department of Computer Science Service Award.

Above is the second award John received.  It is the Department of Computer Science Scholar Award.   John

• graduated #3 from Broad Run High School with a 4.33 GPA.  
• started off VT with 38 college credits because of the number of Advanced Placement (AP) courses he took.   
• is graduating today Summa Cum Laude in Computer Science with minors in math and business.  
• received all A's except for a single A- his entire time at VT.  
• was a Sun Microsystems Campus Ambassador - the first one ever at VT.  
• was selected Campus Ambassador of the month for Sun Microsystems.  This was a global selection among over 600 Sun Campus Ambassadors.
• worked on the Collegiate Times his first year.   
• and his room mate, Gabe Martinez, rebuilt the Collegiate Times web site when it went down during the April 16th tragedy.  
• went to Java One 2008 and met James Gosling and John Gage.
• President of VT's Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) for two years.
• had his own blog Blogs.Sun.com as a Sun Campus Ambassador that was called The Ponderings of a Hokie
• as President of the ACM, he hosted many industry thought leaders at VT's ACM evening events.
• was asked to interview students and faculty during the April 16th period for the Collegiate Times.
• was recruited and worked for Microsoft in Seattle last summer working on the next version of Windows and specializing in security.  It was a fantastic experience for him.  
• is currently working on his Masters Degree in Computer Security at VT
• VT is a GREAT school that has become even better during some extremely difficult times in the past 3+ years

Needless to say we are very proud of our oldest son.  I am also not shy about blogging how proud we are :-)

What Cloud Computing is Smart for Manufacturing

Why cloud computing is smart for manufacturing

I wrote the article below for AMT (it is available at ReliablePlant Magazine).   This was written pecifically for IMTS this fall in Chicago.  

 

International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) 

What is cloud computing and why should I care if I am in manufacturing? Cloud computing simply means using remote, large Internet server farms in the same manner as if they belonged to your own company.


Here is an example.  When you use your browser to search for something, such as through Google, do you know where the servers that are processing your search request are located?  Do you even care where the servers are located?  No, of course not.  You have a browser window open, you type in what you are searching for and the results come back.  The search could have been run in California or London for all you know.  It does not matter where these servers are located because you are not using a telephone dialup to get to the Internet like back in the early 1990s.  You are using high-speed broadband.  As we all know the speed difference is significant. Instead of moving a paragraph per second, you can now move a book per second with broadband.


These tremendously large information pipes allow large groups of server farms to appear like they are local to your manufacturing shop. This is a tremendous change from what manufacturing shops had to do just 5 to 10 years ago.  Instead of having to buy large computers and purchase lots of software, with these large information pipes and Internet server farms, you can simply pay for the services you need on a "pay by the drink" basis.


This "pay by the drink" scenario will revolutionize manufacturing in the same way that the Internet has already revolutionized our everyday and business lives.  Manufacturing shops are starting to take advantage of cloud computing because it simply makes good economic sense.  You pay for what you use and do not have the additional costs and burden of managing your own data center.  Instead of large capital expenses for new computer systems, the costs will move to operating expenses and you will pay for only what you actually use.  The graphic illustration below shows how MTConnect machine tools can be connected to the cloud where detailed analytics could be run simply from a browser.

Cloud computing is real and manufacturing shops should seriously consider it to take both time and cost burdens off their businesses. Next month we will explore specific examples of manufacturing in the cloud.


The International Manufacturing Technology Show takes place September 13-18, 2010, at McCormick Place in Chicago. For more information, visit the conference Web site atwww.imts.com.

My Oldest Son John Is Graduating This Weekend From VT

We could not be any prouder of my oldest son John who is graduating from VT today.  John:

• graduated #3 from Broad Run High School with a 4.33 GPA.  
• started off VT with 38 college credits because of the number of Advanced Placement (AP) courses he took.   
• is graduating today Summa Cum Laude in Computer Science with minors in math and business.  
• received all A's except for a single A- his entire time at VT.  
• was a Sun Microsystems Campus Ambassador - the first one ever at VT.  
• was selected Campus Ambassador of the month for Sun Microsystems.  This was a global selection among over 600 Sun Campus Ambassadors.
• worked on the Collegiate Times his first year.   
• and his room mate, Gabe Martinez, rebuilt the Collegiate Times web site when it went down during the April 16th tragedy.  
• went to Java One 2008 and met James Gosling and John Gage.
• was President of VT's Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) for two years.
• had his own blog Blogs.Sun.com as a Sun Campus Ambassador that was called The Ponderings of a Hokie
• as President,  hosted many industry thought leaders at VT's ACM evening events.
• was asked to interview students and faculty during the April 16th period for the Collegiate Times.
• was recruited and worked for Microsoft in Seattle last summer working on the next version of Windows and specializing in security.  It was a fantastic experience for him.  
• is currently working on his Masters Degree in Computer Security at VT
• VT is a GREAT school that has become even better during some extremely difficult times in the past 3+ years

Needless to say we are very proud of our oldest son.  I am also not shy about blogging how proud we are :-)

Congratulations John!

24/7 Wall St Reports: Jonathan Schwartz Worst CEO in American History

I was sent a very interesting article from a friend that lists (in the opinion of 24/7 Wall St.) the top ten worst CEOs of all time in American history.

It includes some of the easy to guess usual suspects, such as Ken Lay of Enron, John Sculley of Apple, Bernie Ebbers of Worldcom, and John Rigas of Adelphia Communications.  Those names would likely appear on most individuals top ten lists.  Below is the text regarding Jonathan Schwartz on 24/7 Wall St. that has Jonathan Schwartz as the worst CEO in American history:

1.   Jonathan Schwartz. By the time Sun Microsystems was bought by Oracle for $7.4 billion, Jonathan Schwartz, the hip, blogging, ponytail wearing CEO, had ruined the firm’s prospects so badly that acquisition was its only option.

In the early 1980s, the company was founded by a small group of engineers and its CEO, Scott McNealy.  During his tenure, Sun Microsystems grew to become one of four dominant players in the server and processor space, which also included Oracle, HP and IBM. Prior to Schwartz’s appointment by McNealy, Sun was a largely profitable and competitive company.

Schwartz’s promotion to CEO in April 2006 was followed by a long series of losses. Despite its strong position, Sun started to fall apart as it lost market share in its main server business to HP and IBM.  The company’s shares fell from almost $27 to under $4 from late in 2007 to late 2008; Sun also later fired nearly 6,000 people, or about 18% of its employees.

In 2008, in an attempt to diversify, Sun bought MySQL AB, the company offering the popular open source database. The acquisition did not work.  As Sun’s share of the server market continued to fall, Schwartz tried to improve market adoption of its Java software, which never brought in much revenue.  Despite some success, the problem was that Java is free and Sun never came up with a realistic model to monetize it.

Larry Ellison went on to state in an interview his true feelings on Jonathan Schwartz:

Reuters published an article in which Mr. Ellison firmly stated that mismanagement and “madness” wrecked Sun.

Some of Larry Ellison's comments were:

“Their management made some very bad decisions that damaged their business and allowed us to buy them for a bargain price.”

And this is my favorite quote by Larry Ellison:

“The underlying engineering teams are so good, but the direction they got was so astonishingly bad that even they couldn’t succeed. Really great blogs do not take the place of great microprocessors. Great blogs do not replace great software. Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales.”

Larry Ellison is 100% accurate.  Great blogs do not make great companies and certainly do not show great leadership.  Larry Ellison is a brilliant businessman.   

Spinal Tap Trivia :-)

I heard this on a Unwigged and Unplugged Concert by Spinal Tap that I watched today.   During the middle of the concert, Spinal Tap has a question and answer session.  An interesting question and answer was the following:

• QUESTION:  How much was scripted and how much was pure improv during the shooting of Spinal Tap?
• ANSWER:   EVERYTHING was improv except for two lines:
1. "I say, Tap into America."
2. "Straight from Hell, Spinal Tap."

It is an amazing to think that the number one cult film of all time was shot by turning on the camera and just make up the lines as it was shot.

Changing a Battery in a C5 Corvette and Charge System Fault error

Above is my home made "memory tool" that keeps the many settings in car radio when you are changing the battery.  You can buy these with the male 12 volt car outlet connector on it with a 9v volt connector for about $17.   Or, if you are like me and cheap, you build your own with two 6 volt lantern
batteries, put them in a series for half the price.  What I like about this is it is 12v and a greater amperage if you take longer than expected to change your car battery.  I do not like to waste my time resetting 24 of my favorite radio stations and the many settings inside today's car radios.  With today's aftermarket car radios, you have so many different devices that you can connect, that after you get everything working perfectly, the last thing you want to do is re-enter all of that back in just because you needed a new battery or had to clean some corroded connections on your car's electrical system.

I am documenting this because my C5 Corvette was getting random "Charge System Fault" warnings on the Driver Instrument Console and I decided to fix it today.  I had a 6 year old Optima battery that was in there and I decided to spend $110 and get a Sears DieHard Gold instead this time.  Sears stopped selling the Optima because (as I was told by multiple Sears employees) Sears had too many exchanges of Optima batteries over the years.  I did get 6 years out of mine, so I can not complain.  I also steered away from Optima because of the less than pleasant experience I had with Optima when my oldest son had a problem with his Optima.  Luckily, Advance Auto was very nice and took back the faulty Optima after I went up there with him.

On a C5 Corvette, there are two possible outlets to plug your memory tool into.  You want to use the 12volt outlet in the arm rest as that is unswitched.  The 12 volt connector below your radio is switched.  What this means if you plug your memory tool into the 12 volt outlet below the car radio, it can not provide the 12 volts to the overall system to keep all the settings in your car radio because it is switched off when the ignition is turned off.   Use the 12 volt outlet below the arm rest which is unswitched.

Above is a photo of the switch near the front bumper that is for the hood light that comes on with a switch when the hood is raised.  You want to unplug this as well because this will needlessly eat up the power from your memory tool.

Above is the light built into the hood that should be off.

Above is a photo that is in the lower right of the C5 battery compartment.  Because of this location, it has a tendency to become corroded pretty quickly if you do not clean it right and protect it.  After you remove the battery (taking the ground off first, then the hot lead, then hold down bolt) you can clean this ground.  This ground is (naturally) tied into the ground lead that goes to the battery.

You should pull up on the plastic housing (nothing is keeping it down on the upside bolt above) and then take it off to properly clean it.  I would recommend using a Dremmel tool to get all the corrosion off both sides as well as running it through the center of the two round spade plugs that you will find.  Above you can clearly see the large black round spade plug and to the left you can see the silver looking wire that also has a round spade plug on it.  Clean them until they are shiny. Take a small metal brush to the actual bolt itself to make sure that is clean.  When you are done, make sure you get all the metal shavings and corrosion off with a clean rag.  I like to use denatured alcohol as well here, then dry it off.  The bolt will not get shiny as it is made of brass (I think).

Above is the finish product.  BUT, before you put the battery back in, clean up any corrosion that is in the bottom of the tray.  Also, take a good, close look at the inside of the positive (red) and negative ground (black) connectors.   There is likely corrosion on those connectors as well.  Clean them up with a good metal brush until they are shiny.  Remember that ground is first off and last on when you are dealing with a car battery.

Above is Corrosion Block and is what I prefer to use to keep corrosion away on battery terminals and ground points in a car.  It is highly recommended by the boating crowd and has worked out well for me.

With my Corvette, there were multiple issues that could have been causing the "Charge System Fault" warnings on the Driver Instrument Console:

• The two round spade connectors that go to ground in the lower right of the battery compartment were very corroded.
• The positive or hot connector on the battery was slightly corroded.
• The Optima battery was 6 years old and probably on the slow death spiral.

Everything is perfect now :-)

Daemon by Daniel Suarez

I was listening to TWiT (This Week in Technology by Leo Laporte) and everyone highly recommended the book Daemon by Daniel Suarez.  What got my attention on the podcast was the high praise they had for the technical acumen of Daniel Suarez in his writing.  In other words, Daniel Suarez is a true geek :-)

A daemon is computer science terms is a background process that runs all the time.  Daemon is an abbreviation for Disk And Execution MONitor.

I decided to get the 15+ hours unabridged audio book.  This forced me to do some very long bike rides to finish it in just three rides.  I highly recommend this book.  It is 640 pages if you buy it.  The audio version is very well done.  I could honestly see this being made into a movie.  Daemon is a high tech thriller that is based on sound technical details.  This is 5 star (top) book at Borders.  I prefer Borders over Barnes and Noble - no charge to join the Book Club is why...

Manufacturing grows at fastest pace in 6 years.....

MSNBC is quoting the Associated Press below:

NEW YORK - May 3rd, 2010

The U.S. manufacturing sector expanded at the fastest pace in nearly six years in April, as factories continue to lead the economy's rebound.

The Institute for Supply Management, a private trade group of purchasing executives, said Monday its manufacturing index rose to 60.4 last month from 59.6 in March. It's the ninth straight month of growth. A level above 50 indicates expansion.

It is the fastest pace of growth since June 2004 when the index was at 60.5. 

See full article here....

Automated Energy Monitoring of Machine Tools Article

Dr. David Dornfeld and Dr. Athulan Vijayaraghavan have written a great article titled, Automated Energy Monitoring of Machine Tools. 

Dr.  Vijayaraghavan is the CTO for System Insights.  Dr. Vijayaraghavan obtained his Ph.D from UC Berkeley in Mechanical Engineering in Manufacturing with a minor in Computer Science.  Dr. Dornfeld is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and the Director of the Laboratory for Manufacturing and Sustainability at University of California.

Below is the abstract for the article:

Reducing the energy consumption of machine tools can significantly improve the environmental performance of manufacturing systems. To achieve this, monitoring of energy consumption patterns in the systems is required. It is vital in these studies to correlate energy usage with the operations being performed in the manufacturing system. However, this can be challenging due to complexity of manufacturing systems and the vast number of data sources. Event stream processing techniques are applied to automate the monitoring and analysis of energy consumption in manufacturing systems. Methods to reduce usage based on the specific patterns discerned are discussed.

I have highlighted above what I believe are the key aspects of this article.   It is this actual (not theoretical or approximated) correlation that becomes extremely valuable information for everyone in the manufacturing food chain.   This article provides a case study with specifics on the importance of an architecture that incorporates rules engines and complex event processing (CEP) when analyzing how much actual energy a given machine tool is using for a specific operation.    The authors discuss the importance of MTConnect as an open and royalty free mechanism for gathering of the data.

It is papers, such as this one by these two distinguished thought leaders, Dr. Vijayaraghavan and Dr. Dornfeld, that are the key building blocks for manufacturing in the 21st Century.