This morning started with the traditional report from Maurice Wilkins, Chairman of WBF...I can't get used to it not being World Batch Forum, but I will, because they are right...it is about more than batch. The new tagline is "The Forum for Automation and Manufacturing Professionals," which, considering the contents of the meeting agenda, is much more accurate than "world batch forum" would be.

Asish Ghosh, from ARC, who chairs the WBF Nominating Committee, presented the WBF's own awards this m...

Last night, I had the ability to make grown men cry, as Dick Caro and Russ Rhinehart were honored before their peers as inductees into the Process Automation Hall of Fame. I can report that each of them was humble and a little teary as they acknowledged the accolade. As always, it was short, sweet, and finished fast....

I got to Atlantic City early for WBF. What this means is that the Trump Taj Mahal (there's a reason that Trump Casinos is in bankruptcy) wouldn't give me a room for about three hours. So, I went to Lynn Craig's S88 Tutorial.

Craig, who is one of the parents of the batch standard, and one of the inductees of the Process Automation Hall of Fame, has a deprecating and wry wit, and is enjoyable to listen to, especially since his rate of information transfer is high.

He gave a short history of the ...

I ran across this quote on the Answers.com morning brief...I thought it was good enough to pass on.

Quote: "...who was the first person who stood by a pile of sand and said, 'You know, I bet if we took some of this and mixed it with a little potash and heated it, we could make a material that would be solid and yet transparent. We could call it glass.' ... you could stand me on a beach till the end of time and never would it occur to me to try to make it into windows." -- Bill Bryson

The reas...

United we fall!

I am considerably irked by the actions of United Airlines in dumping their pension fund. Yes, I believe it is legal. Yes, I also think the judge had virtually no chance but to rule with the law. No, it is not ethical, and no, it is not right. But what does this have to do with process automation, you ask?

Plenty, I say. We can now prepare to see a wave of "pensionbusting" and "unionbusting" by bankruptcy as companies on the edge decide to take the easy way out of unrelenting de...

Scott Medford, vice president of RFID for Intermec, and his sidekick, Bob Eckles, Industry Marketing Director for Industrial Markets, came in to brief Putman editors on the state of RFID today.

In my normal, shy and retiring fashion, I asked Scott, right off the bat, to explain the patent and lawsuit situation, and how it might impact adoption of RFID in the process industries and beyond. I think he was surprised by such a hardball first question, but he gamely explained Intermec's history and ...

If you've been reading this for a while, you know that I got to see Spamalot, the Monty Python musical "lovingly ripped off" from the Monty Python and the Holy Grail cult film classic, when it was in tryouts in Chicago. Good thing, too, because I couldn't afford to see it in New York. Several Putman editors were at Interphex, and found that tickets were going from $300 to $1100 and that was LIST. Scalpers were getting more. Of course, the $1100 tickets are for two seats in the front row that...(...

Echoing some of the things I noted in my blog last month about ABB and their emergence from the near disastrous happenings in the late 1990s and early in this decade, Jim Pinto has published one of his company reviews on ABB. I believe Jim's analysis is correct

As I have said before, I believe that Emerson's dominance in the process automation space has less to do with Emerson being brilliant marketers and really good manufacturers as it does with the fact that all of Emerson's major competitor...

Major news reports are surfacing today and yesterday about a major security flaw in Firefox, the Internet Explorer-killer browser being created and distributed free by the Mozilla foundation.

The dirty little secret that all the anti-Microsoft fanatics out there (you know who you are) don't want to talk about is that security vulnerabilities have more to do with the complexity of the software under attack and the number of attackers than they do with the copyright holder, or the license under w...

Over the years, CSIs have had very little in the way of oversight. In many states, and depending on the portion of the project they handle, they don't even have to have licenses as either engineers or as contractors. CSIA has tried for years to remedy that, by producing first its Best Practices and Benchmarks (now available on CD as a PDF) and then by turning those very same best practices and benchmarks into a vigorous third party audit. At the CSIA meeting last week, Don Roberts, president of ...