PI-OSI Soft

Just joined a presentation by OSISoft on their products and activity. Seems like information management is all the rage right now. The presentation shed some light on the important of data analysis, a byproduct of what they’re doing. OSI Soft serves as a tool for data collection, it’s up to the end user to make full use of what has been dumped into the system. 

Our company has been using PI ever since 1999, but I doubt that whatever gathered has been used for analysis. I started to see some initiatves kicking in on performance monitoring. It must be going well since the initiatives is headed by a manager.  My deprtment doesnt even have a proper leader. 

One of the other system link planed for EALIS Seek is to PI. The idea is just like PTW link; graphical representation of information, in this case the information is the live data from PI. From the meeting it seemed that PI has already something like what we are trying to do. But It seems that the sample that they are showing is not running as web web application, it was running on on of their windows client, PI_Book. I forsee that their method will involve redrawing/export all of the drawing into PI_Book. For us we already have a system handling the drawings, and we’re trying to keep that as a reference at the same time update will be done onto it. Duplication onto a different system will just just complicate matters, an unwanted overhead on our side.

The code from PTW-link implementation can be used here, the only difference will be on the database connection code.

Notepad.exe what would I do without you.

What is your most loved windows application; windows, office, ie, iis,.. for me it’s the notepad. I’ve been using notepad to write everything for the EALIS Seek development. I did use Macromedia Dreamweaver (trial) early on, just to get the ball rolling. My HTML and Javascript was a bit rusty (non existant) when i started the initiative myself, so I needed something to guide me, so Dreamweaver did come handy early on.. I don’t think the management will let me by a license for Macromedia, because we are not in the IT business and we are not trying to get into it, we only provided O&M services. 

Notepad was also used to write the asp script. EALIS Seek runs on IIS VB, not .net. With ASP code scatterd over the page, dreamweaver very much loses it’s purpose WYSIWYG. I know there’s an option to tie dreamweaver to an ASP server but it wasn’t fast enough. It was way much faster to edit the code with notepad and run the page as soon as the asp file is edited. Microsoft has VB Studio, they even have the free one express edition, I did try using one express, but just couldn’t get myself into it. 

When SVG comes into play on the conversion program, notepad also helped to edit the SVG files textually since it’s XML. It beats any single purpse XML editor out there, i know nothing is parsed in notepad. But when you know where everything is you don’t need the structure help to locate item. The downside of an xml editor is it parse the XML file prior to any work being done, with a SVG files averaging around 5 MB, the time taken for parsing seems like a lifetime compared to opening it with a notepad.

So Microsft for windows 7 I dont mind if you left aero, media player etc. Just don’t take away notepad.

EALIS.net redesign.

Our website ealis.net is on course of a remake. The original/current one is my hack job prior to a convention that we attended. It serves general  information EALIS. Since it was a hack job, it was pretty much very ugly. But that’s what you get in a one man army kind of operation. The domain name was registered just 2 weeks prior to the confrence. I took 3 days to complete everything (which was nothing much). 

It seems that the boss ask one of our contractor for a quotation last week. The price was reasonable enough, but come to think of it, I could do a better job (that my original work/not the contractors) if I even get half of the contractor asking price. Corporate Malaysia blows.

PTW links.

Looking into the possibilities of linking the system to another system, our permit to work system. This wouldn’t trouble me much, as the groundwork has already been laid out, or is it framework. The only thing left is themeans of a database connection, it’s either from them or i wrote something of my own. Since PTW is very critical to the plant I’ll try to use whatever handed to me by the vendor. The aim for the EALIS – PTW link is to represent information graphically, from any of the system drawings that lies in EALIS.

Not much can be gather on NiSoft from the web. Maybe they will shed some light when I meet them later.