Author Archives: Peter Rowe

About Peter Rowe

Peter Rowe, CTO of Vigillo LLC, leads an ace technical team. Educated at the University of Limerick in Ireland, he escaped to the U.S and has spent his 30-year career in high-tech. Using a camera with a mind of its own and a motorcycle more lethal than a pit of vipers, he enjoys photography and motorcycling. Peter’s motto is to “keep it simple” and he believes Occam’s Razor describes everything.

Top-10 Public BASIC Alert Popularity

by Peter Rowe | November 29, 2011 | Comments Off

The FMCSA publishes 5 public BASIC’s for all carriers each month. For the November numbers just released this week there are 1,276,518 carriers total and of these carriers there are 56,043 that have a BASIC Roadside Alert in one or more BASICs. Here is how those divide out by DOT count:

 

The  first bar above for example shows that over 16,000 DOT’s (out of a total of 56,043 in Alert) have only the Fatigue BASIC in Alert, and so on. The Top-10 rankings above cover over 95% of all DOT’s.

Note: These are Road Alerts so they include both BASIC’s over threshold and citations of one or more serious violations within the past 12 months during an investigation. Read more >

Monthly Update Progress

by Peter Rowe | May 17, 2011 | Comments Off

Since my last post we have been working with the FMCSA to identify the issue with COMPASS Portal access over the past few weeks. I am glad to be able to report that the FMCSA has identified a problem with Compass Portal just this morning and are working on a fix we expect to have today. Hopefully this will return service as normal. We will need a few days to get your data but hopefully this works now and we can get back on track.

I will keep you updated on progress.

Where are my updated Scorecards?

by Peter Rowe | May 12, 2011 | Comments Off

Here at Vigillo we pride ourselves with being able to provide our Scorecards in a timely manner. To do that we source data from the FMCSA SMS website and COMPASS Portal. Recently there has been a degradation in the COMPASS systems ability to provide data access with data integrity. While these problems continue we are working with the FMCSA and Volpe Center to access and validate the data we need.  As a result our monthly Scorecard updates have been delayed. We currently have approximately two-thirds of the required data which  puts our best estimates for monthly update completion at mid next week.

Vigillo is currently working with the FMCSA and working on new technologies that will better address these problems in future.

We will keep you posted on progress and apologize for the delay.

Why it’s Now Critical to be Secure Online—Part 2 Tools

by Peter Rowe | November 14, 2010 | Comments Off

Last time we discussed why it is important to be secure online. We looked at some scenarios used by the bad guys, and we outlined best practices to keep you safe. Now let’s discuss some tools to help.

There are three main areas I’ll address:

  1. Keeping sensitive information on your computer secure
  2. Keeping sensitive documents secure through email
  3. Managing your passwords

Read more >

1800+ Fleets on Cloud 9

by Peter Rowe | August 30, 2010 | Comments Off

You may have heard of “cloud computing” and wondered what all the buzz is about, and whether this new type of IT server environment is right for your company.  Could you reduce your IT costs? Would cloud computing be more efficient? Let’s have a look. Read more >

Why it’s Now Critical to be Secure Online—Part 1

by Peter Rowe | July 26, 2010 | 4 Comments »

We often see the Internet described as the “Wild West.” We see articles about how important Internet security is, the dangers of identity theft, credit card hijacking, hacking, phishing—and we wonder how this applies to us. We think we’re probably pretty safe as long as we’re not surfing dubious websites or responding to spam email… aren’t we?

Read more >