Technology

Long time; no post. This is because of the colossal amounts of Stuff going on.

Quickly:

New Server: 3x as fast, and MUCH easier to deal with. The transfer of all my clients sites is still in progress but this one just made it over this evening. Obviously, I bork-ed some things. If anyone uses those tabs along the top, they'll be back soon, I promise.

Work: Whoa! I'm a CTO. How'd that happen? It's not all just glamor an emergency-pages at 3am though, we are building a business here! Seriously, the further I go the more I realize my future is probably in business dev.

Life: I can screw anything up. Apologies to the last two girls I've been on dates with. Now is a shaky time in my life, I gots too much going on.

Money: Sc&ew you IRS and your self-employment rigamorale! That and the feline decided to go and get a blockage between the bladder and the out-valve. $800 and change later he is annoying me daily again. Never get a pet.

Sustainability: Home compost +, except make sure if you put packing peanuts in there, they are the corn-starch ones. Homebrew ++, just got an Irish red into the primary today - my first All Grain!! Home garden + - getting seeds in, planting next week(?), I think.

Twitter sidebar: I hate twitter, but it is easier than writing this, check it for the latest.

Remember when setting up Thunderbird mail filters to delete all email from a specific mailing list older than two weeks to click the "Matches all of the following" box.

I can pull important stuff from backups, but yes, I just nuked my inbox from the past 5 years. Go me!

Posting in response to The Mad Pigeon's open topic of the week.

In general I've observed that most people writing about global warming like to focus on one of a few topics, usually the Science, the Economics, or the Politics of the situation. Frequently this results in going back and forth in a debate-style format trying to prove one side or the other on facts and figures.

"X number of scientists have found Y facts so we need to change carbon output."

or

"This is a Liberal scheme that doesn't take practicality into account"

or

"It's all well and good to say we need to change carbon output, but it would wreck the American economy."

The three above are perhaps the most Vanilla examples I could post. The arguments range from the most influential powerpoint presentation ever to people who claim that there is no such thing as Global Warming.

What I don't get is why anybody is so threatened by this phenomenon that they feel they need to speak out against it.

Economically, we would see several things. First, and probably chief on my list of Good Things, would be a boom in employment to help with the conversion of all our cars, power plants, manufacturing, etc over to carbon neutral systems. If we are smart we can keep those jobs in the US.

Second, our dependence on foreign oil would decrease. Again, if we are smart we turn to domestic energy sources to fuel our transportation. We have the capability.

Thirdly, we investigate sustainable power production - solar, wind, water, wave. Sure it costs money to do the conversion, but won't we pat ourselves on the back when 30, 40, 80 years from now, we're still generating power in a FREE (except for maintanence and upgrades) method. Right, NO INPUT COSTS - how is this economically bad?

Politically, ummm, not much would happen that isn't a direct result from economic effects that I can see, and I'm happy to be corrected if someone can think of something.

From that line up, this sounds like something we want to do even if there were no global warming.

What's all the hub-bub, Bub?

Well, the hub-bub is that someone needs to eat the initial conversion costs. The corporations aren't crazy about this as they're standard pattern of 'pass expense along to the customer' couldn't immediately* absorb such a hit. I say immediately, because eventually it could be passed on to the consumers of several generations of automobiles, and price per megawatt-hour increases. It still amounts to a hit to the companies.

Well the companies should have seen this coming. Rudolph Diesel invented the diesel engine as well as a solar engine - over a century ago.

In 1893 he published a paper titled, “Theory and Design of a Rational Thermal Engine to Replace the Steam Engine and the Combustion Engines Known Today,” in which he described an engine that would produce less waste heat and use fuel more efficiently. The German patent office issued Patent No. 67207 for a “Combustion Power Engine,” the machine we know as the diesel engine.

Now, the diesel engine, at that time, ran more efficiently than the internal combustion engine and could run off off domestically produced vegetable oil. So, anyone offering me the, "Oh, we're so surprised and unprepared," argument should know that as off now, anyone in the automotive or power industry has had at least 114 years to clean up their act and play well with the environment and the country. UPDATE: I reference diesel here as just the oldest alternative, there are MANY inexpensive, domestic, clean(er) alternatives other than diesel - it just so happens we have a fleet of diesel trucks though - instant infrastructure)

So, if no one stands to lose but the corporations, and these same corporations clearly have opted to use blatantly non-domestic fuel sources, why are we protecting them?

All that is valid whether Global Warming is happening or not. This (reducing carbon) is all still a Good Idea. Global Warming just makes it an Unavoidable Change.

While this video does put things in a melodramatic light, I liked that it points out how drastically things are changing. I wish it pointed out something along the lines of how to rise to the change, but hey, you can't always get what you want.

I promise a New Years post in the near future - but that takes a good deal of effort and this is just fun.

I've written about the $100 laptop - which has since become the $150 laptop before, but the breakdown is that a man named Nicholas Negroponte out of MIT has designed a aptop or distribution to developing countries so that every child ca afford to be computer competent and competitive in the 21st century. Pretty neat, eh?

One of the major ideas is that third world countries will then be able to 'Leap-frog' skipping the ugly industrial revolution, and all the associated goods and evils that go along with it. Its debatable whether that is a good thing or not, and also not the point of this post. (i.e. we can pretty easily see now that instantly democratizing countries pretty invariably causes severe sectarian violence and possibly more trouble than i we'd just eft them alone, what will instantly technologizing countries do...?)

Anyway, what I'm actually writing about is the use interface of these new computers, as it is unlike anything we've seen. It re-designs how we think of computers and their uses. Here's the video:

Now, a few things of note here that I think can/might revolutionize the generation of kids who get these things. You stop thinking of the computer as a tool for producing files and documents and start thinking of it as your work environment. If you watch the video you see how your desktop can be zoomed out to see everyone's desktop in a kind o uber-project management view. So, if you are doing your own research and work other people can peek over your shoulder without bothering you, or spin your work off into something of their own.

Stop right there. What's that say for copyright? Personal prestige? Is this omputer good for private work? Is this communism in a bottle?

I don't think so. This is nothing more than what us gearheads try to set up already on our own machines with a better UI. For good project management we have a bunh of tools for telecommuting already. IRC chats, Instant Messaging, Writeboards, Wikis, Social Networking groups, etc, etc.

Thing is, right now, us gearheads need to patch all these tools together and make them work on our machines. These machines come with it pre-setup - in fact it is the way you use these machines. That is the key - These kids aren't being taught to use a computer at work, they are being taught to work in the computer. If you need a new piece of software - there is a drag and drop section to build it. *nix (Unix and LInux) gurus know this as piping, derived from this character '|' whenever you need to stitch several programs together you can 'pipe' output from one into another. So, say I want to do my taxes. I have my receipts in a spreadsheet that totals them, and a tax program that takes my personal info, and another one that handles the e-file functionality. (and this is a little oversimplified for clarity's sake). I can write something like this:

receipts && personal info.txt | taxes | efile

I now have a 'program' that doesn my taxes for me. Well it looks like the $150 laptop has a graphical version of that. Remember that old game 'The Incredible Machine' where you graphically built machines to get from A to B. Or the board game 'Mousetrap'. Same thing, kinda.

Anyway, if you follow all that - watch out. This new machine with its bitty 386Mhz processor will be able to take out your 3gHz desktop without breaking a sweat because of how its used. Real David and Goliath stuff going on here.

Yup, they've got bionic arms. Personally I thought hover cars would be befre bionic people, but what do I know.

This is pretty cool. They re-route amputees arm nerve endings to other muscle in the chest. Then take the signal from that muscle when it is triggered. The end result is that when the amputee thinks about moving their arm the prosthetic moves.

From CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/09/14/bionic.arm.ap/index.html?section=cnn_tech#

At the moment it looks like they are using forward and reverse on a motor to do clenching and unclenching. So you need to think "relax" instead of it doing it naturally. I'd imagine future versions with springs to provide a certain equilibruim where your hand normally rests in that kinda half-curled position, or mimic how your arm naturally rests by your side.

Of course, much better minds than mine came up with this stuff.

So my new shiny Alienware Sentia is en route back to Alienware to get a screen replacement as about a month into havin it, said screen went out - through no fault of my own.

I've re-re-located back to the old machine, but going back hurts sooo much.

Current machine: Pentium 3 600Mhz, 256 meg of RAM, 18 gig hard drive
New Laptop: Centrino 2Ghz, 1 gig of RAM, 80 gig harddrive

I'm gonna try to overclock a little but I don't have high hopes. The next two weeks are gonna be brutal.