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2007-06-12T14:26:00.000-07:00

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The Coldest Point in the Universe is in Burnaby, BC

2007-02-16T11:07:00.000-08:00

I attended a presentation yesterday at the Telus Sphere of Science Word of Telus World, or whatever they're calling it these days, by D-Wave systems, The Quantum Computing Company™. These are the folks who surprised a lot people, myself included, by announcing their plans to have a commercial quantum computer ready to complete real work by 2008. The crowd lined up outside the sphere was overwhelmingly male, but other than that a good cross-section of the lower-mainland population. We picked up our pre-registration nametags and were herded into a smallish theater on the second floor.

There was a lot of congratulatory talk and thank-yous for investors and employees, and then the CTO of the company, Geordie Rose took the floor to explain a little bit about the proof-of-concept that they've developed. The computer is a 5-millimeter-square chunk of niobium cooled to a temperature of four millikelvins (hence the title of this post). The 16-qubit proof-of-concept is roughly a hundred times slower than a thousand-dollar PC, but apparently it works, and the company is confident that they can scale it up rapidly to the 1000-qubit mark, where the device will become notably faster for certain classes of problems than existing digital computers.

While most people that know a little bit about computing technologies have predicted that quantum computers are about fifty years away from commercialization, something that is technically a five-qubit computer is available for sale right now. The fifty-year number is basically a wild-ass guess of the people trying to develop so-called "gate model" quantum computers, which mimic the functionality of a conventional microprocessor using quantum devices rather than transistors. D-Wave is using an entirely different approach: an analog computer. Not analog in the sense of "continuously varying," but analog in the sense that the manifestation on their four-by-four grid of qubits is analogous to a graph that represents the problem they are trying to solve.

What sorts of problems might those be? They are currently targeting applications in the life sciences (drug database searches and protein folding), molecular simulations, and more general database searches. In mathematical terms, they hope to dramatically speed up the classes of problems known by mathematicians as NP-complete and NP-hard. As an example he used a graph of the shortest path that visits every city in Sweden (no bork jokes, please). With current technology it would take a state-of-the-art PC about 85 years to solve, but it could potentially be solved in minutes by a quantum computer. One of the things any crypto-geek who's seen Sneakers would ask is can it be used to quickly factor large numbers*. The answer is "yes, it can," although this fact was strongly downplayed by Mr. Rose when someone brought it up in the post-presentation question period. Apparently saying that accelerating NP-complete problem solving was a good way of getting funding for QC research back in the '90's, since that sort of acceleration could have a significant impact on the field of public-key cryptology.

The way that the system is configured is that each of the sixteen qubits is connected by a variable link to each of it's eight nearest neighbors (or five in edge-cases and three in corner cases). Each qubit and each connection is biased in a certain direction, and over time they assume the lowest (or second-lowest) energy state, which represents the best (or second-best) solution to the problem, which is then read and transmitted back to the user. If the qubits represent wedding guests (one of the demonstrations), and Joanne really wants to sit near a window, but not at the same table that John is sitting, that fact is represented in a the set of initial biases, and the lowest-energy state that results is the optimal arrangement of guests at the wedding.

Future work, aside from ramping up the number of qubits also involves connecting each qubit in the array to every other qubit. The other piece of the puzzle, and the reason for the public demo, is to generate interest and get people thinking of interesting optimization problems that a future commercial implementation of this type of computer could support.

The problems that were demonstrated were a molecule search (which can be represented as a max independent set problem), the aforementioned seating plan, and a round of SudoQ. However, the fact that the solutions were obtained about one hundred times slower than a modern PC coupled with the fact that the machine, residing a few kilometers away in Burnaby, was accessed through a somewhat hollywood-OS like interface means that I could not swear in a court of law that they actually had a working quantum computer. But my gut feeling is that they have something working at the level that most early-stage demos do, with a bit of sleight of hand and selective choice of subject matter making the thing appear about as functional as it is, though much, much friendlier.

After the question period was closed, I grabbed a fancy poster of their device in its sample holder on the way out and made my way to the SkyTrain.

* I was a bit chagrined that the question that was actually asked was whether a QC could accelerate the factoring of large prime numbers. I will go on record as saying that I can factor any large prime number in only very slightly more time than it takes you to tell me what the number is.

Programming Languages with Units?

2007-01-24T16:19:00.000-08:00

Every now and then I've thought it would be cool if one could specify the variable type in a programming language not as something like and integer or a floating point value, but as a distance, time interval, or voltage.

For the most part it wouldn't be all that difficult. There are only a handful of fundamental units from which all others can be derived (those are mass, distance, time, and depending on who you're talking to, temperature and electric charge).

After some painstaking research (well, skimming the first page of google results) turns up only the Fortress Project as one that's considering including this feature. Maybe something like OCaml could do the trick with an add-on library?

The problem with Wikipedia

2007-01-24T10:42:00.000-08:00

This one hits a little too close to home…

IKEA's death ray

2007-01-03T18:32:00.000-08:00

Found on the instruction manual for a FRÄCK mirror.

BoingBoing Breaks Safari?

2006-12-12T14:42:00.000-08:00

Has anyone else had the experience of visiting BoingBoing and having Safari rendered useless, unable to contact any further sites? It happens with both the site and the RSS feed, and only intermittently. I have to quit Safari and relaunch it to fix things, which is a pain in the ass if I have umpteen dozen tabs open in various windows.

Courier Transform

2006-12-04T14:48:00.000-08:00

All the results for this on Google seem to be typos, which is a shame because it's such a wonderful pun on the Fourier transform: it's the transformation you run when you need a 5-page paper but only have 3 pages of material.

Sustainability and Energy Independence

2006-11-28T12:56:00.000-08:00

I just found a really astounding piece of armchair energy politicking courtesy of Robert Rapier's blog. It paints a fairly convincing portrait of how the US could take an achievable amount of farm-produced biomass and turn it into enough electricity, liquid fuels, and sequestered carbon to replace fossil transportation- and generating fuels while becoming carbon neutral and energy independent (and saving a ton of money).

Distorition in the Time-Space Continuum Surrounds Bellingham

2006-09-11T10:02:00.000-07:00

A headline from today’s Herald:

Time to slow down near Whatcom County schools

Who Killed the Electric Car?

2006-08-28T17:53:00.000-07:00

Last Friday night, amid a smidge of personal drama, I had an unintentionally private viewing of the film Who Killed the Electric Car?[1]. It had finally made its debut in Bellingham, having been delayed two and a half weeks.

I have to confess that one of my motivations in seeing the film was seeing a couple of people I was more or less acquainted with having worked at AeroVironment. I also drove one of the cars at a ride-and-drive in Phoenix back in 1997 and was duly impressed.

Although its focus is more general, the film primarily targets the rise and fall of General Motors' EV1. Those familiar with the car can skip this paragraph, but it was developed from a concept/prototype built by AeroVironment back in their post-Sunraycer glory days. About half of the weight of the car was a stack of lead-acid batteries, and it featured a modern 3-phase induction motor drive system. The car had a single gear, producing full torque from a standstill to around 30 miles per hour, followed by a constant-power band from there to the top speed somewhere north of 80 miles an hour. GM took AV's prototype and made it into a real car, which was to be leased through a number of Saturn dealerships in Southern California and Arizona. After two years on the market, GM introduced a version with a nickel-metal hydride battery that extended the range from the previous 60-real-world-miles to around 120. A couple of years later, having helped scuttle the California EV mandate, they ceased production and repossessed the cars (at the end of their leases), crushing most of them at their proving grounds in the Arizona desert.

Perhaps the most notable feature of the film is that it managed to stay interesting for the entire hundred and twenty-odd minutes. The title overstates the detective-flick nature of the movie, but the storytelling is about as compelling as an automotive documentary can be. It looks at the blame and/or credit due consumers, available battery technology, the auto manufacturers, the federal government, the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the oil companies, and the rival technology of fuel cells. In the end the verdicts are handed down, with most of the suspects found guilty.

Particularly compelling is the way the film details the systematic dismantling of any evidence that the cars ever existed. Aside from a few models in museums and those donated to technical schools (my alma mater among them), the remaining cars were rounded up and crushed with Stalinesque efficiency. Safety and liability concerns aside, one really gets the impression that erasing the cars from the public consciousness was their primary goal [2].

The film does a commendable job of being understandable to laypeople without glossing over important technical details. My only quibble is that it doesn't address a couple of important controversies that were brewing at the time even among EV enthusiasts, notably the design of the charging equipment[3] and the reliability—or lack thereof—of the cars[4]. It also left out, perhaps due to timing, the hopeful news from a couple of up-and-coming EV manufacturers like Tesla Motors.

Finally the movie left out one key element in the demise of the car (that could, in a pinch, be blamed on oil companies): The EV1 finally got pretty good about the time that gasoline dropped to what is and likely will remain its lowest inflation-adjusted price ever (around 99 cents a gallon in Southern California). At the time the smog situation looked hopeful, global climate change wasn't on most people's radar, and thanks to Enron and their ilk, electricity prices were skyrocketing. All of that added up to tough market conditions for a car the manufacturer didn't really want to sell in the first place.

I would recommend this movie to tech geeks and automotive enthusiasts, and even to the sorts of people who found An Inconvenient Truth enriching. Unfortunately, like the cars, this movie hasn't quite received the buzz that it's due, so it's unlikely it will get the attention it deserves.

[1] That is to say, I was the only one in the theatre for the whole movie.

[2] Even the advertising for the car, though supposedly award-winning, broke one of the canonical rules of automotive advertising, abbreviated as STFC (show the car).

[3] GM settled on inductive charging, which was far more complex and expensive than the competing conductive charging standard (the inductive charge cord had liquid coolant running through it ferchrissakes), but lacked the scary electrical contacts that might be exposed by someone with two screwdrivers and an extra hand and accidentally energized by someone capable of inadvertently emitting a one-kilohertz square wave of the right amplitude.

[4] This has been detailed in a now semi-famous Usenet post. But come on, guys, they we're talking about The General here, building four cars a day. What do you expect from a car model that only ever sold 800 units?

Save the Earth: Don't Recycle?

2006-08-23T19:16:00.000-07:00

On his FAQ page, Trevor Blackwell suggests that you can partially offset your personal carbon footprint by landfilling any paper you happen to use, as well as yard waste, kitchen scraps, and the like. Ideologically I'm on the fence on this one. I'm something of a treehugger, but I also get annoyed by the sort of feel-good do-nothing environmentalism that pervaded the popular consciousness in the early 90's. I'm skeptical, so I thought I'd take a look at the numbers.

In 2003, global carbon emissions amounted to 6.8 billion tons. Global paper production amounted to 255 million tons. Even if treated as a pure "carbon equivalent", sequestering all paper produced that year could offset only about 3.7% of global carbon emissions. The carbon content is probably similar to that of cellulose, in other words about half by weight. Still, a percent or three is nothing to sneeze at.

As an aside, I think it's pretty clear that reducing paper use reduces the amount of carbon pumped into in the atmosphere. Paper-grade wood probably costs about $0.10/pound in smallish quantities (i.e. by the cord for firewood), whereas paper costs about ten times that (or so says Froogle), and probably most of that cost is either directly or indirectly related to energy consumption (and hence carbon emissions). So making extra paper to bury is probably a losing strategy when it comes to sequestering carbon.

Therefore Blackwell's argument hinges on two premises: that recycling paper doesn't consume significantly less energy than producing "virgin" paper, and that paper buried in a landfill releases it's carbon significantly more slowly than the forest from whence it came.

The first premise is somewhat shaky. The production process itself uses 60% less energy from scrap paper than from virgin fiber (I can't confirm this statistic on the web from it's supposed source). Curbside collection uses additional fuel, since you have twice as many trucks driving the same distance, albeit less heavily loaded and/or less frequently. But trucking trees from a forest to a pulp mill doesn't happen for free either. I'm going to call the transport energy roughly a wash, and hence the overall energy balance is clearly in favor of recycling.

The second premise is a bit more solid, given that newspapers buried in landfills are typically still legible after half a century. However the time scales for carbon sequestration to be considered successful are somewhat longer (converting the paper to charcoal might be an answer, but that still involves separating it from the MSW).

Trevor's scheme is basically a way to use trees as CO2 collectors while making themselves temporarily useful as TPS reports. I wholeheartedly agree with this general principle, but I'm not convinced the sequestered carbon from a sheet of paper "pays" for the extra energy required to pulp the trees versus shredding, de-inking, and the other steps needed to prepare recycled paper for use in paper production.

Recycling economics are such that for anything (found in MSW) other than Aluminum cans, recycling neither saves much money nor costs much extra. Factoring atmospheric carbon into the question, in my mind, doesn't change the answer much either. Given that recycling can be kind of a pain in the ass, I guess I can get behind people like Trevor not bothering to do it.

For me personally however, I pay for garbage disposal, but not for disposal of recyclables. I loosely fill two or three kitchen bags a month at home, with the majority of my household waste (at least by weight) going into two or three recycling bins. So I'm not about to cough up extra dough (for more frequent garbage pickups) just so that I can sequester at best a small fraction of a fairly trivial amount of carbon.

Hefeweizen

2006-08-22T18:20:00.000-07:00

I hadn’t had the pleasure of drinking a good Hefeweizen in some time. It’s something like the American microbrew equivalent of a gateway drug, eschewed by those who have graduated from the pot of beers and moved onto the harder stuff. But it’s actually quite tasty, particularly that which is brewed in Southern Germany.

It can only be properly enjoyed in the right glass, which I purchased along with the bottle earlier today. The ease with which the bottle slips into the glass is, like South America and Africa, no coincidence. The pour starts with the insertion of the uncapped bottle into the inverted glass. At that point the whole assembly is flipped over, the beer contained by the same principle that prevents the office water cooler from spilling its contents onto the mottled Berber.

In a perfect Hefeweizen pour, the bottle is slowly withdrawn from the glass, emptying its contents as air is drawn in above the ascending surface of the beer in the glass. In my case, it’s important to note that office water coolers typically aren’t carbonated. So in place of a graceful dance of beer and glass, I had a big foamy mess on my hands. I guess I’ll need some more painstaking practice.

But as the old saying goes, its all the same in your stomach, and all the more in your bloodstream. Just don’t fuck it up with a slice of lemon.

FUD of the Day

2006-08-22T14:43:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America. Now, why might they want to cast direct-to-consumer sales of wine in an unfavorable light?

Macintosh SE/30

2006-08-18T13:52:00.000-07:00

From a Wikipedia article:

Apple had indicated the presence of a 68030 processor by adding the letter "x" to a model's name, but when the Macintosh SE was updated to the 68030, this posed an awkward problem, as Apple was not willing to name their new computer the "Macintosh SEx". Thus, "SE/30" was the name chosen.

Quick Sleep

2006-07-07T16:32:00.000-07:00

There are at least five ways to put your Mac to sleep. In decreasing order of how much time they take, they are:

Choose Sleep from the Apple menu
Hit Control-Eject and then S (or click the Sleep button in the dialog that pops up)
Press the power button (for desktop Macs)
Close the lid (for laptops)

The fifth method is to hit command-option-eject. Note that all of these will also lock the computer if you have it set up to require a password after the screen saver kicks in.

Diesel Power wins at Le Mans

2006-06-20T16:08:00.000-07:00

Update: I submitted this story to kuro5hin.org with quite a few editorial improvements, so I'd suggest you stop reading and follow that link instead.

Over the past weekend, in front of a record 235,000 spectators, the Audi R10 took first place in the 24 hours at Le Mans, arguably the worlds premier endurance racing event. This marks the most significant victory yet for a diesel-powered car in a major racing event, and possibly an important turning point in the perception (by Americans at least) that diesels are noisy, stinky, and slow: the Audis were the quietest, cleanest, and fastest cars in the race. Significantly, they were also the most fuel efficient.

On average, the Audi drivers refueled only every 14 laps, considerably less often than the gasoline-powered entries. At one point a record-setting 16 laps were driven on a single 90-liter fuel load. By the end of the 24-hour race, the winning R10 was on it's 380th lap, a new record for the event.

Unveiled late in 2005, the R10 is Audi Motorsport's most expensive project ever, costing an estimated 70 million Euros per year. It is an all-new design that nonetheless looks remarkably like it's predecessor, the massively successful gasonline-fueled R8. It is powered by a turbocharged all-aluminum 90° V12 with common-rail direct injection that generates 650bhp and 811 lb-ft of torque in competition form. The power band lies between 3000 to 5000 RPM, a range so low as to be virtually unheard of in modern race cars. But its primary weakness is weight: the engine is rumored to weigh upwards of 200 kilograms, about 50% more than a comparable petrol-powered engine.

This is not the first diesel to enjoy racing success. In 1931 Dave Evans became the first driver to complete the Indianapolis 500 without refueling. BMW and VW have raced touring cars, the former winning the 24 hours Nürbergring event based primarily on the extended range afforded by its diesel powerplant. Nor is this the first diesel to run at Le Mans. That honor belongs to a Lola powered by a Caterpillar-badged VW V10 that ran in 2004. But there is little doubt that both Audi's TDI brand and the Diesel cycle scored a major coup last weekend.

But does this race represent the Fosbury Flop of endurance racing, or was it an artifact of this year's rules? The answer, more than likely, is a bit of both.

The concessions afforded diesel-powered cars at Le Mans this year are numerous. Compared with a turbocharged gasoline-fueled car, the diesels enjoy a 50-percent larger displacement limit, a 52-percent larger intake restrictor, and an absolute boost pressure limit nearly twice as high. Additionally, the diesels are allowed variable nozzle turbines in their turbochargers. It is also rumored that Audi successfully lobbied to raise the minimum weight to accommodate the R10's massive powerplant.

While diesels in the wild enjoy significant fuel savings over equivalent petrol cars, the differences largely diminish when operating at full throttle (the so-called pumping losses incurred by petrol engines sucking air past their partly closed throttles are entirely absent in diesels, owning to the fact that they don't, strictly speaking, have a throttle). The differences in fuel consumption nearly vanish when one takes into account the higher energy density of diesel fuel: gallon-for-gallon diesel packs about twelve percent more heat energy.

At the same time, the lean-burn character of diesels virtually require them to pass more air through the engine for every unit of energy sent out the crankshaft. The unthinkably-low (for racing) rev limit requires a corresponding increase in displacement (and/or boost pressure) to achieve the same power as a high-strung petrol powerplant. And the rule against VNTs in turbo-petrol cars is likely a cost-saving measure: their much higher exhaust gas temperatures make engineering a reliable variable-nozzle arrangement an expensive endeavor. So from a first-order numbers perspective, the rule changes are perfectly fair, except for that twelve percent number. Look for eighty-liter fuel tanks on next year's slate of diesel-powered entries.

In any case, it could be argued that this year's race is as much an underestimation of diesel's potential by the rules-making committee as it is an affirmation of diesel's capabilities by Audi's win. But to draw a meaningful conclusion one really has to go back to why racing events have rules, and what results the rule-setting bodies are attempting to achieve.

Broadly speaking, racing organizers aim to hold a safe and affordable event (by their own admittedly skewed standards) that is either technically interesting, compelling for spectators, or (ideally) both. Formula One is an example of an event that is mostly technically interesting, although that doesn't keep away the throngs that flock to circuits throughout Europe every year. NASCAR, by comparison, is much more compelling to watch, but almost universally elicits wrinkled noses from automotive technical enthusiasts. The Le Mans series, it seems, is and aims to be a good mix of the two, and their diesel rules are a further step in this direction.

At one point in automotive history, it was believed, and was perhaps true, that racing enhanced the state of the art in such a way as to be applicable to road cars. While this is ever less the case, it is still a secondary aim of many racing events that the race cars should, first and foremost, be cars. And by that standard it is unquestionable that a Eurocentric event like Le Mans should put the pinnacle of diesel technology to the test in the way that only the premier 24-hour endurance race can.

Sources:

Wikipedia entry on the R10
Audi's Press Release (PDF link)
Official Rules for the Le Mans series (PDF link)

I'm not a Real Doctor

2006-06-16T14:07:00.002-07:00

...but I play one on TV

Frank's Mighty Mouse Cleaning Tips

2006-06-08T17:22:00.000-07:00

There are a variety of pages out there detailing the dissection and cleaning of Apple's wonderful Mighty Mouse. Specifically, the scroll ball has a tendency to get gummed up after a month or three of steady use. Mine got gummed up today, and after trying several things to get it clean, I found that Apple's recommended method works the best. But here's what I learned in case you don't believe me:

Don't take it apart. There are two reasons for this advice: first, you'll almost certainly break either the outer or inner gray plastic ring on the bottom. I broke the outer one despite trying to first cut the glue holding it on with a razor blade (OK, the retractable part of the Amazing Open-X). Second, the scroll ball assembly itself is mostly sealed, so you won't be able to get at the rollers to clean them. The best you could hope to do would be to replace the whole scroll ball assembly. Update: It looks like you actually can take the scroll ball assembly apart, just not with the tools I had at my disposal. Maybe good as a last resort.
Don't use the Mighty Mouse around iron filings and the like. The scroll ball uses a couple of really tiny exposed donut magnets to sense when the rollers are turning. Little flecks of metal stick to them and won't come off unless you pluck them off with tweezers.
Do turn it upside down and rub it on a damp cloth. This is Apple's recommended method and works quite well. The turning-upside-down part seems to be key.

Hopefully that will save you the pain and anguish of destroying your mouse in an attempt to de-crud your scroll ball.

Get Out Your Tinfoil Hats

2006-06-01T16:59:00.000-07:00

A really eye-opening article in Rolling Stone detailing how Republican fraud almost certainly threw Ohio for Bush in 2004:

To trust the official tally, in other words, you must believe that thousands of rural Ohioans voted for both President Bush and gay marriage.

Driving Slowly Saves Gas

2006-05-23T18:36:00.000-07:00

"Thanks, Captain Obvious," you're thinking.

But really, foregoing the 70-mile-per-hour speed limit in favor of a leisurely 60 miles per hour really does shave about 15% off my fuel consumption. I was typically getting 23 to 25 miles per gallon with highway-heavy driving in my '92 Accord Wagon. The last tank was around 27 and a half.

The section of freeway I use most has a roughly 15-mile-long stretch where the speed limit is 70 (trucks 60). So I can shave about 2 minutes off the trip by driving at the faster speed. But that two minutes costs me the better part of a dollar in extra fuel, so it's pretty clearly not worth it unless I'm really running late.

Inevitability

2006-04-25T15:49:00.000-07:00

From Habitat Chronicles:

There are three positions you can take on inevitability.

Passive ignorance.

Futile resistence.

Exploitation.

Not sure how to exploit death or taxes, but there must be a way...

(Intentionally) Spoiling your Appetite

2006-04-20T19:27:00.000-07:00

I’ve been reading about some interesting self-experimentation undertaken by a guy named Seth Roberts, a psychology Professor at UC Berkeley.

He’s got a new book out called the Shangri-La Diet. It’s been described as “absurd, ridiculous and remarkable,” which is a pretty good description of it’s central ideas. For the scientifically-minded, here’s a well-written introduction to the idea.

The three tenets of the diet are as follows:

The human body has a body-fat “set point” and modulates appetite to maintain that set point.
Food that is both calorie-rich and flavorful creates a strong Pavlovian association.
The set point has a natural downward tendency but it is raised by consuming the aforementioned foods.

Argument 1, I think, is pretty easy to buy. Starving yourself at one meal typically doesn’t do much to lower your weight, since you’ll make it all up at the next meal.

Argument 2 is also pretty easy to swallow. Basically the body can’t know very well whether a food is calorie-rich without first processing it. So a flavor (the conditioned stimulus) that soon thereafter produces a feeling of well-being and fullness (the unconditioned stimulus) creates an association (conditioned response). It gets creepier in that not only is the flavor involved, but potentially the whole food-eating experience. (As an aside, I’ve noticed the way I crave coffee is disturbingly similar to the way addicts describe craving nicotine, cocaine and heroin: with triggers and enjoyment of the rituals involved in doing the drug and whatnot).

Argument 3—the one that ties the first two together into a weight-loss remedy—is the biggest intellectual leap. The implication of argument 3 is that by eating foods with a low flavor-calorie association, we can lower our body-fat set point, and thereby lose weight effortlessly.

This is explained in part by a just-so back-story of our Stone-age ancestors needing a way of encouraging themselves to pack on the pounds when food was plentiful (in the terms above, they need to raise their set point). To do this, the theory goes, the body measured it’s current body fat percentage (say, by measuring the level of the hormone leptin in the blood—something that has is well-correlated with levels of body fat), compared it to the desired level (the set point), and used the difference to influence its appetite.

This begs the question of how the body knew that food was plentiful. Roberts posits that plentiful food is flavorful and calorie-dense. This seems like a plausible explanation, if well short of an air-tight argument.

If we wholeheartedly adopt this theory, it has a couple of disturbing implications. The first is that in a society with plentiful flavorful and calorie-rich foods (which furthermore are of the most consistent flavor and calorie content possible) our set points will rise nearly without limit.

The second, more sinister implication is that because flavorful and calorie-rich foods are most desirable to our reptile brains, a capitalist economy will optimize food production around the goal of making the most flavorful and calorie-dense food imaginable.

What then, is to be done?

Well the theory suggests that any dieter who doesn’t effectively lower his body’s set point is doomed to failure (or at least constant and debilitating hunger). The inverse, however, is also true: any dieter who successfully lowers his body’s set point can’t help but succeed in losing weight.

But how to do that? Well if the third argument is indeed correct, that one simply needs to eat foods that are either flavorless, free of calories, or both. Well neither flavorless foods nor calorie-free foods are particularly appealing, and something that is both flavorless and calorie free isn’t, strictly speaking, food. Fortunately it turns out that consuming flavorless food with a modest amount of calories limits our appetite enough that flavorful foods can be consumed later without the temptation to overeat. The only catch is that you need to wait long enough between spoiling your appetite and eating your meal that your body doesn’t associate the flavorful meal with the empty calories.

So the “diet” consists simply of drinking small amounts of a dilute sugar solution (about 3 tablespoons in a liter of water) at least an hour before or after a meal. Extra light olive oil (the nearly flavorless variety) can be substituted as well. As the theory goes, you will then eat much less at your regular meals.

I have no idea if this actually works. Initial reports by various people (none of whom I know personally) suggest that indeed it does. I intend to try it out over the next couple of weeks and see if indeed I do eat less. I don’t particularly need to lose much weight, but I do have a stubborn five pounds or so I can’t seem to get rid of without being ravenously hungry and insanely bitchy as a consequence.

Hell Freezes Over

2006-04-19T11:13:00.000-07:00

In other news, there's a thoughtful, poignant, and well-written piece of fiction on Kuro5hin.

2006-04-07T11:10:00.000-07:00

Plot of Bush's Approval Rating versus Cheap Gasoline

Sometimes Truth is Stranger than Fiction

2006-03-30T17:27:00.000-08:00

From a recent article in the Economist:

Readers with long memories may recall GeneDupe's previous attempt to break into the pet market, the Real Goldfish (see article). This animal was genetically engineered to deposit gold in its skin cells, for that truly million-dollar look. Unfortunately Dr Fril, a biologist, neglected to think about the physics involved. The fish, weighed down by one of the heaviest metals in existence, sank like a stone, as did the project.

w00t!

2006-03-29T10:22:00.000-08:00

My site is the second Google result for "things that would make you shit in your pants" (quotes required, alas).

Homegrown Query Languages

2006-03-27T17:14:00.000-08:00

I've been working on a system where one of the requirements is the ability to perform simple searches based on filling out the parts of a form that are known. Basically what most Web sites would classify as "Advanced Search."

At first this struck me as a problem that had likely been solved once or twice in a really compelling way, like how Markdown and Textile have solved the problem of text-to-HTML translation.

On the other hand nearly every Web site's full-text search has a slightly different query system, so perhaps this isn't a completely solved problem. Also, full-text search isn't exactly what I had in mind: I needed a more structured system. And sending in straight or filtered SQL is just too much of a security risk (in a perfect world, this wouldn't be a problem, but we're talking PHP on Oracle here).

Eventually I settled on the following solution:

Fields left blank don't affect the query
Fields whose value isn't one of the "special values" below must be a full, exact, and case-sensitive match (SQL = clause)
Fields whose value begins with a tilde (~) create a case-insensitive like clause (% matches one or more characters, and _ matches exactly one character)
Fields that begin with a greater-than or less-than symbol constrain the value accordingly
Fields that are a single quote are constrained to be null
Any of these constraints (except a blank field) can be negated by prepending an exclamation mark (!)

It seems to do the trick, though it's far from perfect. Two obvious shortcomings are that it doesn't support "between" clauses, or indeed multiple constraints on any one column, and that there is currently no way to escape fields that actually start with a !, ', >, < or ~ (though this could easily be fixed with some sort of escape character). It's also perhaps a bit much to expect a non-technical person to grasp.

So first off, does anyone know of some other widely-deployed system that solves this problem? Secondly, are there any shortcomings of the above system (for the purpose of structured search of a table) that I haven't noticed?

Peak Oil

2006-03-27T15:44:00.000-08:00

I've spent some time reading a blog called Peak Oil Debunked which talks about pretty much what you'd expect. Here's a representative snippet:

So here's a conservation tip for people out in the exurbs: sleep at your office or workplace during the week, and commute on the weekends. That will reduce your commuting fuel usage by 80%, even with single person commuting.

Of course the pessimists will moan and howl over this one. It pisses them off that I am unmasking the "peak oil problem" for what it really is: a trivial lifestyle issue. Sleeping at the office just isn't "realistic". It's more realistic to think that the overweight American populace will wage bloody riots in the street -- because sleeping at the office a few nights a week is so ridiculously unthinkable. The American way of life is not negotiable, doncha know.

In any case, it's an interesting counterpoint to the doom and gloom peak oil sites out there. Despite my relatively liberal and conservation-oriented views in this area, I think I'm a bit more on the Marshall Brain/Cecil Adams school on the whole peak oil thing than I am in the doomsayers' camp.

Things will definitely change once refined petroleum stops being cheaper than bottled water, but I just don't buy the idea that it's going to be an unmitigated disaster. I think it's going to be a well-mitigated potential disaster, not unlike Y2K.

Sony-Ericsson W800i + IOGear Stereo Headset = No Dice

2006-03-27T14:45:00.000-08:00

After throwing my hands up in frustration, infomercial-style, at the flimsy tangly wired earbuds that came with my W800, I decided that wireless was definitely the way to go. I bought a pair of IOGear Bluetooth Headphones (model GBMH201) from Buy.com which arrived this morning.

I charged them for two hours, managed to get the to pair with my phone, but then discovered that they promptly disconnect from the phone after about 10 seconds. Worse, even when they're paired the phone won't play music through them. I guess that means that the W800i doesn't support the A2DP (advanced audio distribution profile). I updated the phone to the latest firmware using SE's update utility, but still no dice. So I'm shipping the headphones back to Buy.com later this week.

Bellingham Public Library Lookup Bookmarklet

2006-03-23T13:32:00.000-08:00

As much for my own reference as for that of my (cough) readers, here's a bookmarklet that takes ISBN-containing URLs and will look them up in the Bellingham Whatcom Public Library catalog:

Bellingham Public Library Lookup

Update: This Blogger ~~piece of shit~~ thing is [not] eating my backslashes. ~~Oh, well, you get what you pay for. Probably time to move to a real blogging system. Here's what the link should look like:...~~

Update 2: Safari is fucking up the link, not blogger. ~~Time to file a bug report with Apple, I guess.~~

Update 3: Found a workaround: URL-encode the backslashes.

I Feel We've Arrived

2006-03-20T16:28:00.000-08:00

Bellingham now has a sub-craigslist.

Seven Things About Myself I need to Admit, nay, Embrace and Move On

2006-02-23T22:25:00.000-08:00

I'm a firm believer in the idea that for every area of our lives that we fix a personal bug, there are ten where we can at best find a workaround. In the spirit of that, here is a list of things that I need to learn to live with rather than try to change:

I rarely dress warmly enough. I guess it's a vestige of my five-year-old self rebelling against my Mom's admonition to wear a jacket. But it's stupid, and it makes me uncomfortable and often cranky. Time to buy more sweaters.
I like listening to movie scores. I realize that's about as low-brow on the instrumental music scale as you can get, but we all deserve a few guilty pleasures. Movie scores are like show tunes for people who take themselves too seriously (no, wait—that's opera), but goddammit, I like them.
I am a geek. And I need to stop trying to impress the non-geeks on the playground with various stunts (like fast cars and big speakers) and start doing what makes me happy.
I need to make a budget. It's a bit like when I finally learned, after three and a half years of college, that I have to study. It's no fun, but as they say, sometimes we have to do things we don't like so that we can do things we do like.
I need to sleep a lot. At least nine hours in a night to feel well rested, which unfortunately isn't compatible with both having a social life and working for my current supervisor. Huh.
I'm hard on my possessions, especially if they're white and made by Apple. I just can't be bothered to put that little buttplug into my iPod's dock connector, and I'm not going to get one of those silly cell-phone holsters. There's a reason they're pocked-sized.
I have frustratingly incompatible tendencies toward perfectionism and impatience. Which means I always alternate between procrastinating and rushing my work. I'm not sure what the workaround to this one is. Let me know if you figure it out.

That is all. I'll spare you the story of my dream where an IKEA store was hosting a clothing-optional rave. Although that pretty much covers it, so I guess I'm not sparing you anything today.

Linksys WAP modded into Network Media Player

2006-02-17T11:21:00.000-08:00

Here's a guy that modded a Linksys WRT router into a network media player. He's running OpenWRT Linux and using a USB audio device and a serial LCD. Very cool.

Tank LOVES Betty Crocker

2006-02-15T12:34:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, the Best things In Life Aren't Planned

2006-02-10T13:42:00.000-08:00

I don't think it'd be possible to come up with this other than by pure, brilliant accident.

Minor Annoyances, Part IV: The Right Click Trap

2006-02-08T19:45:00.000-08:00

This one's for all you nitwits out there that trap right mouse clicks your a web pages. Instead of bringing up my contextual menu, I get a shitty little JavaScript finger wagging at me with some poorly-thought-out argument about why I shouldn't be able to save a copy of your image. Do the words "fair use" mean anything to you? Do you realize that I already have a copy of your image on my hard drive? Are you familiar with "View Source..."? Furthermore, how do you know I'm not trying to look up your five-dollar word in my dictionary? How do you know I'm not trying to, say, Google the product you sell so that I can purchase it? You douchebags can go fuck yourselves while I wget your precious little image files. You like apples? How 'bout them apples? An ongoing theme in this blog is my annoyance with childproof software and hardware. This is my word for products with security "features" that don't really work, but seemingly exist just to inconvenience me. Pretty much any DRMed product fits into this category. These sorts of un-features make me want to do everything in my power to a) circumvent them and b) avoid ever doing business with the person that's trying to feed me this bullshit. Don't get me started on how you won't let me fast-forward through the silly little copyright warning you put at the beginning of my DVD that I just legally purchased! Fuckers!

Minor Annoyances, Part III: The Quicktime Pro Tax

2006-02-08T19:28:00.000-08:00

This one's been beaten to death, so I'll be brief. Apparently the friendly folks at Apple don't think that $130 is too much to spend for a point release of their operating system, and in some respects I'm inclined to agree. Typically they add a number of new features that don't exactly come for free, development-wise. But then they expect me to shell out another $30 to set a flag that enables some menu items in their not-really-any-better-than-Windows-Media-Player-which-is-free media app. That's annoying. Much like the worst crippleware shareware, $30 is just little enough that you feel like it's not really worth anything, and just enough that you can't really justify spending it on impulse. But then they have the gall to take their otherwise pretty nice Web browser and cripple it, too! Right-clicking on a link to a .mov file disables the normal "Save Target As" link and replaces it with a grayed-out save link that tells you that you must pay or you may not save ze mooovie. Fuckers! This is precisely the sort of childproofing that just annoys the hell out of me, and makes me want to circumvent it, not to mention seriously reconsider if I want to continue doing business with the vendor. And don't get me started on how you can't use iTunes to move your (legally purchased) music from, say, your home computer to your work computer using your iPod.

Another New Blog

2006-02-07T14:04:00.000-08:00

This one is called 3WDM, short for Three-Wheel Dorkmobile. That's what I've been calling my hybrid skateboard/scooter EV project. But you can go ahead and follow the link to find out more than you ever wanted to know about the project.

Minor Annoyances Part II: Bus Turn Signals

2006-01-26T13:34:00.000-08:00

If you've driven in a North American city, you've probably noticed how transit buses indicate that they've stopped, or are about to stop, by turning on what on a passenger car would be called the hazard lights, or four-way flashers for you automotive engineers. When they're ready to move back into traffic, they use their standard turn signals. I'm not sure who the dim bulb that came up with this scheme is, but it has a fatal (sometimes literally so) flaw: the only way to tell whether or not you are about to be run off the road, er you need to yield to the bus is via a set of lights that you can't see because they're on the other side of the goddamned bus. I realize there's the issue of retrofitting thousands of buses and retraining both bus drivers and vehicle drivers, but it sure would be nice if we could separate (through blink rate, color, or a whole new set of lights) the "I'm stopping" signal from the "I'm changing lanes" signal.

Sad But True

2006-01-25T09:24:00.000-08:00

Sabl's Law of U.S. Political Rhetoric: “No argument can succeed in American politics if it contains a subjunctive.”

The 10 Commandments of Simon

2006-01-17T17:18:00.000-08:00

Boy does this hit close to home, if you go back a few years and replace "virgin" with "involuntarily single."

Parrot Rhythm N'Blue

2006-01-09T21:01:00.000-08:00

This looks pretty cool. It's a car stereo that does the standard AM/FM/CD/MP3 business, plus it acts as a Bluetooth speakerphone. But wait, there's more! It will also stream MP3s from compatible cell phones. Sounds like a good replacement for my POS iPod-ready Alpine. Too bad I don't exactly have $300 burning a hole in my pocket.

Sony-Ericsson W800i (Verdict: Bad Ass)

2006-01-09T18:02:00.000-08:00

My lovely and talented boyfriend got me this kick-ass phone as a Christmas present. Unfortunately due to the vagaries of getting expensive electronics into Canada (only to be taken back out), I didn't get it until just a few days ago. It's pretty well chock full of features: Bluetooth, 2MP camera, flashlight, FM radio, and a media player. The display is phenomenally clear, with crisp, snappy animations and no UI lag (unlike my previous phone, the very sexy but woefully-underpowered Siemens SL55). The camera is fully compatible with iPhoto, and the phone plays .m4a (AAC) files from iTunes. It doesn't play restricted .m4p files (like those purchased from the iTunes Music Store), but vee haff vays of getting around that. Battery life so far also looks excellent (again, in contrast to the SL55). And it's only about as big as an open SL55, and not much heavier.

New Blog

2005-12-31T13:43:00.000-08:00

I'm starting another blog called Type 3 EV to chronicle a project I'm working on to convert a 1969 Volkswagen Fastback to battery-electric propulsion. Nothing much there yet, but hopefully I'll be able to get some more content on there soon.

Honda, Hybrids and Diesels

2005-12-22T10:48:00.000-08:00

From Green Car Congress today, we have a quote from Honda President Takeo Fukui:

Once we are able to cut costs and lower the premium price of the hybrids, there is a possibility that in some markets like Japan, we will only sell Civic Hybrids and no more gasoline-powered Civics. We plan to install diesels in bigger models and hybrids in smaller models.

This sounds about right: for light vehicles, the additional costs of adding a hybrid drivetrain aren't that great, particularly when some parts under the hood can be eliminated. But hybrid drivetrains are pretty much a dollars-per-kilowatt deal, unlike engines where adding displacement isn't all that costly. So for larger vehicles diesel is a better option for fuel efficiency.

There's also mention of selling light trucks in the US with diesel drivetrains, something anathema to Honda until very recently (they sell a diesel CRV in Europe). I always thought when driving my old Element that it really ought to be diesel powered, to the point that I often found myself short shifting the thing. I for one would be thrilled to drive a Honda diesel in the US.

The Hidden Costs of Private Health Insurance

2005-12-22T09:57:00.000-08:00

Other, smarter people have written at great length about how screwed up the health insurance system is in the United States. To sum up, we're the only industrialized nation without any form of universal health insurance. There are a few reasonably good arguments against it, that basically fall into three categories: that it will cost too much, that the quality of care will go down, and that incentives for medical research will diminish. I'm of the opinion that the first argument is basically 100% bogus. Those with good jobs already pay for health insurance, be it through an explicit deduction or implicitly through a reduced salary. Huge companies like General Motors are basically HMOs with investments in product manufacturing. And health insurance for the poor in this country is paid for on behalf of minimum-wage employers and the unemployed by public hospitals and the insane rates they charge for services not paid for by insurance companies. And there's not a lot of evidence that as health insurance becomes cheaper people use more of it. In other words, the moral hazard myth is largely bogus, too. In the end the total cost of health insurance doesn't vary much with the cost to any particular end user, and hence doesn't vary much with respect to who is paying the bill. Empirical evidence suggests that people with private health insurance don't need to wait as long to obtain care as those who depend on socialized medicine. While most of the countries that have implemented socialized health care seem to have more-or-less phased out retail healthcare, I can't think of any particularly good reason why this has to be so. Under a well-designed plan, those with additional resources (be it cash or supplemental insurance) ought to be able to purchase their healthcare on the open market, whereas those who would otherwise go without (or be financially ruined by accident or illness) might have to wait a while for non-emergency services. So I don't see how this is a compelling argument either. Finally, some people are of the belief that financing health insurance privately will somehow flush the existing incentives for medical research down the toilet. But the existing incentives for the creation of lifesaving treatments doesn't have a lot to do with who pays for healthcare; it has far more to do with what sorts of treatments are patentable. With the reasons against it out of the way, what are some reasons for implementing universal health insurance in the US? First off is the ever-increasing mountain of paperwork we have to fill out, replete with odd "choices" to be made that strike me should really have been made for me by an actuary whose full-time job is to make these sorts of decisions. It reminds me of the recent company holiday party, where the invitation explained that it was a "mandatory meeting" and that we should "please RSVP." Redundancy aside, if it's not really an option, why are you asking me? Case in point for me is the so-called Flexible Spending Account. That sounds good, but in reality it's a pretty-darned inflexible account I can only use on certain uncovered medical expenses. Oh, and if I don't use it up, the money is "forfeited." Forfeited to whom is anyone's guess; does it just sort of disappear in a puff of smoke? The only upside is that it's deducted pre-tax. It's one of those stupid "bets" that American companies seem to be so big on. For instance, why do I have to decide at the beginning of the month how much I'm going to yak on my cell phone? Why don't they charge me less per unit the more I use it, like any other sensible consumer product? But I digress... The second case is the new Medicare prescription drug coverage. From their FAQ:

Question:
Do I have to join a Medicare drug plan?
Answer:
No. Joining a Medicare drug plan is your choice. However, if you don’t join a plan by May 15, 2006, and you don’t currently have a drug plan that, on average, covers at least as much as standard Medicare prescription drug coverage, you will have to wait until November 15, 2006 to join. When you do join, your premium cost will go up at least 1% per month for every month that you wait to join. Like other insurance, you will have to pay this penalty as long as you have Medicare prescription drug coverage.

Who the fuck thought up this brilliant piece of nincompoopery? Lemme guess: a mobile phone exec?

Can't you just take a chunk of my income, consumption, property, or whatever, and pay the good doctor when I get sick? Do I really need to be involved at every step? How much time is wasted in making and administrating these "choices"? Speaking of which, one of the major impediments of me going off and, say, starting my own company is not lack of money or good ideas, but the fact that I'd basically being playing fast and loose with my life savings in the event that I break my arm or get a bad case of food poisoning, let alone come down with some rare, serious and expensive medical condition. And that's me, as a perfectly healthy thirty-year-old. What about the mom and pop types in their fifties that want to open a bed and breakfast? How are they going to compete with the Holiday Inn if literally no one is willing to sell them health insurance? It seems that by shuffling around the risk a bit, we could remove a lot of the completely unnecessary uncertainty from being an entrepreneur, or even running or working for a small business.

What I Want from a Web Framework

2005-12-21T06:45:00.000-08:00

As of today, it's been exactly six years since I started programming in PHP. When I started, the major players for writing web applications (to the best of my knowledge at the time) were CGI scripts written in whatever ¹, mod_perl, and PHP, which was on version 3 and just getting started as a web-development language. PHP was free, open-source, and easy to get running under Apache. PHP also had good library support, which was important for interfacing in a clean way with our database at the time, Oracle 8i. PHP wasn't, and isn't, a framework (as I understand the meaning of the term). Frameworks, (such as the then-contemporary ArsDigita Community System) weren't really an option for us, since we were attacking the massive virtual hosting problem with a single set of PHP scripts that assumed the form of the website in question by, in essence, looking up the hostname in the database and spitting out HTML accordingly. For the problem we were trying to solve (in the way we were trying to solve it), it's doubtful an out-of-the-box framework would've done the trick. Still, by writing what in some sense was a framework (albeit one with an installed base of one system targeted toward a handful of markets), I feel like I have a reasonably well-thought-out wishlist of what I'd like to see if I were creating a new web app from the ground up. So here goes: First off, some prerequisites. Some of these are givens, but others not even longtime players like PHP achieve. But this is a basic list of things that a web language/framework needs to include to even step up to the plate: ease of getting started, cross-platform capability, free and open-source licensing, decent libraries (with some caveats) and built-in support of international character sets.

If a web framework isn't easy to set up, very few people will take the time to try it. It's precisely the "what should I write this in if I just want to get it running quickly" crowd that is needed to make a language succeed. These quick prototypes often quickly accrete into larger projects, which then turn into companies (cf. PHP, for a meta-example). Also, unless there are obvious and compelling features to make me want to try a framework or language, I'm probably only going to try those that are easy to experiment in.
Second, good cross-platform support for a language or framework is essential. One of the reasons the reddit guys switched from Lisp to Python was that the Lisp on their dev system didn't match the Lisp on their production system. I like to do development on my iBook, but for various performance reasons, Mac OS X isn't a particularly good server OS yet. So it would be nice to be able to deploy to Linux or FreeBSD for production use.
A related reason the reddit guys switched was that although there are Lisps that work on both MacOS X and FreeBSD, they are all commercial, and I assume, closed-source products. This ties into ease of experimentation as well. If I need to buy a license or deal with a crippleware free version, I'm less likely to try a product. Also, open source is a pretty-well proven way to develop a platform, if not consumer-oriented software like word processors.
Library support has historically been quite important as well. I'm on the fence whether an RDBMS is going to be the long-term winner for persistent storage for web apps, but at the moment it's pretty important. And lacking first-class support for things like bind variables is a pretty big unfeature, so the libraries have to be complete and up-to-date. And library support adds the sorts of candy that gets people to try your environment in the first place.
Lastly, (and I'm talking to you, PHP), transparent and built-in support for international character sets is an important feature. Heck, if internationalization in general could be cleanly integrated into the framework, so much the better.

Now onto my personal preferences. First in the list would be a clean, powerful language. This is another area where PHP falls short. I'd like to be able to have something like this work:

<?

function that_returns_an_array()
{
        return array ('foo' => 1, 'bar' => 2);
}

echo that_returns_an_array()['bar'];

?>

It should print 2 but it doesn't even parse; a little more closure would be nice. Having to type "array" to define a hash is also a little annoying; something that looks a little cleaner couldn't hurt. And I understand functional programming is supposed to have some kind of salubrious effects, so maybe a language that lends itself to functional programming would be a Good Thing. One thing I do like about PHP is it's inside-out nature. There are all sorts of ways to shoot yourself in the foot with this sort of architecture, but it sure helps with point 1 if you can mock up a site in HTML and then add the active portions in place. Related to this, however, is a pet peeve of mine: the profusion of template languages. I can think of three arguments for the existence of templating languages:

Web designers are scared of programming languages
We need to separate presentation from content
Bad people can do bad things in the native language

The first argument, I think, is bogus. Most sufficiently powerful templating languages are at least as complicated as the equivalent constructs in, say PHP, and if you're in something that's effectively a template language, why spend a bunch of processor cycles str_replace'ing tags?² . The second argument has largely fallen by the wayside with the standardization and widespread adoption of CSS, and it doesn't even really solve the problem of internationalization. The third argument I'll deal with below, but basically an ideal web framework would use a capability model that would render it moot. Which brings me to the only possibly-original idea in this post: using something along the lines of a capability architecture to provide transparent security. The current state of the art seems to be to use an RDBMS for persistent storage and to use SQL to query and manipulate data. Typically a connection with full privileges is made to the database, and the so-called business logic in the Web application or framework decides what level of access is afforded to the end-user. The problem with this arrangement is that the integrity of the database is potentially no greater than the attention paid to security in the most poorly-written piece of software on the server. Furthermore if someone manages to sneak a script onto the server, the damage done is limited only by the permissions of the Web server process. If the process has some kind of built-in persistent connection to the database, the security of the database is equally compromised. In the ideal case, the web framework would have user accounts with fine-grained privileges (possibly including a generic "guest" account with read permission on public areas), and those privileges would trickle down to the lowest levels of the execution of the script. For instance if Joe has write permissions on all appointments belonging to Joe, Joe wouldn't be able to delete Mary's appointments even if poorly-written code would otherwise allow it. The script that Joe manages to sneak onto the server (itself a much less likely scenario under this architecture) still wouldn't allow him to query or manipulate any data that the Joe account isn't authorized to access. I'm not sure if the user accounts on a UNIX machine, much less an off-the-shelf RDBMS are robust and scaleable enough to be able to handle one "user" per user, and it would be interesting to see if any existing frameworks use this approach or something similar. Even then I'm not sure if most RDBMSes have good row-level access control. The second newish feature I'd like to see I haven't thought through well enough to describe in detail. But basically it would come down to (more) transparent persistence for user data. This is somewhat problematic in a stateless architecture like the Web, but it would be neat if I could simply flag a variable as persistent and have it stick around between requests. And not only that, but have it be the first-class way of storing data between requests. This could, of course, be shoehorned into a RDBMS and/or filesystem, but an integrated approach might be superior. If we combine these two, then the use of UNIX user accounts and native RDBMS users sounds increasingly infeasible. In that case it might be the right approach to ditch the RDBMS and raw filesystem, or bury it under enough layers of carefully-reviewed code to make the features transparent. I apologize if this has been a disorganized rant. I'm sure most of the concepts have been gone over by people far more knowledgeable than myself, and it's even possible that all of these are encapsulated in an already-existing framework that I just have to go out and learn. If so I'd love to hear about it in the comments ;) ¹ I have it on good authority that Amazon's obidos is written in C, and also that the number of requests a particular Apache process is allowed to handle before being killed—to control memory leaks and such—is in the single digits. ² As a stunt I'd like to see someone write a templating language in another templating language, preferably on top of PHP or some other inside-out language.

Minor Annoyances Part I: SourceForge.net

2005-12-20T15:00:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I like to browse the web in Safari on my local machine while installing updates on a remote machine in a terminal window. Typically I'll try to find a link to the download on the web and right click it, selecting "Copy Link." Then I type wget "<pasted URL>" in my terminal window to put the file on the machine in question. So the first part of this rant is against links called "Download" that don't actually download. If the link is going to lead to a page that has me pick a mirror, the text should specify such, goddammit! I can't even count the number of times I've wgetted a file only to find the file consisted of a html comprising a mirror-selection page. The next part of this rant is against what happens once you've selected a mirror. At this point it loads a page that says "the download should have started automatically", as though I have nothing better to do than look at your goddamned ad page while the download downloads to the wrong place. Good thing we don't pay for incoming bandwidth. How about a nice simple link to the file, folks?

Up-front and Lifetime Costs

2005-12-12T15:28:00.000-08:00

A few years back my good friend Craig Meyer pointed out that in the days when the Chevy small-block engine was designed the primary criterion for engine design was how many horsepower the engine could produce for a given cost. Of course the packaging had to be reasonable, as did the ease of service and manufacturability, but both of these feed back into overall cost in the end. Efficiency and pollution were, if they were considered at all, at most afterthoughts. It took the oil shocks to change that mindset. I bring this up because until recently computers have been in the same boat. With the exception of laptops, the same criterion has been applied to computers in general and microprocessors in particular: how much power can we squeeze out of every dollar? But it seems like Google, among others, is running into an electricity shock: lifetime costs of servers will soon outstrip up-front costs. This, and a lot of other things suggest that maybe Wally Rippel, the resident mad scientist at my previous employer, was right. He said something along the lines of "[the last] century was when we learned the value and limitations of data; in [this] century we'll learn the value of energy."

Extreme Climbing

2005-12-09T20:12:00.000-08:00

This—and I do not use the term lightly—is the fizznucking bomb.

Drivetrain Deathmatch: Diesel or Hybrid?

2005-12-06T16:33:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking a bit lately about conventional diesel versus hybrid spark-ignition drivetrains and what their respective strengths and weaknesses are. For purposes of this discussion, diesel will refer to a turbocharged direct-injection diesel engine like that found in the US-spec Volkswagen Golf. Hybrid, unless otherwise specified, will refer to a series-parallel system like that found in the Toyota Prius.

I will look at price premium, fuel savings, emissions, and semi-intangibles. All prices are base MSRP (before any incentives), and I'm going to look at marginal values for nearly everything. The wisdom of this is certainly up for debate, but if we're looking for something like a dollars-per-tonne of carbon value, this seems like the best approach. Finally, I won't be considering straight-up gasoline power, battery-electric power, or fuel cells, stirling engines, or nuclear flywheels. That may make for a lame deathmatch, but two contestants makes things much more manageable.

Price

Comparing a Toyota Prius ($21,725) to a similar non-hybrid car isn't trivial, since not only does Toyota not sell a non-hybrid Prius, it also doesn't sell a vehicle that is exactly comparable in terms of size and features. Using the Camry LE ($20,375) at the high end and the Corolla LE ($15,215) at the low end, you could say the Prius represents a $4,000 premium over a comparable non-hybrid car. Honda makes things a little easier on us, where the Accord Hybrid Sedan ($30,140) costs $2,840 more than the Accord EX V-6 Sedan ($27,300), but also makes slightly more power. The Civic Hybrid Sedan costs $3590 more than the Civic EX Sedan but makes slightly less power. So we could put the price premium over a comparable conventional vehicle at roughly $3,600 to make the math easy (see below).

For a mid-priced passenger car, a turbocharged direct-injection diesel engine adds something like $1200 to the price of the vehicle. The engine will typically have lower peak output but higher peak torque that's also available at lower RPM. In other words, outside of the the occasional On-Ramp Grand Prix, the diesel will exhibit driveability that is equal to or better than the equivalent spark-ignition engine.

Advantage: Diesel. The price premium for a diesel is roughly one-third of that for a hybrid. However, as hybrid technology matures, this difference is likely to shrink, if not altogether disappear.

Fuel Economy

The Accord Hybrid's EPA gas mileage is 29/37, or 8.1/6.4 in sensible units (l/100km)[1], whereas the standard V-6 Accord (which makes slightly *less* power) comes in at 11.8/8.1 (20/29), giving us a 100 kilometer fuel savings of 3.7 liters in the city and 1.7 liters on the highway. The Civic Hybrid is rated at 4.8/4.6 (49/51) versus the Civic EX Sedan's 7.8/5.9 (30/40), resulting in 3 liters saved in the city and 1.3 liters saved on the highway.

The Prius' fuel economy is rated at 3.9/4.6 (60/51), versus a Camry LE's 9.8/6.9 (24/34) or a Corolla LE's 7.8/6.2 (30/38). Over a hundred kilometers of driving, the Prius saves 5.9 or 3.9 liters over the Camry or Corolla (respectively) in the city, or 2.3 or 1.6 on the highway.

For diesel cars, the VW Golf again provides a good comparison. The diesel uses 6.4/5.3 (37/44) versus the 2.0's 9.8/7.6 (24/31). So the fuel savings for a 100-km trip are 3.4 liters in the city and 2.3 liters on the highway.

Advantage: Depends. The hybrids pretty well outshine the diesel in the city, but the best of the hybrids just matches the diesel's savings on the highway. This is idle stop and (to a lesser extent) regenerative braking at work, both of which could in theory be applied to a diesel, a topic I'll delve into in the conclusion. One thing to keep in mind is that diesel fuel is more energy-dense than gasoline, so the carbon footprint of the fuel—and hence the fuel savings—is more significant.

Emissions

Advantage: Hybrid. I'm going to cheat on this one with a bit of just-trust-me hand-waving, and if someone can find numbers on this, feel free to call bullshit on me. I know that Emission-control technologies for diesels are much less mature than those for gasoline engines. Currently they still emit quite a lot of NOx and particulates—particularly under high load conditions—when compared with conventional spark-ignition engines. Gasoline-electric hybrids are even cleaner than conventional spark-ignition engines and therefore are the clear winner in the emissions department. As diesel emission-control technology improves, this difference is likely to shrink as well.

(Semi) Intangibles

Toyota's fiendishly-clever Hybrid Synergy Drive gets a few points in the intangibles department. It doesn't require a conventional starter, alternator, or torque converter/transmission. All three are replaced with two synchronous permanent magnet (basically BLDC) motors and a planetary gearset. So you have a stepless transmission with none of the "Captain to Engine Room" lag you get when you mate a modestly-powerful engine to a conventional slushbox. You can fill up at any gas station, and the fuel doesn't smell funny. Plus it has a nifty on/off button.

The diesel has the advantage of an energy-dense fuel that has a readily-available and cost-competitive renewable version (B100 biodiesel). It's a proven technology that's quite fun to drive. And the hint of turbo whine when you take off sounds really cool.

Advantage: Depends. I like the hybrid because of the propellor-head geekiness of it's drivetrain, but that's probably more personal preference than anything.

Conclusions

If we look at the underlying technology, the reasons behind some of the above conclusions become clear. A diesel engine runs in an unthrottled lean-burn regime with the turbocharger enhancing the expansion ratio. A hybrid also runs it's gasoline engine more or less unthrottled in a lean-to-stoichiometric regime with an Atkinson cycle enhancing the expansion ratio. Because they're unthrottled, diesels can idle relatively efficiently. Hybrids typically implement an idle-stop function, achieving the same thing. So in one sense, a hybrid is a clean diesel, and a diesel is an inexpensive hybrid. The price performance of each is likely to converge as both hybrid technology and diesel emission-control technologies mature.

The obvious question is why not both? Why not a diesel hybrid? The answer, keeping the preceding in mind, is that there are diminishing returns due to overlapping advantages, along with accelerating costs. One way to mitigate the costs would be to create a mild diesel hybrid that eliminates the redundant starter and alternator. This could improve the city fuel economy and emissions, but would still cost more than the diesel alone, possibly so much so that it wouldn't be worthwhile.

An interesting side note is that the Prius-style drivetrain is being experimented with as a simple replacement for a conventional transmission, without any true hybrid capability (i.e. no traction battery). It will be interesting to see what the optimum traction battery size is for such a vehicle, and whether it is even greater than zero.

If I had to bet on a winner for the next 10 years or so, I would bet on the diesel. Nearly every car sold in North America has a diesel version that is sold overseas (including such cars as the MINI Cooper and Mazda 5 (nee MX-5 Miata)). Now that ultra-low-sulfur diesel is coming online in the States, there is nothing stopping us from slowly converting our entire fleet to diesel in fairly short order. But a significant drop in battery prices, along with the relentless downward march of electronics prices might well make hybrids, even diesel hybrids, the winner in the longer term, until and unless fuel cells or peak oil dethrone them both.

[1] To reiterate my previous rant, measuring fuel economy in miles per gallon is like specifying your salary in minutes per dollar: it makes for a nice round number, but it makes it needlessly difficult to compare differences. To use my favorite example, a one-mpg improvement in a 10-mpg car saves as much fuel as doubling the fuel economy of a 50-mpg car.

Weird Dream

2005-12-06T14:39:00.000-08:00

Last night I dreamt that I went back to visit my college to find that the late Bob Ross (not late in my dream) had become an art professor there. That is all.

Does AJAX Suck?

2005-12-06T11:23:00.000-08:00

Here's a delightful spoof of a 1996 Jakob Nielsen article entitled Why AJAX sucks.

While the arguments are generally valid, it misses an important point: nobody (for sufficiently large values of "no") is using AJAX for information presentation. Sure, there's the occasional client-sorted table, but in general AJAX is being used to replicate content creation apps in the browser, rather than for content presentation.

This is in stark contrast to the scourge of frames (and don't get me started on all-Flash™ sites) which are primarily intended for use by end users, and have all the attendant problems like breaking bookmarks and the Back button. But I don't know if anyone really expects the Back button to un-send an email they just sent in Gmail.

(I can go on for pages on all the reasons frames suck, since I've had to deal with them for the past six years here at work. If you'd like me to do so, please post a comment accordingly)

How to Become an Early Riser

2005-12-03T19:53:00.000-08:00

Wait. Or, more specifically, grow up.

To clarify, this is in response to this post (found via reddit). This site goes on a great length about how the author now goes to be earlier than he did when he was in his early 20's.

But according to people that research this kind of stuff, our sleep patterns are much less a matter of simple habit than we'd like to think.

Maybe I'm being unduly harsh, but the end result reads like me trying to explain how I stay thin. (The real answer is probably genetics, but here goes: shun sugary drinks, don't skip breakfast, eat small balanced meals, stop eating when you're full and don't be afraid of fat or a small balanced snack when you've got the munchies).

It's snowing outside

2005-12-01T15:38:00.000-08:00

The snow is still coming down outside my window, which around here is—like rain in Southern California—an unusual but in no way unexpected event. That makes it somewhat topical to comment on local drivers' reaction to this. They basically fall into three camps:

There's the normal reasonable driver camp, that makes up perhaps half of the cars on the road, or slightly less when it's snowing. These are people that have been driving long enough or are generally well-adjusted enough not to hold their masculinity and/or self-worth hostage to their driving style. So they drive at a safe and reasonably speed and are generally law-abiding and courteous. Sure, each individual driver occasionally veers into one of the two modes I'll describe below, but overall they react rationally to current driving conditions.

The second camp is the so-cautious-they're-dangerous camp, that make up around a quarter of the drivers around here. Their style is to drive at a snail's pace any time they see white around them. No matter if the roads are bare and wet, fifteen miles an hour is plenty for them, thankyouverymuch. Similar to the granny doing forty-five in the right lane of the interstate with her left blinker on, their primary function is to provoke the third style of driver.

The third camp has a noticeably forced nonchalance about the fact that traction conditions might be sub-optimal. In fact they typically drive more aggressively on snowy or icy roads than they would if the roads were merely wet. More often than not they're driving a large four-wheel-drive pickup or SUV, but the occasional chip-on-their-shoulder Saab or Volvo driver is also guilty.

Back when I had a more performance-oriented vehicle I was often a member of the third camp (of course there was also the Walter Mitty aspect of playing World Rally Championship on the streets of Bellingham), though I now like to think I'm in the first camp. Fortunately we all grow up. Unfortunately there is always a new batch of whippersnappers to take our place.

2005-12-01T15:22:00.000-08:00

“Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass”

2005-11-29T16:13:00.000-08:00

“In general, lottery tickets have a very low expected value because the chance of winning a million pounds is much less than one in a million. You may take those odds anyway because you love risk. To be consistent, you should cancel your house insurance and enjoy the thrilling possibility that it may one day burn to the ground.”

2005-11-24T11:43:00.000-08:00

“Yes, it would be nice to have evidence-based policy-making. But even if we can't get that, perhaps we can do away with policy-based evidence-making.”

2005-11-22T14:50:00.000-08:00

“Did I mention that my personal heartfelt definition of the word "elephant" includes mystery, order, goodness, love and a spare tire?”

South Central Pond?

2005-11-22T13:59:00.000-08:00

I think I just found a watermark in Google Maps: South Central Pond, across the Duwamish from S Boeing Access Road. On the satellite view it shows up as a building and parking lot.

Then there's the non-existent roundabout on this map. I think this one's a simple error, since there is a roundabout at Cordata and Kellog (and now one at Westerly as well).

2005-11-21T11:34:00.000-08:00

“If you can figure out a way to turn a billion dollar industry into a fifty million dollar industry, so much the better, if all fifty million go to you.”

New Study Confirms Sex is Popular

2005-11-17T19:25:00.000-08:00

A story making the rounds in last week's news cycle is that there's a lot of sex on TV. The odd thing is the note of concern with which the news is delivered. No one is decrying the increasing popularity of cooking on television, or the rise of clean-your-junk-out-of-the-spare-bedroom-you-schlub reality TV. But strangely, sex is singled out. Admittedly, there are two important factors that sex doesn't share with these things. The first is that sex, particularly the sort of glossed-over poorly-managed sex that's depicted on television, can have significant consequences: it can, for instance, create life (for sufficiently small values of "life"—I hear you really need a few months if you want something cuddly), strengthen emotional bonds, and swap any number of microbes. But a lot of things on television have consequences that are glossed over. People drive recklessly, shoot guns, fight, and say things so unimaginably vicious to one another that they might well trigger one of the other aforementioned activities if uttered in real life. But what's important to remember is that people watch television to escape from the monotony of their daily lives. Thus television should be, to borrow from Hitchcock, like life with the boring parts removed. Television doesn't show us people donning condoms before sex* for the same reason that we don't see them balancing their checkbook before going shopping: it's boring. But overspending, particularly given the recent reform of bankruptcy laws and our lack of national health care, is probably at least as damaging to one's long-term emotional and physical health as an ill-advised one-night stand. In short, television glosses over consequences because consequences are boring. In fact I have it on good authority that one of the central tenets of screenwriting is to make sure the stakes for the protagonist in any conflict are as high as possible, given the subject matter. High stakes, like a line of cocaine, make consequences fade into the background.** The second thing that makes sex special is that it's controlled by a part of our brain that we don't really consider to be "us," in the sense that we probably wouldn't say "it was decided by us that Britney Spears appears particularly fertile." In contrast to the sincere desire of thinking liberals, that part of our brain usually exhibits racism, ageism, class-ism, size-ism, looks-ism and any number of other frowned-upon -isms. And, lest we forget (in all but a vanishingly small percentage of the population), sexism. That part of our brain also urges us to engage in all sorts of odd activities ranging from the mildly inappropriate to the punishable by hard time. This reptilian brain factor, rightfully so, both scares us and fascinates us. Obviously apart from not being boring, drama—even television drama—must be dramatic. And what, pray tell, do we as humans find dramatic? Well, certainly not a bunch of robots acting in their carefully premeditated rational self-interest. What we crave are human emotions, the interplay of human frailty and virtue, and—for men—explosions and car chases and fistfights. Passion, temptation, risk, revenge—all the sorts of things we secretly wish would happen in our own lives, except when they actually do happen, at which point they're just stressful and we wish they'd be over with already (cf. the Ancient Chinese Curse™). I don't think it's particularly disingenuous of television producers to give us what we want. I think the rise of sex and sexual situations on television—the inevitable commentary from various moral scolds notwithstanding—reflects a natural and ultimately healthy coming to terms with what makes us human. Plus we get to watch really hot people pretending to get it on. *The only popular series I know of that consistently makes a point of the characters' using condoms is the Showtime series Queer as Folk, something I doubt the aforementioned moral scolds would take much comfort in. **You're right, I've never done a line of cocaine. But that's what I hear, anyway.

iBook G4 Brightness/Volume Button Issue

2005-11-15T23:12:00.000-08:00

After updating to Mac OS 10.4.3 I found that I was no longer able to use the hotkeys on my 12" iBook G4 to change the screen brightness or the speaker volume. In fact the brightness control wouldn't appear in the Display preferences either. Annoyingly it was set to a dull mid-range setting rather than the full-on setting I typically use when not in total darkness. Anyway, I'm not sure if it was the hard shutdown or zapping the parameter RAM (by holding down Command-Option-P-R after the bootup sound), but it's fixed now. So if you're having the same issue, I would suggest trying that.

Is a Hybrid Worth It?

2005-11-14T10:52:00.000-08:00

This post is partially in response to a post linked to from Slashdot on whether hybrids will save you money. The article is mostly fair, but appears to be written with a slight slant against hybrids. It also makes a couple of naive assumptions: That buying a new car might save you money (puhleez!) and that a Prius is basically an economy car with a hybrid drivetrain.

The article asks whether, based on fuel savings alone, it would be worth replacing a paid-for 1999 Accord with a new Prius. While buying a new fridge will often pay for itself in a few years, for most reasonable sets of circumstances, you will never save enough in fuel costs to offset the cost of a new vehicle. Sure, if you commute 18,000 miles per year in a 12-mpg land barge and replace it with a Kia, you'll save about 30 bucks a month, but that's definitely an edge case. Replacing any late model car with a brand-new hybrid is going to be a money loser.

The article also suggests a Toyota Corolla as an alternative to the Prius. What I don't think the article makes clear is how much nicer a Prius is than even a top-of-the line Corolla. Though somewhat smaller, it's much closer to a Camry in overall features and comfort, and a comparable Camry is only about $2000 cheaper. Sure, the Prius is similar to the Corolla in performance, but I'm sure I could find a Mercedes sedan that is similar in performance to an '82 Camaro.

To do an apples-to-apples comparison, you'd be better off comparing a new Civic EX automatic to a new Civic Hybrid CVT (which is quite comparable outside of a drag race). The latter is $1790 more expensive, but uses a half gallon less fuel per 100 miles of highway driving and 1.3 gallons less for the same amount of city driving.*

From the above, it's pretty clear we can come up with a realistic scenario where buying the hybrid will save you money. Assuming the life of the car is 10 years and you're paying six percent interest, you'll spend an extra $31 a month for the hybrid in car payments (With a typical car loan you'd actually pay $54 extra a month for the first five years and nothing for the next five). At $3 a gallon (probably an unreasonably low average for the next 10 years), the break-even point is 23,000 miles of highway driving per year or 9340 miles of city driving. Neither of these situations are outlandish enough to be dismissed out of hand.

But wait, there's more! Governments—particularly those like the United States' that subsidize driving private vehicles—have realized that the air quality and energy security benefits are worth money and have enacted tax incentives that bring down the price by something like $2500.** So if you're buying a new car and can put up with a slower On-Ramp Grand Prix time, there's really no reason not to go hybrid.

*Note that stating fuel economy figures in miles per gallon is kind of dumb. Adding one mile per gallon to a 10-mile-per-gallon car saves as much money and fuel for a given amount of driving as doubling the fuel economy of a 50-mile-per-gallon car. Stating the reciprocal instead makes this clear. The Europeans have figured this out and state their figures in liters per hundred kilometers.

**My high school history teacher always used to say that there are two reasons for everything: a good one and the real one. This is the good reason. The real one is left as an exercise for the reader.

No FridayFive this week

2005-11-11T16:09:00.000-08:00

This week's FridayFive is all about being sick. I can't honestly remember the last time I've been sick. At least more than "I'm just sick enough to not go to work" sick, which was a nasty sinus headache last week that mostly just kept me up half the night.

There was that $10 all-you-can-drink night at The Slide that had me puking in the streets of NYC, but alcohol-related sickness is specifically excluded. But while we're on the subject, it seems that alcohol and nicotine have a synergistic effect on hangovers for me. Two stiff drinks and a cigarette and I'm miserable the next day. Any more and I'm puking.

Other than that, I seem to pick up strep throat like it's going out of style. At least twice a year now. On the plus side, I haven't had a cold sore in something like three years. Or the flu in at least as long. Knock on wood...

Remedy-wise I'm inclined toward Tylenol and herbal tea. And lots of sleep and a hot bath.

2005-11-10T10:02:00.000-08:00

Silly String used in combat.

Observation

2005-11-08T10:33:00.000-08:00

Pocky make great coffee stirrers.

Note to all non-Canadians

2005-11-07T20:25:00.000-08:00

Ketchup-flavored, er, flavoured potato chips are really tasty.

MondayFive?

2005-11-07T19:01:00.000-08:00

I started this blog largely for writing practice. If I have a reader or two, so much the better. Anyway, in keeping with the first point, here's another (belated) FridayFive:

What the HELL ARE YOU DOING??!?!?!?!? (this weekend)
Hanging out with G as usual. Maybe going to a car show on Sunday. Nothing too exciting.
If you had to go see one of three people perform a “comedy show” and those three people were Carrot Top, Gallagher, or Gilbert Gottfried, who would you go see and why?
I'd have to go with Gilbert Gottfried, just because I read a great quote about him having “a shrill voice so manic that he makes Jerry Lewis sound like Morgan Freeman.”
If you had to pick one television show that you watched in the 80's to be successful today with a new cast and a new set, which one would you pick and why?
I didn't watch a whole lot of TV in the 80's, since my parents were basically TV nazis and limited us to a half hour a day. But I really liked the anime series Star Blazers aka Space Battleship Yamato. Given what they could do even five years ago with low-budget computer graphics, it could be one badass recreation.
It's time for a Christmas list. Tell me the one thing that you want more than anything else this Christmas. (Please make sure it is a tangible thing that is reasonable. I don't want anyone writing about how they want to know who killed JFK as their Christmas present.)
I'd really like one of those 20" iMacs. It would replace my TV and hold all my music and crap that there isn't really room for on this here iBook. I don't really have $1700 to spare, so I'm not going to buy it for myself. Hence the gift value. Maybe when I sell the house.
If you had to listen to a Weird Al Song on a loop for a two-hour period, which song would you choose and why?
That one about the good old days and torturing rats with a hacksaw. That reminds me...I need to set my rat trap.

OK, this is weird...

2005-11-07T18:57:00.000-08:00

http://www.frankandgordon.ca/

2005-11-07T17:17:00.000-08:00

Apparently I breathe clean air.

2005-11-07T17:14:00.000-08:00

“You're a dentist, not the right leg of Voltron.”

Mighty Mouse SuX0rs

2005-11-03T09:27:00.000-08:00

Ok, so not really...but the scroll ball gummed up on me this morning and wouldn't scroll up any more. A damp cloth solved the issue, but it's a pity that it gets clogged up so quickly.

When can I buy a mouse with a scroll pad on it?

Retrieving Stored Web Passwords

2005-11-02T19:27:00.000-08:00

The other day I needed to retrieve a stored password from a form that had moved. I was eventually able to do it with a very simple bookmarklet. Let's pretend this is your password field:

If you click here, you should see an alert with the value whatever is in the password field.

No big deal. However, if the password was automatically filled in by your password manager, this trick still works. If someone else is using your computer and wants to retrieve your stored password, they merely have to concoct a simple bookmarklet to retrieve it:

javascript:alert(document.formName.passwordInputName.value)

This seems to be a bug/feature of all of the major browsers (I tested it in recent versions of Safari, Firefox and Win IE). It's probably quite tricky to fix without breaking a significant minority of sites. I guess the moral of the story is don't store any really valuable passwords in your browser's password manager.

You can even create a generic Password Retriever bookmarklet that pops up (one after the other) the name and value of all password fields on any web page, including, of course, those populated by the browser's password manager.

Update: Here's an even simpler version: it just changes the type attribute of all password inputs to "text", so the password shows up on screen without any annoying alert boxes.

Flash Cheaper than RAM

2005-11-01T11:05:00.000-08:00

I guess I'm probably among the last to notice, but non-volatile RAM in the form of Flash is now cheaper per gigabyte than DRAM. Flash goes for about $50/gigabyte (depending on form factor) whereas RAM goes for around $70 (for PC2700). Of course the speed difference is huge: Flash is about 200 times slower for reading and about 1000 times slower for writing, and I'm guessing it's unlikely to speed up as quickly as DRAM continues to speed up. So in a way this is nothing new: hard drives have been providing slower-but-cheaper nonvolatile storage for quite some time. But assuming that the speed difference goes away, or is no longer relevant, what sorts of changes would we see in everyday computing if the main memory is nonvolatile? I guess transparent persistence, for one, comes for free.

Another FridayFive

2005-10-28T13:50:00.000-07:00

Another FridayFive:

What is the greatest video game you have ever played, and why? If you aren't a video gamer, give me some other type of game and keep it clean.
I'm a big fan of Tempest, the old vector-based standup game made by Atari in the 80's. But I've been accused of being video game impaired, so I don't have a lot to choose from.
If you could force Google, Microsoft or any other software company to build a custom application to fit a specific need, what would you have them do?
A really good mother-of-all-todo-list-calendar app. Preferably web-based so I can access it from anywhere. Maybe incorporating some of the principles of Getting Things Done methods. Plus some of the elements of this program and a good note taking app.
What is the greatest sporting event you have ever been to and why?
The bar is awfully low for me on this one, so I'm going to pass.
Please send a shout-out to the most menacing bully in your lifetime. Change the names to protect the not-so-innocent so as to avoid prosecution.
Well there was that John kid that dragged me down the hall by my hair in the first grade. But that didn't have most of the elements of a really good bully drama. I'll pass on this one too.
What is your NFL lock of the week? Meaning, which game do you think you can guarantee a winner? Give me that winner. Tell me why.
What's with all the sports questions. Fuck, I dunno, how about them Seahawks?

Cingular Text Message Scam?

2005-10-24T23:15:00.000-07:00

I'm nearing my wits end with these guys. For the past two months they've been charging me one minute per text message. I had thought that that was just for overage, but looking at my current bill online (with its $20/month 2500-message add-on), it looks like this is for all text messages. So be aware that any time you send or receive a text message through Cingular you're being charged 1 minute. Their phone rep basically said that they weren't "real" minutes and that I should wait until I get my bill and see if I get charged for them. But they sure seem to want "real" money at the end of the month. Unfortunately their North America plan is almost too good to pass up. But if this keeps up, I'm gone. Update: It turns out the minutes listed online aren't in fact "real" minutes. So basically their website sucks, which isn't great, but isn't inexcusable either. It also turns out that I've turned into something of a chatterbox, and that that's where most of my usage charges are coming from. Unfortunately, I can't upgrade because they've discontinued their North America plan, and I've only still got it because of some sort of grandfather clause. Guess I'll have to learn to shut my trap.

FridayFive

2005-10-21T16:34:00.000-07:00

I thought for once I'd join in a FridayFive, so here goes:

If you owned a restaurant and you had to put a signature item on the menu that would really set your restaurant apart from the rest, and increase your chances for success, what would you add?
Mom's red cabbage. You never see red cabbage in restaurants, and the stuff is always a hit at the potlucks. Or at least people pretend to like it.
Pretend you are Arnold Schwarzenegger and you are .. THE ERASER. You must erase one actor/actress from Hollywood, who would you erase and why?
Does the Encyclopedia Brittanica kid count?
A robber walks into a bank and proclaims that not only is he going to steal all the money, but he is going to kill people one at a time until everyone is gone because he is a sociopath. There are 30 people headed for the Great Gig in the Sky. Would you want to be first to go, last to go, or somewhere in between? Why?
I'd want to be number two, assuming death was certain. I've never seen someone die, so I suppose it'd be worth seeing before I go. At the same time, I don't think I'd like it, so I wouldn't want to see it 29 times.
Over your lifetime there have been a lot of great inventions. If you could have discovered one, and received all the acclaim, fame and riches that came along with it, which invention would you like to claim as your own discovery?
The World Wide Web, because I've always dreamt of being a knight.
The desert-island top 5 album list is getting old and we are in a faster paced world now. So, please give me the album that you would like to take with you while you are on the show Survivor for roughly a month. This is the only album you will get to listen to over that time period. No mixes, no IPods and no sharing with other survivors.
In terms of something I could listen to over and over again and get only minimally sick of, I'm going to have to say Achtung, Baby. One can quibble about the quality and what not, but it was one of the first CDs I bought, and so it's racked up quite a few (mostly good) associations over the years.

Clearwire: Second Impressions

2005-10-21T09:27:00.000-07:00

A short followup on Clearwire: Still good, still cheap, at least for Web and email. YMMV if you're running BitTorrent and whatnot. I haven't noticed any problems with slowdowns, outages, or anything along those lines. I'm getting 4-5 lights from every part of my house that I've tried the thing in. If you can get a good signal, it seems to be a good alternative to DSL or cable.

Saber

2005-10-04T16:46:00.000-07:00

Not as in a sword, but as in the Spanish/Portguese infinitive "to know."

This is a really fascinating example of a complementary currency. The idea is that you hand out these special banknotes to seven-year-olds. They're valuable only in that they can be used to pay university tuition.

You're probably thinking that the idea is for the seven-year-olds to hoard them until they go to college, but that's not it at all. Instead, the idea is to encourage older students to tutor the younger students in exchange for the currency. In fact hoarding is strongly discouraged by making the currency demur at 20% per year.

From what little I've read, it works quite well: giving university students a $1 billion discount in exchange for about $10 billion worth of teaching.

Stein’s Law

2005-10-04T10:30:00.000-07:00

“That which cannot go on forever, won’t.”

ClearWire: First Impressions

2005-09-23T10:01:00.000-07:00

I just received my ClearWire (or, as they would prefer I spell it, ClearW°re) modem in mail yesterday. The setup was brain-dead simple. There are just two jacks on the unit, one for the power supply and the other for ethernet. After some boot-up initialization, the five LEDs along the top of the unit display signal strength. I can get a 5 lights from most parts in my living room. A cheesy online bandwidth test showed 753kbps, pretty close to the "up to" value advertised (768 kilobits). All in all I'm pretty happy with it, especially since it's going to be something like $30 a month cheaper than what I'm paying now for naked DSL (admittedly at twice the speed and with a static IP). I'm looking into some options for firewalls or even simple NAT routers, as I'm a little anxious about exposing a bare XP box to the open waters of the internets. But then I'm tempted by the AirPort Express, what with it's printer sharing and AirTunes capabilities. But if I go that route I'd probably have to buy either another (non-wireless) router or more likely a wireless card/dongle for my PC. I've been assured that I can cancel without penalty if I move out of their coverage area. So I'm just hoping they don't give me some other reason to want to cancel before a year is up.

2005-09-21T18:40:00.000-07:00

“Doctors describe his condition as stable but homosexual.”

Mighty Mouse R0x0rs

2005-09-06T13:21:00.001-07:00

At the risk of being pegged an Apple apologist, I must say I'm really enjoying my latest purchase, a Mighty Mouse. It replaced a cheapish Kensington unit with two buttons and a scroll wheel, so no, I'm not just now discovering the joys of multiple mouse buttons.

The scroll ball is fantastic. Not so much the horizontal scrolling (which, let's face it, doesn't come up all that often), but the feel of the thing. The squeeze buttons are kind of a pain: I have to shift my normal mouse grip to use them, so I've assigned them to the Dashboard that I only use a couple of times a day anyway. The right click, despite the apparent lack of separate buttons, works perfectly (at least the way I right click: I never noticed this before, but I always lift my index finger up when right clicking. Maybe one of those unconscious things like how I raise my pinky when I'm drinking from a glass. Er, nevermind).

Anyway, if you have a Mac, and extra $50 burning a hole in your pocket, and you're on the fence about the Mighty Mouse, I'd say go ahead and take the plunge.

iScroll2

2005-07-28T22:30:00.000-07:00

This is a very neat little utility that will enable two-finger scrolling on older iBook and PowerBook models.

Methanol from Limestone?

2005-06-28T15:55:00.000-07:00

Thanks in part to my esteemed friend Craig I've been drinking a shot or two of the Peak Oil Kool-Aid. One of the things he mentions is how great methanol is as a post-petroleum renewable fuel since it's an almost direct substitute for gasoline, with many of the benefits that other synthetic fuels (hydrogen, anhydrous ammonia, etc.) are lacking...save for the minor problem of actually getting our hands on the CO2 necessary to economically make it from hydrogen (preferably the atmosphere). The folks at LANL are working on a CO2 sequestration method that involves tossing a bunch of quicklime (CaCO) in the air, where it absorbs atmospheric CO2 and turns into, more or less, limestone. An endothermic (but not break-the-bank endothermic) reaction turns limestone back into quicklime and liberates the CO2. Meanwhile, back at the Bat Cave, we're taking some sort of renewable electric power (e.g. wind power, which if you've drunk enough of the Kool-Aid is cheaper than coal/nuclear/etc.) and are electrolyzing water. Mixing H2 and CO2 generates methanol and water (a third of what we started with). In the end, you're turning limestone, heat, electricity, and water into quicklime and methanol. Numbers-wise, you'd need 2.5kg of limestone, 900ml of water, and about .62 kilowatt-hours (net) of electricity to make a liter of methanol, plus a fair amount of oxygen. Let's see, the limestone gets recycled, water is cheap, and that much electricity would cost a little over a penny if you don't necessarily need it 24/7. That works out to about 5 cents a gallon...clearly too good to be true. What am I missing here?

How does that old saying go?

2005-06-20T10:51:00.000-07:00

As happy as a puppy with ...

On Calories

2005-05-10T10:01:00.000-07:00

So the other weekend I moved around 8,000 lbs. (about 3 and a half tonnes for you metric types) of broken concrete and building materials, by hand, onto (and subsequently off of) a flatbed truck. Figuring that the truck bed was about a meter off the ground, I wanted to figure out how many calories I'd burned simply lifting the stuff up there. So we're talking mgh, or around 34,300 Joules. How many food (kilo) calories is that? Yup. A hair over eight. Eight?! That's only a couple more calories than are involved in giving a someone blow job. I draw several conclusions from this:

The human body is enormously inefficient
The marginal rate at which you burn calories working your ass off isn't that high. In other words, you're better off sitting on your ass and eating less from a calorie-balance standpoint.
Heat energy is pretty concentrated, if only you could harness it at greater than Carnot efficiencies (note to C-minus physics students: you can't). We're talking enough energy to imperceptibly heat about ten pounds of water.
Maybe that's why heating our homes takes so much damn energy
Insulation is a good idea

Discuss.

Baby Name Wizard

2005-05-03T10:20:00.000-07:00

This is very cool. Not that I'm planning on naming any babies any time soon. But it's a really slick way of visualizing phenomena like the Great Jeremy Boom of the 1970s, and the steady erosion of my own name's slice of the baby pie.

HOWTO Build Your Own Bicycle Rotisserie: Part II

2005-04-26T22:35:00.000-07:00

In Part I I discussed the inspiration for the bicycle rotisserie and laid out a bill of materials. Now we get down to the nitty gritty of actually building the thing. So without further ado… The first thing you need to do is pick a master bike and a slave bike. The slave bike doesn't need to have a functioning chain or sprocket setup, or a rear wheel. So pick whichever one has a nicer chain, sprocket, and dérailleur to be the master bike and remove its shifters from the handlebars. Next, remove the front forks from the bicycles. The way to do this varies from model to model, but typically there is a small allen-bolt in the center of the top of the fork tube, which you unscrew. This releases the tension from a small wedge mechanism that keeps the handlebars and fork together. With this bolt loose, you should be able to remove the handlebars and fork from the bicycle. Sometimes a gentle tap on the protruding bolt head helps unstick things. You'll also want to remove the seats from bicycles and the seatpost from the seat itself. The seatpost is usually held to the bike with a small pinch bolt, or with a quick-release fitting, depending how fancy a bicycle you're dealing with. Loosen the bolt or quick release and pull up on the seat. This may require a bit of coaxing, twisting, or WD-40 to accomplish. The seat itself is usually also held on with some kind of pinch bolt, which should let go of the seatpost when loosened. If you're lucky, the top of the seatpost will nest nicely inside the spit you've acquired. To allow for easy removal of the spit from the rest of the contraption, I used the seatpost ends to allow the spit to be unbolted. Basically this involved inserting the end of the seat tube into the spit and drilling a 1/4" hole through both. Later I inserted the 1/4-20 bolts in this hole and fastened it with the nuts. Next you'll want to cut the tops of the seat posts off so that only an inch or so of full-diameter tubing remains. You'll also want to cut off the pedal crank on the chainring side of the bottom bracket and weld the stub onto the chainring where the crank used to be. Putting some effort into getting it welded on perpendicularly will pay off later, but it doesn't need to be absolutely perfect. The remainder of the seatpost needs to be welded onto something that will give the bicycle firm footing when placed upside-down. I used an 18" section of square tubing welded crosswise onto the end of each seatpost. Once this is welded up you can re-insert the seatpost. Ideally you'll want the seattube and downtube on each bicycle to form and isosceles triangle with the ground, but you can vary the height somewhat by using the built-in seat-height adjustment. You need to find a suitable motor to power the thing. In my case I was able to visit the local recycled building materials place and pick up a used blower motor for $5. You want a single phase 120V induction motor with a rating of around 1/3rd horsepower (250W) and a speed of around 1500RPM (a 2-pole motor). A small pulley might be helpful, but I got away with just using the shaft of the motor to drive the belt with a little stick stuck through a hole that happened to be in the end of it. You'll need a fairly long belt (around 10ft/3m) to go around the rear wheel (from which you'll need to remove the tire and innertube. What worked for me was a length of surgical rubber tubing (available, oddly enough, from fishing supply stores). To make it into a loop I just stuffed one end inside the other and super glued it. Amazingly, it held for the duration of the cooking event. About the only thing left to do to the bikes is to defeat the freewheel and lock the chain tensioner in an appropriate position. You'll be turning the wheel in reverse, and driving the wheel rather than the pedals. This is a sort of double negative that means the freewheel doesn't really come into play. But the meat you're cooking is rarely perfectly balanced, so it'll want to lurch forward once every rotation unless you lock out the freewheel. This is as simple as running some wire around one of the sprockets and through the spokes. The chain tensioner doesn't work right when driving things backwards, so you'll want to lock it out as well, which can likewise be accomplished with some creatively placed wire. At this point you'll be ready for a dry run, followed by the actual cooking event. Stay tuned for Part III.

HOWTO Build Your Own Bicycle Rotisserie: Part I

2005-04-15T14:41:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago one of my good friends married a very nice young lady at a lovely ceremony in his back yard. Dan is Jewish and wanted to have a kosher wedding feast, which meant, among other things, that food had to be prepared at the house (well, strictly speaking, any kosher kitchen, but those aren't very common outside the Jewish community). I'll let Dan explain:

When Dan's parents first moved to Fargo, ND, they celebrated their new home by roasting a whole sheep--a gift from the NDSU agriculture department--behind the house. Dan loves the pictures of this event, and is only sorry that he was too young to appreciate it. To compensate, he'll be re-enacting the affair, roasting a whole kosher lamb (actually, six forequarters of lamb).

Anyway, we needed some way of actually roasting said lamb parts. I should say Dan needed some way of roasting said lamb parts, but he's quite good at getting other people to do work for him. Real management material, that Dan… So in any case I was charged with the responsibility to devise a device to roast eight 20-pound forequarters of lamb on the wedding day. No pressure… Now the first thing any sensible engineer would think is "outsource." Not as in rent-a-coder outsourcing, but as in "buy something off-the-shelf that will work." But it turns out the only thing really commercially available is a pig roaster, which just doesn't quite cut the mustard in the kosher department. It also carried something like a $150 per day rental fee. So the next thing any sensible engineer would think of is "improvise." Any improvisation, however, would have to have a relatively low likelihood of resulting in catastrophic collapse, since we're talking about the main dish here. I don't remember the exact thought process, but somehow I hit upon using a couple of old bicycle frames to do the heavy lifting, as it were, in building the rotisserie. It turns out to be a relatively ideal solution in case you need to crank out a sturdy rotisserie in your spare time given a month or so to prepare. The advantages of this approach are manifold, but primarily they are:

The bottom bracket is designed for a heavy-duty offset load
You get built-in gearing (or as my friend Craig would say, "it come widdit"). If you run a belt around the rim of the rear wheel, you get an even greater gear-down.
The seat posts allow for height adjustment
Useless old bicycles are available nearly free of charge

What you'll end up with is both bicycles upside-down, resting on the fork and the seatpost (with a little "foot" attached). The spit will run from one bicycle's bottom bracket to the other's, and one of the bikes will have a belt driving it's wheel (sans tire), which will in turn drive the spit using the bike's chain. So here's what you need:

Two bicycles of roughly the same (preferably small) size, and permission from the owner to render them useless (as bicycles anyway). I used a couple of Murray kids' mountain bike frames
A spit -- one-inch-diameter (preferably stainless) steel is ideal, with a wall thickness around 1 - 1.5 millimeters
A few scraps of steel, such as tubing, I-beams, or angle iron
A hacksaw or reciprocating saw with a metal-cutting blade
A welder and associated paraphernalia
A drill with a 1/4-inch bit
A pair of 1 1/2-inch 1/4-20 bolts with nuts and washers
Fire!! Fire!! heheheh

Now that I've teased you with the ingredients, I'm going to end Part I. In Part II I'll talk about how to put the thing together, and in Part III discuss the actual logistics of cooking with it.

Product Idea: GPS Business Trip Logger

2005-04-08T21:26:00.000-07:00

This is something my dad asked about as a potential birthday gift, and I haven't found anything out there that meets the criteria for what he wants. My dad, like many people that do a lot of driving on business, needs to keep track of how many miles he drives on business-related trips. In the U.S., you can deduct most business-related trips at something like 35 cents per mile driven. Typically the first and last trip of the day (i.e. driving from home to the job site and from the job site back home) aren't deductible, but the intervening trips are (with the obvious exceptions of non-business meals and personal errands). The IRS isn't satisfied with a total mileage in the event of an audit. Rather, they expect the starting and ending odometer reading for each trip to make their job possible in such an event. There are a couple of solutions that exist for this sort of thing, but none that are entirely satisfactory. The simplest is to keep a little notebook in the car, and before each trip mark down the starting and ending odometer reading. This isn't particularly difficult, but it's quite easy to forget, and something that you're likely to forego entirely when you're in a hurry. Another possible solution (one that I did a bit of work on a few years ago) is something like the Davis Instruments CarChip. This is a little device that plugs into your (1997 and later U.S.-spec) car's OBDII port (a little socket under the dashboard that looks like a plastic version of the parallel port on the back of old printers). OBDII stands for On-Board Diagnostics Level II, and it was originally intended for emission-control-related tools to be able to download diagnostic information from the vehicle's ECU (the "brain" that decides when and how much fuel should be injected into the engine, and when to fire the spark plugs, among other things). When a scan tool is plugged into this port it can talk to the ECU using a special serial protocol called J1850 after the SAE specification that specifies it (or ISO-somethingorother on some vehicles). It can ask the vehicle a bunch of questions as defined in another SAE spec (J2178 for those keeping score at home). Among the questions a scan tool can ask the vehicle is "how fast are we going?" The vehicle answers (within 100ms, but typically much faster), "20 miles per hour" (as far as I know they still use customary units). By doing this repeatedly, the CarChip integrates how many miles you've gone (at least I think that's how it works -- there may be some way of directly querying the mileage of the car at any given time). It also has a real-time clock, and it can know when you've turned on and off your car (when it receives or loses power). By putting all these variables together, it can get a pretty good idea of what constitutes a "trip", when it started and ended, and how far you drove. Unfortunately, there's no way to know for sure where you went. What I think would be an ideal solution would be to use a GPS receiver to log where you went. A GPS receiver is very good at telling you what time it is and relatively good at telling you where you are. It can't directly measure when you start and end a trip, but really, that's not what we're concerned with -- We want to know whether you're leaving home, work, or a client's site, and how far you went, and whether its the first or last trip of the day. What I'm picturing is a little dongle you plug into your cigarette lighter (I guess they're calling them "power outlets" these days) that simply records where you went and when. At the end of the month, you take it out of your car, plug it into your computer, and some semi-sophisticated software finds places at which you tend to stop a lot, shows them on a map, and asks you what they are (i.e. "Home," "Work," "Strip Club," etc.). Once that's been established, said software could translate that into trips, and either determine automatically or ask you whether a particular trip was deductible for business purposes. As for how to implement/prototype it, there are relatively affordable Bluetooth™ GPS receivers available. There are also very small computers available with Bluetooth interfaces. One could run a small Linux system that would save all of the waypoint data off to an SD card that you'd plug into your PC and download the data. I'd be interested to hear any alternative ideas for how to approach this.

KCA-420i Experiment/Review

2005-04-05T11:55:00.000-07:00

I recently bought an Alpine KCA-420i iPod adapter from the local Best Buy and an Alpine 9825 CD player (as a closeout from Circuit City) to control it. I don't do a lot of driving during the week, but on weekends I often head up to the Great White North, eh? Radio reception gets pretty crappy between here and Vancouver, especially the NPR station that I know and love. And right now they're doing their spring fund drive, so the iPod feature has gotten a bit of extra use. The good news is that the KCA does what it says. The bad news is that the usability is crap, even if you haven't been spoiled by using an iPod. The reason for this is that the device is essentially a hack — it makes the iPod look like a CD changer to the head unit, and since the iPod is not a CD changer, the usability suffers. Give a literate six-year-old an iPod (better get AppleCare!), and he'll probably figure out how to use it in short order. In fact the UI is so intuitive that the instruction manual that comes with the iPod is basically a waste of paper. I've got a hard-earned Bachelor of Science in Engineering and I couldn't figure out how to get the thing to work without reading the instructions (and let's just say that even if seven languages weren't included in the manual, it'd still be too thick to staple). By far the most infuriating bit is trying to scroll through a selection of songs, artists or albums. The scrolling is done through a little rotary encoder on the faceplate. But no matter how quickly you twist the thing, things scroll by at around 2 lines per second. There are three ways to "search" (read: scroll through at a 2 lines per second) for songs: all playlists, all artists, and all albums. The playlist "search" is more or less usable (more on that later). The other two search modes are strictly emergency-backup material: scrolling through a hundred artists at 2 lines per second while driving is an invitation to having a horrible accident. Same goes for albums. And both are made worse if some or all of your library is downloaded (legally or otherwise) rather than ripped from CD. When you go into an artist playlist, the songs come through in one big array, ordered by album and track number, so if you have a few hundred tracks by one artist, it's still a PITA. To their credit, Alpine acknowledges the above and recommends making all songs accessible through a playlist. I could do smart playlists by genre, but I'd end up with around four slightly less useless playlists ("Electronic," "Alternative" and "Rock," plus "Everything Else"). Instead I've decided to create eight (point one) playlists that are alpha by artist, then album, then track number (think telephone keypad). I'm not sure if this solves much, but I'll get back to you in about a week after I've had some time to try it out. In any case, there's a glaring business opportunity for some boutique car stereo manufacturer to improve on this. I picture a nice fat rotary encoder (maybe the force-feedback one I proposed on halfbakery.com), an FM tuner chip, a bitmap LCD display that doesn't suck (IOW, not like the 9825's), and an optional amp (since quite a few high-end audio types use discrete stuff nowadays). That and either an iPod dock on the front of the thing or a cable to run into the glovebox. The iPod remote protocol has been reverse engineered and in any case you could probably get it from Apple if you look like a perfectly legitimate enterprise. This is the sort of thing you could program a Gumstix to do. Why not leave out the iPod altogether? Well, first off you need a way to get the music from your (friend's) CDs or the internets onto your car stereo. Secondly, you can take your iPod with you (both to keep it from being stolen or to listen to music whereever you've driven to). Third so that you can buy from the largest online retailer of digital music and not have to commit a felony to listen to your music on the road. Another thought was why not "remanufacture" an iPod into a detachable-face-plate-like-thingy with more car-oriented controls? But in the end most people spend a fair amount of time listening to radio in their car, so unless you can come up with a good way of making an iPod control an FM tuner, I think it's a lousy idea.

Yes, I am a Geek

2005-03-31T18:11:00.000-08:00

So it turns out if you type: sudo nvram boot-args="-v" ...in a Mac OS X Terminal prompt, it'll replace that ugly Apple logo with a bunch of pretty text, for example a copyright notice from the Regents of the University of California. Hmm, that'd be fun to do to my Mom's iBook...

Ahem

2005-03-31T17:46:00.000-08:00

Testing...1...2...3... Is this thing on?