Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. (c) Ruffin Bailey 2001-2018

Sometimes, it takes me a while to catch up. Very rarely does a paradigm shift without some firmly established entity benefiting, rarely is it one single entity, and very rarely are all of the entities blatantly obvious when the shift is first noticed.

That said, who stands to gain from so-called "plug-in" automobiles -- ones that drivers can recharge at home -- should have been much more obvious to me. This from treehugger.com is a good explanation of what finally tipped me off:

A new study by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory looked at the impact that plug-in hybrids (and indirectly, electric cars) might have on the US electricity grid in the next few decades. They found that, as they say, timing is everything: If the cars were recharged after 10 P.M. there might not be a need for new power plants (in their 'high-demand' scenario, 8 new plants are required).

I mean, I realized that energy consumption at night is really low. Where I grew up, we had a hydro-dam-generator that the local utility used to brag could cover all of our town's energy needs during the night. I've also bumped into stories about people who sell their nighttime bandwidth because they're paying for the speed of the connection, not the number of bytes served, and at [their local] night they don't do much traffic.

Still, what I didn't realize was what plug-in car batteries do is move the energy demand for all of that battery-powered driving time (looks like about 20-40 miles per car with what they're making now) to the night, when power companies are vomiting unused generating capacity. To them, nighttime now means wasted resources and lost profits. Add plug-in autos and, without spending a dime on new construction, they have only to ramp up energy production and night and *boom*, they get a free, giant new market thanks to [ostensibly] the price of oil. (Ostensibly because of the price of oil? I mean, let's face it, if you think that "gas" via your electric outlet is going to be that much less expensive than fueling it with octane, you're crazy. Plug-ins are about shifting who gets the cash to power our cars, not about how much cash there is in the market. I hope I'm wrong, but on the consumer end, the motivation is going to be solely convenience. If you could get 100 miles per week stopping at the convenience store that is your home, you'd do it, right?)

The upshot is that once plug-ins happen on a widespread basis, until the grid does show serious strain, electricity prices should (ie, have no good reason short of profit not to) stay low. I wonder if they will. And when most folk plug in their cars at 6pm, watch out that these new energy consumers don't drive up the price of energy even more than it already has, lots like using corn for ethanol kicked hungry folk in the kneecaps. (Huh? Who'd've thought that ethanol could starve our citizens! Thanks, Congress.) Are we really all going to put light timers on the outlet so that the power only kicks in after 10pm?

I feel some legislation coming on.

Labels: car, energy, government, Other Stuff

From another article by Tom Philpott at Grist:

The price of diesel fuel -- which keeps those food-stuffed refrigerated 18-wheelers thundering down the highway -- has more than tripled since 2002. Corn and soy continue to trade at rates unimaginable just three years ago.
...
No company leveraged the cheap fuel/input/labor tripod to reach greater heights than Wal-Mart. The retail giant stocked its first grocery shelves at a Missouri "supercenter" less than 20 years ago. Today, Wal-Mart takes in 21 cents of every food dollar spent in the United States, Paul Roberts reports in his new book The End of Food -- far more than any other supermarket chain.

Philpott's lesson here is that Wal-Mart's move away the global food market, largely buying food from China, apparently, to their recent push to local growers is fueled (apologies for pun) by the price of diesel. I've anecdotally seen this shift; the local news was playing up how wonderful Wal-Mart was for using local farmers and putting out signs about it in their stores, with no mention about why Wal-Mart might be doing it, get this, to save themselves money! Crazy. I don't fault Wal-Mart for wanting to make hats on hats of money, but I do for the local news for allowing the implied motivation for the swap to be Wal-Mart's altruism for local farmers. From news to informercial in six seconds or less, brought to you by channel 4.

But the lesson I pull from Philpott is that the brilliant academics have made foodstuffs do too much stuffs. These same brilliant minds didn't stop when they brought us blood from a turnip -- I mean, sweetener from industrialized corn production -- and went on to make gasoline from corn and soy, the two crops Philpott blames by name in this article for much of the increased price of food. Food fueling our cars and our bodies may have been one value-added proposition too many.

I realize there are more reasons corn and soy are more expensive than ethanol competition, and that the line I'm spouting here doesn't resemble news. All I'd like to foreground is that value-added crops are not necessarily always a good thing. The value-added products can decrease the biomass' traditional primary purpose: allowing us to eat affordably. Before ethanol-directed research, there was a huge barrier to entry for turning people fuel into vehicle fuel. Having forever lifted the barrier, we're stuck with more things competing for our prospective biomass. Put another way, we now compete with our own cars (or our neighbors' cars) for our corn flakes, and that's not obviously a very good thing.

(Action items? Ensure that wheat ethanol doesn't gain traction? Not sure.)

EDIT: As always, someone at wikipedia has beaten me to the punch.

Labels: food, Other Stuff, wal marts

title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude.	descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001.
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Friday, July 25, 2008
TUAW.com says no Apple tablet I believe we have a winner. If Apple made a table laptop now -- and end up betting any part of the farm on its success -- they're done. A Mac tablet? Not just no, but 'heck no' - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW): Not only is it insulting [to suggest that artists will use Apple tablets if it's released], but it's bull-effin'-puckey. Has Cringely even used a tablet to design something? Designers would all be at home in a week with neck-strain and RSI. Moreover, I'd reckon that without a keyboard, designers' ability to precisely control the position of objects (in software like Illustrator or InDesign, for example) would be seriously hamstrung. posted by ruffin at 7/25/2008 05:35:00 PM
0 comments
Another virtual rare book room closes its doors From Macworld \| Yahoo: Burn your DRMed tracks to CD now: On Sept. 30, Yahoo will shut down the servers that are needed to reauthorize music purchased from its failed Unlimited Music Store if it is transferred to a new PC, Yahoo said in an e-mail to customers. Re-authorization is also needed if someone upgrades their PC's operating system. The only workaround for customers wanting to listen to their music on a new or upgraded computer after this date is to burn the tracks to a CD and then reload them on a PC. ... The EFF has warned for years about the consquences for consumers when vendors decide to withdraw their support for DRM-encoded music, McSherry wrote. posted by ruffin at 7/25/2008 10:58:00 AM
0 comments
Drive all day, refuel all night; the coal industry thanks you Sometimes, it takes me a while to catch up. Very rarely does a paradigm shift without some firmly established entity benefiting, rarely is it one single entity, and very rarely are all of the entities blatantly obvious when the shift is first noticed. That said, who stands to gain from so-called "plug-in" automobiles -- ones that drivers can recharge at home -- should have been much more obvious to me. This from treehugger.com is a good explanation of what finally tipped me off: A new study by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory looked at the impact that plug-in hybrids (and indirectly, electric cars) might have on the US electricity grid in the next few decades. They found that, as they say, timing is everything: If the cars were recharged after 10 P.M. there might not be a need for new power plants (in their 'high-demand' scenario, 8 new plants are required). I mean, I realized that energy consumption at night is really low. Where I grew up, we had a hydro-dam-generator that the local utility used to brag could cover all of our town's energy needs during the night. I've also bumped into stories about people who sell their nighttime bandwidth because they're paying for the speed of the connection, not the number of bytes served, and at [their local] night they don't do much traffic. Still, what I didn't realize was what plug-in car batteries do is move the energy demand for all of that battery-powered driving time (looks like about 20-40 miles per car with what they're making now) to the night, when power companies are vomiting unused generating capacity. To them, nighttime now means wasted resources and lost profits. Add plug-in autos and, without spending a dime on new construction, they have only to ramp up energy production and night and boom, they get a free, giant new market thanks to [ostensibly] the price of oil. (Ostensibly because of the price of oil? I mean, let's face it, if you think that "gas" via your electric outlet is going to be that much less expensive than fueling it with octane, you're crazy. Plug-ins are about shifting who gets the cash to power our cars, not about how much cash there is in the market. I hope I'm wrong, but on the consumer end, the motivation is going to be solely convenience. If you could get 100 miles per week stopping at the convenience store that is your home, you'd do it, right?) The upshot is that once plug-ins happen on a widespread basis, until the grid does show serious strain, electricity prices should (ie, have no good reason short of profit not to) stay low. I wonder if they will. And when most folk plug in their cars at 6pm, watch out that these new energy consumers don't drive up the price of energy even more than it already has, lots like using corn for ethanol kicked hungry folk in the kneecaps. (Huh? Who'd've thought that ethanol could starve our citizens! Thanks, Congress.) Are we really all going to put light timers on the outlet so that the power only kicks in after 10pm? I feel some legislation coming on. Labels: car, energy, government, Other Stuff posted by ruffin at 7/25/2008 10:29:00 AM
0 comments
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
GPU as your CPU An obvious idea: As they point out, if you have a computer with either an ATI or nVidia graphics card, chances are you have more than 100 microprocessor cores waiting for use. While these cores have been optimized to deliver high performance graphics for games and video, there's an effort to harness these processors for general use. Always wondered how long before this sort of thing happened. It's not like that processing power is doing much when you ain't playing Doom 3. Anybody familiar with the way the Atari Jaguar works/ed should have seen this one coming. posted by ruffin at 7/22/2008 08:40:00 PM
0 comments
Saturday, July 19, 2008
OOXML, not exactly easily accessible I was surprised to see that a plain word document compressed more a relatively equal sized OOXML file when zipping them. I'd expected OOXML to be, well, XML. Text usually compresses a lot more than proprietary stuff, even something as inefficient as .doc. `adding: OOXML.docx (deflated 22%) adding: wordDoc.doc (deflated 89%)` Opening up the docx file showed that it wasn't anything like XML. Turns out there was a reason for that. C#, docx - .NET C#: Docx files are not xml. They are zip files that contain the xml files. To open them and manipulate their contents, the OP will want to look at the System.IO.Packaging namepsace from .NET 3.0 and above. Great. Well, off to google "OOXML to XML" converters. posted by ruffin at 7/19/2008 09:44:00 PM
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Google and iPhone From ZDNet's Googling Google, Google’s iPhone app is really good: I would argue that this app gives you a more integrated search experience, and I can see why they did it. Here is a YouTube video showing the app in action. What do you think? I think we need more product placement, please. Good heavens, everything from ESPN to Kripy Kreme to Cosco. I know we all love Google for its unobtrusive ads, but the scrolling ticket of advert buttons is pretty danged annoying. Seriously, how much do you have to pay to be part of the Google video? Google's nice and relatively open with their APIs. I really like that gmail will do POP and SMTP without adverts. Still, they're moving away from "don't do evil" and over to "don't be so evil in your pursuit of hats of cash that you become gaudy." Labels: apple, Google, iphone posted by ruffin at 7/19/2008 08:55:00 AM
0 comments
Friday, July 18, 2008
ODF vs. OOXML The battle over office doc formats interests me a bit, and I was surprised to see ODF mentioned alongside OOXML as part of Apple's pitch for UNIX Certification in Leopard. Those really aren't exactly related, are they? # UNIX Certification Mac OS X is now a fully certified UNIX operating system, conforming to both the Single UNIX Specification (SUSv3) and POSIX 1003.1. Deploy Leopard in environments that demand full UNIX conformance and enjoy expanded support for open standards popular in the UNIX community such as the OASIS Open Document Format (ODF) or ECMA’s Office XML. I've read a bit about Microsoft leaving the door open on closing the OOXML standard in the future, but haven't quite seen if that's the case with ODF as well. I've only just put my toe in the water here, though. Massachusetts' attempt to swap from .doc and other, unpoliced formats to ODF does seem to have been ill-conceived. By saying that, I don't mean that Massachusetts' desire to escape vendor tie-in and to ensure that their public gov't docs would continue to be accessible in the future aren't absolutely essential goals for democratic governments. Rather, I'm not sure ODF was the right horse to back in the race. Is there a reason xhtml isn't better suited? posted by ruffin at 7/18/2008 09:20:00 PM
0 comments
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Why is your car eating your corn flakes? From another article by Tom Philpott at Grist: The price of diesel fuel -- which keeps those food-stuffed refrigerated 18-wheelers thundering down the highway -- has more than tripled since 2002. Corn and soy continue to trade at rates unimaginable just three years ago. ... No company leveraged the cheap fuel/input/labor tripod to reach greater heights than Wal-Mart. The retail giant stocked its first grocery shelves at a Missouri "supercenter" less than 20 years ago. Today, Wal-Mart takes in 21 cents of every food dollar spent in the United States, Paul Roberts reports in his new book The End of Food -- far more than any other supermarket chain. Philpott's lesson here is that Wal-Mart's move away the global food market, largely buying food from China, apparently, to their recent push to local growers is fueled (apologies for pun) by the price of diesel. I've anecdotally seen this shift; the local news was playing up how wonderful Wal-Mart was for using local farmers and putting out signs about it in their stores, with no mention about why Wal-Mart might be doing it, get this, to save themselves money! Crazy. I don't fault Wal-Mart for wanting to make hats on hats of money, but I do for the local news for allowing the implied motivation for the swap to be Wal-Mart's altruism for local farmers. From news to informercial in six seconds or less, brought to you by channel 4. But the lesson I pull from Philpott is that the brilliant academics have made foodstuffs do too much stuffs. These same brilliant minds didn't stop when they brought us blood from a turnip -- I mean, sweetener from industrialized corn production -- and went on to make gasoline from corn and soy, the two crops Philpott blames by name in this article for much of the increased price of food. Food fueling our cars and our bodies may have been one value-added proposition too many. I realize there are more reasons corn and soy are more expensive than ethanol competition, and that the line I'm spouting here doesn't resemble news. All I'd like to foreground is that value-added crops are not necessarily always a good thing. The value-added products can decrease the biomass' traditional primary purpose: allowing us to eat affordably. Before ethanol-directed research, there was a huge barrier to entry for turning people fuel into vehicle fuel. Having forever lifted the barrier, we're stuck with more things competing for our prospective biomass. Put another way, we now compete with our own cars (or our neighbors' cars) for our corn flakes, and that's not obviously a very good thing. (Action items? Ensure that wheat ethanol doesn't gain traction? Not sure.) EDIT: As always, someone at wikipedia has beaten me to the punch. Labels: food, Other Stuff, wal marts posted by ruffin at 7/13/2008 11:30:00 AM
0 comments
Thursday, July 10, 2008
VIm php indenting fix Thank freakin' heavens. I was able to go MAD. new php auto indent - vim_use \| Google Groups: "I do a lot of php work and have recently found that I'm getting new indents where I didn't before and, worse for me, when I switch out of php with a ?> and go to a new line to enter some html the indent drops to the start of the line where it used to stay at the same indent level." Follow the link and find an answer. Labels: vim posted by ruffin at 7/10/2008 03:26:00 PM
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Making the Vostro close without sleeping Which "on close lid" settings to change?? - Vista Forums: "Windows has power settings at 'Control Panel > Hardware and SOund > Power Options > System Settings' for setting the 'when i close the lid' action. I set this to 'Sleep'." posted by ruffin at 7/10/2008 01:24:00 PM
0 comments
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
Music distribution approaches (already was) GPL-ish I'm going to go out on a limb and say that music distribution services are essentially in the same position as Red Hat. They can't really sell any digital good that's their unique content. All they can really do is support its use and integration with hardware they also sell. I've said before that the reason I go to iTunes' or Amazon's mp3 stores is because it's essentially worth a buck not to have to search for a particular tune. In my case, "search" means look for, order, and wait for a used CD to come in. In other cases, it's probably the time to fire up Limewire or whatever the kids are using now, and find a copy of a song with a bit rate high enough to be worth listening to -- or maybe to go next door and rip their suitemate's CD. There's no real way to protect the music anymore, the same way Red Hat, etc, can't protect the changes they make to Linux. All you can do is provide superior service and hardware integration. Labels: DRM, licensing, online distribution posted by ruffin at 7/09/2008 01:01:00 PM
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Monday, July 07, 2008
New Mac Mini NOW please Oh, for crimminy's sake. When is the new Mac Mini coming, already? It's been 336 days since the last update. I mean heck, give me a slightly faster Core 2 Duo, anything! Been using mine, a 1.25 GHz G4 with a gig of RAM, for programming (curiously enough) this week, and I'm ready for a faster machine with more memory. Most affordable way to do that, grab 10.5 with iLife, and have a Mactel for iPhone and iPod Touch dev fun is to bag a Mini. Where is it, already? (And please, don't kill it because I'm complaining. ;^D) posted by ruffin at 7/07/2008 11:49:00 PM
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Saturday, July 05, 2008
NVu/Kompozer Stand-in for Firefox 3 In April, I complained that I could no longer paste from Firefox 3.0 to NVu, and least not with the pages' formatting intact. The ability to do so was far and away my favorite and most used feature in NVu. If I was on a Mac, Safari would cut and paste formatting into other WebKit apps, like Mail, and the two engines had distinct presences on my Mac. Now, Firefox's usefulness dropped. On the Mini, I didn't install 3.0 for that reason. Well, that and it's lots slower, so noticably so I often wonder if I shouldn't go back. Well, the way to fix this was either to use Seamonkey when I needed to cut and paste with formatting, or to create this page. If you nav there, you can start using Firefox as editor and then save your changes using that `document.designMode='on';` trick I discussed earlier. I'll probably put it in the links section at the top of the blog too, just for laughs. Labels: firefox, html posted by ruffin at 7/05/2008 11:57:00 AM
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Friday, July 04, 2008
Note to Self: PHP: error_reporting - Manual PHP: error_reporting - Manual: "//�Report�all�PHP�errors error_reporting(E_ALL);" posted by ruffin at 7/04/2008 08:17:00 PM
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Note to self: Turning off inline pdf viewing in Safari on Tiger [Archive] - The macosxhints Forums Turning off inline pdf viewing in Safari on Tiger [Archive] - The macosxhints Forums: `defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitOmitPDFSupport -bool YES` posted by ruffin at 7/04/2008 05:17:00 PM
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Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Touching the MacBook Air Finally got my hands on a MacBook Air. Very light. It feels pretty strong when the cover is closed, but I'd probably still be worried carrying it in a bag, as I've had an iBook warp so badly I had to return it and it felt pretty tough too. Still, the Air is feather light, even compared to my 12" iBook G4. I can see how someone might want to use it as their office-to-office machine to look especially k3wl. There is an impression factor there that's hard to resist. When I played around with the apps. though, I didn't get knocked out of my socks the way I recall being even using a G5. Safari started up almost instantly, but iPhoto, even with just over a thousand photos on the test model, wasn't quite so quickly. Alt-tabbing around felt kind of slow as well, which is surprising seeing how I'm using two G4s at home with 10.4. It's a good thing Snow Leopard is concentrating on getting the OS solid and fast; it needs it. When I was setting up an Xserve G5, I remember being absolutely blown away. Same with some Intel iMacs running 10.4, truth be told. The Air didn't do it. I wonder if the mini Core Duo isn't simply underclocked, relatively speaking. It's only 1.6 to 1.8 GHz. (As an aside, this makes me even more sure of my decision to wait on going Mactel until the Mini's updated, if it's ever updated. 1.83-2.0 GHz is too slow to spring now.) Still, the Air is a very nice shape, and aside from the processor speed, doesn't seem to make any compromises where it counts. The screen was pretty nice and the keyboard/trackpad were absolutely excellent. And the weight was a bigger plus than I would have expected. If I were, say, an author or recreational user with too much money to spend, I'd be all over it. Labels: apple, macbook posted by ruffin at 7/02/2008 09:28:00 AM
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