Biofuel Station in Eugene

We are excited about the Sequential Biofuel station opening up in Eugene this weekend. We drive a biofueled VW Beetle and previous to the station we had two 3-hour windows a week to fuel up from a mobile gas station (a truck). It was a cool experience knowing it was the early days of alternative fueling and there was a sense of commraderie as we waited in the line filled with lots of old Mercedes, VW TDIs and big Ford and Dodge trucks. We always meant to take pictures of it but never did.



The station is way cool. It used to be an old gas station and the Sequential people spent the good part of year doing environmental clean up on it. They are using solar energy for the store and have a green roof. The will be selling local produce and foods including treats from Sweet Life which is an incredible local bakery that can make anything vegan.

The grand opening is on Saturday and I will try and make it down and take some pictures.

Team Fortress 2

Here is a video showing the upcoming game from Valve "Team Fortress 2". Recently John Carmack said that graphic quality has kind of reached an apex and what will be important now is game design (I maintain that design is always the key to a good game - look at games like Tetris and Pac Man). This video shows this principle at work. There have been hundreds of first person shooter games and this one has taken the design in a new direction. Very cool.

The ZA Show

Irie Woman recently turned me on to a really good podcast called The ZA Show.

The ZA (pronounced "Zed Eh") Show is a couple who live in Cape Town, South Africa podcasting about their city, country and their lives there. Because I was born in South Africa this show holds particular interest for me, but I'd say everyone would enjoy it. There are a lot negative perceptions of South Africa and Glen and Bridgitte do their best to give a perspective of what it's really like. Listening to their accent makes me think of my family and my youth.

Irie and I went there a couple of years ago and loved it. We especially enjoyed Cape Town and think of it as one of the coolest cities on the planet. Check out some pictures from that trip. Notice how gorgeous Cape Town is.

If you're new to podcasting, the ZA Show is good place to start and if you're already into it, this would make a great addition to the shows you listen to. We just went on a long road trip and quite a few of those hours were spent listening to podcasts.

Blog Stuff

A couple of new things about my blog:

I've added a little section on the right called "What I'm Reading" and I'll try and keep that current as well as posting my thoughts on each book when I'm done reading it.

The other thing I'm going to do is post about the city I live in: Eugene, Oregon. I love the Northwest so I'll share my thoughts and news about Eugene, about Oregon and about the Northwest.

I'm waiting for the blogger.com upgrade to filter down to my account and then I'll be able to categorize (tag) each post which will be nice.

The Golden Spruce

I just finished reading The Golden Spruce. It's a true story about a one of kind Sitka Spruce on the West Coast of Canada that had golden leaves. This tree had religious and cultural meaning to a local indigenous tribe, the Haida, as well as been a member of the ever shrinking club of old growth forest. It was also revered by all local people and tourists alike.

The story is about an ex-logger turned activist (and perhaps crazy) who ended up cutting down the Golden Spruce as an act of protest. This story gives the author room to riff on various subjects such as the history of logging and the coming of the white man to the Pacific Northwest and he does an excellent job of it. I have a new understanding of the logging industry and when we were driving through the Cascades yesterday I was seeing the trees and clear cuts in a new way. I highly recommend this book.

Bush Admits that Saddam Had Nothing to do With 9/11

This is from today:



Of course he tries to get off on the technicality that he never said that Saddam "ordered the attacks".

This video is painful. There have been so many lies and revisions about the reasons for invading Iraq and it shows. You can see the "lie" wheels turning as he stumbles about.

Update: This is a really good article on this press conference. I especially like that part about how Bush doesn't really seem to understand what "strategy" means. He confuses strategy with objectives. Here is an excerpt:

"As for Iraq, it's no news that Bush has no strategy. What did come as news—and, really, a bit of a shocker—is that he doesn't seem to know what "strategy" means.

Asked if it might be time for a new strategy in Iraq, given the unceasing rise in casualties and chaos, Bush replied, "The strategy is to help the Iraqi people achieve their objectives and dreams, which is a democratic society. That's the strategy. … Either you say, 'It's important we stay there and get it done,' or we leave. We're not leaving, so long as I'm the president."

The reporter followed up, "Sir, that's not really the question. The strategy—"

Bush interrupted, "Sounded like the question to me."

First, it's not clear that the Iraqi people want a "democratic society" in the Western sense. Second, and more to the point, "helping Iraqis achieve a democratic society" may be a strategic objective, but it's not a strategy—any more than "ending poverty" or "going to the moon" is a strategy.

Strategy involves how to achieve one's objectives—or, as the great British strategist B.H. Liddell Hart put it, "the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy." These are the issues that Bush refuses to address publicly—what means and resources are to be applied, in what way, at what risk, and to what end, in pursuing his policy. Instead, he reduces everything to two options: "Cut and run" or, "Stay the course." It's as if there's nothing in between, no alternative way of applying military means. Could it be that he doesn't grasp the distinction between an "objective" and a "strategy," and so doesn't see that there might be alternatives? Might our situation be that grim?"

Pres.ide.nt 2.0

I found this list of web 2.0 parody logos. Very entertaining. Below is an example:

My Friend Paul

Paul is life long activist who lives in Washington DC. He's there mixing it up with the Federal Government to help make the world a better place. In this picture he's giving a speech in Japan at a Hiroshima Workshop. He was in Japan for the 61st anniversary of the nuclear bomb being dropped giving speeches and workshops. What a star!

You can follow what Paul is up to by subscribing to The Peace Blog.

Update: Here is a post on The Peace Blog that has Paul's Hiroshima speech. You'll see Paul in the picture at the front of the march. These are the last words of the speech:

There is a light at the end of the tunnel. There are fewer countries than ever before seeking nuclear weapons. Let’s continue to work together as a world community towards nuclear abolition.

I am Japanese, you are American, we are one for peace.

NSA eavesdropping program ruled unconstitutional

A Federal judged has ruled the NSA eavesdropping program unconstitutional and ordered it to be ended immediately.

From the article:

She further declared that the program "violates the separation of powers doctrine, the Administrative Procedures Act, the First and Fourth amendments to the United States Constitution, the FISA and Title III." She went on to say that "The president of the United States ... has undisputedly violated the Fourth in failing to procure judicial orders."

I don't yet understand the implications of this. Does her ruling stand or will there be appeals? How much authority does she have to end this program? We'll see as time goes on. Either way, it's a win for civil liberties.

Update: Great article by an attorney detailing the ruling. He makes a good point that when this very important ruling went down, the "breaking" news on CNN was about the Ramsey murder. He also goes step by step through each part of the ruling and provides a PDF download of it.

And of course the Bush administration denies it.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said the Bush Administration disagrees with the ruling and has appealed.

"We also believe very strongly that the program is lawful," he said in Washington, adding that the program is "reviewed periodically" by lawyers to determine its effectiveness and ensure lawfulness.

Generally, believing you didn't break the law doesn't hold up when a judge rules you did. You have to provide proof, not belief.

The Joys of Working in Information Technology

Well it's 4:42am and I'm sitting on a work conference call to fix a system outage. I've been on this call for over 2 hours now. REMus Sleepus Interuptus. I'm in an on-call rotation where I have to be available 24/7 for one week every third week. I get paid extra money for this. It's a flat rate for the week no matter how many times I get called. Some weeks I don't get called at all but other weeks I do.

I find it amazing that we build computer systems with uptime in mind and we add every kind of redundancy available and yet things break on a regular basis. I think it's just the sheer complexity of the systems and the large number of different hardware and software components involved. Most of the complexity comes from making the systems more secure. As we see with any type of security situation, more security usually means less convenience. And I work for a software security company so we are very diligent about security.

The system we're working on tonight is a website. Just to give you an idea of the complexity, we had members of 8 different technical teams on the call. For one website. 8 teams.

"www" In Website Names

I've been noticing that many of the new Web 2.0 (Digg, Reddit, etc) sites have dropped the "www" convention in their URLs and was wondering what this what all about. Seems to almost a new "style". A good favicon combined with an ultra short precise address and you're good to go these days.



Here is what Wikipedia says about this:

There is no technical reason for a website's name to start with "www"; indeed, the first Web server was at info.cern.ch. The "www" prefix comes from a common convention predating the Web, where an organization's Internet servers are assigned hostnames corresponding to the protocol they serve; for example, many organizations gave their main public Gopher server a name of the form gopher.wherever.edu and named their public FTP server in the form ftp.name.gov. Some organizations extend this convention by using the prefixes "www2", "www3", "www4", etc., for multiple related Web servers.

Update: Someone on Digg gave me a link to this site. It's all about making domains available with both "www" in the name and without.

|Digg This|

Rojo Review

As promised earlier I said I would review Rojo after using it for a few days.

The basic concept is an RSS reader with social features. My review is simple: it does the social stuff well, but the basic RSS reader functionality is currently too flaky for my uses and so I'm still using old the reliable Bloglines.

What Rojo is attempting is probably the reader of the future but they're just not there yet. I've tried other readers as well and so far none have been good enough to get me to switch.

I am using one feature from Rojo however. You see the subscribe button to the right? Yeah that one. If you click that it takes you to Rojo, but it lets you subscribe using any of the major readers.

My Favicon

I created my first favicon which is the little icon in the browser address bar (look up). It's a challenge to make a graphic image that is 16x16 pixels. It could be better, but it does the trick for now.

Credit to Lee Asher for calling me "d5" a few years ago.

Rojo: a social blog reader

I've been using Bloglines for a long time as my blog reader. It stores my blog subscriptions and lets me know when there are new posts to read. There are both online and offline blog readers but I much prefer using the online variety because I can access it from anywhere and my settings are always the same.

I just tried out a new reader called Rojo. Rojo is a blog reader with social functions. In other words, aspects of your personal subscriptions are shared with other users. For example, every single post can be voted on and then the top posts get listed on the front page (like Digg).

You can also "tag" any post. This is handy if you want to "save" it. You can then go back later and sort by your tags and see those posts again. A good use of this would be to have tags like "blog this" or "email to friend" or any category you like. The tags are social as well in that you can search Rojo for posts that have a certain tag. You can also browse the tag cloud.

I'm going to try it out for a while and I'll make a new post with my impressions. One cool thing is that your subscriptions from Bloglines can be exported and then imported into Rojo so you don't have to start from scratch.

More on bicycle brakes

Sheldon Brown is an uber bicycle geek and a foremost expert in fixed gear bikes. With all this talk about fixed gear and braking, Sheldon has chimed in with an article. His conclusion is that learning to use a front brake properly is the best technique for stopping and that brakeless fixies are a bad idea.

Here is an excerpt from the entire article:


Conventional Wisdom

Conventional wisdom says to use both brakes at the same time. This is probably good advice for beginners, who have not yet learned to use their brakes skillfully, but if you don't graduate past this stage, you will never be able to stop as short safely as a cyclist who has learned to use the front brake by itself.

Maximum Deceleration--Panic Stops

The fastest that you can stop any bike of normal wheelbase is to apply the front brake so hard that the rear wheel is just about to lift off the ground. In this situation, the rear brake cannot contribute to stopping power, since it has no traction.

Johnny Marr now the guitarist for Modest Mouse

According to Rollingstone, Johnny Marr (the genius guitarist from The Smiths) is now the guitarist for a band called Modest Mouse. I have to say I'm not a Modest Mouse fan but when this album comes out I'll have to check it out anyway to see what Marr has done.

Fixed Gear Law

There was a recent case in Portland, Oregon of a fixed gear rider (messenger) getting a ticket for not having brakes on her bike. I personally ride a fixed gear but I have front and rear brakes. The case came down to a discussion about brakes.

Here is an article from Cycling News talking about the physics of it.

Fixies outlawed?

By John Stevenson

There's been a bit of hoo-ha in various bike forums around the net in the last few days about a case in Portland, Oregon where a rider was fined for not having a separate brake on her fixed-gear bike. According to bikeportland.org, bike messenger Ayla Holland was ticketed on June 1 and charged with violating Oregon Revised Statute (ORS) 815.280(2)(a) which states:

A bicycle must be equipped with a brake that enables the operator to make the braked wheels skid on dry, level, clean pavement. strong enough to skid tire.

Ms Holland's lawyer Mark Ginsberg attempted to argue that a fixie's transmission constituted a brake. The judge was having none of it, and in his decision said:

"The brake must be a device separate from the musculature of the rider. Take me for instance. I don't have leg muscles as strong as a messenger… how would I stop safely?"

This has led to some rather alarmist talk about the future of fixies. "Will the cops now feel emboldened to go out and ticket everyone on a fixed-gear? Are fixed-gears now essentially illegal? Are fixed-gears truly a public safety hazard?" asks Jonathan Maus in bikeportland.org.

Well, no. The issue here is a badly-written piece of legislation being interpreted by a judge so that it achieves its aims, rather than what the absolute letter of the law says.

A fixed-gear bike with no brakes cannot stop in as short a space as one with a front brake, because only the rear wheel is providing the braking force. As a vehicle on the road, it's therefore clearly less safe.

This is a matter of simple physics. In the third edition of Bicycling Science, David Gordon Wilson demonstrates that the maximum deceleration of a crouched rider on a standard bike (that is, not a recumbent) on a dry road is 0.56g. Try to brake any harder than that and you go over the handlebars, which is the limit condition, as the limit from tyre adhesion of vehicles that don't pitch over (tandems, recumbents and cars) is about 0.8g.

If you brake with only the rear wheel, according to Wilson, the limit is 0.256g, because braking effectively shifts your weight forward, reducing the load on the rear wheel to the point that it skids at that deceleration. Once a tyre is skidding, its braking effectiveness is reduced because you no longer have sticky solid rubber in contact with the road, but a lubricating layer of molten rubber. (Which incidentally demonstrates that the Oregon legislation was written by someone with no clue at all about bikes.)

Therefore, however good a fixie rider is, stopping distance is roughly doubled without a front brake. In practice, it's probably more than that.

In some jurisdictions, better-written laws make this issue moot. In the UK, for example, the law requires a bike to have two independent braking systems. I used to ride a fixie in the winter in the UK, and I knew quite a few fixie riders who dispensed with a rear brake on the grounds that the transmission was a braking system, but I never met anyone daft enough to have just a rear brake.

This judge has clearly decided to ignore the letter of the law in favour of enforcing its obvious intent, that bikes have at least one maximally effective brake. That's the sort of thing judges are handy for: turning idiotically badly-written legislation into rules that make sense in the real world.

All that fixie riders have to do to conform is slap on a front brake; hardly rocket surgery, and a long way from fixies being suddenly illegal. And to fixie riders who are about to reach for the email to defend riding brakeless fixies, I refer you to Cmdr Montgomery Scott: "You canna change the laws of physics!"

A Magical Surprise

As stated before, I lost out on the chance to by a classic antique magic book. After not buying it at Powells, there was my failed attempt to call and buy it. Someone had beat me to it!

That someone was Iriewoman. What a sweet and thoughtful thing to do. She was laughing inside for a week as I talked about regretting not getting it and then it just showed up in the mail a few days ago. She rocks.

The book is interesting because there is no date in it although it says that it is the first American edition. I did some research and found it was first published in 1876 in London and then the first American edition came out in 1881. My research also confirmed that this edition did not have a date in it - kind of strange. So I have a magic book that is 125 years old! I love it.