Gray Watson's Blog -- March 2007

Blogging is a useful way for me to record my thoughts and digital travels every so often. Hope you enjoy my digital stream of consciousness.

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March 30, 2007

Here's a good store for energy efficient products. I just bought 3 of their dryer and exhaust vents to stop the cold air getting in those areas and a Spin-X laundry spinner to drop our drying times. Here's another decent site.
In looking on some green sites I just found the Spin-X spindryer. What a cool device. Instead of using heat (in our case natural gas) and exhausting inside air from a typical dryer, you use high RPM spinning to get a good bit of the water out of the clothes before they go into the dryer. Here's some discussion on the topic.
Your problems: Despite the relative speed of your washing machine, 8 lbs. of wash after being removed from your washing machine, will contain as much as 1/2 gallon of water and soap deposits that the Spindryer can remove. In order to dry that much water, your clothes dryer has to tumble the washing for a considerable period of time, while drying it with hot air. This extended period of drying time costs time and money, not to mention the excessive mineral, soap and detergent deposits that are dried into your clothing.
The Advantages of the Spin-X Spindryer: This Spindryer has a remarkable super speed of 3,300 RPM, and in a short period of time will remove 50% or more of the water and soap deposits left in your clothes by your washing machine. Your clothes are tumbled in the dryer for a short period of time, saving you time and Energy, giving you softer clothing, and saving you money at the same time.
For a while I've been wanted to run ducts to my refrigerator. In the winter I could use outside air to keep things cool and shut down the fridge motor for months. In the summer I could route hot air from the heat exchanger outside instead of heating the house with it. Here's a site which sells equipment for large walk-in type refrigerated rooms. Here's some discussions about what I want: otherpower.com, halfbakery.com.
"Free Cooling" In colder climates, the Freeaire taps into the greatest source of refrigeration ever created: winter. The Freeaire can use cold outside air to cool the space, simply using what Nature has so kindly made available, to give the entire compressor system a winter vacation.
Save Energy. All year long a Freeaire system saves large amounts of electrical energy by running all the refrigeration equipment, condensing fans, compressors, evaporator fans and door heaters for a cooled space only as much as it has to. Using outside air cuts energy use even more drastically.
So I've always wanted to have an underground house. Here's an interesting design for one which incorporated interconnected rounded "igloo" type structures buried. So much of the energy from an aboveground house is wasted heating and cooling the world. A structure wrapped in the earth would have probably use 1/4 of the heating and cooling costs.
Once the metal frame was completely covered, Gunnite concrete was sprayed over the entire interior surface, and trawled smooth. The inside layer was concrete mixed with marble powder to form a smooth white surface . The exterior of the house was covered in a waterproof tar, buried in dry sand and a membrane layer of rubber sheeting was placed over the entire area to act as an umbrella to keep the sand mass dry. The sand mass is crisscrossed with air ducts that circulate warm air from the solariums located at either end of the house. Topsoil was then replaced over top of the membrane, covered with grass seed and gardens and now must be mowed on a regular basis.

March 29, 2007

Interesting. Just found this site which specializes in greywater recycling equipment. They basically take the output from clothes washing, bathroom sinks, and showers (called greywater as opposed to output from kitchen sink and toilets) and recycle it for use in toilets and for irrigation. Why such systems are not mandated for new California construction, I'll never know.
Brac systems can help you save 35% to 40% on your annual water bill, and while saving money, you will also help save the environment and provide a better future for our children and their children to come. With this amount of savings, your Brac Greywater Recycling System pays itself.
"UNESCO has predicted that by 2020 water shortage will be a serious worldwide problem."
So I just got a MacBook Pro and all of a sudden we have multiple Macs in the house and I thought it would be good to share a printer. I went online, did some research and settled on Trendnet's TE100-P21 print server. Man did I make a mistake. After struggling with it for a couple of hours and doing a lot of web searching because the manual is just CRAP, I got it working -- barely adequately. In the morning I decided to look at the price of the Apple Airport Express which is a wireless router, music conduit, and print server. A trip to the Mac store and US$100 later (only ~$35 more than the stupid Trendnet) and I was plugging in the Airport Express. It just worked seamlessly. My Macs detected the printer type correctly, added the right drivers, and printing was done. 15-20 minutes later after playing around with the security settings via the remote setup utility (extremely slick) and my wireless network was up too. Apple may be a tad more expensive at times but you get a lot more bang for your buck. Now I will start at the Apple Store before going somewhere else to save a buck.
The US Congress has finally stood up and tied funding of the Iraq war to withdrawal. Bush will most likely veto the bill but it is important point to be made -- that the president must plan for a horizon with this war. Good for them.
The vote of 51 to 47 links funding for the war to a goal of getting US combat troops out of Iraq by March 2008. The House has passed a similar bill.

The Senate bill approves US$122 billion in funds - mostly for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq - but also orders the president to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq within 120 days of passage of the bill. It sets a goal of pulling all combat troops out of Iraq by the end of March of next year, but does not explicitly demand their removal.
More information is coming out about the TJ Maxx data theft which has been happening for over a year. They announced in a SEC filing that 45 million credit and debit card numbers have been stolen from its IT systems. They estimate that hackers had penetrated their systems for over a year, stealing credit cards and other financial information.
As a result, TJX is a company under siege. The company recorded a fourth-quarter charge of about $5 million to cover the costs of containing and investigating the breach, as well as improving the security of its IT systems, communicating with customers, and paying legal fee. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has launched an investigation of TJX. While the FTC wouldn't reveal the nature of the investigation or when it began, it's likely the result of the data breach. And lawsuits have begun to fly, including one by the Arkansas Carpenters Pension Fund, which owns 4,500 shares of TJX stock.
Very cool looking site which specializes in plastic repair kits and supplies. They talk a lot about automotive repairs (fenders, etc.) but they have information about identifying and welding many different plastics for everything from toys to lawn mowers.
Our web site gives you all the information you need to do your repair [many products] and, it requires absolutely no thinking on your part. It's all spelled-out for you in simple, easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions that are so easy, an eight year old could do it. Not only that, you can purchase everything you need to get the job done right... and it's ALL just a click away.

March 28, 2007

Given the fact that I have recently moved to using a Macintosh MacPro portable from as my desktop, I thought it was apt to post this line to a story about the status of the cult of the Macintosh. I do miss some of the UI features of my FreeBSD/X11 desktop, but the integration and the (unfortunate) need for MS Office crap is a vast improvement. It is interesting to hear about how Wall Street and other analysts are now reevaluating the Mac because all of a sudden with the hype around the iTv and the iPhone, the iPod does not seem like a fluke. As far as I can tell, the introduction of the Intel Macs has also meant a lot of desktop/laptop sales.
There's been a distinct sea change in the way people think about Apple in the last few weeks. Recently, people have been saying the strangest things about Apple and the Mac. Everything is topsy-turvy. Pundits aren't trotting out the old conventional wisdoms any more. They're saying odd stuff, like Macs are good for business; Macs can save money; and that Apple's stock -- at $90 a share -- is a bargain.
In fact, there seems to be a widespread re-evaluation of Apple going on, a cultural shift that's changing the way people think about the company. It's been building for a while but it has reached a tipping point in the last couple of months. Here's what people are saying now.

March 22, 2007

Very old URL here about the Space Shuttle Challenger accident. Still very interesting. Lots of timing details and images.
At 45 seconds into the flight, three bright flashes appeared downstream of the Challenger's right wing. Each flash lasted less than one-thirtieth of' a second. Similar flashes have been seen on other flights. Another appearance of a separate bright spot was diagnosed by film analysis to be a reflection of main engine exhaust on the Orbital Maneuvering System pods located at the upper rear section of the Orbiter. The flashes were unrelated to the later appearance of the flame plume from the right Solid Rocket Booster.
Both the Shuttle main engines and the solid rockets operated at reduced thrust approaching and passing through the area of maximum dynamic pressure of 720 pounds per square foot. Main engines had been throttled up to 104 percent thrust and the Solid Rocket Boosters were increasing their thrust when the first flickering flame appeared on the right Solid Rocket Booster in the area of the aft field joint. This first very small flame was detected on image enhanced film at 58.788 seconds into the flight. It appeared to originate at about 305 degrees around the booster circumference at or near the aft field joint.
Excellent list of Congressional must-do items by the New York Times. I could not agree more. I am pessimistic that any of these will get done. Their list includes the following entries:
1. Restore Habeas Corpus (remove Illegal Enemy Combatant status)
2. Stop Illegal Spying (obey the FISA laws)
3. Ban Torture, Really (stop breaking international human rights laws)
4. Close the secret C.I.A. Prisons (stop bringing us down to the moral level of our enemies)
5. Ban Extraordinary Rendition (another violation of international law)
In another example of Neocon failures, former UN ambassador John Bolton has corroborated the reports that the US intentionally avoided a cease-fire in the Israeli/Lebanon conflict because it expected Israel to eliminate Hezbollah's military capability. The US, UK, and Israel where the only 3 nations at the UN to not support a cease-fire. Israel did billions of dollars of damage to Lebanon, killed thousands, and made homeless tens of thousands, all in our name backed by our jets, missiles, and fuel. Now Hezbollah is more powerful than ever since they arguably "won" the conflict and have recently challenged the fragile government of Lebanon for more power. Oh, and we have promised billions of dollars to help rebuild the country so again we are paying for both sides of the war. And we wonder why they hate us?
At the time US officials argued a ceasefire was insufficient and agreement was needed to address the underlying tensions and balance of power in the region.
Mr Bolton now describes it as "perfectly legitimate... and good politics" for the Israelis to seek to defeat their enemy militarily, especially as Hezbollah had attacked Israel first and it was acting "in its own self-defence". Mr Bolton, a controversial and blunt-speaking figure, said he was "damned proud of what we did" to prevent an early ceasefire.
Interesting page about Linux's "Syslets" and "Threadlets which gives come background into the thread models of the modern Linux kernel. Syslets are in-kernel calls that can be scheduled asynchronously without a userspace context switch and have seen good performance improvements over traditional mechanisms. Threadlets are similar in that they allow a thread's code to be executed but don't allocate a new thread structure until necessary. Very cool stuff.
Announcing the third version of his syslets subsystem patches, Ingo Molnar [interview] noted that he has implemented many fundamental changes to the code including the introduction of threadlets, "'threadlets' are basically the user-space equivalent of syslets: small functions of execution that the kernel attempts to execute without scheduling. If the threadlet blocks, the kernel creates a real thread from it, and execution continues in that thread. The 'head' context (the context that never blocks) returns to the original function that called the threadlet." As threadlets are only moved into a separate thread context if they block, Ingo refers to them as 'optional threads'. He also describes them as 'on-demand parallelism', "user-space does not have to worry about setting up, sizing and feeding a thread pool - the kernel will execute the workload in a single-threaded manner as long as it makes sense, but once the context blocks, a parallel context is created. So parallelism inside applications is utilized in a natural way."
Dan just pointed me to a great weather, sensor, hobby hardware store. Dan's the author of thermd which takes 1-wire temperature and other data and graphs it. He's got his home monitored to the hilt and I'm jealous. I've been wanting to do it for a while as well as add monitors and automation to my HVAC units and lights. I've got a bunch of hardware that I've not hooked up yet (not a priority) as well as a weather station. Hope to do it sooner.
Interesting piece about how broadband providers are disconnecting high volume users. Broadband providers are finding that that top 0.1% of users are taking a large amount of the bandwidth of their systems and are starting to issue warnings and disconnect their services which is permitted under their acceptable-use-policies. I actually don't have a problem with this.
Feddeman declined to say where Comcast draws the line on too much Internet usage, instead saying the amount of data that could trigger a warning call would be roughly the equivalent of 13 million e-mail messages or 256,000 photos a month. Although those files vary in size, a typical photo file size is 1 to 2 megabytes, meaning that excessive users are downloading hundreds of gigabytes per month.
Matt Davis, a research director at IDC Corp., said that because of the way cable high-speed Internet works, a person using a huge amount of bandwidth will slow service for hundreds of customers.
"You look at it and see there's some two to three people in the neighborhood or a college dorm . . . and what they're doing is impairing the customer experience for the rest of the people off that node," Davis said. "Then it's a business decision: Do you alienate a small percentage of customers to make your other customers happy?"
So we hold a movie party every year for our community down in Wareham. Lot of fun. I've been looking for popcorn machine and popcorn supplies for some time and these look like good sites. No experience with them yet. Ooooh. They have Star Wars popcorn machines and funnel cake machines. They also have corn dog, shaved ice, and cotten candy equipment and supplies. Weeeee.

March 20, 2007

I've read a couple of stories of the decline in bee colonies. Since 1971, half of the bee colonies in the US have vanished. Although some are from natural or understood reasons, a recent acceleration of the decline has caused alarm in scientists who are calling it colony collapse disorder. Makes me interested in starting a bee colony myself as a civic duty. Other sources: NY Times.
Penn State scientists estimate that the number of colonies [in Pennsylvania] has dropped to about 35,000, down from 80,000 in the late 1980s. Those declines could have serious consequences for farmers across the state who rely on honeybees to pollinate many of their crops.
Pollination refers to transfer of pollen from the male portion of a plant blossom to the female part. That is done by wind, hummingbirds and a variety of insects, and is necessary for plants to produce their fruits or vegetables and their seeds.
They have begun using genetically modified mosquitos to fight Malaria in Africa. Malaria still causes over a million deaths every year. The WHO is also encouraging the use of DDT even with the environmental impact.
A genetically modified (GM) strain of malaria-resistant mosquito has been created that is better able to survive than disease-carrying insects.It gives new impetus to one strategy for controlling the disease: introduce the GM insects into wild populations in the hope that they will take over.

The insect carries a gene that prevents infection by the malaria parasite.

March 12, 2007

Cool geothermal heating/cooling kit. I've been thinking of doing this for some time. Basically the concept is to drill wells or run piping around your land and use it to heat and cool your home. The idea is that you are heat exchanging with 50-55 degree ground temperatures instead of air temperatures. The heating loop requires compression to extract the heat from the ground but cooling is a simple fluid exchange -- extremely efficient.
What is included with your kit? Closed Ground loop designs for, horizontal, pond, slinky flat or radiator loops, specifically for your project. All ground loop 3/4" ID (optional 1/2" or SDR11 sizes available), piping pre-charged with required antifreeze, and comes with easy to use compression couplings, no fusion welding needed. (25 year limited warrantee, longer or additional pipe circuits may be required in high unbalanced operating conditions such as Florida or Canada or poor heat transfer conditions such as sand or gravel subsoil's, please call to confirm).
All pumps and manifolds, fully assembled, in a heavy gauge powder coated metal cabinet. (10 year limited warrantee, 1 year on pump(s)), ready to connect to your supplied heat pump control, now with standard flush and fill ports, for the professional.
Cool article about how one family in Britain went green for a year. Their goal was a to drop their carbon footprint to help global warming. They got rid of their car, insulated their house, ate more veggies and less meat, got more conscious about their power usage, flew less, and conserved water. Lessons for us all.
Our homes produce a quarter of the UK's carbon emissions. You should consider insulating your home but, as I discovered, that can be expensive. So why not try draught-proofing your windows and just turn down the thermostat by a degree or two and put on a jumper. If you can afford it you could line your curtains - that'll stop draughts and save almost as much heat as double glazing your windows. Consider buying a rug or carpeting your floors, that also helps keep rooms warm. We did all these things and cut our gas usage by 15%. That has saved us real money - I reckon over £50 in one year.
Good article about how much of the security changes since 9/11 are more about covering the asses of the folks in power as opposed to true security measures.
Once you think about this in terms of CYA, it starts to make sense. The Transportation Security Administration wants to be sure that if there's another airplane terrorist attack, it's not held responsible for letting it slip through. One year ago, no one could blame the TSA for not detecting liquids. But since everything seems obvious in hindsight, it's basic job preservation to defend against what the terrorists tried last time.
We saw this kind of CYA security when Boston and New York randomly checked bags on the subways after the London bombing, and when buildings started sprouting concrete barriers after the Oklahoma City bombing. We also see it in ineffective attempts to detect nuclear bombs; authorities employ CYA security against the media-driven threat so they can say "we tried."
Very interesting article about high and low density energies and our ability to continue at our current levels of energy usage. I think that some of the numbers are off and that the author is not taken to affect the market forces will have if the cost of energy skyrockets. Still, I've been think about this piece a lot as of late so at the very least it is worth reading for that reason.
People who talk about energy, and alternative energy in particular, usually have no idea just how much energy they are talking about. Let's take an easy example, transportation, transportation takes a very small proportion of the total amount of energy we use as a society (if you want to know what high energy consumption is all about take a look at aluminium smelting) and the USA is just one country in the world, and they have an office of transportation statistics, which, up till the year 2000, collates the approximate amount of energy used in transportation.
These numbers are trillions of Btu, for the year 2000, a trillion Btu is about 7 million gallons of diesel (about 700 articulated tanker trucks) or about 280 gigawatt hours, a big nuke plant may generate 10,000 gigawatt hours in an entire year of operation.
People are [just] starting to look into the Patriot act revisions lately brought to light over the possibly forced resignation of U.S. Attorneys. Yet another example about how the current administration is/was trying to grab as much executive power as possible.
The background: When Congress reauthorized the Patriot Act last year, it included little-noticed language that changed the way U.S. attorneys would be appointed if their predecessors were removed in the middle of their term. Under the old regime, interim U.S. attorneys needed to be confirmed by the Senate after 120 days. If they weren't, federal district judges could select their replacement. The new language removed both judicial and congressional oversight of the interim U.S. attorneys, letting DOJ anoint them indefinitely. This served three important goals: consolidating presidential power, diminishing oversight, and ensuring that "interim" prosecutors had permanent jobs.

March 9, 2007

So my current desktop box is a good 5 years old and I've been meaning to upgrade it. I decided to build out a good performance box that has low power usage. I decided to see if I could get a AMD Turion (or a Pentium M) mobile CPU. Here's a number of good resources that I've been using along the way:
On my wikipedia travels today, I started at the Spruce Goose since we are visiting Long Beach, CA last week. But it's been moved to the Evergreen Aviation Museum near Portland, Oregon. That took me to this cool image showing the world's largest airplanes comparing the Hercules with the Airbus A380-800, Boeing 747-8, and the Antonov An-225 Mriya. The Antonov An-225 is the world's largest airplane with a maximum loaded takeoff weight of 1.4 million pounds using 6 (51k lbf) turbofan engines. Wow.

March 2, 2007

Here's another example of the administration dictating Iraqi oil policy. The stories about how the neocon implants tried to rewrite most of the policies in the country to be favorable to US oil and business interests are disgusting.
... the U.S. occupation of Iraq seems to be about to grab its oil prize by establishing a new sharing arrangement between a major national producer and the multi-national giants...This prize has been the dream of successive U.S. administrations: on January 18th, they came one step closer to reality when Iraqs Oil Committee approved the new draft hydrocarbon law, sent it to the cabinet within a week and, when approved, will go to the parliament immediately thereafter.
The early draft of the law was prepared by BearingPoint American consultants, hired by the Bush administration, and sent to the White House and major Western petroleum corporations in July, and then to the International Monetary Fund two months later, while most Iraqi legislators and the public remained in the dark.

March 1, 2007

An incredibly depressing article from Seymour Hersh on the administration's redirection of Middle East policy. He talks about how all signs are pointing to us attacking Iran in an apparent fight against Shiite power. We are sticking our necks once again into the fire and helping to still the sectarian fires. We are also sponsoring radical Sunni Muslim factions in the process. We have been having military operations (without Congressional oversight) and sponsoring radical Iranian anti-government factions in direct conflict with the Iranian administration and we wonder why they are trying to build a nuclear weapon. Required reading but here's a good summary.
To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has cooperated with Saudi Arabias government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.
Cool paper by Adi Shamir about a mechanism to share secrets.
In this paper we show how to divide data D into n pieces in such a way that D is easily reconstructible from any k pieces, but even complete knowledge of k - 1 pieces reveals absolutely no information about D. This technique enables the construction of robust key management schemes for cryptographic systems that can function securely and reliably even when misfortunes destroy half the pieces and security breaches expose all but one of the remaining pieces.

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