Blue Sky On Mars

Woah… you can write Quicksilver plugins in Python. I guess it makes sense, given how all-encompassing PyObjC is, but I’ll definitely have to start thinking of applications for this. I’ve been hooked on Quicksilver for a while now (and I’m still waiting for someone to make it for Windows!)

My server for Blue Sky On Mars is running on Fedora Core 3. I’m not in a rush to upgrade to FC4, but I know that such an upgrade is inevitable. Since the server is remote, thousands of miles away from me, I’m interested in doing the upgrade via yum. Apparently, it can be done, but there are potential gotchas. Thankfully, those gotchas have been enumerated here: YumUpgradeFaq.

I get all my political news from Rolling Stone. (Yeah, right.) In reality, though, The Long Emergency over at RollingStone.com is a book excerpt about the coming crisis brought on by “peak oil”. Peak oil is the term used for reaching the maximum possible oil production. It’s all downhill from there. I was aware of peak oil’s coming, but I wasn’t aware that some are predicting that 2005 is the year we reach it.

The Long Emergency (excerpt) is long on doom projection and short on useful suggestions. I don’t know if the book itself offers more. The main suggestion for dealing with the problem is to build more nuclear power plants, though the author is not certain we have the means to do it.

While I do believe that peak oil is going to cause a huge shift in many ways, I don’t buy into the extremes of the doom mongering of the Long Emergency. One author, reading articles and formulating opinions on the coming crisis, does not have the ingenuity of millions of people around the world working in the various fields that can help the situation.

The positive aspect of articles like this is that they raise awareness. The Bush administration has not been good at making people aware of reality, and rushing up to Alaska to get a couple pints more of oil is not a viable solution. As more people become aware of peak oil, they will start seeing business opportunities.

The Long Emergency focuses on how difficult it will be to replace all of those fossil fuels. However, the problem can be attacked from both the production *and* consumption angles. I bet that *everything* we use can be made more energy efficient. Consider that 10 years ago, a “60 watt” lightbulb took 60 watts of power. Today, you can get a bulb of equivalent light output that takes just 15 watts. Computers have been made more energy efficient for the sake of longer-running laptops. Hybrid cars get double the gas mileage of traditional cars, and 3-4 times the efficiency of the SUVs that are clogging our streets.

If you take everything in your house and make it a few times more energy efficient, things like solar power become far more viable.

Doing all of this will cost money, but it is money that we’ll have no choice but to spend.

Update 10:44AM EDT: It’s worth pointing out that the Senate has just approved a sweeping energy bill, which is the first of its kind in 13 years.

The bill provides $14.5 billion in tax breaks and potentially billions more in loan guarantees and other subsidies to encourage oil and gas drilling, improve natural gas and electric transmission lines, build new nuclear power reactors and expand renewable energy sources, especially construction of wind turbines.

Let’s not forget that the Bush family has significant oil industry ties, so it shouldn’t be overly surprising that this bill was, as CNN put it, a “tepid response to reducing the country’s consumption of oil”.

Cory Doctorow had an interesting quote to go along with the death of the broadcast flag: “The fact is, elected lawmakers are not suicidal enough to break their constituents’ televisions.” Considering that the automotive and oil companies represent 8 of the top 10 global companies, according to Fortune, I’m sure that the lawmakers are very leery of “breaking” their constituents’ cars as well.

This Congress and administration is not going to be forced into action. It’s possible that the president will not be forced into action between 2008 and 2012 as well. Assuming that peak oil is actually being reached this year, I’m guessing that crisis mode will start for sure before 2016. Let’s hope that the response to that particular crisis is not to throw out chunks of the Bill of Rights.

In Microsoft’s ongoing hunt to find more money after saturating the market, they’ve decided to harass existing users rather than coming up with useful new product. Since they’re going to all the trouble to harass their users, you’d think they could’ve at least made a more thorough attempt than this: window.g_sDisableWGACheck=’all’.

That’s the tagline for MochiKit – A lightweight Javascript library, and it is accurate. There are a bunch of useful, well-documented and tested bits of JavaScript in there. It’s worth a look, particularly if you’re targeting modern browsers.

Wow. I’ve been out of the loop a bit for a few days. I just discovered that Yahoo! has bought Konfabulator and released it for free as Yahoo! Widgets. For those not familiar, Konfabulator is basically the same as Dashboard on Mac OS X Tiger. The biggest difference is that Dashboard uses Expose to zoom on and off screen, and Konfabulator widgets sit around on your desktop all the time.

The other big difference is that Konfabulator is also available for Windows! Nice move on Yahoo!’s part.

Now if only someone would get Quicksilver ported to Windows.

You get spoiled by a lot fo the niceties of a high-level language like Python. JavaScript has *some* high-level features, but MochiKit adds a bunch more. I’ve been playing with MochiKit for a couple of weeks, and it has a very nice, solid design that does things in a way that is both JavaScripty and Pythonic.

Bob Ippolito is doing a great job with it. Take a look!

Some enterprising (read: “crazy”) folks have gone and implemented CSS3 multicolumn support *in JavaScript*. Very nifty. As I noted a few days ago, though, multiple columns is not so great for reading on-screen. A printed view that uses multiple columns would be beautiful, however, and it’s quite cool that people using browsers other than Firefox 1.1 can get in on the action.

I’ve read only a little bit of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, so this is not really about the book. This is actually about *receiving* the book.

For some reason, I remember that Order of the Phoenix was shipped with special FedEx Saturday delivery. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was FedEx’s busiest Saturday ever. What made Amazon’s logistics for this book interesting is that UPS carried the book most of the way, and then *delivered it to a post office*. The postal service then delivered the book with the normal mail on Saturday. That makes a lot more sense, since the postal service always does Saturday deliveries.

It’s hard to imagine the coordination and exchange of money that had to happen for that. (The UPS shipping labels even said “Deliver to USPS” with another section that said “USPS please deliver to”…) But, Amazon almost certainly sold more than 500,000 preorders. With that kind of volume, you can probably get a bit of special handling.

The second thing is that I had noticed that Amazon had dropped their price on the book by $1 since the time when I preordered. I didn’t particularly care, but I was surprised to get an email in which Amazon said they were refunding the $1! That’s great customer service and a great way to make sure that people don’t feel like they’re getting burned for preordering.

Finally, I received an email today (Sunday) from Amazon saying that my book was on time and that I’d receive it by 7PM on Saturday. I’m not sure whose mailserver is at fault for that one.

All-in-all, I’d say it’s nice to be able to place an order online and get it on release day and I’m sure I’ll do the same for book 7.

(Reviews for Half-Blood Prince have been mixed, which is not really surprising. I think that’s been true of all of the books, with the possible exception of the Hugo winning Goblet of Fire.)

I’ve been using the Deer Park alpha (Firefox 1.1 alpha) for a few days now. So far, it’s been very stable and very fast. It also includes a couple of regular annoyances with Firefox 1.0… those things that don’t really stop you from doing what you want, but annoy you every time you hit it (which is frequently).

1. When you open a link from an external program (like Mail), it now opens in a new tab rather than replacing the contents of your topmost browser window.
2. You can middle-click to open a link in a new tab, which something I do *a lot*. Opening a link in a new tab is part of my normal reading flow with Zesty News.

I’d highly recommend Deer Park for other Mac users. The only drawback I’ve seen is that some extensions have not yet been updated for Deer Park. Don’t worry, though… the Web Developer extension is there!