Tech

  • Adages,  Atlanta,  Tech

    Well put

    From Reason’s interview with NYT columnist John Tierney

    I find it ironic that after half a century of the golden age of urban planning, people all want to live in neighborhoods that were built before then—that the planners are now trying to recreate. They were built by private developers and private streetcar companies, and the market guided it. I’ve heard it argued that urban planning is one area where the market really doesn’t work that well, that you find in great cities that there was a lot of central planning of the street grids. I’d like to know more. You obviously need someone to set some rules, but I still tend to think that the really successful cities and neighborhoods are the ones where there’s a lot of trial and error, people trying things on their own.

    Which brings to mind the programming definition of creationism

    The (false) belief that large, innovative software designs can be completely specified in advance and then painlessly magicked out of the void by the normal efforts of a team of normally talented programmers. In fact, experience has shown repeatedly that good designs arise only from evolutionary, exploratory interaction between one (or at most a small handful of) exceptionally able designer(s) and an active user population — and that the first try at a big new idea is always wrong.

    It’s annoying that the current design v evolution debate consists of spastic posturing, it’s really an interesting topic.

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  • Tech

    Much Quieter

    I finally installed my new case fan and it works very well, the entire workstation is much less noisy than before.

    What an exciting life I lead.

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  • Links,  Tech

    Thursday rapid fire

    • Shoplifting as Social Commentary – We truly have it easy and are getting soft when we (the West that is, not the US) this happens. Germany should sentence them to live in Darfour for a year as punishment.
    • E-Machine Shop – It would seem that Instapundit’s era of cottage industry here. Originally from a Wired article (not online yet). You can design something entirely online, they fab it and ship it off.
    • Men Smarter than Women in Australia – The article doesn’t actually provide much useful information on the distribution. It also doesn’t address Paulos’ notion that the reason women aren’t at the good end of the Bell curve is a matter of personal taste and habit (i.e. they are more likely to occasionally clean (taking up valuable time) and maintaining personal relationships whereas men are more likely willing to live in filth and lose everyone in their lives in the pursuit of a goal.)
    • Cars, PHEV, and Green Tuning
    • Another superb article + photos from Michael Yon always worth reading
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  • Tech

    Still!

    I’m still doing data recovery. Still! I have no idea why all this crap is taking so long.

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  • Tech

    Curses

    So, it would appear that my data drive has joined the choir invisible. I think I only dropped about two days of data, but most of that was two days worth of editing Silver Photos AND all of my time tracking stuff, which totally sucks.

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  • Tech

    Technical Adventures

    Here’s the sequence of events

    1. My CD burners stops working (not really a big deal at this point)
    2. Some drive starts making a weird clicking sound (no other side effects).
    3. I incorrectly assume that the clicking noise is coming from the inoperative CD burn
    4. My computer starts to freeze for tiny periods of time, in rough accordance with the clicking noises. I also acquire a need to burn a CD, I decide to fix the problem.
    5. I got to Comp USA at Lenox to get a new CD Burner but their power is out and I can’t buy the one I wanted, so I head to Circuit City.
    6. While on the way over there a guy runs into me (very lightly). Happily no harm done to either of us or our cars, so I continue on my journey.
    7. At Circuit City I get a new CD Burner one that does dual layer DVDs as well, which is pretty cool. I also get a new “quiet” case fan.
    8. Once home I install the fan and the Burner, the fan does not work (is there some secret to installing a fan besides plugging it in?
    9. I also discover that the problem drive is not the broken burner, but my main data drive
    10. Which leaves me moving data from one drive to another before the drive dies entirely. I also must re-activate windows and redo all of my drive letters. This is an annoying way to spend a Sunday evening.
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  • Alt Energy,  Tech

    Cool and needed

    I came across an interesting article on Fox News

    Experimental Hybrid Cars Get Up to 250 Mpg

    It looks like a typical Toyota Prius hybrid (search), but in the trunk sits an 80-miles-per-gallon secret — a stack of 18 brick-sized batteries that boosts the car’s high mileage with an extra electrical charge so it can burn even less fuel.

    Gremban, an electrical engineer and committed environmentalist, spent several months and $3,000 tinkering with his car.

    Like all hybrids, his Prius increases fuel efficiency (search) by harnessing small amounts of electricity generated during braking and coasting. The extra batteries let him store extra power by plugging the car into a wall outlet at his home in this San Francisco suburb — all for about a quarter.

    He’s part of a small but growing movement. “Plug-in” hybrids aren’t yet cost-efficient, but some of the dozen known experimental models have gotten up to 250 mpg.

    University of California, Davis engineering professor Andy Frank built a plug-in hybrid from the ground up in 1972 and has since built seven others, one of which gets up to 250 mpg. They were converted from non-hybrids, including a Ford Taurus and Chevrolet Suburban.

    Frank has spent $150,000 to $250,000 in research costs on each car, but believes automakers could mass-produce them by adding just $6,000 to each vehicle’s price tag.

    Instead, Frank said, automakers promise hydrogen-powered vehicles hailed by President Bush and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, even though hydrogen’s backers acknowledge the cars won’t be widely available for years and would require a vast infrastructure of new fueling stations.

    “They’d rather work on something that won’t be in their lifetime, and that’s this hydrogen economy stuff,” Frank said. “They pick this kind of target to get the public off their back, essentially.”

    Curiously missing from this article is any mention of a break-even point. Namely that at some price per gallon a $3,000 add-on is well worth the expense. Granted, it comes on top of an already high hybrid price, but a back of the envelop calculation would be welcome.

    It sounds very intresting, though I am a bit dubious about the “quarters worth of electricity” bit. If true, that is just staggering.

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