Got two messages from the taller Holy Modal Rounder, Steve Weber,
tonight. He was jamming away, and recorded a great song for me, Blue Navigator.
Messages from Steve
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Monthly Archives: August 2004
Help, I’ve been traded!
My blog appears to be a (very minor) commodity in BlogShares: We Saw A Chicken …
We Saw A … Beaver?!
Highly unlikely, but I saw a biggish brown animal with a strangely
shaped tail swimming in the Don River. Could it be Castor?
Get outta my way!
I walk. And when mass thoughtlessness blocks my way, I get angry.
Another cool thing about WordPress
…. is that you can e-mail in blog entries. Like this one.
bad scene on Kennedy Road
There’s a big do at the Salaheddin Islamic Centre this weekend. It seems that there’s some convention being held by the Muslim Ummah of North America. Yesterday, there was a small but very heated demonstration, with a group of people being very opposed to a particular person being present. Obligatory placards, shouting and police cars; you know the deal.
I still haven’t been able to work out what this was about. If I find out more, I’ll post it.
Linksys NSLU2 – Network Storage for the people
I’d been looking for a backup solution for a while, and yesterday I found it in the very small shape of the Linksys NSLU2 – Network Storage Link for USB 2.0 Disk Drives. There’s been a lot of talk recently about hacking these tiny embedded Linux boxes, but I just want to store stuff from my Linux machines and Catherine’s eMac.
I bought it, an external USB2.0 3.5″ drive case, and a 160GB Seagate driver yesterday from Canada Computers on College St for under C$350, including tax. It took about half an hour to assemble it, install it, and format the drive from the web interface.
I find it’s easiest to make named users — and tell the unit to make a subdirectory for that user — than fiddle about with other methods of making shares. You’ll also need to enable smbfs (File Systems → Network file Systems → SMBFS support in your kernel config) on your Linux machines.
I have created three shares: scruss (for me), craine (for Catherine) and mp3 (for our shared MP3 collection). I have created relevant directories from /mnt, and chmoded them to the appropriate user. These are the lines I have added to my fstab:
//squirrel/scruss /mnt/smb_scruss smbfs username=scruss,password=******,rw,users 0 0 //squirrel/mp3 /mnt/mp3 smbfs username=mp3,password=******,rw,users 0 0
I renamed the NSLU2 squirrel to fit in with the Canadian rodent theme I’ve got going with the other machines around here.
With Catherine’s eMac, I’ve found I have to use the OS X 10.1 / .nsmbrc method. Once you have the shares defined in the .nsmbrc file, you can call them up by doing Connect to Server and specifying something like smb://netbiosname/share, like smb://squirrel/craine.
The NSLU2 looks like it will be rock-solid. It has a couple of quirks — it formats the drive in Linux ext3 format, it will shut down at the slightest hint of a power glitch, and it’s rather slow — but I can put up with slowness if the data’s secure.
Mostly working
Okay, WordPress works now. I’m keeping the old MT archives for now, as there doesn’t seem to be a sane way of getting Apache’s mod_rewrite to work properly here. I suspect PEBCAK, probably, with intensely arcane rewrite rule syntax as a mitigating factor.
Under New Management
You’ll notice that the blog looks different. I’ve changed from Movable Type to WordPress. The latter is free, and looks more fun. All I need to do is work out how to reindex my archives.
dark stain ahead
To avoid the rain, and in order to become sufficiently caffeinated for work, I ducked into a Tim Hortons and opened up my Toronto Public Library book, Jane Jacobs’s Dark Age Ahead.
I thought I heard my phone ring, and in reaching for it, I upended my almost-full medium black coffee all over the book. Horrible mess, pages stuck together, much nastiness.
This evening I dragged my sheepish carcase into the local library to explain what happened. The only way I could pay for a replacement book was to “lose” the book. I have to say, it reads pretty well for a “lost” book, but the smell of cheap, over-roasted coffee isn’t so great.
nice scaling
My Nikon D70 makes images that are too large for the web, so I have to scale them down. Most image scaling routines use simple linear interpolation, which can lose a lot of detail, but some packages use cubic scaling. This keeps most of the detail.
I was looking for a scriptable cubic routine, and I found it in Image::Magick, aka perlmagick. The syntax is simple:
$x = $image->Resize(geometry => '50%',
filter => 'Cubic');
I used this routine to resize my 2004 Ontario Renfest pictures.
two cheers for sympatico
Sympatico finally fixed my DSL problems last night. It seems that my account was set to fast mode, when the cheesy old copper we have around here really needs interleaved mode, which trades higher latency for error-correcting operation.
I’m happy now, but why did it take two calls — the second of which I was on hold to the Bell DSL centre for nearly 20 minutes — to sort this simple problem?
photo printers
I want to print some of my D70 pictures, so I asked the GTABloggers what they used:
- Henry’s, by Custom Colour — though their system is Java-based.
- pikto — ‘very high-end, fancy-pants, colour-profile snobbery types’
- Future Shop Future Photo — ‘if you just need a print dammit’
- shutterfly
I’m looking for a non-proprietary upload system, so Ofoto is out. I’d like to try photocentre.ca, but I know no-one who has tried them.
more vawts, yawn
boingboing picked up on Worldchanging‘s story about Former Soviet Weapon Designers Take On Wind Power, claiming ‘this one is supposed to be quieter and less hazardous to birds’. I just had to comment:
Sigh, yet another vertical axis wind turbine claiming world-changing characteristics. Wind Sail are to be congratulated for keeping their efficiency numbers in the realms of the possible. Many companies have sprung up claiming efficiencies (Cp) of greater that 16/27, the Betz Limit, or theoretical efficiency limit of a wind turbine.
Reducing the tip speed ratio reduces the efficiency of the device, so the Wind Sail’s Cp of 28% at 12m/s is quite a bit lower than a typical horizontal axis machine (like the Lagerwey LW900, which has a Cp of 34% at 12m/s).
This machine is miles ahead of the modified Savonius (drag) turbines that some manufacturers are touting. But still, very few knowledgeable wind engineers would advocate roof-mounting a wind turbine. There are issues with turbulence and vibration, not to mention that built-up areas tend to be quite sheltered.
I also take issue with their claims about fewer bird kills. Any structure kills birds. Buildings and windows kill over 5000x more birds than wind turbines, and cats more than 1000x (source: Bird and bat kills and other effects, AWEA ). It would be a very dizzy raptor that could sit on top of a running vertical axis wind turbine.
Vertical axis machinery is not some magical energy source suppressed by The Great Conspiracy. They were the subject of huge development projects in the 1970s and 1980s. There were problems with fatigue, higher costs, and lower operating efficiencies than horizontal axis machines. I design wind farms for a living, and I don’t know of a single utility-scale vertical axis machine that is operating, let alone available for commercial purchase.
The aerospace industries have had limited success in developing viable wind turbines. NASA, Boeing and MAN all tried developing machines, but could never bring a machine to market. It’s interesting to note that most of the successful companies now manufacturing wind turbines started out in agricultural engineering, not aerospace.
whew!
Well, as of noon, the Ontario Renewable Energy RFP deadline has passed. That means I can take a short break from wind farm design.
Renfest ’04
(links to my Renfest gallery.)
I went to the Ontario Renfest twice this weekend. On Saturday it was with Chris, Andi, Blair & Norvin (who was taking a little time off from promoting Zenon Membrane Bioreactor technology). Yes, there was merriment, in both liquid and meat form. Oh, and Zoltan the Adequate was indeed more than adequate.
I went again on Sunday, after picking up Catherine from the airport. We mostly went to see the owl at the Canadian Raptor Conservancy flight display.
I think we’ll definitely go again next year. Huzzah!
biggest vee-hickle ever
Seems it’s a big weekend down at the rental lot. This Buick LeSabre — approximately the size of Clackmannanshire, for Scottish readers — is all they had left.
Oh well, at least I’ll be stylin’ on the way to the Rennfest, and at the airport to meet Catherine. Or, since it’s about the size of a Zil, I guess I could be Stalin.
Would you like baby’s-breath with that?
Somewhat alarmingly, Burlington has the first drive-thru florist in Canada.
Monkeys
Gabe the Gibbon — image copyright Jill Greenberg.
First mentioned in The Walrus, and now picked up by BoingBoing, Jill Greenberg took studio portraits of monkeys.
Talkin’ Energy with Darrin and Paul
Darrin Mitchell & Paul Gipe
I had the pleasure of finally meeting Darrin Mitchell, of TalkEnergy.com, at OSEA‘s office in downtown Toronto. He was in talking to Paul Gipe, who gave Darrin a signed copy of his latest book, Wind Power: Renewable Energy for Home, Farm, & Business