The cost of Natural Gas

It is quite amusing sometimes to look at official statistics: 4 times more natural gas is lost in storage and in the natural gas pipe network than is used for transportation.
This means that they (Sempra etc) could in theory sell natural gas for use in transportation for free and write it off as 20% increase in network storage losses.
However, the cost of fuel to owners of natural gas vehicles in California is up to 3 times higher than the cost of fuel to vehicle owners in Utah. Given that the wholesale price of natural gas is prroximately $9.03 per 1000 cu.ft. and the retail price to CNG vehicle owners in California is around $2.89 / gge (1 gge = 127.77 cu.ft.), then the natural gas companies have a profit margin of approximately 150%. If California is really serious about reducing pollution, natural gas vehicles needs to be encouraged since natural gas is the source fuel used by all hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, whether the natural gas is cracked in a converter at home, within the vehicle itself (natural gas fuel cell) or done industrially at the filling station. Price gouging by the natural gas suppliers needs to stop - CNG vehicle owners should not have to have a home filling station fitted just to avoid the inflated prices at the filling stations.

There can be a whole new service industry,

Here is an interesting business idea which maybe someone can run with and exploit:
For a nominal fee, perhaps $5-$10 per week, a company can provide a junk call phone screening service. Here is the details:

• A FXO/FXS device is plugged into your PC which is wired to the internet.
  
• The phone line from customer's phone service plugs into the PC.
  
• All the home phones are connected to the PC.
  
• Outgoing calls are unhindered... The service may optionally route the call through cheapest path.
  
• VOIP-based phone services, such as Vonage, can skip some of the above.
  
• An incoming call which matches customer-supplied list of phone numbers causes home phones to ring.
  
• All other incoming calls are immediately picked up by the computer.
  
• If it sounds like a FAX, receive it and store on hard drive.
  
• Otherwise, call is routed to phone-screening operator, perhaps in India or wherever is cheap.
  
• If caller can identify themselves, matching supplied list (such as credit card account number), the call may be forwarded to the customer's home phones or a pre-recorded message can be played back at the caller.
  
• Forwarding services can be provided for extra $$ subscription... No need to miss an important call. Forward to a VOIP target, or a cellphone perhaps...
  
• All received non-personal calls can be recorded. The operator will notify the caller immediately after answering the call.
  
• The audio file will be stored (long term) on the customer's PC.
  
• Short-term audio retrieval would be available online from the service's web site.
  
• All received calls, (CID details, date, time, duration) are logged/archived on customer's PC.
  
• Recent calls list may be viewed online.
  

Now, wouldn't it be funny when a Telemarketer from India is received by an operator in India, and you never need be bothered by a phone call in the middle of the night?

Call came through.

Well... I predicted that it would happen back in 2006... I said that Microsoft will change to a subscription model within the next two years and here is the announcement!

Cannot say that I am surprised.

Speculations

Some people have asked me of what I think lies ahead... so instead of having to remember what I have told who... here are my wild speculations.

My opinions and speculations:

• We will see $5/gallon during 3Q08.
  
• Federal Reserve base interest rates will rise by 0.5% before end of FY08
  
• Residential property prices will bottom out during 4Q08.
  

MSOOXML has been made an ISO Standard,

Of course, the challenge is to now produce a OOXML document which conforms to the now ratified standard which is capable of thoroughly crashing implementors of OOXML readers, including MS Office, and to create such a document which to fix the problem would require breaking away from the published specification and rendering documents in an incompatible manner.

Given the penchant for largely undocumented binary globs in the file, I should imagine that this should be possible - because by the nature of being undocumented, they are not part of the standard so a document which has an 'invalid' binary glob would still be conforming to the OOXML standard.

Anyways, it is not a disaster - I am sure that there must be plenty of ISO standards which are defunct or rarely used because they are irrelevant or unimplementable. OOXML is likely to become another one. Where people fail to specify exactly which ISO document standard, that is their own problem. Supporters of ODF should continue doing what they were doing - refining their specification and making it good and stop wasting time trying to berate their competitor.

Besides, now you have an easy way to tell PHBs about what each of the two standards are about:

When archiving legacy documents, use ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML.

For all new documents, use ISO/IEC 26300 Information technology - Open Document Format.

I now have Time!

Well, it is done.

I am now officially a jobless lazy bum. On the plus side - I now have time!

Time to think about relaxing properly. Time to read one of those dozens of books I never seemed to have time for.

There are a few things I need to do - but there is no work stress or pressure. This weekend will be the first in years where I have no deadlines to think about. Okay - I did have a couple of deadlines but they don't matter anymore.

Important things have happened - Iain M Banks has published a new Culture novel: Matter. I plan to read it this coming week... but not too fast - I shall wait until I have a nice open slot for that activity so I can enjoy his work fully.

"Chick-Kut-Teh"

Wonderful news: The nearby 99 Ranch Market now stocks the Bah Kut Teh kit near their section for Indonesian foods. No longer do I have to travel to San Francisco's Chinatown just to purchase Bah Kut Teh spices..

This evening, I prepared it using about 2 lbs of chicken with some baby carrots and sliced white onions thrown in near the end (the two vegetables which Katie readily eats). Served with steamed Jasmine rice. Perfect.

Of course, the best is yet to come... Tomorrow, it would taste even better!

Early morning activity...

Waking up and then moving a whole bunch of stuff is not an ideal way to start the day. It's not even 8:30am and I feel tired. At least everything is operational again, For a number of hours from yesterday afternoon, we were essentially offline with not even the house phone nor DSL connected.

Used the opportunity to vacuum the cooler fins inside the Quad G5 - it was truely impressive how much dirt had collected there - amazing that the machine did not suffer badly from overheating problems.

The sorry state of computing literature

While I was browsing a Borders yesterday evening, a revelation came upon me as to an analogy for the computer book situation:

Imagine in a bookshop that there is a "Food" section where there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of books, all quite clearly divided into sections:

• How to eat Pizza
• How to eat quiche
• How to eat soup
• Serving food
• Table settings
• The Art of Plating
• Slicing Turkey
• Serving Pie
• Reheating Dinners

Dozens of sections about food... yet none of them actually tell you how to make anything. No ingredients. No recipes.

That is the state of the majority of computer books and computing magazines today.

Tower of Hanoi

Moving stuff around or even preparing to move stuff around is all hard work - especially when space is limited. Preparing stuff for my new home office and getting things ready... Soon the rest of the furniture and stuff will be ordered. I hope that it would all be done by Christmas.
My arms are aching though.

Leopard Spaces...

I wish that Spaces can use multiple displays ... Having all the 'thumbnails' only on the primary display makes them small and unintelligible.

Book browsing

I went to Borders this evening after work and while I was there, I browsed some books ... My interest today was looking at different scripting languages (yeah computer books, how predicable of me). Had a look at the books on Python and Ruby - It's amazing that none of them are thread safe which makes it impractical for some of the stuff I want to do.
*sighs*
So I purchased a Terry Pratchett book. I much prefer the artwork on his UK books than the artwork over here.

Time Machine

Looks like Apple's "Time Machine" feature can be made to work with a non-Apple fileserver. From the helpful hint at the following URL, I now have it working to my fileserver, a FreeBSD machine with netatalk... http://blog.danielparnell.com/?p=43
Now... I just need some more storage space...

Leopard is a bit spotty

It appears that the formerly excellent X11 support in Tiger has regressed and the X11 support in Leopard, despite being based upon the more modern Xorg codebase, shows significant regression in functionality.

1. Unable to move windows on to secondary displays


2. Unable to be configured to use TCP connections, except by manual startup (Do we really need multiple Xquartz processes?)


3. DPI is fubar - I prefer to set 75DPI even though I have large displays - I have large displays because I want more stuff on the screen!


4. Display feels slower.

Some of the other new features are nice - the new SSH AskPasswd program is a nice new touch but I think I shall just have to bite the bullet and 'upgrade' to the Tiger X11 release. I shall be following the instructions detailed at http://aaroniba.net/articles/x11-leopard.html

Leopard's CUPS defaults

Mac OS 10.5 was not discovering my CUPS printers like how 10.4 was. It turns out that Apple has decided to only discover printers by Bonjour only and has turned off CUPS own detection. This seems like a poor decision.
I found the answer at http://mcdevzone.com/2007/10/28/printer-fix-for-leopard

Leopard Review

Here is my not-very-objective review of MacOS 10.5 aka Leopard.
Installation was pretty painless - I uninstalled things like APE beforehand and after reading the various blogs where people had hanging installs, I am sure glad that I did take the precaution. It feels faster on my Quad-G5 PowerMac - things seem to respond faster. Visually - I'm going to have to change the default background - some of the annoying artifacts on the menu bar are from the background image. The work done to Mail - is excellent. Much improved responsiveness. The iChat improvements are very welcome - it can now be signed-in on multiple accounts.
I have not managed to get Time Machine working from using a FreeBSD fileserver, even when I have netatalk installed and operational - There has been some skectchy reports of workarounds but its not working here. I really don't want to have an external drive for each Mac for backup - I would prefer to be able to back them up centrally over the network.
With respect to software development - time will tell. There is already some indication that the assembler/linker may have some problems with some inline PowerPC assembler which prevents the build of the glib macport from completing successfully.

Mac OS X Leopard has arrived

Actually, the small box arrived about an hour ago. Clearing some old work source repositories from my hard drive and other general 'housekeeping' duties. I haven't eagerly anticipated a new OS release for a long time: I would probably compare this to the time when OS/2 2.1 was released with its full 32bit Presentation Manager or perhaps even OS/2 Warp 3 with its UI enhancements... As to what features I am looking forward to exploiting, I would say in no particular order: Spaces, XCode, DTrace, Shark. There is a bunch of other 'nice to have' features... I guess I will see how well I like it after I install it.

We can smell the smoke from here.

All throughout today and yesterday, there has been ash falling from the sky from all the fires around near Los Angeles. We have had all the windows closed to keep the dust and ash out - going outside for a short while irritates my eyes something awful and that is even though I take a powerful anti-allergy medicine daily.

Today we lean that Microsoft has lost it's appeal regarding their monopolistic practices in Europe. I foretell that Microsoft will continue with business as usual and otherwise completely disregard the ruling and the penalties. So, they may pay the fiscal part of the penalties but the rest of it will have to wait for Satan to get a new job as a snow-plough driver in hell.
What can be done about it? Quite simple. It is within the EU's power to void Microsoft's copyrights, patents, trademarks and all other intellectual property in Europe.
Radical, yes. But it would also serve as a warning for all other companies that they are not above the law. Europe is a big market for Microsoft ... bigger than their American market.
I doubt that would ever happen but it doesn't hurt to dream.

Time to morn the passing of an old friend. My old Pentium 200MMX (SMP 2 Processor) machine would not start up today. The PSU is fine - the DPT SCSI controller can be heard to spin up the hard drives but to no avail - the CPUs failed to start up. No POST beep codes, nothing. No activity.

*sighs*

It was a trusty workhorse, from 1997 to 2007.

Only one question plagues me.... What machine should I butcher in order to have a working OS/2 machine or do I wait until eComStation goes GA and buy a modern machine?