Wind power isn’t a viable always-on solution because wind isn’t always on. Step outside your house right now: It might be windy, or it might not be windy. Even places like parts of Texas which have almost constant prevailing winds, the wind sometimes dies down. When it does, we burn coal to keep the lights on.

So in order to use wind power as an always-on power generation system, we’d need a remarkably large array of batteries to store power for when the wind dies down.

Of course, batteries are expensive. No-one wants to buy as many batteries as it would take to store the amount of power needed for, say, an entire day without wind.

What if there were an existing infrastructure solution to this problem, though? What if there were literally millions of batteries out there just waiting to get plugged into the grid?

Maybe there will be someday soon: Electric cars. They’re basically filled with batteries. Think about it: You drive your car for 15 minutes to and from work at times with low power usage (because people are driving to work instead of using power) and the rest of the time it sits in a parking lot or a driveway.

Instead of just sitting there, it could be plugged into the power grid all night powering up when demand is lowest. Then when demand is highest during daylight hours, it could feed back into the grid if the grid needed it.

We’d still need other generation facilities, yes, because wind might die down for two days and we’d be cursed with having no power and no cars to drive, but for most of the “wind is dying down for two hours”, the blips that are the real concern, electric cars would solve the problem admirably.

I have solved the wind power problem. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-07-22.

What Outlook does, though, is easily plug into Exchange. Which just happens to easily plug into things like Sharepoint and Office. All of which rests on a foundation of MSSQL and Active Directory. Which only exist on Windows Servers. This is what we call an ecosystem. It’s one of the few things that Microsoft does right. Outlook is simply the thin end of the wedge, that little bit of lubrication that enables you to more easily give money to Microsoft.

And right now, there’s really no good alternative. Outlook + Office + Sharepoint + Exchange + MSSQL + Windows Server is damned expensive, (often) hard to maintain and administer, and hooked into a system of constant and unnecessary upgrades that ensure it will be expensive now and in the future, but it’s so easy.

Thunderbird doesn’t have that ecosystem. Evolution doesn’t have that ecosystem. Thunderbird is getting close with the Lightning calendaring application, a fine, even essential addition to the program. I can’t imagine installing Thunderbird without Lightning. But this is all frontend stuff. If you want to set up a proper backend for Thunderbird using, say, Linux + MySQL + Postfix + whatever, you’re in for quite a steep learning curve. Unless you have a lot of spare time, that learning curve will be almost insurmountable.

What the Linux business community needs, to penetrate the SMB market especially, is something along the lines of Exchange. Something like Zimbra, for instance. We need to cast aside this idea that a competent UNIX admin must be in charge of the Linux server. Most small and medium sized businesses simply do not have the resources for that. We need to be able to say, here, have this server. It will do what you need it to do.

Can you imagine a Linux-based server with a bunch of pre-built virtual machines designed to work with each other to provide a smooth computing experience for those of us who can’t afford to hire an admin full time?

You buy some iron, lay it down in the spare room, and say, okay, I need the “Storage” virtual machine and the “Mail Server” virtual machine and the “Web Server” virtual machine, and the “Collaboration” virtual machine. You install them, you click through a bunch of helpful wizards and boom, you’re done. Maybe it points you in the direction of a backup server for good measure.

You go to your Windows or OS X or Ubuntu machine and start it up. You install a couple programs on it that just work right out of the box. Could be Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, or whatever. You get to work and everything is exactly the way you want it.

Then one day when your company has enough money for an full-time admin, you separate that functionality into separate servers or whatever.

I guarantee that business owners will pay for that. Bundle all these free software ideas together and make a usable package out of them. I don’t care of you GPL your front end or not. I’m a pragmatist when it comes to things like that. But there is serious money to be made in the marketplace for a company brave enough to do just that. You can sell your product and the support of that product for far less than all that Microsoft software. You can undercut them and create a better, more secure product in the meantime.

A guy can dream, right?

A SMB-friendly stack: Why doesn’t Linux have one? originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-04-28.

Instead, I get to see how many times y’all typed “sudo” in terminal. Huzzah! My revenge? I’m going to post mine.

$ history | awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
144 cd
140 ls
105 sudo
20 rdiff-backup
16 rm
10 uname
8 man
8 cp
5 exit
5 crontab

Way to go, Planet Ubuntu. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-04-10.

Happy Post-Valentines Romance originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-02-15.

Attribution / License

Bullet points for a Wednesday afternoon. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-11-28.

I’m excited!

The countdown begins! originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-10-15.

Why can’t we have just one cord with two or three plugs? Certainly the thing that would send information and power to a hard drive could do the same thing for your digital camera, your screen, your video camera, and your network. We could have on kind of plug for removable devices, another kind for semi-permanent devices, and a small version of both for compact devices.

Am I missing something here? Why can’t this be done?

Why do we have so many different kids of cables and plugs? originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-09-19.

Eventually I worked out that the transaction log was, well, gargantuan. Enormous. And even though we have 2TB of storage just sitting around, we can’t use any of that because it’s a perfectly good Debian RAID server that came along after the initial investment in… Windows 2000, MSSQL 2000, a commercial mail server, ISS, Visual Studio and who knows what else.

This is why you don’t let your bosses make technology decisions for you. We’re not doing rocket science here. This isn’t a high-load database context, or some complex thing that needs a heavy-duty solution. What we need is a hang-glider. What we have is the Deathstar.

What really bothers me is we could have, with a tiny bit more investment in personnel, and a lot less invested in buying software, have done this all for, essentially, free. Apache is used around the world, as is Postfix, as is MySql or Postgre, as is PHP (or any of the other up-and-comers). We could have done it for an up-front cost of zero dollars in software and used the money saved to hire a competent person to administer the servers and do some simple web programming.

But no, we went the comfortable, half-assed route, and instead of creating a site that just works, we have a site that half-works, sometimes, and is tied in to proprietary programs that will chain us to an upgrade cycle that we either submit to and pay the price over the long term, or escape and pay the price in the short term.

At least you can say, if you’re chained to Linux or BSD or Solaris, that your upgrade cycle is essentially free, barring hardware costs. You can, at least, say that.

This morning, to get back to the original thing, I had to wade through a tide of screens, logins, and all that sort of thing, and figure out a horrible GUI just to manage a database. And then figure out the command syntax, which makes no sense whatsoever. And then finally, after two hours of research, the entire task took five minutes to execute.

Insultandinjury.

And, to top it off, the beyond-ridiculous antipathy of some of my former compatriots to body modification has reared its head again, if only on my periphery. Still, I won’t say anything about that, lest I say something stupid.

Early morning frustrations. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-08-22.

Bullet points for a Friday morning. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-08-03.

We must protect the children! To do so the government must be given sweeping power to monitor the populace! We won’t use the newfound powers at our fingertips for evil!

Idiots.

Somebody needs to shoot Ted Stevens with a RPG. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-07-26.

It was a thing of horrible, dark beauty.

One final cheer for the fallen. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-07-24.

But the real storm comes at Upstream Version Freeze, and Feature Freeze. After that patches and package revisions come flooding down the pipe. I think I remember something like 50 a day for a couple of weeks. I couldn’t keep up with all the changes with my small simian mind.

So yeah, this is what I do for fun, eh. I’m looking forward to Gutsy Gibbon, whatever the case, as I hear there’s a good chance that desktop effects will finally be integrated into the system. Nice, because the bolt-on and backports don’t always work very well, and I fondly remember running Beryl in all its buggy glory. And while Compiz Fusion is nice, the packages I’ve used are backports and don’t necessarily always work that well.

Today’s Ubuntu Post originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-07-18.

What functionalities of MSO and OOo do you use? Do you use Word/Writer to make documents? Do you use Excel/Calc to put things in rows and columns? Do you use Powerpoint/Impress to make slideshows?

Then you’ve never scratched the surface of the functionality present in either of these office suites. You might say that they’re both way, way too complicated and unwieldy for you. You need a knife, what you have is the USS Enterprise.

Or, do you use Excel/Calc, for instance, as an application development platform of some kind? (And, tangentially, are you completely and utterly insane?)

I have been emailed a thousand spreadsheets and text documents. Literally. And I have never come across one that did anything other than page layout and a few basic formulas.

MS Office and OpenOffice both suck because they try to be both simple and complex and in trying to be both actually arrive at neither. In your typical office, what do you need to do? You need to collaborate with co-workers, you need to share calendars, you need to email, that sort of thing. None of these things is a single-user process, none of these things exists as an island.

Why then do both the major office suites insist on foisting this single-user mentality from the 1990s on us? I don’t want to edit a document, save it, have someone else edit the document, save it (or even worse, have it emailed around). I don’t want a document with an embedded application.

I want a document that I can edit in real-time while other people edit it in real time as well. Why has no one done this? Why are spreadsheets and text documents still two different things? Why has no one put them together?

Microsoft, at least, has tried, in its dorky, cumbersome way, to remedy this with a Sharepoint Portal, but even that’s a weak solution to a huge problem. Throwing a bunch of wikis and shared calendars at a paradigm that needs radical change isn’t going to solve anything; they’re merely adding another layer of abstraction on a layer of cruft and acting as if this is a new and radical idea.

It isn’t. Microsoft Office and OpenOffice are old and busted. Where’s the new hotness? Why is a company like Google trying to re-re-invent the wheel by replicating this old and busted on the internet with AJAX for crying out loud? Talk about bolting crap to crap! Where’s the new and different and outside the box and productivity-enhancing program that’s going to rock my socks off?

It’s not just that MSO and OOo are boring. They are, but that’s not the problem. They don’t meet my needs. I don’t need to make a document. I consider the idea of a document out-dated. I don’t need to save or auto-save or click through menus or scroll along a ribbon. I consider both those interface ideas out-dated.

Old and busted. So tell me, ladies and gentlemen, where is the new hotness?

Or, who is going to build the better mousetrap?

Microsoft Office and OpenOffice both suck. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-07-17.

I’m just torn about what to call this tool. Something to do with the internet… something with a little more punch than Firefox Downloader… I’ve got it! We’ll call this tool, “Internet Explorer”!

I’m going to go down in history for this one.

Oooh! I had a great idea! originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-07-15.

1) Retry
2) Restart
3) Reboot
4) Reconfigure
5) Repatch
6) Reinstall (application)
7) Reformat
8) Rebuild (system and application)
9) Retry (everything from #1 to #8)
10) Relinquish / Reassign / Reject (project or task)
11) Resign
12) Résumé

I’ve made a derivative list for Gentoo, should anyone be interested.

1) Recompile
2) Recompile
3) Recompile
4) Recompile
5) Recompile
6) Recompile
7) Recompile
8) Recompile
9) Recompile
10) Recompile
11) Recompile
12) Recompile kernel

How to fix something on a Microsoft system. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-07-13.

If all the userland tools and common packages like Samba were forked and maintained as GPLv2. Two developmental branches if you will. And if someone were to keep a repository of these forked projects.

And if that someone were Microsoft.

GPLv3 panic in Voucherville… originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-07-10.

Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, Skype, etc, are all exactly the same in Ubuntu. Compiz beats the pants off any other windowing system, period.

And Windows XP is that appliance I put in a box in a closet and don’t pay much attention to except when I need it, which is rarely.

It’s a beautiful thing really. The simplest of simple technologies gives me back the choice I want. As a fanboy might put it, I no longer bow before the golden calf of Redmond.

Running Windows under virtualisation: A retrospective. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-06-20.

Mr Stallman, a question. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-06-18.

Microsoft, of course, has other ideas. Support has ended or is ending for Windows 2000–their most stable OS to date in my experience–and in order to keep a well-patched web-facing server alive, we have two choices. One, we upgrade to Server 2003, and replace the boxes as well, as they’re pretty old and probably won’t handle 2003. Two, we keep what we’ve got, understanding that if vulnerabilities are found, we’ll be, well, vulnerable. Either we pay out a large ($10,000 or so) sum to upgrade, or we cross our fingers and hope for the best.

We’re a small company with a small technology budget. Guess what we’re going to do? I hate crappy hardware and upgrade cycles; there’s no good reason that a well-made server and operating system shouldn’t run for ten years without breaking down or becoming out of date. And not something you need a forklift to move.

On a related note, what is it with operating systems and applications devouring RAM and disk space? I mean, I understand that computing is more complicated than it once was, but Windows 95–piece of all-dancing crap that it was–took something like 25mb of RAM to run. Something like that. These days, only Mac OSX gets faster with each release, and I’m not sure how they can keep that up. Linux gather more moss with each passing day, and Microsoft Windows is positively ballooning with each new and less-needed version.

I ask myself a simple question: what sort of insane processing power, HD space, and RAM will one need to simply check ones email in 2015?

Tech talk; those of you who read Us and People can tune out and wipe the spit off your chins now. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-06-11.

But you know what? That post is wrong. iTunes sucked before, and it sucks now. I have had the unusually annoying experience of trying it out on a computer at work–you know, seconds chances and all that–but came away disappointed again. Let me address a few key points.

iTunes is a system hog.

It just is. Come on people, I know you like it, but let’s not deny the facts that I’m not going to support with numbers. Instead, a worthless anecdote: I initially installed iTunes on a grey box with a fresh vanilla XP install, and it used 46mb of memory fresh out of the box (so to speak). On my sister’s computer, with a large library, playing a good old MP3, it’s using 59mb. That’s far too much memory for something as basic as a music player. WinAmp, even with all the bells and whistles, doesn’t come anywhere close. Without the bells and whistles, it’s at a quarter of the memory used.

iTunes does too much stuff. But not enough stuff.

Really, people. iTunes is wildly functional. Extravagantly functional. It plays video, for crying out loud. It generates a thousand kinds of playlists. It has a built-in music store. &cetera. Except where it needs to be. When I want to write a plugin, how do I do this? How do I play a different codec than the limited pre-chosen selection? How do I easily manage multiple collections? Any player worth its salt–including Windows Media Player, the most worthless hunk of confusing crap ever imagined in the mind of man–can do these things. Why can’t iTunes? Sure, iTunes is pretty easy to use. It’s an MP3 player for crying out loud. But who cares if it does things easily if it doesn’t do what I want it to do at all?

Note to software designers: You will never be as inventive as those who use your software. Design for extensibility. It may be hard, but it will add value you can’t even imagine to your software, and allow those who use it to use it as they see fit.

Wait, I don’t want to use iTMS.

I don’t particularly like the iTunes Music Store. I mean, I know I can get restriction-free music for a buck thirty or so, and their selection is great. So maybe I want to use iTMS and a different music store in conjunction, or maybe not use iTMS at all. How do I do this inside the program?

iTunes is locked into this proprietary iPod -> iTunes -> iTMS channel and won’t let you exit the channel except by going outside the program. Do you see how silly this is? Imagine if you bought your car from Ford, and not only were you only allowed certain Ford-approved fuels, but you had to buy them from Ford-branded petrol stations. Or if you bought a Sony television and it could only be plugged into a Sony brand electrical socket with a patented electrical plug. You wouldn’t stand for that.

Now of course, people are going to say, “Well, iTunes can handle other music store’s MP3s!” Which it does. But that functionality is only a caveat from Apple, understanding that no one in the world would use a player that only played restricted media from iTMS.

So they went another route entirely. iTMS -> iTunes -> iPod is an easy way to buy music. It’s all integrated. You literally just click a couple times, and you’re done.

Boot up Firefox -> Log in to other music store -> Download -> Drag into iTunes -> iPod is decidedly less easy. So of course, only the people know alternatives exist will use said alternatives, and then only sometimes. This is Apple’s right, of course. It’s their software. They can do with it what they like, at least within the bounds of law. But that doesn’t mean that I have to like iTunes, or even use it. I’d much rather nurse an antipathy.

But you don’t have to listen to me. I may think iTunes is annoying and bloated, but you can keep using it. That’s your right. iTunes will fade into history like every other media player has, and eventually neither of will have to worry about it.

iTunes still sucks. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-06-06.