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It's not JUST that the goverment subsidizes oil. While it certainly doesn't help to have artifically low gas prices, a much more difficult problem arises in America. Our country is fracking HUGE! Also, it's relatively new. In europe, and especially in european cities, places were built and designed in eras where horses were high tech, and most people walked most places. It's actually feasible to not have a car there. In America, there are very few places one can really live without a car. Most of those places have mass transit already. The other 2/3 of the country though... we have no option but to drive. I grew up rural Colorado, and we had to drive 30 miles to get to wal-mart even. As for food, there was a local grocery store, but it was tiny, and if you didn't want to pay $5 for a jar of mayo, you'd just wait and drive 30 miles for a real grocery store as well.

Now, granted, my prediciment was pretty extreme, but even in major cities like Dallas, a good percentage of the population lives miles and miles from various stores and things they need, and even if you want to take the bus, it's still 3-5 miles to the nearest bus stop. And then, even if you can psych yourself up for a 5 miles of walking to get to the store, it's not even an option unless you're suicidal. The layout of such places doesn't include pedestrian access in anything but the most limited way. You can't just walk or ride your bike on the interstate (unless your want to die or get arrested.)

Yeah, you could subsidize mass transit, and I think it's a good thing to try, especially for regional services like the proposed houston-dallas high speed rail, but for day to day life, cars are simply the only viable option for most people. Our country's entire infrastructure is designed with cars in mind, and no matter how much you try, you really can't replace that with mass transit without redesigning entire cities. Believe me, I drove the bus here last year. This town is only 9000 people, and the difficulity in designing routes that work is just horridly impossible. For a large city, imagine designing a system for the thousands of origins and destinations people could be going to, and then finding a way to get them there efficently, and in a reasonable time. Either you have a few routes that go and wind through lots of stuff... meaning a long ride if you're looking for a later stop... or you have a bunch of mini-routes that all intersect... in which case people have to switch busses a dozen times and know exactly what bus is going where and when.

No, without redesigning most of our cities and towns, the only viable mass transit solutions are the really far-fetched ideas like computerized smart-subways or road-trains where each car can switch tracks and link with others, meaning people get a fairly direct route to wherever. When I say "smart" I mean the person gets on, punches (or says) a destination, and the train (or maybe their transit pass) tells them when and where to switch cars, and eventually gets them within a couple blocks of their destination. Of course even that only covers large cities. Those of us that don't like living like rats and sardines are still stuck with personal vehicles.

I know for my part, I would love to ride my bike to work. Problem is, for my job as an on-site consultant, I have to travel to various clients throughout the day, often bringing tons of computer equipment and tools with me. I've had several calls in the past few weeks there were 20+ miles out in the country. There's never gonna be mass transit to places like that, and you're never going to convince me carry 100lbs. of computers on my bike for that distance.

Count yourself lucky you live in Seattle. It's one of the few cities in all of America with a truly workable mass transit system, and most of that is only because the city is pretty old, and even after the fire, they rebuilt in pretty much the same way. Still though, just try living in bellvue and getting to a job downtown, and see how much time it takes out of your day. Now try some equally far place that's not as popular as downtown, say some neighborhood up north of town. Make 20 miles from residential to residential, then see how much faster and easier it is by car. Then imagine that you've got a family, and kids that have to get to soccer practice and ballet. You simply can't get from school to home to soccer to ballet on time via the bus. It's not just hard, it's impossible. Until you fix that, you can't fix our reliance on cars.

Fuel cell technology (such as GM's) isn't that new, but the problem is that it's not very efficent yet. The "running on water" bit is only true if you don't count the electricty you have to put in it to split the water. The basic idea is that you plug in the car overnight, and it electrolyzes water into hydrogen and oxygen, then you can run the car the next day by reversing the process. Although most solutions just dump the o2 and later pull in new o2 from the air. In this sense, it's effectively just a rechargable battery. That's where our problems come into play, if you store h2 just under pressure (like bottles) the volume you need to make any great distance with a fuel cell is huge. On top of that, you've basically got a shuttle fuel tank sitting in your trunk. Not the safest thing to carry.

What they're working on is hydrogen storage in solid substrates. Basically solid or semi-solid matrixes to which h2 can be easily bonded and unbonded. This would mean that the gas isn't under pressure, and also that it can be stored much more densely, giving you a much farther run than with bottles. Such technology isn't production ready yet, so the only viable short-term option is to have hydrogen filling stations, where you can fill up on h2, rather than electrolizing your own. Then we come to the chicken and egg problem. Which comes first, h2 cars, or h2 stations? How do you convince people to buy/build one before the other is in use?

I still hold that nuclear is the only real solution to the energy problems we're going to be facing. We have new reactor and power plant designs that are incredibly advanced beyond anything in operation. Pebble bed reactors that simply can NOT have a melt down. New ceramic materials that resist corrosion in pumping systems and can last for a century or more. All sorts of nifty stuff.

What we do is build dozens of these plants. We build more than we need. Once they're built, operating costs are relatively low, and the price of electricity starts coming down. If we've built enough, the price becomes extremely cheap... to the point where electricity is practically free to the average joe. Once you've done that, then it becomes reasonable to power cars with hydrogen, as the electricity to make it is cheap. Filling stations would just make their own, rather than have it shipped. Sure, splitting water is by no means the most efficent way to make hydrogen, but it's the cleanest, and the only real cost is in electricity. If that's cheap enough, then everything becomes cheap (and clean!)

At this point we've made electricity cheap enough for just about every energy need we have. It even becomes commercially viable to use it for things like foundries and smelting. (Some places do it with electricity already.) You move anything that was a petrol engine over to fuel cells, and now the only sources of pollution we have left are a few chemical manufacturing plants. No cars, no power plants, nothing is burning fossile fuel.

"But what about the nuclear waste?" First off, that's not a huge issue. The new designs are highly efficent, and the fuel in them will last 50+ years, and unlike old reactors, they can easily be refueled without dismantaling the entire facility. We can then take the used fuel, and do one of two things. We can seal it up and bury it, taking the time to do it right of course. Or we can throw it away. And by throw I mean "launch" and by "away" I mean "into the sun."

No, I'm serious. Take the waste from a single powerplant refueling. It's gonna weigh well less than the payload capacity of a single Atlas rocket. You could literally just launch it out of orbit on a path that it'll send it towards the sun. Gravity does the rest. You could probably send 3-4 plants worth of waste on a single heavy lift rocket. But hey, as long as we're revamping the national infrastructure to nuclear, why not make better rockets too?

Nuclear rockets. "Ooh, but what about radiation?" someone always asks. The rocket design I'm talking about (nuclear-thermal gas-core "lightbulb") has perfectly clean exhaust. All the radioactive material is compltely contained inside the engine, and stays there for 50 years or so. The only exhaust is pure hydrogen, heated a bit hotter than the surface of the sun. There's an excellent article detailing all the designs for it here but the basic stats are thus:

It's 115m tall (about the size of a Saturn V they used to go to the moon), completely reusable, single stage (nothing gets tossed away) and it has enough fuel to take off with a 2 million pound playload (six times that of the shuttle) put it in oribit, pick up a new payload, and then land on it's own exhaust. Just like the old science fiction rockets, it doesn't glide or anything fancy, just comes down and burns engines to slow and then settles right on it's own tail. The rocket itself weighs 3x what the Saturn did, and all that extra weight goes into safety. It's got 7 engines, but can take off with only 5. It's made of honest-to-god metal, not all that lightweight aluminium foil and such. It'd be on the bullet proof side of things. No piece of foam is gonna take this thing down. Let me reiterate... it can carry 6 times the shuttle, both to AND from orbit, absolutely nothing gets thrown away and (for at least 50 years) the only thing it needs for fuel is hydrogen... which we'll have plenty of by that time. The "reusable" part of it is honestly true too. They say the shuttle is reusable, but by that they mean it only has to spend a year or so being completely rebuilt before it's good to go again. With one of these you could, quite literally, land in the middle of L.A., run some hoses from the nearest 10 filling stations, and be ready to go again as soon as the tank filled up. No special launch gantries are required, no elevators and assembly buildings, just fuel and a nice clear spot of ground.


Now, I'm not the only one clammoring for us to do something like this. The problem is that it takes a massive initial investment of the sort that only the goverment could instigate. That, and people are still afraid of the word "nuclear." But if you look at the amount of money we spend as a nation trying to keep a petroleum infrastructure running... The problem is that politicians don't think more than 4 years to the next election. God forbid they should do some long-term planning.

I'm in Steamboat Springs, and yeah, it's expensive up here, but it also looks like we (northwest colorado) may save us from OPEC. Check out this article on what Shell figured out... http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/news_columnists/article/0,1299,DRMN_86_4051709,00.html

I just got the highest score I've ever seen!

...then I realized I was at a gas pump.

1 tank of gas
3.15 per gallon
42 gallons of fuel
132 dollars

I left the place laughing a bit hysterically (Many brontasauri died to bring us this fuel!) but I was whimpering on the inside.

So far it seems more reliable than MySQL, as that system involves a client/server architecture that has dozens of points of failure. SQLite, via the code library, reads/writes directly to a single file (per database) meaning much less chance of failure. On a lot of MySQL backed sites, (penny arcade springs to mind) you'll often see MySQL errors pop up on their site when the database goes down, but not the webserver itself. No such thing for SQLite, as if the scripting engine is up, then so is the database. And since it's directly writing to a file, it's a lot quicker, and a lot easier to manage. You can just directly copy the file and have a full database backup, and from the point of an admin, you no longer have to manage an entirely seperate permission and quota set for the database server.

The drawback to SQLite is that since it does direct file access, you have no sort of transaction queueing or user permission levels. In place of transactions, it compensates with simple file locking, basically making processes queue for file write access, which works just fine in 99% of situations. I wouldn't try to use it for say, bank accounting when you have a hundred thousand transactions a second though. As for user permissions... it's not that it's insecure, it's simply a matter of permissions to the file itself. That is, anyone who can write to the file can write to the database. This really only becomes a problem if/when you need to set varying permissions to certain columns and tables. Of course, the best way to handle this is to have those permissions set and checked in the program's code, rather than the database engine. I personally think that's a better solution anyway, but it does mean that in such situations where a program relied on that functionality, it can't be just a drop-in replacement for MySQL.

*nods* The SQL bit is the same syntax, the only difference is in the function calls in PHP, where you'll use the something like sqlite_query() rather than mysql_query() The only other change (I think) is in what characters have to be escaped in text strings. Still though, should be a trivial difference if you're actually coding (and not fixing someone elses code.)

When you get around to it, yeah. I'm talking about a year or so here though, as most of the Xepher.net backend itself runs on MySQL, so I have a lot of code to rewrite before I can ditch it completely. For now, I'm just trying to encourage everyone to move to SQLite when possible.

...have you heard the one about the dyslexic devil worshipper who sold his soul to Santa?

No, but I heard the one about the dyslexic, atheistic, insomniac who stayed up all night wondering if there was a Dog.

So, I was listening to music... and "House of the Rising Sun" came on my random playlist. I didn't realize the irony (in light of current events) until it was almost over. Then I had the urge to write better lyrics.

To the tune of 'House of the Rising Sun'


There was a house in new orleans
Lost in the rising flood
And it's become a ruin of soggy wood
And now I fear a dud

My father was an oilor
He pumped the black gold seas
My sweetheart was a looter, lord
Down in new orleans

Now the only thing a looter sees
Is profit from other's loss
And the only time he's satisfied
Is when he's hauling dross

He fills his truck up to the brim
And he'll pass the guns around
And the only pleasure he gets out of life
Is shooting rescue choppers down

Oh tell our fellow cities
Not to do what we have done
Don't build below the ocean
Where we all will sink as one

Well it's one foot in the dome
And the other's in the rain
I'm goin' back to new orleans
But never shall remain

I

I'm in the process of closing down the old forums this week. After that, I have to rewrite a few bits of the application rules to accomodate the new forum software... most notably there are no polls, so that part from the old rules is invalid.

I'd say a few weeks to a month at the outside. Things here are greatly influenced by my real-world life, work, and motivation. It's entirely possible I could go all hard-core productive this weekend and get it done. Or I could sleep 'till noon and spend the rest of the day riding my bike and enjoying this awesome weather. I know that's annoying from your point of view, as you're really just waiting on my whims, but... Hey, at least I'm being honest about it.

In the mean time, hang out, say hi, get to know some people. It can't hurt, and it usually helps.

Open Source to the rescue!

http://www.adiumx.com/

OSX IM client that does Jabber (Google Talk) as well as AIM and others.

I will note that, technically, Gaim works for OSX as well, but it's a lot trickier to set up than adium.

For the record, you should use SQLite, not MySQL whenever possible, such as with punBB. From your POV it'll simply be faster, from my view, it's way less of a headache to manage, and is more secure. I actually plan to do away with the MySQL server within the next year or so, as many of the hacks that come in through various forums are exploits in MySQL. Setting it up to use SQLite now will mean much less headache trying to convert later.

I don't have a config set up for the nameserver to point the site here, but the mailserver somewhere else. If you use the XN nameservers, then everything is going to point here, and all email to that domain will dump into your account here. If you use someone else... well then you need to tell all of those various subdomains to point here as well. So long as the domain name resolves to this server (and is *.databits.cc) it'll go to your account, from which the .htaccess things can be used to send it to a specific site.

Oh, and if you want to use XN for nameservers, it's ns1.xepher.net and ns2.xepher.net. Please don't use JUST "xepher.net"

is there a linux version? (dumb question #1)

What? You think I'd go and recommend something that work in linux? :-)

It is doable... what you're looking for is called "ModRewrite, the swiss army knife of URL manipulation." It's a built in part of apache, and so it's already running on the server. You just have to put the proper directives in the .htaccess configs. That's the hard part, as, from the offical documentation...

The great thing about mod_rewrite is it gives you all the configurability and flexibility of Sendmail. The downside to mod_rewrite is that it gives you all the configurability and flexibility of Sendmail.

    -- Brian Behlendorf
    Apache Group

Also, like the docs say "it's voodoo... cool voodoo, but still voodoo"

As such, I'm simply going to point you at some useful docs, and then wish you the best of luck.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html