Author: Dave Shevett

Goodness, what a day. With Cat out of town this week, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Zach, and today we got to go out and bikeride for the first time in probably 2 weeks.

Not only was that cool, but today I received my new Olympus D770UZ camera. Astute readers will remember that about a year and a bit ago, my old camera was stolen at an event. I’ve been without a decent digital camera since then, and with work picking up now, I finally bit the bullet and bought a new one. It arrived today, and so while Zach and I were out biking, I naturally gave it a go.

The camera generates stupid-high resolution pictures (2277×1712) which would make very little sense sharing on the web, so I’ve thumbnailed and rescaled these to avoid 800k downloads beating the bejeezus out of our server.

Down the road from us is Berlin Orchards, an apple orchard we sometimes go to to pick apples. They have some fantastic trees around the fields, and I loved how this one stood out. By the way, this is less than 2 miles from our site for Mosaic, so it gives you an idea what the area is like.

The camera is small enough that I’m comfortable letting Zach handle it. I handed it to him and rode away from him and back, asking him to just keep taking pictures. This is the one that came out the best. By the way, that’s the Assabet River Rail Trail we’re on. It’s a beautiful trail as you can see, and Zach and I ride it a lot. Check out the AART inc site for pictures of the ongoing construction on it.

Quiz time. Can you figure out what this image is? I didn’t do much more than hold the camera and take the picture, but it’s a nifty keano pattern. My pattern/artist/nutso mom couldn’t figure out what it is. I’m pleased 🙂

This is an example of why I like the Olympus larger-scale lenses over the small-aperture standard digital camera lens. Because the 770UZ has a 10x zoom on it, it has a larger lens, and therefore handles long distance pictures in an elegant way, but shortening up the depth of field. This picture was actually taken from about 30′ away, with the zoom at about 80%.

These are selected from about 2 dozen pictures I took, including an MPG of Z bikeriding. The camera is fast, handy to work with, and I’m screamingly pleased with the results. The image quality is what I’ve come to expect from Olympus digcams.

Oh, and the bikeride was nice too. We rode about 6 miles in (according to happy bike computer) about 34 minutes. We stopped and fiddled with the camera a bunch, hence the slow pace, but even still, with me on a trail bike and Zach on a kids 5 speed, we move along okay.

Yay, it looks like Derek has started blogging again, another person to add to my Sage feed. I have to thank Derek for finding this quote, which I had seen many years ago, but couldn’t actually find:

The geographical center of Boston is in Roxbury. Due north of the center we find the South End. This is not to be confused with South Boston which lies directly east from the South End. North of the South End is East Boston and southwest of East Boston is the North End. –(unknown)

Last, but not least, everyone must check out Darth Vaders Blog.

This past week I drove my nifty Golf TDI down to NJ for a quick visit to a client. It was a great drive, but it gave me time to think about the moral arguments in my head about my car.
On the one hand, it can’t be denied that getting 42-43mpg nowadays is a good thing. Diesel prices in Boston run about $2.49 a gallon (though down in NJ it was down to $2.15. What’s up with that?). I can run almost 600 miles on a single tank of gas, and the car is _FUN_ to drive. This was one of rare long distance drives where I could really wind it out and have fun with it (go go gadget Merritt Parkway, a road that is high on my list of East Coast Speedways.
On the other hand, there are questions about the cleanliness of the Turbo Diesel Injected, or ‘TDI’ engine.
It goes without saying that the TDI engine in the current model Golf is vastly superior to the old Diesel engines that went into the VW Rabbits in the 70’s. They’re far cleaner and more efficient. You don’t see current generation TDI’s with black soot all over the back of the car. But California, New York, and Massachusetts have forced VW to withdraw the TDI because of questions about the emissions.
I did a little digging trying to find out the reason behind this. If I’m driving a car that is dirtier than a standard gasoline engine, I’m really not gaining much…
The folks over a TDI Club have one of the most detailed and complete FAQ’s about these engines (heck, about ANY topic) that I’ve ever seen.
The relevant section is in the part about emissions…

TDI vs. gasoline – The TDi emissions levels are among the lowest ever for Diesel powered engines. All TDi powered Volkswagens sold in the US meet so-called “Tier 1” emission limits. The TDi is often “cleaner” overall than gasoline powered cars. CO2 emissions are 25% less than a conventional gasoline powered engine. CO, HC and NOx emissions are less than previous Volkswagen Diesels. Diesel fuel has lower evaporative emissions than gasoline. Diesel fuel also requires less energy intensive refining than gasoline.

Diesel engines generally emit higher amounts of NOx and particles than equivalent gasoline powered cars, even though CO and HC emissions may be lower, and total emissions are lower due to much better fuel consumption. The current TDI Volkswagens typically emit slightly somewhat lower than the Tier 1 limits for NOx and particles (around 0.052 g/mi of particulate matter [PM] and 0.82 g/mi of NOx per EPA data), but the CO and HC emissions are far below the Tier 1 limits and well below the emissions of the equivalent gasoline engine.

Further down, there’s the section specifically about why California and NY (and now Massachusetts) have withdrawn these engines:

California and New York issues – The state of California places limits on the “fleet average” emissions of auto manufacturers. Currently, a manufacturer can only sell a certain proportion of “Tier 1” vehicles in relation to the number of “LEV” or low-emission vehicles. Certain other states have copied the California legislation. Volkswagen has stated that the withdrawal from sale of 2000-model TDI vehicles from certain states is due to these reasons. Furthermore, California has declared diesel exhaust to be a toxic air contaminant, although other studies dispute this conclusion. The situation in New York is the same.

My interpretation of this document (and it’s long, and quite detailed), is that the TDI engine is in fact more efficient on all fronts than a gasoline engine. MPG for MPG, it is dirtier in particulates, but because of it’s uncommonly high mileage, it is still cleaner than a standard-mileage car.
Compared to ultra-efficient gas-hybrid engines (such as those in the Toyota Prius) it appears that the TDI still puts out less of the more gruesome chemicals (Formaldehyde and Benzine – in Benzine’s case, by an order of magnitude), but can be considered ‘dirtier’ due to particulate emissions.
I’m also intrigued by this comment:

The emission levels from diesel engines tend to remain more-or-less constant throughout the useful life of the engine, whereas gasoline engines have many more emission-related components which deteriorate and lead to higher and higher emissions as the engine gets older.

So for me, I think I can keep driving my TDI with a clear conscience. It is a high performing, very clean engine that gets great mileage. It is not the ultra-clean engine that a pure electric or Hydrogen based vehicle may be, but it is available now, the price is good on it, it has 4 doors and is very zippy to drive. I think I’ll keep it.

A post in Tom’s livejournal made me think a bit about how people use computers in the modern day.
Back in the Dark Ages (the 80’s and early 90’s), most PC’s ran single tasking operating systems that let you run (with only slight variation) one program at a time. You ran one program, when you were done with it, you closed it, and ran something else. This mindset set the stage for many people’s home-computer use.
By way of digression, I use the term ‘PC’ in the generic defintion, not in the context of an “IBM Compatible Computer”, after IBM co-opted the name in 1983.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand. Because of this “One screen, one application” approach, folks who continued working on Microsoft-based systems tended to stick with that model, while those who ‘branched out’ into alternate systems, such as the Amiga or the MacIntosh, or spent time with the early Unix X windows environments, tend to work on their machines in ‘multitasking’ modes. Running many applications at once, and flipping between them rapidly.
More recently, Windows systems have progressed to the point where it is feasible to actually run more than one application at once efficiently. But even with that improvement, compare how a Unix desktop user operates with the way a Windows user operates.
Unix (and by extension Linux, and even Mac folks) tend to run their desktops as a series of floating or tiled windows – each application running in its own window, but with the windows overlapping or tiling. On Unix, I personally set up multiple desktops – one having my ‘communications’ stuff (email, irc, etc), and another having my ‘work’ desktop (editor, compiler, reference materials). My experience watching Windows users tends to show them running the 2 or 3 applications they have available all in full screen mode – and generally it is in fact only 1-2 apps.
At the moment, in a ‘quick off the cuff’ setup on my laptop, I have 3 windows on a single desktop (shell, browser, and irc), with 1-2 small things in the dock (Jabber, etc). But even within my browser, I have 5-6 tabs open. To me, this is a minimalist setup. To a windows user, this would be ‘busy’.
I’m not making any value judgements here, just an observance. Much of this came to light watching people use Internet Explorer – a browser I find supremely inferior to Firefox, if only for Firefox’ ability to use Tabs. This (IMHO) quantum leap in browser useability is not as strong a draw to Windows users because, I believe, this mindset of ‘one app at a time’ softens the attraction to a tabbed interface. There’s just nothing for a Windows user to latch onto and say “Oh, I could see how that could help!” Whereas Unix and Mac users are all over it. (I’ll note that Safari, under OSX, has a tabbed interface).
I’m not going in for bashing Windows users here – to each user his or her own. But to me this does go to explain why Windows users haven’t flocked en masse to Firefox (though the adoption rate by Windows user is quite high all things considered – this mostly driven by the incredible insecurity of IE).

… visiting your old high school 23 years after you graduated. Seeing things you yourself built (“Wow, that’s still there. I wired that.”), seeing things you don’t remember (“Was that building there before?”), talking to teachers who still remember you (“DAVID SHEVETT!!! My goodness, you used to be so skinny!”), and talking to students (“Dude, I wasn’t even born then.”).
And even with all that, it’s still a beautiful place.

There’s a long note pending here somewhere, but just wanted to let folks know I’m back and survived the weekend. This was by far the largest event I’ve done (over 7000 attendees), and all in all, things went very well.
Special thanks to fraterrisus and dancingwolfgrrl for all the work they put in.

This is sort of buzzing about in blogland, sort of the equivelent of a Livejournal Meme.
I’ve been chattering about setting up my KVM and how things finally turned out. Thought it might be nice for folks to check out my digs.
This is where I spend untold hours a day either coding, browsing, chatting, gaming, but for the most part doing what I do.
The laptop is my IBM T40, which is basically my entire online life 🙂 I do everything on it, from development, to email, to browsing, to chatting, to some gaming.
The Shuttle box has no name, and is a Windows XP box whose primary purpose is running high end games and doing the occasional Windows thing that I can’t do under Linux. At the moment, I’m doing some work for a company that is all Windows based, so I have to test / transfer my things under Windows on occasion.
There’s a hidden KVM that lets me switch the flatscreen monitor between the two (but nicely, while gaming, I can still keep the laptop screen open and see chat on IRC while I game 🙂
BTW, the laptop is open because I run mostly wireless, and the antenna on T40’s is in the lid. If I close it, the signal strength goes down to where I start getting performance issues, not to mention randomly hopping over to the neighbors un-secured WAP.
And yes, that is in fact a Rokenbok stand that is holding up my laptop and power supply. Normally my printer is under there, but it’s getting ready to go to Animeboston.