mindlace

Sorry that it’s been so long since I posted; life has been busy, but fruitful.

At the moment I am trying to get a work visa in Germany, and living with the wonderful and charming Claudia. This features lots of kafka-esque moments, wherein I try to convince people that have no understanding of the work I do that I am sufficiently qualified.

Besides that, my zero-owned-matter quest proceeds apace:  I have fewer than 10 physical books now (an enormously difficult thing for me to do), and am in the process of selling off my car.

The clothing-rental thing would work if I were in the states; I haven’t looked here in Europe yet. Unfortunately it is not particularly cost-effective to rent your clothes, and has rather dire consequences for one’s ability to make a sartorial statement.

In any case, once the car is sold the largest piece of matter I will own is an Aeron chair and associated desk. Not quite ready to give up on that, but for the moment it is in the states.

My work is interesting – getting to implement a scrum-like development environment for a web-development firm, as well as improving their toolchain all round – svn, redmine, automated testing, etc. I am enjoying the challenge of moving an existing team towards a better method of working.

I’m still shoveling through my mountain of debt, incurred while attending college, and it seems unlikely that I will be free from it until at least the end of ’09; I am seriously looking forward to a future when I actually get to allocate more than a quarter of every dollar I earn somewhere other than “paying for yesterday”.

For those of you who follow my twitter feed, you know I’ve already broken down and pre-ordered a Kindle 2. Despite announcing it many months ago, I have not given away most of my books. I suspect my reticence is in not wanting to give up the content. However, I have a workaround. I’m going to use delicious library to catalog all the physical books I have, so that I can gradually re-acquire my library in ebook format.

Anyway, so this should get rid of the bulk of my non-car owned matter. As part of the move I’m going to try to come up with an estimate of how much mass remains in my possession, so I can accurately track its diminishment.

So of course on the way to material independence, I find a (few) new things to buy; a pen and a cot with wheels and a roof. The cot looks like it will assemble in my Fit with the passenger seat down, and I imagine I can insulate it against the cold. Have to see if they’ll even let me buy one, as they seem intent on giving them away; I’ll try to give and get.

I still have to watch out for all the places in which it would be illegal for me to sleep. I have to find someplace to park my car anyway while I am not in the Estados Unidos, so I will be looking for some long term parking where I can sleep and preferentially get watts and in a perfect universe get bandwidth.

Of course, it’s not exactly a trivial pen, but I’m already planning on needing to plug in my book and half a dozen other bits of electronic lampreys. As much as I want to be a 21st century digital boy there are some thoughts I can only get out on paper, so at least this way I will get a digital transcription of what I write.

You have to use special paper, but I could use the discipline of only having one thing to write on. I also ordered some moleskin-alikes, so I should have a decent form factor. We’ll see if it works as advertised, as it is the latest in a long line of dead gadgets that tried to do something similar.

If it works, then at the end of every page I can (if I so choose) just rip it out and destroy it; the data will stay with me, so it counts as more portable than the few other old journals I never read but lug around anyway.

Now for a brief PSA:

In these Turbulent Times I feel it my duty as an American to whore myself out to the general public with more élan. It is in this spirit that I would like to formally announce the opening of the Mindlace T-Shirt Shop. Please spend all the money you were saving for that Senate Seat or Convertable Debt Swap Instrument.

The women’s T-shirt is made of organic cotton harvested using sustainable methods, so I thought I should mention that the ink on that shirt is made with the crushed bones of underage sweatshop workers.

After seven months of more or less non-stop working like crazy to establish a foothold in Boston and keep up with the exigencies of life, I’m finally to the point where I can pay (some) attention to the work I wanted to do when I arrived.

The work itself is hard to articulate in less than a few thousand words, but a simplistic take on it is that I want to make a game.

In order to make myself focus on work, I ditched my MacBook Pro for a MacBook. Having no 3d capability to speak of, it eliminated the temptation to write games when I should’ve been working.

Yesterday I finally got myself a new machine that does have dedicated 3D; the 24″ iMac. For a thousand dollars less than the Mac Pro, it has enough graphics oomph to give me the graphic fidelity I need; I’m no super 3d artist or anything so most of the visual effects of the game will have to wait until I can con an artist into working with me.

I’m fairly happy with it. Firstly, the keyboard is a thing of beauty. It’s basically a refined version of the keyboard on the MacBook with slightly more spacious function keys and a full number pad. It’s commentary of some sort that a number pad makes me so happy.

I was this >< close to getting the 20″ iMac, but I have also developed something of a sweet tooth for TV on iTunes, and, well… the 24″ is juust bigger enough to be substantially more compelling when viewing at about six feet.

I’ve yet to figure out whether the built-in speakers will suffice for most of my video watching, but the screen will certainly suffice.

Even the Mighty Mouse is not as apocalyptically awful as I thought it would be. The ball, which felt horribly sloppy to me when I first used it, turns out to be very responsive to your movements, which almost makes it tolerable. The one thing that bugs me is that the right mouse button doesn’t seem to work if the left button is being touched at all, which is definitely requiring me to change my finger-wiggling habits.

Mac OS Leopard is also pretty durn spiffy; I haven’t used much of it yet, but the new look is a welcome change and the improvements to Mail.app quite welcome.

I also bought an upgrade to Unity, the 3D game environment I’m coding in, and I really look forward to diving into that – just as soon as the firm I’m consulting in association with gets around to getting me a machine like they said they would, so I can take this bad boy home.

Note: I have not actually received my Kindle yet. Another post will follow around Dec. 7 when I’ve had it for a day.

Seems like everyone wants to piss on the Kindle for not reading pdf. While that is something I would Really Like™ I looked at this thing and thought “I can get another book after I’m finished reading one any time, any where.”

For a serious text junkie like myself, that’s nirvana. Everything else that sucks – prophylactic encryption for scaredy-cat publishers and hyper-minimalist document formats – just pales by comparison.

The other factor is that I commute on the subway these days. When I was younger I was a serial monogamist with books; nowadays I am a dedicated polyamorist with at least three books going at once, one for code, one ‘fluff’ and one spiritual and/or sciency; and dear gods but weighty tomes are, well, weighty.

And the NYTimes and Crooked Little Vein is out on it. Basically, I looked at the page for CLV, and saw that Soon I Will Be Invincible, Halting State, and Spook Country are available for it as well. That’s at least four of the books I’d like to be reading, and without the hassle of remembering which one is in the bag at any given time.

Plus, has no-one heard of converting pdf to html?

The pay for RSS feed thing is one thing I might be cranky about; I sub to hundreds of feeds. I suppose I suddenly have a use for a meta-feed.

Fossil Fuels are the molecular mummies of photosynthesizers. The primary periods of fossil fuel formation are mass extinction events, particularly the late Paleozoic ( ~ 248 myear ago) and late Mesozoic (~ 65 myear ago). The Paleozoic mass extinction was the worst in the fossil record, with over 90% of marine fossils disappearing; the Mesozoic was much milder.

Mass extinction provides the local surge in dead organic material necessary for the eventual formation of oil-containing sediments. An additional requirement is that the organic material has to be rendered unavailable for metabolism, otherwise the surviving creatures would just eat all the dead ones and there’d be nothing left for us. In a review of mass extinction events leading to oil formation, a rapid rise in sea level seems to be the culprit.

The current favored cause for the sea-level rise are massive volcanic eruptions that deposited gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. A rapid rise in sea level converts the light-filled shallow waters of continental shelves into dark depths. Without light, the photosynthesizes die, and without the oxygen they release, aerobic conversion of hydrocarbons into carbon dioxide and water ceases. The flooding of the littoral (tidal) zone kills most of the algae that thrive there. Drowning of previously dry areas and increased precipitation near the new coastline washes millions of tons of organic detritus into the former continental shelf. Decay proceeds extremely slowly in the endless frigid night of this mass grave, and the ongoing volcanism causes rapid burial. Over millions of years the dead matter, now compressed into oil-rich rock, experiences varying amounts of temperature and pressure. This squeezes out the oil that can be motivated to move, and it collects in big pools of what we know of as crude oil.

Mummy Juice

Crude oil is a liquid- but just barely. It consists of a complex mixture of hundreds or thousands of different carbon-rich molecules that vary from one carbon to hundreds of carbons. The thickest bits are tar and pitch; mixed with stones it becomes asphalt. These giant molecules are classed as asphaltene, and are made up of hundreds of carbon atoms. Slightly further down, you get waxes; paraffin candles are the iconic product. Smaller still, and you’ve got hydrocarbons that have roughly a lard-like consistency, and it gets made into products like vaseline. The thinner stuff makes for fuel oil, largely used for heating. Thinner yet and you get lubricating oil; finally you get the hydrocarbons used in diesel, then gasoline, and finally naphthalene, kerosene and so on down to methane.

From Crude to Gas

Because gasoline is the end-product of crude oil with the highest demand, oil companies have long been modifying what they get from the well to make them into the 7-11 carbon molecules that make up gasoline. The two techniques used are cracking and reforming; the first involves breaking the large hydrocarbons that predominate in crude oil into smaller pieces using high temperatures and pressures in the presence of a catalyst.

Knock Knock… Octane who?

Reforming is a curious process because it mostly involves shuffling the carbons around a molecule while keeping the molecule the same size. This is necessary for gasoline engines because the spark-ignited explosion creates a wave of pressure and heat that cause the straight-chain hydrocarbons to break apart in chunks before they start burning. Each piece burns at both ends, or breaks into smaller chunks creating even more ends, and the resulting extremely rapid combustion causes the characteristic “knocking” sound. To combat this, the oil industry looked for ways to change their hydrocarbons and for an anti-knock agent. They found their anti-knock agent in the form of alkyl lead (see sidebar), and reforming proved to be the best way to change hydrocarbons to reduce knock. By changing straight-chain hydrocarbons into fuzzy hydrocarbons with many branches, the bonds between the carbons and hydrogens was strengthened, reducing the pre-ignition reactions that cause knock.

Our ancestors were using fire for cooking over a million years ago. This gave us an artifact to compensate for our mutant jaw muscles, which were not as strong as those of our fellow primates. Fire aided our masticatory ambitions as well as our gustatory needs by rendering previously inedible or toxic foods into a feast fit for a king.

With fire, we managed to squeak through the last ice age, and the climate that unfolded before us was like unto a Garden of Eden. Using fire to preserve food, martial game, fire clay and to render deep forest into the more open environment characteristic of the early Fertile Crescent, we began our journey through our species’ logistic growth curve.
Today, we are immersed in the products of fire. By using the products of fire to contain fire we developed cultural artifacts that are the product of temperatures and pressures previously unattainable by Earthly life. Metals, plastics, ceramics, glass; these material products pervade our modern world.

The materials we take from the living world rarely make it into our purview without being touched by fire. The cultural practices that allow a substantial minority of the Earth’s population to live largely free from parasites, malnutrition, and disease were born from fire. The only surcease our kind has known from the unrelenting labour of agriculture has come from ruthless exploitation of others’ lives or the power of fire to toil in our stead.

Fire is not a tender Muse, and our obeisance to her dictates have caused us to repeatedly burn all that we could find to burn. Our initial love affair with Fossil Oil arose from the rapid depletion of another over-exploited resource: Sperm Whales. While themselves the fourth choice, after having extinguished four other species in the North Atlantic, an oil extracted from their fat was the only oil for lanterns if you didn’t want to stoop to burning lard.

Everyone who lacked the mixed fortune of living near a gasworks was utterly dependent upon them for light. The first binary communications medium, the telegram, had dramatically shrunk the world; if you didn’t burn the midnight oil, the other guy would, and by the 1855 whale oil was going for the 2003 equivalent of over $1500 a barrel. The extraction of kerosene from fossil oil freed us from burning whale fat.

By the turn of the 20th century, internal combustion engines dramatically increased our appetite for oil; the newly developed spark engine delivered more horsepower but demanded a less viscous fuel than the rapeseed and peanut oils used in early diesel engines. By this time, ‘crude’ oil was already being distilled into different fractions, and a fraction that was slightly more viscous than kerosene was adopted for internal combustion engines.

Today transportation fuels dominate our consumption of oil, and in the largest markets it has surpassed the use of all other fossil fuels. We now sit perched somewhere near the peak of oil production, and the consequences of continued fossil fuel use will make the mere extermination of whales seem quaint.

Some hold out the hope that another energy supply will come to surpass oil, or more broadly combustion; Photovoltaic Solar, Nuclear, Wind, Hydroelectric and Geothermal sources have all been mooted. Using these sources will allow us to reduce our use of fossil fuels, particularly coal, as point sources. None can provide the portability, stability, and ease of use that has made oil the number one source of energy.

I would like to see the entire human population be able to ask about, discuss, and vote on things to do.

This implies several preconditions that the entire human population must have:

Adequate nutrition and freedom from toxins

A healty adult human of whole mind is the consequence of a host of material prerequisites. It comes as no surprise that the absence of these material needs during the development of the mind can substantially impair its function. These needs are remarkably simple to meet given modern technology. In what can only be considered a colossal failure of morality, some two billion people suffer from some form of malnourishment today.

• Humans that are deprived of nutrition, particularly at a young age, are prone to a constellation of neurological disorders that limit their ability to think and communicate. This sort of developmental handicapping cannot be reversed by current medicine or social practice, and therefore needs to end.
• Humans that are exposed to environmental toxins suffer from a variety of developmental maladies that are also permanent.

Heath care sufficient to be free of illnesses that impact their ability to communicate, cogitate, and choose.

While much health care extends individuals abilities, a basic level of lifetime preventative care is the most significant variable in illnesses’ tendency to cripple decisionmaking.

Freedom from abuse

Humans subject to slavery and other forms of abuse suffer permanent neurological consequences that make them particularly subject to unethical forms of suasion.

Access to communications technologies that allow freedom of association.

Humans expend a good deal of effort in limiting individual freedom of association. Assotiation is an important prerequisite to community participation. Communications technologies have already enhanced association in ways that are difficult to suppress through social action; bringing these technologies in a distributed fashion to all will help minimize the effects of sequestration and segmentation tactics.

Energetic resources

Individuals must be able to cause material changes in their environment in order to “do” anything. Lack of access to energy resources keeps many communities from enacting changes that have already been discussed and agreed upon.

I got a base-model MacBook Pro to replace my dual 2GHZ G5 desktop. I’m thrilled. At the moment it has been upgraded with 1GB of ram ($75) bringing it to the same amount as on my G5.
Performance
So far it has been equivalently fast with the exception that disk reads from the dual 7200 RPM raid array was much faster than from this machine’s single 5400 RPM drive, and going from 160GB to 80 was a noticable shift. Rosetta (PowerPC) emulation is slow but adequate; All of the software recommended below is available as a Universal Binary.

User Experience
The 1440×900 is enough that I can comfortably run two windows, or the mac-popular “one window and all its floating palettes” comfortably. It’s requiring some un-training as I’m prone to having one window, or two or three terminals, be the entirety of my workspace.

I get the Spinning Beach Ball of Delayed Gratification from Finder much less than I did on the G5. The same more-or-less goes for other apps, though the Mozilla programs are still the champs.

Spotlight has been a pretty bad scene for me for a while. It consistently refuses to find files that are new or it just doesn’t like for some reason. I understand that I’m not the typical user, but the whole appeal of spotlight is that it would index the thousands of pdf’s on my machine and actually give me results from them. As it is, strings I know are in a pdf because I found them in Preview are not coming up with hits in Spotlight. That continues with the MacBook; I intend to set things aright as the promise of Spotlight is too great, but in the meantime, Path Finder has been a life saver.

The glowey keyboard is triple fat, the big trackpad and two-finger scrolling makes me almost not hate it and its absurd single button, and the integrated iSight is a delight, if mostly a toy so far.

The magnetic power connector is nice if a bit on the falling-off side of things; still, I appreciate not yanking on the power connector of my laptop, something I did with every other laptop I’ve had. I have unfortunately tested the motion sensor, and I did not experience any damage when it fell off a low table while on.

The Missing Software

These pieces of software should be installed on every mac. I’ll get to the ones I use for my particular expression later, but everyone should have these. Only one costs money.

• Quicksilver is the Missing Interface for the mac. It is an utter must-have that makes your computational life much easier. Make sure you go through the available modules and install all the stuff that sounds useful; Quicksilver is one of the few applications that facilitates serendipity and having more available actions is actually not very distracting.
• Virtue is the best multiple-desktop software for the mac. It allows me to cluster related windows in separate workspaces, so that I can interrupt a task without interrupting the set of applications I have running. It’s like fast user switching without the user business. I set my Virtue to have four desktops and use the Cube transition so that I can get a spatial memory for where different things happen.
• Firefox is the best browser on earth, its sometimes halfway-there mac support notwithstanding. Extensions – like Scrap Book, Greasemonkey, and Web Developer – make it an incredibly versatile tool. Technologically, its support for SVG and XSLT make it superior to the polished utility of Safari. It certainly still has its quirks; I cannot figure out how to force it to download everything to one directory no matter what helper app launches the downloaded file, nor can I persuade it that it really doesn’t have to ask me if I want to download a .dmg file.
• X11 – Too much useful software requires it. Would it really be that confusing to pre-install it?
• Path Finder – I know Jobs would rather eat his own intestines than offer a competing Finder, but only Path Finder ($35) has been able to accurately search my local and mounted drives. PathFinder’s inability to remember a folder’s view has demoted it from primary finder interface for me, but until Apple gets its act together with Finder – something they haven’t done in seven years - it is pretty much essential.

More details later; for the moment I’m just making all the non-standard software I’m using available for download. Note that most of these are demo-only and require eventual payment. Of all the files listed there, ShadowPlan is the only one I know for sure is a keeper.