Introducing Google Chrome Frame

Introducing Google Chrome Frame:

"With Google Chrome Frame, developers can now take advantage of the latest open web technologies, even in Internet Explorer. From a faster Javascript engine, to support for current web technologies like HTML5's offline capabilities and <canvas>, to modern CSS/Layout handling, Google Chrome Frame enables these features within IE with no additional coding or testing for different browser versions.

To start using Google Chrome Frame, all developers need to do is to add a single tag:

<meta equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">
"

I guess that's good news. Makes you wonder why the target audience wouldn't just install Google Chrome. But I suppose this lets people continue to use IE while using modern web facilites on sites which require them.

TR: China Wind Energy Potential, HVDC

(Just taking notes, trying to understand what HVDC is, what it has to do with variable power sources such as wind, and why it makes buried transmission lines convenient.)

Technology Review: China's Potent Wind Potential:

"The major grid upgrades already under way in China are making extensive use of continental-scale high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) lines, which remain the stuff of supergrid blueprints in Europe and the United States. 'They are leading the world in implementing long-distance transmission schemes,' says Bjarne Andersen, director of U.K.-based consultancy Andersen Power Electronic Solutions and an expert in the ultra-efficient HVDC technology."

Technology Review: Europe Backs Supergrids:

"This summer [2008], for example, a negotiator appointed by the EC convinced France to accept a new transmission connection with Spain, breaking a 15-year impasse over expanding power exchanges between the countries. Use of high-voltage DC (HVDC) technology will enable planners to bury the new line and thereby overcome local opposition to conventional overhead AC transmission lines."

Wikipedia explains how HVDC can have low power losses:

"Power in a circuit is proportional to the current, but the power lost as heat in the wires is proportional to the square of the current. However, power is also proportional to voltage, so for a given power level, higher voltage can be traded off for lower current. Thus, the higher the voltage, the lower the power loss."

"The advantage of HVDC is the ability to transmit large amounts of power over long distances with lower capital costs and with lower losses than AC."

Lots of interesting stuff in the Wikipedia article. This excerpt seems to explain the connection between HVDC and variable power sources:

"Because HVDC allows power transmission between unsynchronised AC distribution systems, it can help increase system stability, by preventing cascading failures from propagating from one part of a wider power transmission grid to another. Changes in load that would cause portions of an AC network to become unsynchronized and separate would not similarly affect a DC link, and the power flow through the DC link would tend to stabilize the AC network. The magnitude and direction of power flow through a DC link can be directly commanded, and changed as needed to support the AC networks at either end of the DC link. This has caused many power system operators to contemplate wider use of HVDC technology for its stability benefits alone."

ActionScript: TileList, deleting, scrolling backwards

I have a Flex app which shows users a TiledList of chemical structure depictions. Since it can be a large list, it's lazy-loaded from the server as the user scrolls through the list.

Users can delete items from the list, with undo. In order to do this with reasonable performance, once the app has received confirmation from the server that an item has been deleted, it clears out the single deleted item from its local lazy-list.

To undo the deletion locally, the Flex app fills the correct lazy-list entry with an ItemPendingError; that error gets thrown as soon as the TileList tries to retrieve the item.

All of this works okay when the row containing the undeleted item is already visible. On the other hand, if the user has scrolled away from the row where the undeleted item will reappear, then when (s)he scrolls back the TileList simply empties out that item and all of the successive items in the row. Ugly!

Workaround

When the item is undeleted, immediately try to retrieve it via getItemAt(itemIndex). Catch the resulting ItemPendingError and register an ItemResponder. When the ItemResponder's result or fault method is called, tell the TileList to invalidateList(). If the undeleted item actually contains a value, the TileList will repaint correctly -- no more unsightly gaps.

import mx.collections.errors.ItemPendingError;
import mx.collections.ItemResponder;
[...]
try {
    structures.getItemAt(offset);
} catch (e:ItemPendingError) {
    e.addResponder(
    new ItemResponder(
        function(result:Object, token:Object = null):void {
            tilelist.invalidateList();
        },
        function(error:Object, token:Object = null):void {
            tilelist.invalidateList();
        }));
}

I like Mike -- General Michael Collins, That Is

This year's John Glenn Lecture Series featured Sen. Glenn, Chris Kraft and the three Apollo 11 astronauts. Michael Collins was as smart, funny and humble as in "When We Left Earth." His talk starts roughly 55 minutes in.

Apologizing for the lecture-unfriendly layout of the IMAX theater, which he helped approve:

"I'm down here in the bottom of a black hole about to be sucked in by gravity..."

After putting up this picture, which he took as the LEM began its descent to the lunar surface:

"I like that photo, it's my favorite one. You see in the little thing there are 3 billion people, and then in the big thing there are two people..."

About the glistening blue earth in the background:

"Serene it is not. Fragile it is. The world population when we flew to the moon was 3 billion people. Today it's over six and headed for eight, so the experts say. In my view this growth is not wise, healthy or sustainable[...]

"Our economic models are all predicated on growth. They require it. Grow or die, or maybe both: the dead zone created by the runoff from the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico is now larger than the State of New Jersey, and still growing...

"We need a new economic paradigm that somehow can produce prosperity without this kind of growth."

The video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9fCPhspOCQ

Sen. Lamar Alexander on Nuclear Energy

On July 13th Sen. Lamar Alexander held a press conference to propose a low-cost, clean energy plan centered on nuclear energy. I still haven't digested the whole proposal, but it's an interesting read.

C-SPAN has video. Senator Alexander's website has the proposal in PDF format.

One bullet item from the press conference really resonated:

"We want an America in which we are not creating “energy sprawl” by occupying vast tracts of farmlands, deserts, and mountaintops with energy installations that ruin scenic landscapes. The Great American Outdoors is a revered part of the American character. We have spent a century preserving it. We do not want to destroy the environment in the name of saving the environment."

Amen to that! "Energy installations" can be beautiful...



But I'd hate to see the Taos valley scarred over with wind turbines.

Anyway, just now the most cost effective way to address the electricity needs of the U.S. seems to be to reduce demand, by improving energy efficiency. Going forward, since our population is projected to grow by 44% by 2050, we'll probably still need to increase electricity production.

If we're willing to change U.S. policy on re-processing spent nuclear fuel, Sen. Alexander's proposal could work. France provides an existence proof.

---

Life Shore Gits Tedious

I was hoping to find numbers on total electricity consumption by country, to compare France's production capacity to our own projected needs. Instead I found this Wikipedia entry, which describes the currently-decreasing per capita electricity consumption of the U.S.; notes that the U.S. still consumes considerably more electricity per capita than countries such as Germany; discusses various ways of measuring national energy efficiency (e.g. energy intensity); describes the relationship between population growth and electricity consumption; and so forth.

Why does the reading list never get shorter? :)

Unresponsive console.app on OS X 10.5

Recently, when I opened console.app and tried to view either Console Messages or All Messages, cpu usage spiked and console.app became unresponsive. Activity Monitor showed aslmanager using up all of the cpu.

The following discussion thread helped solve the problem. The final required step seems to have been to remove the entire /private/var/log/asl/ directory before restarting syslogd.

Apple - Support - Discussions - ASLMANAGER hogging CPU, resisting fix? ...

Update: It looks like aslmanager first appeared in OS X 10.5.6. It also looks like the asl facility is Apple's replacement for syslogd, created to make it easier to quickly search system logs. From the asl(3) man page: "This API permits clients to create queries and search the message data store for matching messages."

I really like New Mexico...

... but every once in awhile I wish I was back in Dayton.

Apollo astronauts relive experiences at ceremony

Bravo Bill Gates

In the same vein as yesterday's half-baked post, Bill Gates has helped make freely viewable (if not downloadable) a lecture series by Richard Feynman.

From CNET:

"Gates first saw the series of lectures 20 years ago on vacation and dreamed of being able to make them broadly available. [...] Tapping his colleagues in Redmond to create interactive software to accompany the videos, Gates is making the collection available free from the Microsoft Research Web site."

The name of the site?
Project Tuva. Nice touch.


The site doesn't seem to load in Safari 4 w. Silverlight 2, but Firefox 3.5 / Mac works fine.

Lots of offsite backups

[behold, another half-baked post]

The Register says that NASA will on Thursday release 'greatly improved' footage from the Apollo 11 landing. They speculate that this footage is derived from original tapes of the landing, which in 2006 NASA admitted having lost.

I hope NASA makes the new video freely available for download. If they do, they'll get thousands (millions?) of offsite backups for free, hosted by history buffs around the world. And they won't need to worry so much about losing the originals again.

The Library of Congress has already done something similar with the nation's library, e.g. by posting images to Flickr.

Granted, backups are useless if you can't restore them. It should be easy to put out a call for well-known documents such as the lunar landing videos. But LoC has all kinds of documents ranging from famous to obscure, and retrieving them by broadcasting a call to volunteers would be dicey at best.

So it's interesting to see that LoC is launching a pilot program "to test the use of cloud technologies to enable perpetual access to digital content."

Canada and Japan blocking climate-change deal, Sir David King warns - Times Online

Canada and Japan blocking climate-change deal, Sir David King warns - Times Online:

"Governments previously were able to hide behind the US's intransigence on climate change, he said, but the pro-climate policies being launched by the Obama administration means this is no longer possible. 'The time has come for people to reveal their cards,' he told delegates."

via @TomRaferty by way of @timoreilly.

The Benefits of a Classical Education

Tim O'Reilly has posted yet another article full of thought-provoking nuggets, in which he answers interview questions for a special report:

The Benefits of a Classical Education

The article muses on ways in which capitalism can be altruistic rather than greedy; bumps up my respect for West Virginia's Robert Byrd, whom I often see as a detriment to Congress; and includes incisive quotes from Alexander the Great and Mark Twain ("While history doesn't repeat itself, it does rhyme"). All this in response to the first interview question.

A Supreme Leader Loses His Aura - NYTimes.com

If only because of the Times's reputation in recent years, I have to wonder how much of this report is real. Still, a compelling read.

Op-Ed Columnist - A Supreme Leader Loses His Aura as Iranians Flock to the Streets - NYTimes.com

@terrycojones has posted a link to the Wikipedia article on Iran's 1953 coup. Among other things I hadn't known that British Petroleum had its origins in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. http://bit.ly/11q8Oq

Opponents blast Northwest Quadrant housing project

Santa Fe's northwest quadrant housing project has all of the smells of the malling of Beavercreek, Ohio. City staff will just keep asking for approval until they get the answer they want.

Opponents blast Northwest Quadrant housing project:

"Other residents questioned [...] a plan to pump sewage uphill and other facets.

The housing project on city-owned land would be concentrated on about 122 acres of the 540-acre Northwest Quadrant. The proposal calls for construction of more than 750 housing units, including single-family homes and multi-family complexes that would rise up to three stories tall [emph. added] as well as up to 110,000 [square] feet of mixed-use development that could include commercial uses. "

<Incoherent Pre-coffee Ramblings>

Up to three stories tall... on top of a ridge line. There goes the neighborhood.

Would there be no value in turning this land into public space?

When I first moved to Santa Fe ten years ago, I could walk to the top of the ridge above my apartment and take in a view that encompassed Los Alamos, the Sangre de Cristos, and the Sandias more than fifty miles to the south. The view is still available, and it's on land which city staff wants to bury under multi-story housing.

These days I live "in the hole" of Casa Solana, just to the south of the proposed development. The targeted land is still the best place, for miles around, to watch the fog of a morning storm turn into ragged, fast-moving tufts of cloud.

Of course, when I first moved here the open area was also filled with old mattresses, broken beer bottles and old engine blocks. Human nature is everywhere the same.

Perhaps awesome views are of value mainly to those who have lived too long amid urban sprawl. Even city planners, who must know that scenery is one of the reasons people visit northern New Mexico, believe they will gain more from taxes on developed land than from natural beauty.

"You can't eat scenery." — Victor, "Local Hero"

</Incoherent Pre-coffee Ramblings>

Palm's Big Opportunity

Via Macintouch:

"An iPhone app developer's world is lonely...

Three parties are involved: the developers (us), Apple, and the customers. For the most part, Apple stands between us and our customers[...] we can't issue refunds, we can only issue a few promo copies, we can't collect upgrade revenue, we can't respond to App Store reviews, we can't provide installation support, and we can't release updates to address customers' issues in a reasonable amount of time. We can't even tell them when the next update will be available, because we honestly don't know. [...] Our customers, like us, are mostly in the dark with this process, and we can't do much to help them.

For the most part, it's just us and Apple in the room.

And Apple's a brick wall.
"

In large part, Palm has based webOS on open standards. The Palm pre user experience is reported to be very good. Sprint (tethering) and AT&T (rug-yanking over data plans) both stink.

So will Palm be able to draw developers, and customers, to its platform by running a less authoritarian app store than Apple's? Will it even try to do so? Here's hoping...

We are too many

Sciam examines relationships between environmental degradation and population. Still haven't digested it all. This looks like the punchline:

Population and Sustainability: Can We Avoid Limiting the Number of People?: Scientific American:

"...the evidence suggests that what women want—and have always wanted—is not so much to have more children as to have more for a smaller number of children they can reliably raise to healthy adulthood. Women left to their own devices, contraceptive or otherwise, would collectively ‘control’ population while acting on their own intentions."

The TSA - back in bounds?

AOPA Online: TSA lessens security restrictions on transient pilots:

"According to the new directive, transient pilots who fly into commercial-service airports no longer need to get an airport badge or background check. However, they must remain close to their aircraft, leaving it only to walk to and from the fixed-base operator, service provider, or airport exit. The TSA also has said that it will make provisions for self-fueling operations and grant allowances for emergency situations."

Score one for AOPA.

...Mentally awake...

Brain Power - At Card Table, Clues to a Lucid Old Age - Series - NYTimes.com:

"Interacting with people regularly, even strangers, uses easily as much brain power as doing puzzles, and it wouldn't surprise me if this is what it's all about."

Heck, I have a hard time just remembering names during introductions...

H1N1 Death totals

The CSV data from the rhizalabs site does seem to show more than 150 deaths worldwide from H1N1. I'm not sure why the number is higher than the totals quoted elsewhere, but the CSV data does point to an excellent source of summary data: the Mexican government's Health - Mexico website. (I'm not sure about the proper site name. The URL is http://portal.salud.gob.mx/.)

In my previous post I wondered about the distribution of ages in fatal cases. The PDF reports from the Mexican health site present exactly that information (albeit for Mexico only), very clearly. See for example page 4 of http://portal.salud.gob.mx/descargas/pdf/influenza/situacion_actual_epidemia_190509.pdf

U.S. Says Older People Appear Safer From New Flu Strain - NYTimes.com

U.S. Says Older People Appear Safer From New Flu Strain - NYTimes.com:

"...federal health officials said on Wednesday that people born before 1957 appear to have some immunity to the swine flu virus now circulating.

Tests on blood serum from older people showed that they had antibodies that attacked the new virus, Dr. Daniel Jernigan, chief flu epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a telephone news conference."

It would be interesting to see the distribution of ages in all confirmed incidents. Who aggregates that data?


Self-Serving Status Update

I've continued working on the Mesa H1N1 interactive timeline site. It now includes a graph of cumulative incidents (confirmed, suspected, fatal) over time. The number of new incidents worldwide has grown enough that I'm going to need to refactor the code, to better limit (through aggregation) the number of incident markers which must be placed on the map.

I'm still having trouble with a discrepancy in the time-series graph. The development server yields 86 deaths worldwide as of 20 May 2009, whereas the production server shows 154 deaths. Both are supposed to be using the same code, and the same database. I'm reloading the production database now.

It appears that http://flutracker.rhizalabs.com is still the best source of incident data, although there are a few discrepancies in its records. If anyone knows of an authoritative source of detailed incident data, please let me know via the comments.

More about masks and flu transmission

I really need to learn to read...

How can masks be effective in preventing spread of viral infections, when viral particles are so small and when experiments with guinea pigs show that coughing and sneezing aren't required for transmission?

From the PNAS journal article:

"Our results indicate that droplet transmission of influenza virus occurs between guinea pigs..."

Granted, I haven't dug into the article for information on the droplets' sizes, but this suggests all kinds of variables to examine: mask porosity, how vapor/droplets condense onto masks, etc.

More anecdotal evidence on the effectiveness of masks in preventing secondary pneumonia, at least, comes from "The Great Influenza". From page 211:

"Capps did write the JAMA article. He reported finding the masks [used by patients with respiratory disease at Camp Grant near Rockford, IL] so successful that after less than three weeks of experimenting he had abandoned testing and simply started using them 'as a routine measure'."

They didn't always work. Page 215, describing the September 1918 wave of infection:

"Despite all precautions, despite wearing surgical masks and gowns... 43 percent of the staff... required hospitalization. Ten nurses at this single hospital died."