Internet service has been slowing down for some time up here. Might be roadrunner, might be those distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks on gov'ment web sites, tired computer, bad karma, who knows.
So I decided to upgrade Firefox to the new version 3.5. Although the new Firefox rendered pages faster it was less effective at getting onto the web. Lots and lots of "cannot find the such-and-such server" error messages, after a lengthy wait for a reply. Try again later and I could get thru. After a few days of this, I took a look at the mozilla website. They had a tab "What to do if you cannot connect with V3.5" That sounded promising. In short, the Mozilla people claim that firewalls are the problem. Turn the firewall off they suggest. Well, not sure about that, especially as the older V3.0.11 Firefox had been working OK for a year on my Zone Alarm freeby firewall.
But, hope springs eternal, I downloaded the latest copy of Zone Alarm and it works. Not 100%, but a lot better. It reduced the "cannot find server" errors to maybe one an hour, whereas with the old Zone Alarm I was getting 10 or 15 such errors per hour.
The V3.5 Firefox is faster than previous version 3.0.11, and with an updated firewall, things are somewhat better than the older software setup.
Lesson learned. Update your firewall more often.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Does California pay too much?
According to a Wall St Journal story, a suburban fire chief was making $186,000 a year. That's about twice what we pay fire chiefs around here. Then he turned in his accrued leave and sick time for a once time salary boost to $241,000. Three days later he retired. Guess what, his retirement pay was based on the $241,000. Plus, he hasn't retired really, he is serving as temporary fire chief and drawing $176,000 as a contractor AND drawing his retirement pay. By the way, he is only 51 years old.
Nice work if you can get it.
Somehow I don't feel very sorry for California's budget problems.
Nice work if you can get it.
Somehow I don't feel very sorry for California's budget problems.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Reminiscing about Apollo
Discovery channel did 40th anniversary of Moon landing stories all day. The TV talking heads marveled at the Apollo computer with "only" 64 K bytes of memory. Brings back memories that does. A PDP-11 with 64K, programmed in assembler, could do most anything. Somewhere I still have my PDP-11 programmers card. Back then programmers were supermen. Now they are mostly dweebs.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
New Hampshire Wind Power 2009
According to the Union Leader, a state permit to put up wind turbines in Coos County was approved. The developer had to file a mitigation plan for that all purpose project slowdown bird, Bicknell's Thrush. This magical bird held up the Cannon Mt land swap for years, and now appears to be hard at work slowing down another project. Bicknell's Thrush did not exist until 1998. Prior to 1998 it was considered to be a member of the Gray Cheeked Thrush family. After Bicknell's Thrush was declared a seperate species in 1998 it was declared endangered.
With a state permit in hand the developers now need to obtain federal permits. Lenthy comments attached to the article complain about the terrible esthetic damage the project will cause. Other commenters feel the project paperwork was rushed thru improperly.
No discussion of costs was furnished.
With a state permit in hand the developers now need to obtain federal permits. Lenthy comments attached to the article complain about the terrible esthetic damage the project will cause. Other commenters feel the project paperwork was rushed thru improperly.
No discussion of costs was furnished.
Energy Policy.
First off, we ought to develop oil and gas reserves in the Western
Hemisphere. The gas people have done right well at this. New
technology has found new domestic gas fields and the price of natural
gas has dropped from $12 to $3 over the last few years. Right now most
of our domestic production comes out of the Gulf of Mexico. We need
expand that, to drill off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. We need to
develop oil sands and oil shale.
Then we need to drill in the "Alaska National Wildlife Refuge" (ANWR).
The fields at Prudoe are reaching end of life. There will come a time
when the cost of maintaining the pipeline overwhelms the value of the
oil moved. At this point, the pipeline will be shut down and abandoned.
After a few years of rusting, it will be useless.
If we exploit the ANWR field now, its oil can come down thru the
pipeline. If we delay drilling in ANWR until the pipeline is gone, it
will require a new pipeline to bring the oil out. The cost of the
existing pipeline was horrendous. Doing it over will be worse.
Prior to the discovery of oil, ANWR was merely another piece of arctic
tundra. A few oil wells won't hurt anything. No one lives there.
Nuclear power is completely carbon free, for those who still believe
in global warming. It works, 20% of US electricity comes from nuclear.
80% of French electricity is nuclear. The "nuclear waste" and Yucca
Mountain arguments are irrelevant. Spent nuclear fuel rods have been
placed in ponds next to reactors for 50 years. They do just fine there,
and the volume is so small it will take a thousand years before the
ponds run out of room. One day we will recycle the "spent" fuel rods
and recover nearly as much fissionable material as the brand new rod
contained.
Nuclear power plants would be cheaper if the design were
standardized. The design costs and the huge paper work costs to get the
plant blessed as safe by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission could be done
once, and then dozens of plants could be built with no additional design
and paperwork costs.
There is a very promising hydrogen fusion project, the Polywell
project, that with some very modest funding might yield fusion power
within 10 years. A small scale test reactor has already fused hydrogen
and produced neutrons. Scaling it up from its current size of a
basketball to a couple of yards across ought to give a practical fusion
reactor. We should fund this, the cost is tiny, and the potential
payoff is enormous. It's not a done deal, it might not work, but it is
worth putting a little money into it.
We can build super insulated houses that stay warm all winter without
a furnace. A couple have been built up here and they are comfortable.
Just make the walls 18 inches thick and provide enough south facing
windows and they stay warm using no furnace and no furnace oil.
Hemisphere. The gas people have done right well at this. New
technology has found new domestic gas fields and the price of natural
gas has dropped from $12 to $3 over the last few years. Right now most
of our domestic production comes out of the Gulf of Mexico. We need
expand that, to drill off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. We need to
develop oil sands and oil shale.
Then we need to drill in the "Alaska National Wildlife Refuge" (ANWR).
The fields at Prudoe are reaching end of life. There will come a time
when the cost of maintaining the pipeline overwhelms the value of the
oil moved. At this point, the pipeline will be shut down and abandoned.
After a few years of rusting, it will be useless.
If we exploit the ANWR field now, its oil can come down thru the
pipeline. If we delay drilling in ANWR until the pipeline is gone, it
will require a new pipeline to bring the oil out. The cost of the
existing pipeline was horrendous. Doing it over will be worse.
Prior to the discovery of oil, ANWR was merely another piece of arctic
tundra. A few oil wells won't hurt anything. No one lives there.
Nuclear power is completely carbon free, for those who still believe
in global warming. It works, 20% of US electricity comes from nuclear.
80% of French electricity is nuclear. The "nuclear waste" and Yucca
Mountain arguments are irrelevant. Spent nuclear fuel rods have been
placed in ponds next to reactors for 50 years. They do just fine there,
and the volume is so small it will take a thousand years before the
ponds run out of room. One day we will recycle the "spent" fuel rods
and recover nearly as much fissionable material as the brand new rod
contained.
Nuclear power plants would be cheaper if the design were
standardized. The design costs and the huge paper work costs to get the
plant blessed as safe by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission could be done
once, and then dozens of plants could be built with no additional design
and paperwork costs.
There is a very promising hydrogen fusion project, the Polywell
project, that with some very modest funding might yield fusion power
within 10 years. A small scale test reactor has already fused hydrogen
and produced neutrons. Scaling it up from its current size of a
basketball to a couple of yards across ought to give a practical fusion
reactor. We should fund this, the cost is tiny, and the potential
payoff is enormous. It's not a done deal, it might not work, but it is
worth putting a little money into it.
We can build super insulated houses that stay warm all winter without
a furnace. A couple have been built up here and they are comfortable.
Just make the walls 18 inches thick and provide enough south facing
windows and they stay warm using no furnace and no furnace oil.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
787 Taxi test
According to Aviation Week, the long delayed Boeing 787 started taxi tests this week. They have some pix showing the plane zipping down the runway. They still don't have fix for the wing-body join problem, but at least something is happening.
Vermont Wind Power in 1941
From "Engineer's Dreams" by Willy Ley.
"A really large wind generator worked faithfully for years on a mountain called Grandpa's Knob, near Rutland Vermont. There is often a steady breeze on top of a ridge of hills even though down in the valley the air seems perfectly quiet. In 1939 a Boston engineer, Palmer Cosslet Putnam, had the idea that a hilltop should be a suitable place for a wind generator. Since aviation engineers had gained considerable knowledge of how air flows around an airplane wing, a wind generator could be designed far more efficiently in 1939 that it could have been two decades earlier.
The tower for the wind turbine on Grandpa's Knob was 125 feet tall, just tall enough to carry the two bladed impeller, which had a diameter of 175 feet. Each blade looked very much like an airplane wing and the whole was mounted in such a way that it turned into the wind automatically. The turbine was ready for operation on October 19, 1941 and ran virtually without serious interruption until March 1945. Then the wind generator on Grandpa's knob became a war casualty. On the twenty sixth of March one of the two blades was torn loose. Since the generator was spinning at the moment, the lower blade smashed into the other one, damaging it badly. If the had happened in normal times the damaged blades would have been carefully inspected, and the accident would have resulted in new and better blades. But it happened during the second world war. Neither material nor labor could be obtained, and since the wind generator could not be classed as "vital" -after all it was mostly experimental even though it did produce current which it fed into the local network - the structure had to be abandoned. "
"A really large wind generator worked faithfully for years on a mountain called Grandpa's Knob, near Rutland Vermont. There is often a steady breeze on top of a ridge of hills even though down in the valley the air seems perfectly quiet. In 1939 a Boston engineer, Palmer Cosslet Putnam, had the idea that a hilltop should be a suitable place for a wind generator. Since aviation engineers had gained considerable knowledge of how air flows around an airplane wing, a wind generator could be designed far more efficiently in 1939 that it could have been two decades earlier.
The tower for the wind turbine on Grandpa's Knob was 125 feet tall, just tall enough to carry the two bladed impeller, which had a diameter of 175 feet. Each blade looked very much like an airplane wing and the whole was mounted in such a way that it turned into the wind automatically. The turbine was ready for operation on October 19, 1941 and ran virtually without serious interruption until March 1945. Then the wind generator on Grandpa's knob became a war casualty. On the twenty sixth of March one of the two blades was torn loose. Since the generator was spinning at the moment, the lower blade smashed into the other one, damaging it badly. If the had happened in normal times the damaged blades would have been carefully inspected, and the accident would have resulted in new and better blades. But it happened during the second world war. Neither material nor labor could be obtained, and since the wind generator could not be classed as "vital" -after all it was mostly experimental even though it did produce current which it fed into the local network - the structure had to be abandoned. "
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)