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As I picked up my coffee this morning, I was shocked to see that Delmarva Power and Bluewater Wind announced a contract to install wind turbines off the Delaware coast.  This has been an ongoing battle with all the typical negative ads by Delmarva.  I believe Delmarva Power is owned by a huge energy company which owns the power plants under a different name, so they may have a vested interest in natural gas or coal fed plants.

Hopefully the deal will go through and cost overruns stay minimal.  But this has been a political battle, so it’s still early to see how this will end up.  It’s definitely a step in the right direction though.

George Carlin passed away.  So sad.

Last week, Michelle Rigney passed away from Melanoma at the age of 22.  Very sad.  Some of her friends and family started a facebook group.  She was very active in cancer awareness and co-founded the Delaware Miles for Melanoma group.

According to the American Cancer Society, 1500 per day will die of cancer in the United States.

Firefox 3 is coming and they are going to try and hit the world record for the most downloads in one day. Since Firefox is the best browser out there, everyone should join in!

EDIT: Firefox Download Day is tomorrow!

I saw this Youtube video on another blog today. I had heard he was calling for impeachment in a recent House session. He makes a decent argument and it’s odd that this didn’t happen during Bush’s first term.

I’ve always been interested in fiddling around with things and for that reason, building an electric vehicle would be a fun project. I’ve helped out old friends in the past with many automobile projects. Like swapping out engines or working on Jeeps. But converting a vehicle from gas to electric would be a big undertaking. It isn’t cheap either.

While searching and reading many pages on the subject, I found a blog dedicated to the subject. He converted one car years ago and is now working on another one. He just put up a very informative blog post about converting your first car. He also wrote a very cool calculator for figuring out what will work and what won’t.

While this could be a fun project to undertake, I’m not sure it’s something I’ll ever do. I don’t have a garage, so that would make the logistics difficult. I also wonder about new battery technology and what could be around the corner. I think many people that convert vehicles end up using lead-acid batteries because of the cost and that they seem to be a little more forgiving than other battery types. The lead-acid batteries more or less work out to ~30 mile range vehicles, which is good enough for 80% of the trips American’s make.

So after reading many blogs and websites documenting the work that other people have gone through to convert a vehicle, I started looking at what the big car manufacturers are working on. The Toyota Prius and Honda Civic hybrids are pretty popular. I’d be more tempted to go with the Civic because of the look of the vehicle and cost. The one I’m most interested in is the Chevy Volt. It was a concept car shown at the last round of car shows. There are some pictures here, including one of the mule they use for testing. The difference with the Volt is that it will plug in and will run for miles. It will only use the gas engine once the batteries have been depleted.

I’m not a big fan of Hydrogen powered vehicles. I can see that technology as an easier thing to replace gasoline, but there is some overhead with generating Hydrogen. The combustion engine wastes a lot of energy as well. Using electric motors is much more efficient and they have great pickup. The big problem is energy storage.

It will be interesting to see what the future holds for energy storage. That will effect so many things in our lives.

At work, we mainly use RedHat Enterprise Linux. We have a RedHat Network subscription to manage pushing or viewing updates and that all works fairly well. I decided to use Ubuntu Linux on my Linode. Since it’s not a desktop, I need a way to know when there are updates. The desktop versions will alert you when updates are available. I’m not going to blindly script cron to install updates for me, so I put together a short script to let me know when they are ready and to cache the packages on the server.

The Ubuntu site does have a page describing how to do weekly updates, but my script suits my needs. I created a crontab entry to call the script below. It’ll only output info, which causes cron to send an email, when there are applicable updates. Maybe it’ll be helpful to other people as well.

#!/bin/bash
#
# Script to check for updates.  If any are available, print to stdout
# and download packages.
#

tempfile=`mktemp`

# Update package info
#
apt-get update -qq

# Cache available updates
#
apt-get upgrade -s > $tempfile

# Check to see if any updates are applicable.
#
egrep "^Inst " $tempfile > /dev/null
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
   # Download updates
   #
   apt-get upgrade -dyqq

   # Print available package info so it gets emailed.
   #
   cat $tempfile
fi

# Remove tempfile and exit
#
rm -f $tempfile
exit 0

So, I’ve just set up the blog again. The last one I had was deleted a few years ago, but I’ve been feeling like having another go at it. Now that I have a post, I’m going to go back to worrying about themes, colors, and other superficial things.