Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

Hard disk drives these days are cheap. Too cheap, in that while we love paying 30 cents/GB, the reliability is getting pretty poor. Doing backups, especially automatic backups is a must, but what about RAID?

One of the problems with RAID, at least RAID-5 is that you need to have 3, and ideally 4 or 5 drives in a machine. That's a lot of drives, a lot of power, a lot of heat, a lot of noise. And many machines only have two IDE controllers so they can barely do 3 drives and can't readily do more even if they had the slots and power for them.

So I propose a software RAID-5, done over a LAN with 3 to 5 drives scattered over several machines on the LAN.

Slow as hell, of course, having to read and write your data out over the LAN even at 100mbits. Gigabit would obviously be better. But what is it we have that's taking up all this disk space -- it's video, music and photos. Things which, if just being played back, don't need to be accessed very fast. If you're not editing video or music, in particular, you can handle having it on a very slow device. (Photos are a bigger issue, as they do sometimes need fast access when building thumbnails etc.)

This could even be done among neighbours over 802.11g, with suitable encryption. In theory.

Not that there aren't some major issues to overcome. The machines must be on most of the time. (A single disk can be taken out of a RAID temporarily, and thus a single machine hosting one disk can be turned off or rebooted, but not for long periods.) If you lose access to two disks (or your LAN) you can't get access to the data. And it's going to use a lot of your network capacity, though gigabit networking is starting to get cheap. And the idea gets better...

(You might want to see Tivo's actual press release about being able to move programs from a Tivo to an iPod.)

ALVISO, CA -- NOV 21, 2005 -- TiVo Inc. (NASDAQ: TIVO ), creator of and a leader in television services for digital video recorders, today announced an enhancement to it's system which actually allows the copying of files from one computer device to another, at least if its one of their partner devices.

You've all heard the famous "Nokia ringtone" many times (hard to describe in text, it's 10 notes, often satirized on Trigger-Happy-TV) and even the polyphonic version.

I suggest that a symphony orchestra, around warmup time, should suddenly play this song with their full glory and set of instruments. This would be funny on its own, but could then be followed by a very memorable, "please remember to turn off your cell phone now in preparation for the performance." It might actually get people to do it.

We hate waiting in line at the cashier and stores don't like paying cashiers so some have self-service cashiers which are still hard to use. So here's an idea.

Provide shoppers who wish to self-serve a scanning wand, which is battery powered and attached by coiled cable to the shopping cart. In the shopping cart, have a number of shopping bags present and numbered. Paper bags which hold a square shape are better. Also have an open area or special bag.

I don't post most EFF news here, since the EFF has a news page and 2 blogs for that, but today I'm doing it twice because congress is voting tomorrow on renewal of the PATRIOT act. There was a lot of effort to reduce the bad stuff in the bill, efforts that seemed to be getting somewhere but were ignored.

At the EFF, we're announcing today a membership drive around our various efforts for blogger's rights.

In the EFF blogs in my blogroll, you will have read this year about our legal guide for bloggers, and the various free speech cases we've done protecting publishing rights online, anonymity and assuring reporter's privilege for online journalists.

Today there's more evidence we should be taking more and more supplements, but they often come in giant pills that are uncomfortable to take. At the same time, easy to take chewable vitamin pills are also on the market.

So I propose: Divide up all the vitamins and minerals and supplements wanted in a daily regimen. Make a chewable pill that contains all the ones that can go in a chewable pill (ie. don't taste bad, and will maintain proper cohesion.) Then take the ones that can't go in that chewable, and bundle just them in a hopefully smaller, coated pill to swallow.

Earlier I posted about my panoramas of Australia. Now I have put up the large gallery of regular spect photos from the trip. We began with a short visit to Melbourne, then drove the Great Ocean Road , ending in Adelaide. From there we flew to Darwin in the top end to visit Kakadu National Park and Litchfield National Park.

There's talk that in the battle between the USA and Europe over control of ICANN, which may come to a head at the upcoming World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, people will seriously consider "splitting the root" of DNS.

I've written a fair bit about how DNS works and how the true power over how names get looked up actually resides with hundreds of thousands of individual site administrators. However, there is a natural monopoly in the root. All those site admins really have to all do the same thing, or you get a lot of problems, which takes away most of that power.

Still, this is an interesting power struggle. If a large group of admins decided to switch to a new DNS root, different from ICANN, they could. The cooperation of Microsoft, which includes the default root list for IIS, and Paul Vixie, who puts that list in BIND, would play a large part in that as well.

In fact, many times in the past people have split the root by creating alternate, "superset" roots which mirror the existing .com/.org/.net/etc. and add new top level domains. Some of these have been "innocent" efforts frustrated at how slowly ICANN had created new TLDs, but in truth all of them have also been landgrabs, hoping to get ownership of more generic terms, furthering the mistake that was made with .com. ICANN is also furthering the mistake, just more slowly. (The mistake is ignoring what trademark law has known for centuries -- you don't grant ownership rights in ordinary generic terms.)

All of these superset attempts have also failed. I don't think I have ever seen anybody promote a URL using one of the alternate root TLDs, or give me an email address from an alternate root TLD. I consider that failure.

This is, of course, what creates the natural monopoly. Few people are interested in setting it up so that two different people looking for a domain get different results. That applies to the fact that most people get an error for www.drug.shop (in the new.net alternate TLDs) and a few get the registrant's site, but it applies even moreso to the idea that Americans would get one answer for foo.com and Europeans a different one.

Because of this, Larry Lessig recently suggested he wasn't worried about a root split because there would be such strong pressure to keep them consistent.

The difficulty is, what's the point of creating your own root if you can't actually make it any different from the original? The whole point of wanting control is to have your way when there is a dispute, and to have your way does not mean just doing it the same as everybody else lest we get inconsistent results.

It's possible that a group of nations might try to wrest control in order to do nothing at first, but eventually create a superset of TLDs which would, for the first time, be a success. That might work, since if all the nations of the world except the USA were to go to a new root set, it would be hard for the private individuals in the USA who control name servers not to follow. But then the new group would no doubt attempt at some point to issue policies for the existing top-level-domains and country code domains.

I was amused to hear folks on PRI's Marketplace radio program say that 99 cents for a rerun on the video iPod was a good price. Turns out that 99 cents includes commercials in that rerun, because people polled said they would rather pay 99 cents with commercials intead of $1.50 without them.

Everybody is annoyed at how long it takes computers to boot. Some use hibernate mode to save a copy of the system in a booted state, which is one approach. Booting procedures have also gotten better about running stuff in parallel.

I took a lot of photos in Australia, including of course, many panoramas. I've assembled some of the best panoramas.

You can see them in this gallery: Panoramas of Australia

After we picked up our rental car in Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia, the blasting heat told us we would like a cooler full of drinks on our 3 day road trip through the outback. So we stopped at a Woolworths and picked up one of those terrible foam coolers, ice and some drinks. There was no bar code on the cooler so we wasted what seemed like 10 minutes in the checkout because the clerk wasn't authorized to ring up an item as general merchandise. (Hint to stores: I know you're scared of your cashiers stealing from you but this is ridiculous.)

You may have heard of the idea of pollution credit trading. I've been pointed to two firms that are selling CO2 credits on the retail level for individuals, to offset the output from driving a car, heating a house etc.

I'll get into the details on how it works a bit below, but if you have a car like mine that is putting out 5 metric tons of CO2 each year, you can for a low price (about $50, which includes a whopping markup) pay a factory somewhere to cut their own output by 5 tons, meaning that net, you are causing zero emissions. Which means you are reducing total emissions by a lot more than you would by switching to a Prius, and you are doing it at a vastly lower cost. (This doesn't mean you shouldn't drive a Prius, it just means this is a lot more effective.)

Normally pollution credits are traded only by the big boys, trading contracts with hundreds or thousands of tonnes of emissions. The retail firms are letting small players get in the game.

This is a fabulous idea, in theory at least, and also a great, if sneaky gift idea. After all, if you buy the gift of not polluting for your loved one all they get is a bumper sticker and a good feeling. At least it's better than giving to The Human Fund in their name.

Here's the catch. I went and priced the credits, and while www.certifiedcleancar.com wanted $50 to credit my car, the actual price of credits on the Chicago Climate Exchange is about $2.16 per tonne of CO2, or about $8 for my actual output as they calculated it. One expects some markup, of course, and even some profit for the company selling the retail credits, but this is nuts. I called the other company, Terrapass and got reasonably frank answers. First of all, they claim they invest more in wind power and other truly non-polluting forms of energy more than they just buy carbon credits. Secondly, this is still a small volume thing, and most of the costs are not the credits, but the $20,000 or so to become a member of the exchange, or so I was told. And of course, in small volumes, administrative costs can swamp the real costs.

Another outfit I found is carbonfund.org which is non-profit and cheaper. In some sense since people buy these out of guilt rather than compulsion (they were meant to be forced on polluters to give money to non polluters and make a market) non-profit might make sense, but they are also supposed to be a real market.

Still, if I pay $50, I would love for my $50 to mostly go to reducing pollution, not mostly to administration. Usually when exchanges are expensive there are members who will trade for you at much more modest markups. The folks at Terrapass said they were not yet profitable at the current prices.

And it is such a good idea. Read below for more on pollution credits.

Yesterday I visited Tag Camp an impromptu weekend conference on tagging in the spirit of Foo Camp and the Bar Camp I wrote about earlier. User-applied tagging has become all the rage on sites like fickr and del.icio.us. I was pleased when one person at the conference saw my name and said, "hey you started all this."

As noted, in Australia, I picked up a SIM at the airport for my unlocked phone. Australia, like Europe and most other places outside North America, uses a system where incoming calls to cell phones are paid by the caller, and are free to the mobile owner. As you may know, in North America and a small number of other countries, the mobile owner pays for airtime on incoming calls, and they look like ordinary landline calls to the caller.

Of course, if you don't answer your cell phone it goes to voice mail and plays your pre-recorded message.

But what we need are phones which can answer and play a pre-recorded message for a short time. In particular a message of the form, "Hold on, I'm in a meeting and must keep silent. However, I'm walking out of the meeting right now while you hear this recording, and in a few seconds I'll be able to talk to you. Hold on... Still walking..."

When I visit a foreign place, it's interesting to note what everyday things are done differently there, what's caught on and what hasn't. (P.S. I now have my panoramas up.)

Recently I purchased an external battery for my Thinkpad. The internal batteries were getting weaker, and I also needed something for the 14 hour overseas flights. I picked up a generic one on eBay, a 17 volt battery with about 110 watt-hours, for about $120. It's very small, and only about 1.5 lbs. Very impressive for the money. (When these things first came out they had half the capacity and cost more like $300.)

One of the more interesting results in human sexuality was the study that revealed that women prefer the smell of men whose immune systems are the most different from their own. In the study, women were given a variety of men's T-shirts (used) and asked which ones smelled the most appealing. It was found they liked the most men who had different genetic immunities from their own.