Image by Kansir via Flickr

The previous generation of HAL data collection hardware was an RS/6000 AIX-based system that was very network friendly. One could easily hook two data acquisition trucks together and broadcast the job for high-profile work. One truck could also easily tell the other truck what to do by logging into the other truck and issuing terminal commands.

One service supervisor was learning the software in an intensive, 3 day, 12 hour/day class. The class had four of these systems networked together. Since I had worked with Unix-like computers in college, he asked me for some cool things he could do to the other people learning the system.

Well, I said, you could telnet to the other machine and run commands. If you did that, then typed in a command like warn "Have a nice day!", you could pop up a red box on their screen wishing them a good day.

The next day, he came back.  “Dan, I did something.”

Uh oh.

“We were in the middle of a practice session, and everyone was recording data like they were on the job. It was a really long job, and I was bored, so I telnetted to a friend’s machine, like you said, and typed:”

shutdown -h now

Which performed an immediate shutdown of the poor guy’s machine. Fortunately after the initial shock they thought it was a fun prank. Of course, he promised never to do it again.

I found one good thing about the system from the Chicago Climate Exchange web site. They sell their contracts in metric tons of greenhouse gases that are sequestered or destroyed. Tying money to a physical quantity, rather than a “credit,” is a good thing; otherwise one could change what the “credit” is and really abuse benevolent people.

But there is a severe market distortion: Instead of an independent authority that would stake its reputation in deciding what benefit to the environment results from a certain amount of eliminated gases, and then that authority would issue ratings of environmental stewardship, the government is called in to set emission caps. Caps are used to force companies to buy credits and buff up green companies.

The effects of this kind of government distortion are visible in the financial markets, where banks were coerced into creating loans they wouldn’t have made in the first place. In the environmental market, no homes would be bought by the government, but you can count on a lot of wasteful spending.

The Washington Post reported Tuesday that 10 Northeast states banded together to create a regional cap-and trade system. $40 million dollars in allowances were purchased by (coerced from?) power generation companies. The system has one redeeming quality: it isn’t federally mandated.  Someone took the 9^th and 10^th Amendments seriously. Doing things regionally also gives us the ability to see how a system affects a region without harming everyone else, and maybe someone else will figure out how to do it better.

Note in the Post article, someone has decided that not enough is being done:

Critics have said the program will not have an immediate or national effect, because the emissions cap is set too high — at 188 million tons annually, slightly higher than the current level — and the prices are low enough for utilities to pay the fees and continue to pollute.

Now, this is interesting. The intent is to force companies not to pollute at all. It isn’t enough that they pollute and purchase enough remediation. Are the critics telling us that remediation doesn’t really work? If “purchased” metric tons of sequestered/destroyed greenhouse gases do not counter actual emitted greenhouse gases, the market is broken.

The Washington Times posted an article on Saturday about the House of Representatives’ experience with the carbon offset market. The House calculated that they needed to buy 30,000 short tons of carbon offsets, but they bought 30,000 metric tons, overspending by $25,000. Rather than get a refund, the Chicago Climate Exchange will hold our tax dollars and apply them to future spending.

The GAO is asking the same type of questions posed above about the credibility of the carbon trading system, leading to this quip:

“Without proper assurances, the only thing we know carbon-offset purchases reduce are taxpayer dollars,” said Rep. Darrell Issa, California Republican and ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on domestic policy.

Pelosi’s swamp deepens…

Also, you won’t find it in the iTunes Store, but I have set up a podcast feed that you can directly subscribe to through iTunes’s “Advanced->Subscribe to Podcast.” Right now there are seven files that you can download and listen to. The only limitation seems to be that I can only podcast one file per post.

Constructive criticism is always appreciated.

The big news for you and me is that the hacker gained access to the account by figuring out the answers to the questions Yahoo! asks if you lose your password and say that you don’t have access to another e-mail account. Zip codes are easy to look up. Birthday? It was published on her Wikipedia page. Where she met her husband? Researchable.

Some sites will let you change the confirmation questions should you lose your password. Pay attention to those questions, and decide whether that information has ever been publicized.

And no, that’s not my secret question. If you don’t like yours, you can change it.

They did break one important feature. Before the move, one could set a bookmark to the current “Best of the Web” post by James Taranto:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/

If you point your browser to that link, you’ll now get a 404 File Not Found error.

Best of the Web, 9/15/08

Instead, it appears that they’ve moved “Best of the Web” to a widget within the general Opinion Page. The link one clicks on for “Best of the Web” is an unreadable link that likely doesn’t change the page each day. Today’s link is:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122149777671437025.html

At least Taranto’s very funny column isn’t gone forever. Check it out.

Update, 10:23pm: The new link is: http://online.wsj.com/article/best_of_the_web_today.html. Thanks, James!

Chrome about:memory Page

Chrome screams, rendering web pages faster than Firefox 3.0.1, no slouch itself. It has an about:memory page which shows its memory usage alongside other browsers the user has open, so it can show off its relatively low memory usage.

One feature I have as an add-on in Firefox is the ability to move a tab to a new window. Chrome does this without an add-in, and it can convert a new window back into a tab, which is neat. Another feature that is going to be useful is the “incognito” mode, which will let me test NR’s view to guests without requiring me to log out of the blog.

Chrome also uses a different process for each tab and window, which should make it more stable and allow the user to end a web page that causes a crash without killing all the windows.

The standard menu bar and status bar used in Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer are gone, allowing Chrome to show more web page. I did see a refresh bug with the scroll bar, but it went away when I resized the window. There was also a textarea that resized over elements of the window when I uploaded the picture of Chrome to this post.

Suggestions for Google: AdBlock! I’d forgotten how many ads I’ve missed. There are also other add-ins that I’m going to need in Chrome before I kick Firefox off my desktop, such as FireShot, the screen capture add-in, and iMacros, my form-filling add-in. Chrome has some cool diagnostic tools, but they don’t quite match the features of Firefox’s Firebug + YSlow.

The browser was more than happy to import my Internet Explorer bookmarks, but I would have liked for it to offer to import my Firefox bookmarks as well. There is an option in the wrench button to import Firefox bookmarks manually. If you use keywords in your Firefox bookmarks, those will import with no problems.

Chrome uses the same Webkit code as Apple’s Safari browser. Once I found Chrome’s wrench button to manage my settings, I had no other problems with its interface.  Safari was so Mac-like I had to uninstall it.

All in all, Google has done a decent job with Chrome on XP. It’s quick and some nice features that will likely be copied by Firefox and other browsers. Firefox’s extensibility and plug-in library still keep it as my most-used browser.

Among Stan’s projects are the Lutheran Lectionary Project, which displays a link to a Higher Things Daily Reflection, a Collect, Bible readings for Matins and Vespers, and quotes from early church fathers. If I want to do Matins or Vespers at home, I consult this web site.

Dinner was a lot of fun, and we discussed both technical and nontechnical stuff, such as Pr. Borghardt’s driving habits, podcasts, travel, and some of Stan’s web page code that got noticed by commercial developers.

To keep spammers from creating a lot of user accounts, registration will be turned off again in the next week or so, and after that accounts would have to be created on request. If you’re not sure whether you’ve created an account here before, send me an email, and I’ll let you know.

If you login to NR to read it — I’ve extra functionality for logged in users — you may find that you can’t login. Clear your cookies for necessaryroughness.org, then login again. Don’t think you need to reset your password. You can imagine what I felt like when I couldn’t get into my own blog after the upgrade.

Other than that, things look good. There are some new gallery features I’m going to try out as well as nearly 200 fixed bugs. I’ve already had to delete one plugin (Theme Test Drive), as the feature is now standard.

Such an idea isn’t really necessary, and it would be a waste of our tax dollars. Our economy, shackled as it is, would still reward the next DieHard with more than $300,000 in purchased goods. Certainly the government would prefer to have the corporate income tax over the corporate hand-out. Perhaps more importantly, a government-sponsored prize would likely reward mediocrity because of pressure to show results, while the market would reward the manufacturer when the product was good and ready.

That’s not to say that prizes aren’t worthwhile. Several companies have contributed to establishing X-Prizes. They do it for the publicity and the chance to own a highly profitable product. They manage their own risk inherent in their contributions.