Older blog entries for ncm (starting at number 279)

Transient Power Storage

Perhaps the most efficient of all possible energy storage media is ammonia. It's needed everywhere, as fertilizer, so conversion loss is effectively zero. Transport costs are minimal because it doesn't need to go very far. It can be produced any time power is available, and then not when there isn't.

Whoever develops a self-contained fertilizer production module that may be plugged into any variable-output generator will do more for the planet than anybody developing clean power generation.

Such a module would be immediately usable attached to wind generators in places with wind but no transmission grid, and next to oil wells that presently flare off natural gas as too expensive to condense and transport. It could be attached to solar power towers in deserts far from population centers, and operate directly off the high temperature in the tower without first converting to electricity.

chalst: My experience is that the account deletion threshold is set so (artificially) high that the only way to get a spammer account deleted is to mark them down as spammers unless it's dead clear they're not. Even then lots of fake accounts get through. Mostly the real spammers don't start spamming immediately; they appear to be accumulating fake accounts and holding them in reserve.

Anybody who gets their account deleted can just sign in again and behave less spammerishly next time, so there's no reason to use kid gloves.

I have altered the "s_t" and "c_t" ligatures in my copy of the Linux Libertine font so the loops are higher. They look really good in Firefox, when it uses them. (I haven't discovered yet how Firefox -- really, libpango -- decides whether to substitute ligatures; sometimes it does, sometimes not, sometimes both in one paragraph, e.g. this one.) Now I need to fix the italic, bold, and bold-italic versions, and get them all accepted upstream. I'd still like to find a better way to get them used by default.

labaru: What? I'm one of Mauro's biggest admirers. Sincerely: Go, Mauro!

redi: No kidding! "We do not use C++ exceptions." What a way to dispel the myth of a Google populated by geniuses. Oh, and StudlyCapsTypeNames, too. If it's true that "taste is the feminine of genius", they've shot both. Oh, look, enumerator names that get clobbered by common vendor header macros? Fail. No rule against public virtual functions? Fail. No requirement to qualify member accesses with "this->"? Fail. "Don't use an unsigned type", without a peep about how signed overflow is undefined behavior? Fail.

I just changed my linux-libertine typeface to make Firefox use the looped ligatures for "st" and "ct". I don't know what would be the "right" way to do it; I just added those ligatures to the default set. Unfortunately, they're kind of ugly (not loopy enough), and there's no ligature for "sc". To fix.

Solar

Whenever I read a serious discussion of the prospects of solar power in the U.S., I read that huge expanses of land would be needed, presumed to be in faraway deserts, to cover with solar panels or mirrors. I look out the window, though, and see huge parking lots all around. These lots are mostly uncovered, but not because people don't want to park in covered spaces. Rather, it would cost money to roof them over. Roof them with solar power collectors, everybody benefits: the lot owner gets another income stream, the car owners get covered parking, and the power company avoids transmission costs and losses.

The same argument applies to sports stadiums. Warehouse and mall roofs would last much longer if shaded, and their owners' cooling bills would be lower. Many bridges would look better, and be safer in bad weather, covered; likewise freeways. It seems to me there is plenty of public and semi-public land that would benefit from another use.

The Debian Iceweasel/Firefox 3 crash (tickled by the linux-libertine 2.8.14 release) is fixed today with libpango1.0-0 1.20.4-1. (Yay Sebastian Dröge!) But why is it "urgency=low"?

fzort: I would hate for you to think me your a.o nemesis. I enjoy, and learn from, your postings. That one just tickled four peeves at once. Emulating a class hierarchy in C, though, looks like make-work.

fzort: Your mistake was fourfold. First, using StudlyCaps names rots the brain. Second, even thinking about Singleton rots the brain. Third, the visible presence of keyword "delete" usually indicates bad design. Finally, class hierarchies are an optimization step; first code without. The biggest difference between writing a program well in C++ and in "straight C" is in how expressively powerful are the libraries you have access to.

The place where you code very differently in C++ vs. C is in libraries. Of course any big enough program will have parts that increasingly resemble libraries, but programs don't start out big.