Most EV companies say you pay about 2c/mile for an electric vehicle to run. Power that from solar or wind sources, and you have ZERO emissions. For our estimates, lets assume DOUBLE that estimate, or 4c/mile for an EV.

Take a gasoline car. Average fuel economy is about 22mpg. Though US average for regular was put at $3.69 yesterday, I’m going to use $4, because that’s what it will be in a month. Assuming you have an average car, you are paying 18c/mile for your petrol sucking car. Plus you are spewing CO2 emissions in the air; not as much as your parents were, but there are emissions.

Now look at biking, cycling or generally using a bicycle. Using a few different sites on the web, they average about 1000 calories for biking 15mph for 1 hour. I don’t know if this assumes hilly or flat terrain, but I don’t care — the number seems reasonable. For healthy food, not power bars but actual food with health value, I’m guessing you pay about $4 for 1000 calories. The calories have got to be sustainable over 8 hours of biking, and I’m guessing 32 power bars (at 230 cals per bar) isn’t the ideal consumption for long term performance. At $4/1kcal, you are paying an astonishing 26c/mile. And you’d like to think that biking is emissions-free, but it isn’t. All of your food is shipped and carted around this great country on diesel trains, trucks and boats, spewing more CO2 into the environment, just to process your healthy food for you to burn 26c/mile, forcing you to breathe all that pollution along the way, stupid bike.

But for skeptics, let us say $2 for 1000 calories. you are still at 13c/mile, 3+ times more expensive than our DOUBLED estimate per mile for an EV.
And on top of that, YOU are spewing CO2 into the environment!!! At a much greater rate than if you were sitting in a nice, quiet, efficient and ZERO EMISSIONS EV.

Bottom Line: Stop biking, you pollution loving hippies, and get yourself an EV.

Where to get an EV? The Aptera does 85mph for 40-60 miles on pure electric, and you can get up to 120mpg for longer drives, all for $29,900 (or the pure EV for $26,900 with 120 mile range). Or consider the Triac that does 80mph for 100 miles, and only costs $19,995. Or my favorite and future vehicle, the Venture One that does 0-60 in 7 seconds, goes 100mph, with all three types (1 EV, 2 gas-hybrids) doing better than 100mpg, and does it all while you feel like you are flying a fighter jet. Pricing between $18,000 and $23,000. Excellent.

PS — I guess you could almost say that food these days isn’t really green. So stop eating America! Save the environment!
PPS — Just kidding.

Apple Logo surrounded by razor wire used without permission; From the cover of Wired 16|04. © 2008 Wired Magazine.

Don’t wanna read my blatherings? Add this to your ~/.ssh/config:

Voila, no more delays. No server config changes either. Hope you don’t have to use Kerberos!

Read on to see how I got to this solution.

So a new hosting company set up two fresh from ISO FreeBSD 6.2 installs and enabled sshd for me. Using my trusty MacBook Pro running OSX 10.4.9, I attempted to connect to my brand-spanking new servers. When I ssh‘ed to the boxes, there was a 30-60 second delay before I got the password: prompt. Believing it to be the standard reverse DNS problem, I mucked with the nameserver entries in /etc/resolv.conf, but to no avail. I started playing around with __ UseDNS yes or no __ settings in the /etc/ssh/sshd_config, but still no luck. It’s starting to piss me off, and my red wine levels are dwindling.

I google, I yahoo, I search mailing lists on FreeBSD.org and the MacOSXhints.com Forums but I still fail at finding the issue. I can see the problem:

I make an educated guess that it is something Kerberos-related, so I disable anything Kerberos related in my servers sshd_config, but that doesn’t help. So I keep searching. Finally I discuss the issue with my genius geek friend Jay and he says he’s having the same problem, but had given up trying to solve it.

“well – I’ve given up… I tried for a couple hours and then said ‘screw it, nobody’s paying me for this.’ and that was pretty much that.” – Jay Kuri

Jay did mention something about Kerberos, which I had tried and seen mentioned with the whole “credentials” thing, but passed over when I tried disabling it on the server. I finally came across this blog entry and it suggested to add some GSSAPI config vars to your sshd_config. Well I already tried that, but, hey, let’s throw them in the /etc/ssh_config on my OS X MBP.

Poof! No more delays. All I added to my ~/.ssh/config was:

Stupid, stupid OpenSSH sucked 2 hours of my life. Damnit.

The download took about 15 seconds for the 17MB dmg download, Firefox reporting a download speed of 1045Kbps, or about 8mbps. I was encouraged by this, hoping the video experience would be just as snappy.

Not so. Click more to read on.

The installation was as clean as any. The release notes were comprehensive, if not a little too wordy, though the complexity of the application probably warrants it. I started the application, at which point it took over my screen. I was prompted to log in or create an account. The account creation is simple — email, username, password twice — with nice ajax-y hints to let you know if you’ve entered your information correctly to their specifications or not.

The first thing that played was the Joost intro video, a nice sampling of videos that you might be able to come across in Joost. During playback however, my disappointment set in.

I’m not sure what I was expecting, maybe ultimate video quality, maybe amazing content, who knows. I realize I’m a more picky customer, having all HDTV in my house, running at 1080p whenever possible, and having been in the online video content delivery world for the past few years, very sensitive to digital video encoding quality. One problem may be due to a friend of mine, Dan Summer, who runs DVLABS , and it probably the best digital video expert when it comes to encoding video for use on the Internet.

Well, the video quality delivered by Joost does not rival video quality I can get, legally or otherwise, via BitTorrent. It is heavily compressed, blocky, and a bit of a disappointment. In Joost’s favor, while their About Us page mentions “great picture quality,” there seem to be a lot more features they are trying to pack into Joost than just picture quality. They talk about Instant Messaging and channel chat. Maybe they spent a lot of time on that, because the picture quality has suffered.

Additionally, I ran into a lot of “program is unavailable #121” errors during my short use of Joost between 2:40pm-3pm EDT today. When I could get video to play, it would stop to buffer 3-4 times for a 3 minute video for about 3-5 seconds, definitely not TV-esque. Additionally attempts to watch Laguna Beach on the MTV channel resulted in constant 2-3 second hiccups every 10-30 seconds, sometimes not even getting through a scene cut without hiccups. Then about 5 minutes into the show, it stopped with the ominous “unavailable #121” error, not even getting through the show during this review. I’m pretty sure the bandwidth problem isn’t on my end; during watching I ran a bandwidth speed test to make sure it wasn’t an issue on my end:

Though Joost stopped playing during the test, it is clear that I have enough bandwidth and speed isn’t an issue. I tested it to a nearby location about 200 miles away; it could be their servers are on the west coast, so let’s test that too:

Even to LA (Joost seems to connect via Level3 in Tustin, CA based on a traceroute JOOST-OPERA.car2.Tustin1.Level3.net for their web services; for this test we assume their video distribution is there as well), we have decent bandwidth and round-trip times.

One last gripe — the loading logo in the bottom right corner is painfully annoying. It’s a little jerky, it almost “blinks” when the colored gems merge into a bright white, it’s distracting rather than informative. It should be more simple, really smooth, and the same color and brightness through the whole sequence.

So while Joost has a cool user interface, the video quality is disappointing, the channel changing is worse than the slowest satellite tuner, and the selection is limiting. Bump up the video quality and minimize dropouts and increase content selection, and I’ll change my tune. But right now Joost is not as impressive as I had hoped.

Trouble is that the SimpleShare documentation mentions NFS once, but doesn’t say how it works. Gack. Google to the rescue.

Click to read on.

I tried all sorts of commands:

mount 192.168.0.20:/NetFolder /private/mnt
mount_nfs: can’t access /NetFolder: Permission denied
mount 192.168.0.20:/share/NetFolder /private/mnt
mount_nfs: can’t access /share/NetFolder: Permission denied
etc…

to no avail. So I googled a few times, finally falling upon this blog and reading:

“With the SimpleShare, you have to add the prefix /shares/PoolName for NFS access.”

OK, great. I tried mounting 192.168.0.20:/shares/NetFolder but that didn’t work. I kept google searching. That link came up again, so I read it again. And again. And again. Then I read it again. PoolName. Oh. You mean the Pool that share is in?

mount 192.168.0.20:/shares/SimplePool/NetFolder /private/mnt mount_nfs: /private/mnt: Operation not permitted

Sweet! A new error message to google! This lead me to this blog where a helpful comment was posted:

“Thanks a lot for posting this hack. It worked great for me, but only after I modified the NFSvolumes script very slightly. I was getting Operation not permitted. So I googled some and found that because most Linux systems require the use of a reserved port for NFS mounting, I had to change this line:

/sbin/mount_nfs $rvol /NFS/$ldir to this: /sbin/mount_nfs -P $rvol /NFS/$ldir

Could it be that easy?

mount_nfs -P 192.168.0.20:/shares/SimplePool/NetFolder /private/mnt

YES!!! Whoohoo!!! Success. My SimpleShare NAS is now connected to my OSX MBP via NFS. Wicked. And it is indeed faster!

ls -la via SMB/CIFS
Time spent in user mode (CPU seconds) : 0.013s
Time spent in kernel mode (CPU seconds) : 0.080s
Total time : 0:09.51s
CPU utilisation (percentage) : 0.9%

ls -la via NFS
Time spent in user mode (CPU seconds) : 0.017s
Time spent in kernel mode (CPU seconds) : 0.027s
Total time : 0:01.27s
CPU utilisation (percentage) : 2.3%

NFS is 7.488x FASTER than SMB/CIFS on OSX!! Damn. Always use NFS. Stupid Samba.

The Springfield City Government hired an outside contractor to cut down a few trees around the city. Too bad they cut down the tree in front of the home of Margaret Schneider.

Schneider is now suing the City for damages. She claims that the tree provided a lot of shade, and now that the tree is gone, her electricity bills have doubled.

"I'm angry. The tree was in fine health, and it was on my property. Someone's got to pay."

Her case will be heard later this month.