With the destruction from hurricane Katrina, the ongoing unrest in the middle east and most importantly, the inability to refine enough crude oil to meet the ever growing demand, gas prices jumped a total of 22 cents in the past 24 hours in the town that I live. Yesterday morning, the price for a gallon of regular (87 octane) was $2.479 at all of the gas stations I pass on my way to work. On the way home, the price had jumped to $2.599, a 12 cents/gallon increase in about 8 hours. Feeling that this was just the beginning, I had my wife fill up her minivan, to the tune of about $30 for a little more than 3/4 of a tank. We are now looking at over $40.00 to fill her vehicle every week. Well, my suspicion was correct, as gas was at $2.699 this morning for a gallon of regular! I don't think this is the end of the pain.
As expected sooner or later, I got an email this morning calling for a boycott of gas stations on September 1st. While these sound like a great idea, make the oil and gas companies hurt like we do, they actually do nothing. Most people do not participate, and those that do, simple fill up the day before or after, more than making up for the loss of profits, or the oil companies simply raise their prices again to make up for it. The bottom line is that we all are still going to buy gas, no matter how much it costs, because we are a power hungry society, and are too lazy to do anything to correct this.
I have been commuting with John for over a year now, and this works out well for both of us. We save a bit of money, and help out the environment at the same time. While this is a start, there is so much more that can be done. The only true solution to alleviating the strain of higher fuel costs is to wein ourselves off of fossil fuels entirely. I applaud the car companies that have been developing hybrid cars or other alternative fuel cars, but this work needs to continue, and needs to become cheaper and more main stream. Two or three percent of the population isn't going to put a dent in the problem. Washington needs to tell the oil companies where to stick it, and do what is right for the people, the economy, and the environment.
At this point, do whatever you feel is right and will help, but don't expect any major relief in the short term, or even the mid term at this rate.
While trying to add the gnome-keyboard-applet to my gnome 2.8 panel, (in order to switch to Dvorak), I managed to stumble upon a problem I had a while back. For some reason, adding this applet causes the gnome-panel to crash, and it won't start up successfully again until you either remove it from the panel configuration using gconf or kill it with 'killall gnome-keyboard-applet' which will then prompt you to remove it from the gconf properties.
For more information, take a look at my post on forums.gentoo.org.
In the recent issue of JDJ, there was an advertisement for a performance and testing conference, www.stpcon.com. I presented this to my supervisor, and we started talking about the possibility of other java conferences, such as Java One or the conference for our application and database server, Sybase Techwave. He also asked me if I knew of any other Java conferences that were held regularly, especially on the east coast. I pose the question to all of you, which conferences have you attended, what you thought of them, and their location. Please provide URLs in your comments.
NPR had a story today about Penguin publishing company selling all 1,082 of their classics as a set via Amazon.com. John and I decided we needed to look at the list out of curiosity and see both what was on the list, and how many of the books on the list we have read. Well, those that we thought would be on it, like 1984, Farenheit 451, Catch 22, Brave New World, and other such newer classics actually did not make the list. They mentioned in the radio interview that there are a number of books that they wanted to put on the list, but couldn't because of copyright issues. It would be interesting to see that list as well. As I expected, all of the books we had to read in school were listed, as well as a number of those that I read in college for my literature course, but nothing that I have read on my own accord. There are, however, a few books on this list that I have wanted to read, namely On the Origin of Species, Das Kapital and Comunist Manifesto.
The books I have read already are listed 'below the fold'. A total of 21 out of the 1,082.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
Beowulf by Anonymous
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings by Charles Dickens
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
The Epic of Gilgamesh by Anonymous
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Medea and Other Plays by Euripides
A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare
The Odyssey by Homer
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Silas Marner by George Eliot
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Anonymous
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
After borrowing the DVD's from a friend at work, I've done some searching around the net looking for websites and other such fan fare material for the series and/or movie. Thanks to the TWiT podcast, I found The Signal, a podcast devoted to all things Firefly/Serenity. I have been listening to these podcasts for the past couple of days instead of my usual techno music.
I am also looking forward to reading the upcoming graphic novel, now in back order, which you can order from Things From Another World. I also hear there is a novel due out, but I do not know any details, including whether it is a free standing novel, or a novelization of the movie. Guess I'll just have to wait for it to come out and read it, of course, I already have my own long reading list (see right hand pane).
Much like John, I will not be using the new Google Talk in favor of my own private Jabber server with which I can encrypt and tunnel my messages between my laptop and server. It is a hope, however, that my friends will drop AIM and the others in support of this free and open service. And the great thing, you don't need to download thier client in order to use their service. Any Jabber capable client will connect.
I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgeniag. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?
NPR has been running a four part story this week on the Galapagos Islands, with the final installment delving into the controversy over ID and Evolution. This story was preceded by a story about the Kansas board of education drafting a change to their science standards that would allow teachers to talk about alternatives to evolutionary theory, namely ID. And a large portion of the state agrees with this! You can believe that this will end up infront of the courts in the near future, and hopefully all the way up the U.S. Supreme Court where it will surely be declared unconstitutional, and put an end to.
As I have said in previous posts on my blog, I completely disagree with allowing non-scientific theories to be taught in our public schools. When I was in school, it was always addressed as "this is the prevelant theory in the scientific community, we are not saying your religion is wrong, or that you should believe evolution instead. We are here to teach the scientific views of the world". People ask what's the harm in exposing our children to opposing view points. Technically nothing, as long as those apposing view points have strong roots in the scientific community, and are generally accepted as a legitimate scientific theory. ID is not a scientific theory, but Judao-Christian religious doctrine shrouded by the false label of science.
I've said my piece on this subject, and get very upset everytime I hear of school boards or other government bodies attempting to step into this mess and force their regligion on our children sent to PUBLIC school. Religion is taught in a house of worship, science is taught in science class. Period.
Anyway, Dispatches from the Culture Wars has a number of excellent posts on this topic. I'll defer to him for the rest of the story.
One of my tasks as my job is to monitor, evaluate, and tune the performance of our large, statewide, system. This has been a tricky endeavour, as I have found that I need to balance usability, with the performance. We have converted some of our framework, such as the XML serializer we are using, to another, more efficient product (JOX. I have also implemented presized ArrayLists for our data caching that we do at startup and implemented the Flyweight pattern to the storage. This improved server startup time significantly, and decreased the memory footprint by more than 75%. (Previous post about the flyweight pattern).
Today I stumbled upon an excellent resource that has general knowledge comparisons of java object types that can provide the same functionality, but will perform differently under different circumstances. I'll have to study this list in detail. I have already found the tip that suggests changing ArrayLists to TreeSets if you need to do a .contains, since the ArrayList uses a linear search, and the TreeSet is a Hash lookup.
The article can be found here.
I have been borrowing the Firefly complete series DVD from a friend at work over the past month and watching it in my spare time (what little I have). Like most good science fiction series, this has a western flavor, set in a futuristic/fantastic universe, shortly after what has become known as World War III. After watching the pilot, "Serenity", I was only slightly impressed. I thought there was too much of a western flavor to this series. I prefer more of the science in science fiction, but have been pleasantly surprised with further episodes.
I do, unfortunately, see why the show flopped on TV. When it was aired, they decided to show the episodes out of order. Much like Buffy and Angel, Joss Whedon goes to great lengths to put seemingly inocuous details into the show, that turn up in later episodes with a large impact. This show can not be watched out of order, especially not the pilot. Joss also does a lot with character development that adds to what we have already learned in previous episodes, and these building blocks need to be there before more can be learned and understood.
I now have only two episodes left to watch, and will be sad to see the show go once I finish them. There is hope, however. On September 30, 2005, Serenity will be released in theatres across the US. There are many unanswered questions that the show leaves open due to it's untimely cancellation that I'm hoping the movie will begin to answer. Questions such as "What happened to River at the Academy", "Who are the Reavers", and other questions central to the story of these characters and the universe in which they live. This is one more movie I am looking forward to this year.