fromjumpstreet.com - Learning and Relearning Computers and the Web

1. Drill ANWR and the offshore fields near Florida and California. This is a no-brainer. Drilling for oil can be done without wrecking the environment and that has been proven for years. Every little bit of oil we can get for ourselves comes at the margin. Oil prices are going up at the margin. We need to widen the margins in which we can get the energy we need. In Florida, drilling near Cuba that we don’t do will be done by China at Cuba’s behest. Who do you think uses safer drilling rigs?

2. Mandate flex-fuel capability for all cars sold in the U.S.  Author Robert Zubrin http://www.energyvictory.net/ suggested as much in his book. Basically it costs $100 exra per car and involves eliminating terne (an alloy the corrodes in the presence of alcohol) from the gas tank and changing the composition of several other fuel system components, as well as the engine control computer’s settings. Even if we can’t make enough ethanol for ourselves (and that’s questionable), we can buy it from Brazil. Although purchasing ethanol from other countries isn’t really energy indpendence, it is dependence on a competing source of energy, if not on a friendlier regime.

3. Promote the use of anhydrous ammonia as a motor fuel. The safety aspects have been studied: http://www.risoe.dtu.dk/Risoe_dk/Home/Knowledge_base/publications/Reports/ris-r-1504.aspx This is “hydrogen-lite” since you get a more energy-dense product that is less likely to leach away into the atmosphere through seals that are porous to hydrogen molecules. And it’s carbon free, just like hydrogen. Ammonia is easy to make, store and ship–in fact there is an infrastructure already present in the U.S. to do all of that.

4. Lithium-ion powered electric cars and plug hybrids. The lithium-ion battery technology is touchy, so car-b-ques would doubtless be more common due to the occasional thermal runaway problem. But Tesla has already put a sports car on the road, and both GM and Subaru are promising advanced-tech vehicles using the technology shortly.

5. Build more nuclear plants. Again, new technology leads to safer solutions. Pebble bed reactors won’t melt down, and there are other designs, including a sealed, lifetime, maintenance-free unit that Hitachi can put just about anywhere. Why let France have all the nuclear fun?

6. Promote natural-gas powered cars. Honda has a Civic you can already buy, and a home-refueling station from them is not far behind. Right now the key barrier is that owners planning long trips need to plan them very carefully in order to stop at the few places the public can buy natural gas for their vehicles during those places’ operating hours. More NG cars on the road means more refueling options, which in turn will make the technology more attractive to potential carbuyers.

7. Use Stirling engines in hybrid cars. The key drawback to the Stirling when Detroit tried to develop it for automotive use was that it took 20 minutes to start generating power for the car. For those not in the know, a Stirling is basically a sealed steam engine, using a gas instead of steam to run, and recirculating that gas permanantly instead of boiling it off. Meanwhile, any external source of heat will make it go–and that means you could conceivably run a car on coal or burning newspapers for that matter, although ideally what engineers would develop would be a vehicle that could use computer burn-management technology to make it run on any liquid or gaseous fuel (it could have both types of burners) and do so with as clean and efficient a burn as possible. A hybrid car could be driven without waiting for the engine to warm up, and the engine could be extremely low-power (say 5-8 horsepower) and used only to recharge the battery. If the vehicle included a computer that could be given a “drive plan” it could make decisions about when to run the engine and when not to–preferring nighttime plug-recharging and using the engine minimally in light of the day’s driving plans.

8. Lower the weight of automobiles, buses, trucks and airplanes. Costs for formerly exotic materials like carbon fiber have come way down, and the ability to engineer traditional materials to perform the same duties using less metal has come way up. The lighter the vehicle, the less fuel it will use.

9. Find new fuels: Coal gasification. http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/earth/4218251.html Shale-oil deposits in Wyoming. Tar sands in Canada (technically not the U.S., but close enough. Algae products. Biodiesel. There are a lot of things we can find to burn, and a lot of them can be made from what are currently waste products or plants we don’t consider useful crops (perhaps even the Jerusalem Artichoke or hemp). The Brazilians are way ahead on this (their sugar cane to ethanol process has tem times the efficiency of our corn process). Let’s catch up.  

10. Explore the fringe: There are energy sources that have been looked at and largely discarded, although they remain well within the realm of possibility and should continue to be researched for their long term potential. Foremost among them is Low  Energy/Chemically-Assisted Nuclear Reactions (www.lenr-canr.org), formerly known as “Cold Fusion”, and their close cousin, sonofusion. Additionally, zero point energy, the research being conducted at CERN, and even Tesla’s theories merit new attention.

At this point you may be asking yourself what about wind and solar energy? In my view, those technologies are already well established and are being used wherever they are practical. Wal-Mart, for instance, is going to use solar on the rooftops of all of its stores. When they do that, it will be the handwriting on the wall for everyone else to adopt that approach as a matter of course. Everywhere that wind energy is sufficient, it is being installed by power companies and independent entrepreneurs. Again, it is showing up now as a matter of course, although Europe is ahead to the point where on a recent windy day in Spain their wind farms produced 40% of the country’s electricity needs that day. We don’t need to change any policies to get solar and wind technology, nor for that matter to get ethanol–the lobbyists have already taken good care of ethanol as a motor fuel. However, the ten that I mentioned all need help in one way or another to have their day in the sun.

What about hydrogen? Sure, it could come online, but it’s tricky to store and not terribly energy dense. Ammonia trumps it in many ways.

There is something we should stop funding: hot fusion. It’s been fifty years away for … fifty years. It will always be fifty years away. Or 93 million miles away, where it’s working just fine. Perhaps we should just take advantage of the source that is already up and running instead of building huge, expensive toys that don’t do anything but soak up grant money and keep graduate students busy.

OK folks, this is going to be kind of long, so stay with me.Last night our son, Sammy had to go for a little helicopter flight … immobilized on a backboard!

Sammy and our across-the-street neighbor were playing “Wonder Pets” while the moms klatched on the sidewalk. Running and chasing. It was time to go in and have dinner (this was about 5:30). Sammy ran to my wife Julie, and tried to grab her legs and bounced off … and the back of his head hit the sidewalk. It happened that fast. No loss of consciousness, he was up and crying immediately. I went inside, got a cold pack, and Julie rocked him in a recliner for a few minutes until he stopped crying. Then he got a little Tylenol and the dinner routine commenced. And he fell asleep immediately right at the table. Normal bedtime would have been 8:30. So she called the doctor’s office, and her sister in law (a former nurse) up in Minnesota while she held him in her arms.

There were discussions with the doctor’s office, and once they were aware we were not able to rouse him they told her point blank to call 911, which she did. I estimate 911’s response time was under 3 minutes. A set of very professional paramedics arrived and they grew increasingly concerned because they too were unable to rouse him. So it was time to get out the backboard and call the helicopter.

The immobilization procedure sure roused him! And he was not happy! But … his protests were mostly verbal and his struggling was not as vigorous as what they would have liked to see … and we know this kid is muscle from head to foot … anybody who has ever picked him up has commented on that.

The first time the word “helicopter” came up I told them there was a park “out back” (I was thinking of the one adjoining Stoneleigh), and was informed that a landing zone was already being set up … at the Connerton Publix!   This is the neighboring development. Believe it or not the drive to get there is a couple of miles.

So we went there, and he was airlifted to St. Joe’s … frightened and angry, but very much alert (though they did ask mom at one point whether he was seizing and her answer was no, he’s mad) … we raced there to find … a happy toddler charming the nurses and playing with a new Hot Wheels car they’d given him. The doctor said it was a coin toss whether to do a CAT scan, but that judging by what they’d had to deal with when he arrived, the necessary immobilization was not going to be well tolerated.

So it was off to Whataburger and home, none the worse for wear and with a story to tell along with the world’s most expensive Hot Wheels Austin Healey.

But I can’t stop thinking about that trip to Publix.

Although it took perhaps only five minutes to drive over there and in fact the chopper did not arrive for several minutes after that, at least during Visual Flight Rules I can’t imagine why these guys can’t put down in any one of the several large open areas we have at our development (Wilderness Lake Preserve). I can count at least half a dozen suitable spots (perhaps there are more), one near every village if not in the village. I’m talking no trees, good separation from the homes, flat, grassy, ideal. Heck the turnarounds in the cul-de-sacs would work in a pinch and I haven’t even counted them.

If you’re MediVac’ing someone, you’ve basically already sort of committed to the concept that seconds count in terms of outcome for this patient. Doesn’t it make sense to operate from the very nearest safe spot? I hate to gainsay what appears to be established protocol, but patients get picked up off busy streets where light poles and businesses are within scant yards of the whirling blades (and in fact that was more or less the case with Publix’s outpad). I am concerned that the next patient lifted out of WLP will actually be a case where time will be lost and outcome could change accordingly. I’m thinking our county commissioner’s office needs to look into this. There are other developments even more distant from commercial landing zones, and the situation there could be even worse if the policy is not to put down in subdivisions.

I’ll keep the blog posted with what I find out. I haven’t been on much lately, but I do have a lot to say and I’ll be saying it.

So I wanted to get Google Analytics going for this WordPress blog (the one you’re reading right now). The way you do that typically is to copy a small snippet of JavaScript to the bottoms of your HTML web pages, or you can insert the same snippet into your theme so that it runs every time a page is rendered.

There is, however, another way to go: a plugin. I decided to use a plugin for WordPress frankly because I didn’t know where to find the files for the theme and I didn’t want to track them down and I didn’t want to do the detective work to figure out which file is rendering the bottom of the page. So the idea of using a plugin was attractive because without it I’d have to do all that. Plus, plugins can offer more convenience than Google Analytics because as the site administrator you can get information about your site’s visitor statistics right from the admin panel rather than having to go to Google Adwords/Analytics and log in over there.

The first plugin was a non-starter. It was by Rich Boakes. I’m sure it’s a good plugin and works for some folks under (probably) older versions of WordPress. However, I’m taking heed whenever Fantastico! tells me there’s an update for a piece of software that’s running on my site. So when running the very latest version of anyone’s software it’s likely that the third-party software may be lagging behind in the compatibility department, and the analytics plugins are no exception. Boakes’s plugin was DOA … it simply dumped its source code as HTML ahead of whatever Wordpress was putting on the screen, which made my site largely unusable. I went looking for another solution.

However, TanTan’s Google Analytics plugin runs. It did throw numerous errors when I loaded it … I believe there are three panels of results it won’t be giving me until TanTan updates it (probably twice as many panels do work) … but perhaps I also have some setting that still needs fixing. Remember folks, I’m a newbie at all this stuff. Google’s website confirms that the needed code is on at least the home page of the site.

I didn’t have the smoothest installation experience. My IPP, Bluehost has a control panel that provides a nice file manager, and I was trying to drag and drop the Tantan folder that I created on my notebook computer when I downloaded the zip file that Tantan comes in. It wasn’t working. In fact I tried creating the Tantan folder by hand in the WordPress plugins directory, and I didn’t seem to be creating it.

However, I decided to use Microsoft ExpressionWeb to try to move the Tantan folder where I needed it, and it turned out that I had actually been creating the folder, it simply wasn’t visible to me. It’s possible that the FrontPage extensions that are running on my site had affected the ability of the control panel’s file manager to do its job fully. I’ll have to check the flacorps.com website to make sure it’s still working OK and the oh-so-fragile extensions weren’t broken by my having dared to use something other than ExpressionWeb to make changes to folders that aren’t part of the site that I work with using ExpressionWeb, but that are subfolders under that site.

I picked up the Dummies book on Pay-per-click advertising last night, and I’ll be poring over it looking for every scrap of actionable information it might contain. At $25, just one good idea from it could pay for itself many times over.

I’ve been doing the tedious job of validating my XHTML code for the flacorps.com website using the W3C validation service. Microsoft Expression Web has its own ideas about what’s valid, so it doesn’t pick out in yellow things that are errors according to the W3C standards body (perhaps there’s a setting that makes it do so, I haven’t found it yet). The result is pages that work for IE7, but may yield surprises for other browsers. I aim to prevent that, since the web is increasingly mobile and you can’t count on mobile browsers to support various extensions to XHTML.

The way validation works is you point the validator to your page, and it comes back with a list of dozens (maybe hundreds) of things that it doesn’t like. Typically, they all can be handled by moving various settings to the style sheet (where they belong) or eliminating them entirely due to redundancy. Sometimes it gets a little sticky, but so far I’ve done pretty well at it.

The www.florida-entrepreneurs.com site (the one you get to by clicking past the old, static version of the page) is run on the Mambo content management software. This was the hottest thing around circa 2005 and had many independent coders developing for it. I picked it because the www.creditboards.com site was using it as a front end, so I figured they were paying attention to what was really good. I checked it out and was satisfied that I would find it suitable. What I missed was that much of its following dissipated when the folks in charge of its development had a falling out over how it was being licensed. I’m not enough of a software licensing guru to understand what the whole kerfuffle was about, but the bottom line is that a “fork” called Joomla! split away from the Mambo community and took a lot of the goodwill with them. Now that I’m looking into Ruby on Rails I also have found out that there are RoR content managers like Mephisto that I might have liked better as well. Oh well. It’s not like the site had a lot of pages on it yet. If I decide to dump Mambo for something else it will be easy enough to pack up the existing content and move it to whatever will be its new home.

I may have to do something soon, as there is a snippet of content on the Mambo site that I need to change. The problem is that right now I can’t change it. Seems that when the www.flacorps.com site switched to a static IP address and got a security certificate, that threw a kink into both Mambo and Wordpress (wordpress is the software that drives this blog, and thousands of others). Seems that the software for both got “broken” by the change. The only thing is, I was easily able to get into the Wordpress admin panel and fix it … Mambo is still messed up. Mambo is dependent on a built-in WYSIWYG editor called MOStlyCE … and without it you *should* be able to edit the HTML of your content, but it doesn’t seem to work that way. MOStlyCE isn’t working for me right now. And while that has been a problem in the past, it was only a problem on one computer of mine that happened to be behind a Vonage telephone adapter at the time, my other computers could use the admin panel of the Mambo site just fine. That has changed. Now I can’t get in there from any of my PCs.

 I don’t think I’ve checked the www.florida-entrepreneurs.com forum … it’s running on SMF (Simple Machines Forum). If I had all this to do over again (and it looks like I may), I would run the fromjumpstreet.com blog on an RoR blogging engine like Typo, run the www.florida-entrepreneurs.com site on Mephisto, run its forums on Beast and write some custom RoR code to run the back end of www.flacorps.com. Rails doesn’t run multiple sites from one installation out of the box, but there is a rails plug-in that will do the job, the multisite plug-in … though that may not be what I need. It may just be that there is no real problem hosting multiple apps from a single rails installation so long as they are separate apps. The multisite plug-in appears intended to allow the same back-end to run multiple front ends. That could be an intriguing idea, but I’ll let it alone for now.

Over the years, the Flacorps website has suffered from two major flaws, both of which were pretty unforgivable (though enought users forgave them to keep me too busy to pay them too much attention). First, transactions lacked security, and second, the order forms required users to total their own charges.

 The first was remedied by having my IPP, Bluehost, get me a dedicated IP and a security certificate. Setup ran about $35 and there will be an extra $2.50 per month charge. All I needed to do to make any page secure is invoke it with “https” instead of “http”, and that was done in the links leading to the order forms. I could also secure the entire site by creating a redirect in my .htaccess files if I wanted to. But it’s not a good idea to monkey with the .htaccess files if you’re using the Frontpage extensions, which are notoriously easy to break.

Speaking of Frontpage, I was halfheartedly looking for a way to get calculated totals going in my order pages because my 3 year old was asleep and I had nothing else to do. I figured I would have to do it in Frontpage or PHP, and since I don’t know PHP and I’m using Frontpage that would be the way to go. What I wound up finding was an implementation in Javascript referenced on the Frontpagetalk website. It’s on a second site, but there’s a good discussion of it on the Frontpagetalk thread that I linked. Surprisingly, it required only that code be dropped into the page in three spots, and the checkboxes for the charges suddenly began producing a total in the total box. The last time I had that capability was in the ‘02 time-frame, about the time that Peregrine dropped support for the ordering system that fed directly into Peachtree Accounting.

This is another one of those “what-an-idiot-I’ve-been” moments where you realize that so much in life is out there free for the taking, you just have to wake up, take your head out of the sand and look around for the resources that surround you.

So I’ve been having trouble getting the bizbox template I downloaded to render correctly in the browser window. The template itself should have showed up nicely centered in the browser window, but in some cases it was shoved over to the left side. I was at a loss … I couldn’t find any reason why it wouldn’t work. So I commented out whole blocks of text and HTML code using the <!– …. –/> format. and still the text boxes stayed stuck to the left.

Stumped, I looked at the first tags in the document. And on the good ones, I found this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>

And that is the tag needed to invoke the latest standard, the one that supports that nice centering I wanted.

Well, the probem printing from Paperport 11 to Windows fax and scan under Vista is now solved. I uninstalled and reinstalled Paperport for a second time after doing a system restore back to June 23 (at the MS tech’s request) a couple of days ago that completely broke Paperport (it crashed with “OCR error” every time I tried to load it after that). The roll back may have gone back before some registry edits I made, I can’t recall when I did those. But in any case, those who get the “The fax cannot be sent at this time” message might consider uninstalling and reinstalling Paperport 11. Perhaps twice…

Microsft can’t seem to call back on support issues during normal business hours (of course, this is on account of the time difference to India), so they were calling during the evening which was family time, etc. The best they seem to be able to manage is late in the business day. Go figure.

My redesign of the flacorps.com website is in full swing. The site is still operating while I tinker with the look, but it all should be completed pretty soon.

In short, I’ve entered the world of Cascading style sheets using the bizbox template I downloaded from freecsstemplates.org under the Creative Commons attribution license. I have been editing it using Microsoft Expression Web. It’s been a little bumpy, but I’m getting the hang of both CSS and Expression Web. Style sheets were a 1999 innovation for the web, so it’s about time I got with the program. In short, what style sheets do is exactly what they do for documents: they create a new canon for the appearance of various features that are left ordinarily to the browser to guess at, and they also allow you to carry that canon from one .html document to the next (with the ability to make minor changes when necessary in each document without affecting the others when you so desire).

While I’ve had an easy time getting the basic appearance elements correct, and my submission forms have been unaffected in their operation, I’ve still had trouble getting the header and content sections to stay aligned with each other, and also difficulty getting them to center in the browser’s window … so far only the home page and the FAQs are doing that correctly. It seems that HTML tags in the text inside of divisions can override the division’s controls, so you’ve got to comb through your HTML to find the offending items and remove them.

I’ve also had trouble turning a nice vertical menu bar that came with the format horizontal so that I can use it in another spot where I need it to be horizontal. I created a second menu style in the style sheet and declared it in the document I’m working on, then tried varying all sorts of settings. I got it showing horizontally, but I’ve yet to clear up a couple of white space issues. I’m reading a document from Adobe labs on making an auto width horizontal menu bar that I found online and I expect to fix the problem shortly.

Just a quick note to counter some of the glowing reviews. I got a can of Stoner’s Tarminator bug & tar spray on clearance at Target a couple of months ago. I used it on the front of my ‘05 Hyundai Elantra GT, and the next thing you know I had some nasty white scratches highlighted on my left headlamp. I guess I picked the scratches up at the car wash, but they were almost invisible until Tarminator worked its way into them and affected the plastic. Watch out!