Anyone who pays attention to Apple news is, I’m sure, aware of their recent announcement of Snow Leopard, the successor to Leopard, which will be coming out in about a year. They’re also probably aware that Apple is advertising this release primarily as a code refactoring that will add stability, optimization, and ‘no new features’. Since that announcement there have been any number of blog posts explaining how there actually will be some significant new features, they’re just mainly under the hood enhancements that the average user wouldn’t actually be aware of. RoughlyDrafted has an excellent post explicating what some of those features are, so I’m not going to rehash that discussion. I do, however, want to address one of the points made, specifically that ‘ZFS isn’t going to replace HFS+ outright in Snow Leopard, and has limited relevance today to desktop and laptop users, particularly those who never move beyond the single disk drive installed in their system’. I disagree.

This statement is partly true in that most people, especially those with only a single HDD, won’t benefit from ZFS‘ pooling and the various benefits that come from that (such as RAID-Z). But I still think it’s inclusion in OS X will be a coup for the average user as well. Specifically, the use of ZFS means that silent data corruption will be a thing of the past thanks to copy on write and full data checksumming. Also, the advantages that ZFS’ snapshots will bring to TimeMachine will greatly enhance it’s usability, speed, and effectiveness for anyone with an external hard drive, network hard drive, or Time Capsule. On top of that, there are, in fact, a few benefits of ZFS pooling for those with just a single hard drive. In particular, filesystem level compression will allow the user (or, more likely, Apple) to designate certain folders to be their own filesystems that are automatically compressed to to provide a) more efficient use of space and b) faster access. This won’t help much with your music and video files, but it should do a lot to greatly reduce the size and increase the access speed of the configuration and preferences files in your Library (mine is currently 3.24 GB uncompressed). I don’t imagine it would be difficult for Apple to update OS X so that /Library, /System/Library, and /Users/*/Library are all their own filesystems with compression turned on. And even if they don’t a savvy user could do this themselves if they really wanted to.

ZFS will also be a boon to those who might want to create their own home server. A niche market for now, perhaps, but the ability to just keep adding new USB or FireWire (or eSATA?) hard drives to their computer and have that storage space just seamlessly added into their storage capacity will make it significantly easier to manage.

I, for one, think that ZFS is probably the best news related to Snow Leopard that I’ve heard. I’ve already been using ZFS in both Leopard (you can download an update from the ADC that gives you full read/write access to ZFS) and FreeBSD and loving every minute of it. I just wish Sun would release it under the GPL so it could be included in Linux as well…

Currently I’ve got two projects hosted on WebFaction servers. So far, I really like them. As managed hosts go, they’re probably the best I’ve worked with, and they certainly make life very easy when building Django powered sites.

Today I got an email from one of the clients whose project is hosted on WebFaction saying that their site is down. So I checked it out, and while I was able to access it, it was extremely slow, to the point where a less forgiving browser/LAN setup might cause it to time out. So I fired off a support ticket to WebFaction, and within a couple minutes, not only was the site back up to speed, but I was provided with a very good explanation for why my server was having problems.

Apparently there was an explosion at one of WebFaction’s data centers this weekend. It took out power to the data center, but fortunately no one was hurt and none of the servers were damaged. Obviously, there have been some interruptions in service for the servers in that data center (which includes both of my WebFaction projects), but they’ve already gotten a significant number of the servers back online (though only one of mine).

Amazingly, this is actually the second time I’ve had a server taken out by an explosion at a data center. The first time was with a hosted Microsoft Exchange server with a hosting company in London.

It really sucks having sites down, especially critical ones (fortunately only one of the projects I have hosted with them is critical, and it’s the one that’s back up already), but as reasons for downtime go, you have to admit that an explosion is a pretty good one.

So as I mentioned, I was at the opening of the new Boston Apple Store on Boyleston St. last night. Unfortunately I was a little late showing up and didn’t get my free t-shirt.

As I mentioned, it’s an extremely nice location with some extremely cool design. The entire top floor (of three) is dedicated to support with a gigantic Genius Bar that is apparently able to support several thousand people per day, and a ton of iMacs lining the walls where you can get one on one help/tutoring (they call it their One-to-One program). Another cool new features they’re rolling out (or possible already had and I just haven’t been paying attention) is their personal shopping service. You can make an appointment to show up and have, essentially, a personal shopper to help you out with any questions or help you might need while shopping. Seems like a pretty cool idea, and I imagine it will be very useful for the parents who want to get their kid a new computer or something but really have no idea what they’re looking for.

All in all, I think this store is going to be a huge success. Especially positioned, as it is, directly across the street from the Prudential Center and the soon-to-be-opened Mandarin Oriental hotel. It will definitely be a little more pleasant to visit than the Cambridgeside location, though parking won’t be nearly as easy so you’ll probably start seeing more people with big iMac boxes on the T…

And in closing, these people weren’t on the guest list and therefore aren’t as cool as me:

(Yes, both pictures in this post were taken with my iPhone.)

So, currently there are signs up and down both sides of Somerville Ave. saying that there’s no parking on those streets due to an ‘emergency’. Well, that’s all you can read of the signs as you drive around looking for parking due to the fact that everyone who usually parks on Somerville Ave. is now parked elsewhere, anyway. If, however, you take a closer look at those signs, they say that there’s no parking there on 4/30 and 5/1 from 7:30 pm until 6:00 am or so because they’re painting bike lanes.

Painting bike lanes? Bike lanes are great and all, and I wish there were more of them in general. But this is just an absolutely moronic way to go about it. The most obvious reason that it’s a completely moronic thing to do is that Somerville Ave. is currently being re-paved. For the past, I don’t know, 6 months or so, they’ve been very very very slowly working their way from Union Sq. towards Porter Sq. tearing up the roads and repaving them. Now this is definitely an essential thing for them to be doing as the state of Somerville Ave. is, in a word, abysmal. So, in general I heartily approve of both these measures.

The problem is that they’re doing it in the wrong order. Unless they’re planning on not fixing up all of Somerville Ave., which seems somewhat ridiculous since they’re already investing time and money in the project and disrupting just about everyone’s lives for it now, or they’re planning on somehow, miraculously finishing the rest of Somerville Ave. tonight and tomorrow, they’re just wasting a bunch of money here. They’re going to spend the next two days painting bike lanes on the street only to tear it up and re-pave it in another month or so (if we’re lucky).

This just strikes me as a tremendous waste of money. Also, it seems kind of odd for them to be painting bike lanes on a street that doesn’t really have car lanes painted on it. I guess we’re not really far enough away from Boston to escape the sphere of city planning moronicism.

Like many others I upgraded to Safari 3.1 last night. Also like many others I’m now encountering the ’shift bug’ in Gmail. If you haven’t yet read about it, what happens is that for some reason in Gmail on Safari 3.1, and apparently only in Gmail Safari 3.1, when you hit the shift key (or caps lock key) in the body of the message it changes focus. The result of this is that it’s impossible to enter capital letters or any other character that requires the shift key suchs as ‘$’ in the body of your message. Basically, Gmail is unusable in Safari 3.1.

There is a workaround for most people: at the top right of your Gmail page you may see a ‘newer version’ link. If you go to that and then select US English as your language, this apparently fixes the problem. Unfortunately, the ‘newer version’ link isn’t available in the Google Apps Gmail, which is what I use.

The other fix, of course, is to simply use a different browser. I’m a big fan of Safari, and have been using it exclusively pretty much since it was released. I’ve tried Firefox a number of times, but never really liked it that much for a variety of reasons. But like others, this problem hasn’t really left me with much of a choice. So I’m writing this post from Firefox 3 beta 4 which, I have to say, isn’t too bad. It definitely, as others have said, uses far less memory than Firefox 2, which is a big part of the reason I generally don’t use Firefox. I’ll keep using it for a while and we’ll see how it goes.

The other reason I generally stick with Safari is the tight integration with OS X, as well as the .Mac bookmark syncing. But I have been looking into cross-platform alternatives to .Mac, because it would be nice to have a solution that would work with other OSes as well (the price issues doesn’t bother me so much because it’s such a useful product and it’s actually pretty cheap if you have a family pack). The one real issue with switching away from .Mac for me is that I make pretty extensive use of Yojimbo which uses .Mac to sync it’s SQLite database and Transmit which uses .Mac to sync bookmarks. Not to mention my use of Apple’s Address Book and iCal because they sync not only with my other computers through .Mac but with my iPhone. So if anyone can recommend a solution that would allow me to replicate all that functionality across multiple *nixes (specifically OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD), I’d appreciate it.

Ridiculous fifth-grade name aside, I suppose this is a big day. Not for me, however. This morning I drove Jessi over to our polling place to vote in the primaries before work. I suspected it wouldn’t really work, but I decided to go in and see about voting myself. My name was in the rolls, but rather than the familiar D, R, G, W, or, apparently, U next to my name there was a very cryptic and unknown symbol: L

‘L, what’s L?’, said the woman checking people off in the book. ‘Do you know what L is?’ The gentleman next to her mused, ‘L? Liberal? That’s Democrat, right?’. My clarification that L stood for Libertarian didn’t really clear things up very much, and they ended up having to make a phone call to …someone who told them that there was no Libertarian ballot and that I wasn’t eligible to vote. I figured this was probably the case as I hadn’t heard anything from either the state or national party about primaries, but it was disappointing none the less, especially as we have a local, George Phillies of Worcester, in the running for the LP presidential nomination. Phillies also happens to be my favorite candidate for President being not only a Libertarian, but a science fiction author and college professor as well. With any luck he’ll get the nomination and I’ll actually get a candidate that I want to vote for this time around (in ‘04 none of the candidates I liked got their respective nominations: Dean, Nolan, McCain; I’m not longer a McCain supporter however so his likely nomination this year doesn’t really help things). Oh well, at least I won’t be barred from voting in November.

Which brings me to another topic I’ve been meaning to discuss: a particular ballot question. Come November there will be a rather important question on the ballot, the question of whether or not to end the Massachusetts state income tax. If you check out their website it sounds like they actually have a decent chance of passing this. It was on the ballot before in ‘02 and just barely failed with only 45.3% of the vote. That was with very little publicity and the media presenting it as a cause that couldn’t possibly succeed. However with that strong a showing in ‘02, no one can claim this time around that it has no chance. It very clearly has a chance, and therefore media reaction to it has been a little more positive this year. They’re also investing a lot more in publicity to spread awareness, so I think there’s a very good chance this might pass in November.

That said, I don’t want it to, I think we should keep the income tax. Well, that’s not entirely true either, I don’t want the income tax, but I think that repealing it right now is the wrong thing to do. This is Massachusetts, after all, and with a democratic legislature and Deval Patrick in the Governor’s office I find it unlikely that, even given an $11b drop in tax revenue, the state is going to put the brakes on any spending. Instead they’ll just look for different ways to bring in money like increasing the sales tax, increasing fees, and just generally taxing more things. One area where spending is probably likely to fall, however, is local aid. A lot of the cities and towns of Massachusetts are already suffering from anemic income and getting very little help from the state. This clearly isn’t going to improve if we stop giving the state part of our paychecks. So how are those municipalities going to keep making ends meet? Easy, they’ll keep doing what they always do and raise property taxes. I pay enough in property taxes as it is (about three times more each quarter than Jessi’s mom in Illinois pays in a year), and I find property taxes to be by far the more egregious kind of tax.

Think about what it means to have to pay property tax. Essentially, it means that you can never actually own property. In all but name, the State owns your property and you merely rent it from them. Don’t believe me? Try not paying your property taxes and see what happens: the same thing that happens if you stop paying your rent. You have to pay for the privilege of living on your own land! I say that rather than repealing the income tax, by far the better thing to do would be to repeal property taxes. This would a) strengthen the right of people to own property, b) reduce the cost of living significantly by lowering rent as well, and therefore c) reduce the prices of goods and services by lowering the costs for the providers and sellers.

Now, maybe repealing the income tax would actually be successful. Maybe next year we’d get a budget that was $11b lighter (wasn’t that one of Patrick’s campaign promises anyway?). Maybe Massachusetts will implement something like the FairTax on a state level, and prove one and for all that either it can work or it can’t. Probably not, but one can hope. Regardless, I think our first priority should be repealing property taxes. I would much rather see that happen, and I think it’s a revenue loss that could be more easily and quickly accommodated (rent assistance payouts, for example, would suddenly become much lower which would free up more money for local aid to compensate). But we’ll see what happens in November. I may even vote in favor of repealing the income tax just on principle; if it passes and our legislature and governor surprise me by taking it in stride there could still be some good that comes of it.

Apparently! The Idaho National Laboratory has announced a new technology that uses nanotech to create a flexible, highly efficient solar panel. And at 80% efficiency, they aren’t kidding when they say highly efficient. Most panels clock in at about 40%. I’ve seen a few reports of experimental systems that have approached 70% but that are extremely complex and expensive. This technology, apparently, is actually quite cheap. In addition, it can convert infrared radiation to electricity as well, so it will even produce power at night.

There’s just one problem though: they have no way of harnessing the electricity created. Light and heat are converted to electrons, but we don’t yet have a way of collecting those electrons. Oops. But apparently that’s in the works and should hopefully be coming soon.

Even still, this is a huge breakthrough. It brings us almost to the point of cheap, limitless power. Use this stuff in the roofs of electric/hybrid cars and trucks and you’ll get a pretty decent range extension and the ability to charge (probably slowly) even in places without power. Cover the roof of your house with this stuff and you’ll probably be pretty close to being able to go completely off grid. Since it will generate power 24/7 (though much more during the day)

There are obviously other topics for me to write about, but I’m quite busy lately and this is one that I both want to keep on top of and want to spread awareness of.

Anyway, just a quick update for now. Now that the new Republic of Lakota website is back up, they’ve continued to make improvements. The biggest is the addition of a discussion forum. It doesn’t have a whole lot of traffic just yet, but it’s still relatively new so hopefully that will change. Certainly I think the existence of the forum will help drive traffic to the site and therefore spread awareness, and hopefully some good things will come of it.

For the record, I’ve registered on the Republic of Lakota forums with the username ‘josho’.

I’ve just discovered that there is a new website for the Lakota Freedom movement: www.republicoflakota.com (the old website forwards to it). The new website is, in my opinion, a little better looking and, more importantly, better organized. There’s a separate section explaining their motivations, as well as one explaining the history of the movement. I do think it would be helpful to their cause if they added a news section or blog with an RSS feed to make it easier for people to keep track of what’s going on (and help their search rankings).
Most importantly, however, they have addressed the criticisms leveled at them that they do not actually represent the Lakota people. They say that they have had ongoing communications with traditional chiefs and treaty councils for the past three years, and have been in consultation with the traditional treaty councils of: Pine Ridge, Porcupine, Kyle, Rosebud, Lower Brule, Cheyenne River, Standing Rock, and Flandreau.

I hope that this means they actually do have some legitimacy behind them, although there still hasn’t been any real mention of them in the news. But I’ll be continuing to follow the story and hopefully something actually come of it.

Edit:
It appears that republicoflakota.com is now down, and currently displays only a GoDaddy domain parking page… (Thanks, Windtalon, for the heads up.) I’ve emailed the people in charge (the Means) and let them know, so hopefully this will be resolved soon.

Edit 2:
The site’s back up now.

Amusingly enough, just two days after my post on photovoltaics in which I mentioned the possibility of orbital power generation plants that send the power back to Earth via microwave transmission, National Geographic ran a story on exactly that.

This technology is one that’s been of interest to people for quite a while, and has been showing up in science fiction for decades. Apparently the Pentagon is also interested in space-based solar power, and the South Pacific nation of Palau has expressed interest in being part of a proof-of-concept implementation of the technology.

The details are all in the article, but essentially Palau has an uninhabited island where they propose building the rectifying antenna to receive the power from space. This would demonstrate the possibility of the technology as well as the safety. Apparently, this project could be completed as early as 2012 for about $800 million.