Beutelevision

This is totally cool… a brand new steam engine was just completed in Britain and is undergoing testing. They used parts fabricated all around the world since the skills of making a steam engine in one place have disappeared.

The group I’m working with, San Francisco Trains is working to preserve both a steam engine and the place where running repairs for steam engines were made, namely the Bayshore Roundhouse just south of San Francisco. All of that same knowledge that goes into creating a steam engine was there at one time at Bayshore.

Geeks3d is “All 3D Tech News, All The Time”, and they just covered the Shapeways announcement.

Shapeways looks really interesting. According to Technology Review you upload a 3-D design to the website, and 10 days and $50-$100 later, you receive a polymer version of your design.

I can see this as really handy for creating masters for items that I want to replicate in urethane or plaster, such as bridge parts or passenger car sides. Cool!

Can you see what is wrong with this Perl code snippet?

foreach my $cat (@$categories) {
if ($cat->{col} == $column and $cat=>{pos} == $position) {
return $cat;
}
}


It gets the “Useless use of private variable in void context” at the last brace. Well, it took me a while, but it was the equal sign in $cat=>{pos} which should be $cat->{pos}. Worse, I copied and pasted this code somewhere else, which doubled the problem. (Yes I know, all copying and pasting is evil–I get it!)

In any case, this comment on Perlmonks was helpful, suggesting to look for typos backward from the point of the error. Yup, that’s exactly what it was.

I just love this idea: integrating lava lamps to Cruise Control so that you can see when a software build has gone bad. The idea is to turn on a red lava lamp when the build failed, otherwise turn on a green one. Cool!

After reading the Productive Programmer, I was inspired to write a custom script to add Symfony menus to my Emacs editor. After some frustration (I find emacs LISP tough to grok), I finally figured it out. (script is below)

Anyway, here are a couple of pictures showing custom menus for a small project. This allows me to find and load module templates, action files, and models quickly and easily.

 

 

OK, I didn’t write the script in elisp. Instead, I use perl to generate the elisp code. To create the elisp code, I run this script at the root of the Symfony project.

Update: After I wrote my implementation, I found this pure elisp implementation that creates an even better symfony navigation: http://svn.tracfort.jp/svn/dino-symfony/emacs-symfony/emacs-symfony/symfony-navigation.el

It’s enough to power 80 homes in SF and it offsets 14 million pounds of carbon over its lifetime, according to this Marketwatch article.

I spent some time this afternoon speaking with various solar installers at the GoSolarSF fair at the Eureka Valley rec center. To say the fair was crowded would be an understatement. I wasn’t able to speak to most of the installers–the crowds were too deep. It’s fantastic to see this amount of interest in solar.

Of course, San Francisco is doing its part by providing incentives, which along with state and soon to expire federal incentives makes it a no brainer. A typical $25,000 system will cost about half that after incentives, and with ever increasing electricity prices the typical return-on-investment is 5 to 7 years.

According to one of the companies I spoke with, the ROI is even better if you are using solar to power a plugin hybrid electric car. At current gas prices, a 1.5KW solar array along with a PHEV like the Chevy Volt would pay for itself in 2 years. 

The only question in my mind is whether to buy a larger array now, or wait until PHEVs are actually available.

Johannes Fahrenkrug wrote a nice tutorial on building an OpenSocial app with SproutCore.

I just finished reading the Productive Programmer and I really like the suggestions, such as SLAP (single level of abstraction). The book isn’t language specific, but it is Java-heavy in the examples. Still, everything is adaptable to other languages.

There is now also a wiki for the book.