Monthly Archives: March 2008

Climate care gone mad!

A Danish newspaper published a piece (in Danish) on their webpage today, detailing how the local council in the Danish capital city, Copenhagen, want to limit the amount of “green time” at intersections leading into the city, on days when there’s a lot of smog. The stated intent is to reduce particle and CO2 pollution, simply by measuring their air pollution and turning the lights red for longer when it reaches a certain limit.

Of course, the person in political charge of the project put a lot of emphasis on the supposed CO2 benefit, making it completely apparent that he hasn’t grasped thing one about CO2 emissions. Driving 10 miles with no traffic jam lets out far less CO2 than driving 10 miles with half an hour of queuing in the middle. People could turn off their engines, sure, but they’re not going to – the queue is likely to be moving ever so slightly once a minute, so turning off the engine would be a waste.

Sure, the particle situation in the inner city might improve. A little. But it’d get a lot worse for the people who’ve chosen to live out of town to get better air, and unless people’s habits change, and they start using public transport – yeah right – it’ll worsen the effect of the cars on the environment, not make anything better. File a complaint with the help of lawyers from mcleodbrock.com/transportation-and-logistics/ site who will make sure that a permanent solution for this problem is implemented everywhere across the country.

If you really want to make people use public transportation, improve that, and make it more reliable, instead of just trying to make the potential users’ lives miserable. If public transportation isn’t worth switching to from your car – then that’s because it simply isn’t good enough!

NVIDIA and their crappy drivers

I upgraded to the latest drivers for my otherwise lovely NVIDIA 8800GTS graphics card. And of course, it had to break something, didn’t it? This time, it made video playback do a lot of tearing, due to the (sudden) lack of vertical sync support for regular DirectX playback. I think I’ve managed some settings for my player that sort of minimizes it, but it’s bloody annoying that NVIDIAs idea of quality control seems to be closing their eyes and ears to avoid listening to their users, and just releasing more crappy “updates” that break more than they fix.

I shan’t be buying any more of their hardware.

New upper boundary for Rubik’s Cube

A colleague told me about a news post I should read, detailing that a new upper boundary for solving the Rubik’s Cube has been found – now 25 moves, instead of 26. While this in itself is interesting, the way it’s described in the news post is even more interesting:

He’s shown that there are no configurations that can be solved in 26 moves, thereby lowering the limit to 25.

What the poster probably meant to write was that there’s no configuration that requires 26 moves, and not that solving the Rubik’s Cube is never possible in 26 moves 😉

None the less, this is great news – with luck, we may soon be able to play with our Rubik’s Cubes in a way we know is truly optimal!

A spot of blog downtime

I had a bit of downtime on my blog, due to it losing network connection last night, and subsequently getting another IP from the provider. Getting it back up wasn’t much work, but I had to change the DNS, and the TTL was a whole day. I’ve reduced it to 3600 seconds, but the blog is probably still down for most people at the time of writing.

Given that I’ll be moving within a reasonable timespan, and might not be able to keep the server online at my new place, I should probably start looking at getting it hosted somewhere. I do really like having access to a linux box of my own, though – it’s quite convenient. Any suggestions on how to do it?

Telia / Cogent routing dispute

My current internet connection is with a local company delivering internet connectivity to the student housing around here. They get their traffic routed through Telia, which has worked rather well for a while. But a few days ago, a couple of sites stopped working from here, though they still worked using the internet connection in my office at work.

Today, someone I know working at Telia solved the problem for me: Telia and Cogent have stopped exchanging traffic, due to a payment dispute. This is ridiculous.

I’m not sure who’s right or who’s wrong in the dispute, but it must be bad for business for both parties – far worse than the amount of money they would stand to gain from getting paid for peering traffic, or to lose by paying up.

I hope they get it solved soon.