After meeting Ubuntu zealots Alan Pope and Jono Bacon at Fosscamp this morning, I made the mistake of leaving my laptop screen unlocked within the range of these two dangerous characters while I went to the bathroom. What’s worse, I left a terminal window with a root prompt open on the desktop. (I don’t remember why– I think I was installing some software earlier.) When I got back, this so-called “Pope” had blown up the font size on my terminal window and added “rm -rf /” at the root prompt.

It was good for a laugh. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the poise to take a screenshot.

Later, it was revealed that the Bacon, not Pope, was the instigator, or so says Pope.

Note for the non-haX0rs in the audience (I guess that’s you, mom): “rm -rf /” is a command that recursively deletes all files in your filesystem. Incidentally, I did once execute that command on an OS X server that I was maintaining a few years ago. I needed to reinstall OS X for some reason, so I tried executing the legendary command. It was pretty sweet– various programs on the desktop crashed, services disappeared, and the machine was eventually rendered unbootable.

Anyway, I won’t make the mistake of leaving my laptop unprotected when Bacon is on this side of the Atlantic.

One other interesting note from Fosscamp– I talked to Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth for a few minutes after one of the morning sessions; he mentioned that the Dell Linux machines that I was so excited about a few months ago were actually Dell’s idea. I had assumed that the whole Dell Ideastorm business was more of a marketing exercise, while Dell and Canonical had actually been planning Dell PCs with Linux for a while. I guess I was wrong.

In a comment to my last post, Ben Harris suggests that I read Cape Wind by Williams and Whitcomb. I haven’t read the book yet, but I did read up on Cape Wind.

The outcry against Cape Wind is a travesty. It comes down to an unpleasant choice of how we get the energy we need. We have to satisfy our rising energy needs somehow. If you’re opposed to using local energy sources to fulfill our energy needs, you have to be in favor of either reduction of our energy needs (which have been strictly increasing for all of recorded history) or getting the energy from somewhere else.

The first choice, reducing energy consumption, requires either widespread, voluntary efficiency gains among the populace, forced efficiency gains via government intervention, or the arrival of the hard times. I think it would be imprudent to plan on any of those events occurring. Our understanding of efficiency improvements falls vastly short of what we need. Even the NPR-listening Prius drivers among us are making decisions around the level of 20% improvements by 10% of the population, while the population continues to increase. We’re excited about skyscrapers with green roofs, which collect water for irrigation of the plants in the lobby, and building-integrated solar, which can supply maybe 1% of the heating and cooling requirements of the building. We’re not thinking about changes on the level of, “You don’t get to heat your house in the winter any more.”

Forced efficiency gains via government intervention seems equally unlikely to me. The current US administration argues about whether we should mandate minor increases in fuel efficiency, while allowing exemptions for vehicles over 6000 pounds. The most recent increase was from 21.6 mpg to 24 mpg, and it doesn’t take effect until 2011. 10% decrease mandated in 4 years, while our vehicle usage continues to increase? This will not solve the problem.

The arrival of the hard times may well solve the problem, but I would strongly prefer to avoid having to affiliate myself with a local warlord in order to get bread, watery gruel, and a burlap sack to keep me warm in the winter. I don’t think that constraining energy usage by simply failing to build more power plants, be they clean or dirty, is likely to be an optimal solution.

If we won’t reduce our energy consumption, we need to get more energy somewhere. There’s a temptation to think that we don’t need to get energy locally, but everywhere is local to someone. If we had an uninhabited Oil Planet, we would need only design a sturdy pipeline to connect the two planets (akin to the Moon Bomb). The location of the Oil Planet is currently unknown, and nobody wants a coal plant in their backyard any more than I do. At some level, we need to collect energy locally.

It’s reasonable to debate the resolution of “local.” Do I need to get all my energy from my state? My town? My house? My desk?

Right now, eastern Massachusetts imports the vast majority of its energy. In Boston, the major electricity source is the Mystic Generating Station in Everett (you know, the pixelated section on Google maps, just north of the river). According to the Energy Information Administration, the 2600 MW Everett plant currently runs off of natural gas from the Gulf Coast, Canada, and the Appalachian Basin. Additional natural gas in liquid form is brought from foreign sources to the LNG terminal in Everett. According to the EIA, we also burn coal from West Virginia and Colorado. Coal is burned in the Brayton Point plant in Somerset, Massachusetts.

The limited availability of fossil fuels, the pollutants released by their combustion, and my assumption that if I don’t want my tap water tainted with mercury runoff from strip-mining coal, the residents of West Virginia probably don’t either, lead me to believe that we need to look for local alternatives for energy.If you’re going to satisfy your energy needs locally, what’s the best choice?

In Massachusetts, we get about 40% of our electricity from natural gas, 50% from coal and petroleum-fired power plants, and 5% from nuclear power. The remaining 5% is from hydro, solar, and wind. Nationally, the percentages are similar, but more hydro and nuclear, less natural gas.

The non-renewable options aren’t pleasant. We don’t have coal, oil or gas– you have to go at least as far as western Pennsylvania to find it. Robert Milici of the USGS says of the areas east and north of the Appalachians that, “these provinces do not produce oil or gas and are not currently viewed as prospective for oil and gas.” The USGS only studies 5 major coal beds; nobody is digging up coal in Massachusetts.

Nuclear power is waning in New England. Since the 1991 shutdown of the 540 MW Rowe nuclear plant in western Massachusetts, there is only one nuclear power plant in the state (Pilgrim, nominally 690 MW, in Plymouth), and one just over the state line in Seabrook, New Hampshire. The Seabrook plant is larger, nominally 1150 MW. Another New England nuclear plant, the 900 MW Maine Yankee plant in Wiscasset, was shut down in 1997 due to lack of economic viability. The spent fuel rods are still there under armed guard, as they will likely remain until at least 2017. There are two plants, totaling around 2000 MW, operating in Connecticut and one 650 MW plant in southwestern Vermont. There are currently no new nuclear plants planned [PDF] for New England.

There’s not much opportunity for large hydropower in Massachusetts– we’re a mostly flat state, especially toward the eastern end. The Idaho National Laboratory puts its total estimate of hydropower potential in Massachusetts at 132 MW, which is about a third the size of Cape Wind. Furthermore, the estimate include sites like Moody Street in Waltham, that face worse public acceptance problems than Cape Wind.

That leaves solar and wind. Solar power is great, but New England is not particularly sunny, compared to, say, Arizona or New Mexico. Cape Wind is proposing a wind farm that peaks at 420 MW. According to the Prometheus Institute in Cambridge, total US installations of solar this year are around 120 MW, with the bulk of them in California and New Jersey. (Sorry, Keith, for using peak numbers– I know you find it galling. Post better comparisons in the comments or, better yet, start your own blog.) The point is that on the scale of renewable energy projects, the Cape Wind installation would be massive. (On the scale of coal fired power plants, which currently top out around 1500 MW, it would not be that big.)

In eastern Massachusetts, wind power is a good choice. From a power density perspective, the site chosen by Cape Wind is in a zone characterized as “excellent” by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MTC, hereafter) and verified by the National Renewable Energy Lab. (Disclosure: the company for which I work has recently worked on a technology assessment for the MTC, and we may do more for them. However, I have not been personally involved in any of the work, it hasn’t involved wind, and I didn’t know that MTC had done this study until a few minutes ago.)

While I do agree with Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s assertion in the New York Times that the project ought not to be enabled by government subsidies of $241 million dollars, his characterization of Nantucket Sound as a pristine region is ridiculous. I’ve been there; what I recall was a bunch of champions from the Buzzards Bay Power Squadron running two-stroke engines at full throttle. Maybe if I had a compound in Hyannis like that of Mr. Kennedy, I would feel differently, but I’m in the same boat as the roughly 6.4 million non-Kennedy residents of Massachusetts.

Currently, opposing wind power in eastern Massachusetts is extremely likely to result in the construction of new fossil fuel power plants like the plant in Everett. The cost of wind power incurred on the neighborhood is different from the cost incurred by a coal plant. If your kid breathes enough crap out of a smokestack for long enough, your kid will die. I won’t say that the visual damage done by wind turbines is nothing, but if forced to make the choice, as we are, I think choosing your view at the price of the lungs of some kid growing up across the street from the Brayton Point plant in Somerset is unconscionable.

The state approved the Cape Wind project in March of 2007, though the project is in federal waters, so state review is less significant than federal review. The Boston Globe predicts federal review to be complete in mid-2008. I would be proud to live in the state that supported the first offshore wind farm in the nation.

Comment sent to Massachusetts about their bone-headed inclusion of ECMA 376 (OOXML) in their latest draft of the Enterprise Technical Reference Model:

Hello,

I’m a long-term resident of Massachusetts; I run an engineering firm in Waltham. I have no affiliation with any company that produces any document format.

I have two objections to the inclusion of Microsoft’s ECMA 376 in ETRM 4.0:

1. As a citizen, I don’t want to buy a certain vendor’s software to read government documents.

2. As a technical professional in a competitive market, I don’t want to pay the overhead of upgrading the de facto standard Microsoft Office every 3 years for no good reason.

ITD had the right idea with its choice of ISO 26300 (ODF) as a single, open standard for government documents.

In the engineering work that I do, we need to maintain two sets of tools– one in metric units and one in English units. The choice of two standards for the same function provides nothing but inefficiency. ITD should not introduce similar inefficiency into government document formats.

It is predictable that no other vendors will implement ECMA 376 well enough to guarantee document fidelity across platforms. To see why, consider this excerpt from page 1379 of ECMA 376:

“If this compatibility setting is turned on:
<w:compat>
<w:autoSpaceLikeWord95 />
</w:compat>
Then applications should mimic the behavior of Microsoft Word 95 when determining the space between those characters, as needed.”

No explanation of “the behavior of Microsoft Word 95″ is given. How might a competing vendor determine all the rules that Word 95 uses for character spacing? Type all possible sequences of characters in all fonts on a computer borrowed from the Computer History Museum, and then analyze the results?

This sort of incomplete specification, found throughout ECMA 376, will mean that nobody other than Microsoft will be able to implement ECMA 376 completely. While ECMA 376 is nominally open, in my judgment, it is so incomplete as to be effectively proprietary. In the language of ITD, ECMA 376 is publicly available, but not fully documented. The predictable result of ECMA 376 adoption will be a series of buggy import functions in competing software, while Microsoft Office remains the government-supported standard.

The same cannot be said for ODF. Many competing products that implement ODF already exist; I’ve been using them for all my personal documents for several years. I understand the objection that the switch to ODF from Microsoft’s closed formats will be painful, but it’s a better choice than upgrading to the next Microsoft format every three years for eternity.

I request that Massachusetts return to its innovative idea of choosing a single, open standard for government documents; I believe that ODF is the best choice for that standard.

Thanks for your consideration,
Brandon Stafford
Cambridge, MA

As of the start of 2007, I am living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and commuting 16 miles round trip by car at 35 mpg to GreenMountain Engineering in Waltham 250 days/year. That’s about 125 gallons of diesel per year, and I drive an additional 20% for other reasons. That’s around 150 gallons * 155 MJ/gallon = 25000 MJ/year = 25 GJ/year. Increase that by about a third to include the amortization of the energy used to build the car and transport the fuel before sale, according to the Institute for Lifecycle Environmental Assessment (summary of study by Maclean and Lave of Carnegie Mellon, 1988). That’s 33 GJ/year.

Additionally, I live in a house that consumes an average of 100 therms of natural gas and 400 kWh of electricity per month year-round. The total for the house is (100 therms * 105 MJ/therm) + (400 kWh * 3.6 MJ/kWh) = 10500 + 1440 MJ = 11940 MJ/year. I share the house with my girlfriend, so count this as 6 GJ/year. My office is similar in size to our house, but we have 4 employees, so add another 3 GJ/year. The total is now 42 GJ/year.

I eat about 2500 kilocalories of food per day, and that reflects 7500 kilocalories of energy used, once farming and transportation energy costs are included. I probably do slightly better than that buying local produce and eating mostly vegetarian. (The 3:1 ratio is from a 2002 paper by Leo Horrigan, et al., of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.) That’s the same as 7500 kilocalories * ~4 kJ/kcal = 30000 kJ = 30 MJ/day, which corresponds to 11 GJ/year. The total is 53 GJ/year. Virtually all of it comes from non-renewable resources (diesel, natural gas, and electricity from mostly coal).

This omits the amortized manufacture and transportation energy for the physical goods I buy–computers, books, furniture, clothes.

For reference, I’ve read of typical consumption rates for North America in the range of 200-300 GJ/year.

I attended a version of BarCamp for old lawyers today– the launch of the first draft of GPLv3, put on by the Free Software Foundation at MIT. Eben Moglen, Richard Stallman, Bruce Perens, Andrew Tridgell, Larry Rosen, Bob Sutor– all the stars were out in Cambridge, laptops shined up and beeping accessories a-dangle!

Richard Stallman is far more amusing than he gets credit for– more details in the Wikinews article I started.

Any BarCamp folks going to the GPLv3 launch conference at MIT on Monday? I’m planning on covering it for Wikinews, and I could use some help.

Boston Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray had an article yesterday, October 29, 2005, about Massachusetts’ proposed switch to OpenDocument. He seems to misunderstand the whole point of the switch– he writes as if Massachusetts has refused to use Microsoft Office, rather than refused to use Office’s proprietary formats.

The good news is that in our modern era of email, instead of just fuming, I can send him an email. It’s probably questionable as to whether that actually changes anything. Maybe it’s just a palliative measure used by the Globe to keep zealots like me from storming their offices. Anyway, here’s the email I sent him.

Hello Mr. Bray,
In your article, “Senators question file-storage shift,” you’ve missed the crucial point in the argument behind Peter Quinn’s new policy. You write that the state will stop using Microsoft Office because it “uses a unique data format that may
not be readable by other programs.” The part you’ve missed is that the data format is not just unique, but secret.

This is the whole reason for the new policy– as you write, companies can, “add the OpenDocument format without paying royalties or licensing fees.” This will ensure that state documents will remain readable forever, not just until Microsoft decides to change their formats, as they have done repeatedly in the past. As you know, the Romney administration has explicitly asked Microsoft to add support for OpenDocument, so the problem should be characterised as
Microsoft refusing to support open standards, rather than the state refusing to use Microsoft. The state has refused the secret format, not the software or the company.

As a taxpayer in Massachusetts, I’m glad to hear that my government won’t use software that relies on a secret format. I don’t want to buy Microsoft Office to read state documents when there are obvious alternatives. The issues for blind state workers are significant, but solvable– a short term side-effect of a long-term solution.

Brandon Stafford
Cambridge, MA

In the meantime, Citizens Against Government Waste, a group based in Washington, D. C., not Massachusetts, has issued a press release opposing the change. Strangely, the argument presented seems to argue in favor of the change.

“‘It is bad procurement policy for any state to unilaterally lock itself into one set of technologies,’ CAGW President Tom Schatz said. ‘Agencies should be able to accept bids from any company that can provide the desired product or service.’”

The desired product or service is: an office suite that supports OpenDocument, a standard open format recognized by an international standards body, ISO/IEC JTC1, the International Organization for Standardization International Electrotechnical Commission’s Joint Technical Committee. The companies that can bid on this contract include: any company. If we stick with Microsoft’s proprietary formats, the companies that can bid on this contract include: Microsoft. How is sticking with Microsoft not “unilaterally lock[ing] itself into one set of technologies”?

And also, this just in: a company in France is working on a filter that allows Microsoft Office to open OpenDocument files. According to a post on Dan Farber’s blog, Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie “attributed the tentativeness on ODF support in Office to resource allocation issues, mainly based on the user support demands that would crop up given that exporting to ODF won’t have full fidelity with the Microsoft’s own formats without some tweaking.” The word for this is “whinging.”