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Tuesday, October 31, 2006

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Monday, October 30, 2006

A Different Kind of Hybrid

MIT researchers at the startup company Ethanol Boosting Systems, LLC, claim to have come up with a gasoline/ethanol hybrid engine that approaches the efficiency of today's gasoline/electric hybrids.

From an article at Power Online ("A VertMarkets Marketplace for Industry Professionals"), the design is based on boosting engine output through a combination of a turbo and ethanol injection.  By using ethanol rather than gasoline, the effective octane rating increases to more than 130 which greatly reduces the chances of engine knock.  This allows for a much higher compression ratio; for compared to a conventional engine, in EBS' design more than twice the amount of air and fuel can be combusted, producing a proportional increase in power over a conventional design with the same engine volume.

The additional efficiency appears to be gained purely from smaller engine sizes, with less weight.  However it is achieved, EBS estimates efficiency gains over a regular turbo-charged engine to be in the range of 25-30%.

While a classic gasoline/electric hybrid also uses the electric motor to boost performance when needed, there doesn't seem to be any reason why these two technologies couldn't be combined to form a gasoline/ethanol/electric hybrid.  Make it a plug-in on top of that, and we'll have a gasoline/ethanol/coal & nuclear (providing the electricity) hybrid car...  I envision a car that operates like an electric car at speeds upto 35 mph, uses the ethanol injection to accelerate to highway speeds, then continues to cruise on gasoline.  Then, when braking, it recouperates some of the lost energy through regenerative braking.

Of course my vision is not likely to come to fruition: this all comes at a cost - about $3000-4000 above that of a conventional design (gas/electric hybrid premium of ~$3000, plus gas/ethanol premium of $500-1000).  Gas would have to come back to well over $3/gallon and stay there to make that worthwhile in the US. In Europe however, it seems like it ought to be an attractive option.

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Saturday, October 28, 2006

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Thursday, October 26, 2006

If you have an interest in politics...

...and polls then I highly recommend electoral-vote.com, a site originally created to track the electoral votes of the 2004 presidential election (with great success as it became the most popular polling site of the '04 campaign).  The site now tracks U.S. Senate and Congressional races, basing it's daily prediction on state polls - and never silly national polls like the media seems addicted to.  The prediction as of today is that the GOP retains control of the senate (just barely), but loses the house (by a substantial margin).

The site is run by Andrew S. Tanenbaum, a U.S. computer science professor living and teaching in the Netherlands, he has the honor of having created MINIX, which Linus Torvalds used as a basis for a certain more known operating system.  While Tannenbaum is most certainly a democrat, he is generally true to the facts - and he doesn't skew poll numbers like other votemasters are wont to do.

As I did in the 04 race, I'll add the predictions of the day to the right side of this blog, for all my 7 daily visitors to see.

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Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Fwd: [#79235926] Non-spam review and verification request: http://austegard.blogspot.com

Yay!

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Blogger Help <support@blogger.com> Date: Oct 25, 2006 6:33 PM Subject: Re: [#79235926] Non-spam review and verification request: http://austegard.blogspot.com

Hello,

Your blog has been reviewed, verified, and cleared for regular use so that it will no longer appear as potential spam. If you sign out of Blogger and sign back in again, you should be able to post as normal. Thanks for your patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

Sincerely, The Blogger Team

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Monday, October 23, 2006

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Sunday, October 22, 2006

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Saturday, October 21, 2006

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Friday, October 20, 2006

Spam Blog? Me?

Hah - I knew something was up, my daily del.icio.us links weren't posting as they should, but I thought there was just some unanounced change in functionality somewhere along the way - the posting process isn't exactly straightforward.

Turns out the posts triggered some spam blog threshold at blogspot.  Oh well, it's under review, hopefully it will be resolved soon.

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Microsoft Concessions

No, not a new product from Microsoft for hotdogs and soda, but observations on Microsoft making some interesting concessions to market leaders:

  • Microsoft just launched the MSN Soapbox in invite-only Beta; a Video site to compete with YouTube, I guess.  What's interesting is that they chose to use Flash video for the format, rather than Windows Media 11
  • In ATLAS ASP.NET AJAX Beta 1, just launched today, the $() function is renamed to $get() in order for ASP.NET AJAX scripts to play nice with Prototype and Scriptaculous, among others.

It's nice that Microsoft shows an awareness of other market-players, but a bit surprising to see them make concessions like these.

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Thriller ...with Lego

Some fancy Lego footwork:

I'd forgotten how long this video is. Over 4 minutes of introductory footage...

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Thursday, October 19, 2006

CodeSmith 4.0 Public Beta released

Eric J. Smith and his team at CodeSmith Tools has released a public beta of CodeSmith 4.0. Full set of changes are here. If you ever do anything repetitive in C#, VB.NET, HTML, SQL, JavaScript, XML - in short, any ASCI based language, and your repetiveness is based on data from a table or an xml document, then CodeSmith can help you get your work done in a fraction of the time spent before. I highly recommend it.

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Wednesday, October 18, 2006

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Tuesday, October 17, 2006

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Monday, October 16, 2006

NYT: The Reporter Is Real, but the World He Covers Isn't

(Another post directly from the NY Times Reader:)

Excerpt from New York Times Article: The Reporter Is Real, but the World He Covers Isn’t http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/16/technology/16reuters.html

In preparing to open a Reuters bureau on a bustling island, Adam Pasick has been introducing himself to residents and interviewing entrepreneurs. After finishing such interviews, Mr. Pasick often levitates for a moment, then flies over buildings.

Adam Reuters has posted two articles so far, with the usual quality of Reuters intact. The virtuality of the whole thing is a bit unreal, but I guess that’s the point.

Sunday, October 15, 2006

NYT: Is Windows Near End of Its Run?

Excerpt from New York Times Article: Is Windows Near End of Its Run? http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/14/technology/14interview.html

Steven A. Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, has his hands full. The next version of the Windows operating system, Vista, is finally about to arrive — years late and clouded by doubts that it might violate antitrust rules in Europe.

PS! I read this (and mailed this to my blog) using the NYT’s Times Reader, a .NET 3.0 Smart Client. Quite nifty, though a bit too ad-heavy for my taste.

Saturday, October 14, 2006

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Friday, October 13, 2006

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Thursday, October 12, 2006

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Tuesday, October 10, 2006

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Monday, October 09, 2006

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Saturday, October 07, 2006

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Friday, October 06, 2006

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Wednesday, October 04, 2006

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Tuesday, October 03, 2006

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