taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Green Karma - Carbon-offset your colo box must-read post from Chris. If you run a colo box, you should think about offsetting the ~2 tonnes of CO2 output it generates per year

sorenragsdale: Building a Cheap ZFS Server good set of details on MrN’s new ZFS-based home disk server

Tags: carbon, carbon-dioxide, co2, colo, disks, drobo, environment, filesystems, green, hacking, hardware, home, hosting, offsetting, readynas, servers, solaris, sysadmin, via:iloaf, zfs

This question came up on a forum I’m on. It turns out it’s really quite easy to work out — this page covers pretty much all the details.

In addition to what’s there, it’s worth noting that the current Irish price for a kilowatt-hour under the ESB’s domestic rate is 12.73 cents per kWh, which works out as 14.41 cents per kWh once the 13.5% VAT is added in. So Irish users, pretend you live in New Hampshire (15 cents per kWh) to get realistic figures from the excellent cost calculator.

Using this, it looks like if I was to leave an 160W desktop computer on permanently in Ireland, I’d be spending 215 euros per year to power it. Wow, that’s pricey! My strategy of using low-noise, low-power hardware for home servers has paid off already, in that case. ;)

For what it’s worth, if you’re worrying about the power consumption of an NTL digital Pace Digital TV set-top box — if this Pace presentation is anything to go by, it appears the standby power consumption is on the order of 1-2 watts — about 2 euros per year. Grand.

Tags: costs, electricity, environment, green, money, power, saving, watts

Green: Wow — UC Berkeley’s Lab Notes newsletter this month includes an article noting the benefits to the environment of reading your news on a PDA instead of getting a delivered newspaper. Check this out:

In a new study, UC Berkeley researchers report that receiving your news wirelessly on a PDA instead of delivered to your door requires up to 140 times less carbon dioxide, several orders of magnitude less greenhouse gases, and the consumption of 26 to 67 times less water.

…

To tease out the truth, Horvath and graduate student Michael Toffel dissected nearly all of the environmentally-relevant processes involved in both wireless news delivery and teleconferencing. In the case of newspapers, the researchers focused on the environmental effects of reading the New York Times in Berkeley, California, from the manufacture of newsprint and ink to the delivery from a nearby printing press to disposal of the newspaper. This data was then compared to such factors as the energy used to manufacture a PDA, including its microprocessor and battery, and the electricity required by wireless and Internet service providers to deliver news content to the device.

Sitescooper is therefore a WorldChanging tool!

Tags: article, delivery, environment, green, lab, month, news, newsletter, newspaper, pda, study

Music: Ever wondered what the lyrics to Plastic Bertrand’s classic belgopunk tune really said? (Apart from ‘I am the king of the divan’, that is.) Wonder no more. (…ok, maybe these are a bit more likely. ‘Ey up!’, indeed.)

Mail: Google Mail front page. It has MXes — but they don’t answer yet. No SPF record yet, either ;)

Funny: XCP - the XML Control Protocol ‘is a drop in replacement for traditional Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP. With the advent of XCP/IP, connection-oriented networking will finally move from the legacy environment of inscrutable bits and bytes to a structured, human-readable world relying upon XML. XCP is the first 4th Generation Protocol, or 4GP. It is designed for a networking environment that is very fast and very reliable - the Internet of today!’

Tags: belgopunk, control, environment, mail, music, networking, plastic, protocol, tune, xcp, xml

Environment: (the built one, that is): LA Observed links to a couple of stories about kayaking the grim concrete trench that is the Los Angeles River. Well worth a read, and don’t miss the 1999 LA Weekly story, in which the journalist makes it to the sea before being picked up by police.

The LA river was once a real river, but due to its tendency to flash-flood, was turned into a trickle in a concrete trench back in the 1930s. Since then, it’s starred in a wide variety of movies and TV; the ones I can remember from the top of my head are Terminator 2, Earthquake, and V (which hilariously stole the river scenes directly from Earthquake, the cheapskates).

BTW, one interesting factor of living in the LA area is that you realise just how much of the TV and film of your childhood is taken directly from these surroundings; last time I was at the local train station, I looked out over a patch of sun-baked scrub and a couple of warehouses, and could clearly see The Six-Million Dollar Man running across it in my mind’s eye — wakka-wakka-wakka.

All along, I’d assumed these great sets were chosen for a particular reason, not just because they were right around the corner from the studio ;)

Talking of my local train station, here’s a good article about a very Irvine situation; it seems people keep a second, clunker car at the train station, due to the shortcomings of the Southern California public transit system.

Tags: couple, earthquake, environment, observed, read, river, station, story, train, trench, weekly

Environment: Long-time taint.org readers (yeah, right) may recall last year’s encounter with the pla beuk, the Mekong giant catfish. (hey, it made for a good story in the end!)

Well, it seems the pla beuk now listed as ‘critically endangered’. 2Bangkok points to this Yahoo! story:

More data, including Hogan’s, have shown that its numbers fell by at least 80 percent over the last 13 years, a ‘pretty massive decline’ that prompted the critically endangered classification in the group’s latest list released Nov. 18, Pollock said.

It seems recent dam-building and dredging may be to blame:

The river had mostly remained isolated due to wars and geography, but dams recently built along it in China and work on the upper Mekong River to clear navigation channels for large boats are threatening the catfish and other species, said Chainarong Sretthachau, director of the Southeast Asia Rivers Network.

Tags: beuk, catfish, environment, long-time, org, pla, right, story, taint, yeah, year

Environment: WorldChanging.com. Bruce Sterling writes:

‘Worldchanging’ is very much the same work the Viridian movement has been doing since 1998, only now (thanks God!) it’s being done by a relatively organized team of capable activists instead of by some wacky novelist in his spare time! So go make them famous. Do it now.’

The Viridian movement is Bruce’s baby, best summed up, I reckon, as ‘electronic green‘.

Anyway, WorldChanging.com is a full-blown MovableType weblog, RDF and all, frequently updated and smartly written. Sign up!

Tags: baby, com, environment, god, movement, novelist, team, time, viridian, work, worldchanging

Software: Shirky on the Semantic Web. Great snippet:

it turns out that people can share data without having to share a worldview, so we got the meta-data without needing the ontology. Exhibit A in this regard is the weblog world. In a recent paper discussing the Semantic Web and weblogs, Matt Rothenberg details the invention and rapid spread of ‘RSS autodiscovery’, where an existing HTML tag was pressed into service as a way of automatically pointing to a weblog’s syndication feed.

About this process, which went from suggestion to implementation in mere days, Rothenberg says:

Granted, RSS autodiscovery was a relatively simplistic technical standard compared to the types of standards required for the environment of pervasive meta-data stipulated by the semantic web, but its adoption demonstrates an environment in which new technical standards for publishing can go from prototype to widespread utility extremely quickly. …

This, of course, is the standard Hail Mary play for anyone whose

technology is caught on the wrong side of complexity. People pushing such technologies often make the ‘gateway drug’ claim that rapid adoption of simple technologies is a precursor to later adoption of much more complex ones. Lotus claimed that simple internet email would eventually leave people clamoring for the more sophisticated features of CC:Mail (RIP), PointCast (also RIP) tried to label email a ‘push’ technology so they would look like a next-generation tool rather than a dead-end, and so on.

Here Rothenberg follows the script to a tee, labeling RSS autodiscovery

’simplistic’ without entertaining the idea that simplicity may be a requirement of rapid and broad diffusion. The real lesson of RSS autodiscovery is that developers can create valuable meta-data without needing any of the trappings of the Semantic Web. Were the whole effort to be shelved tomorrow, successes like RSS autodiscovery would not be affected in the slightest.

Another good line: ‘There is a list of technologies that are actually political philosophy masquerading as code, a list that includes Xanadu, Freenet, and now the Semantic Web.’

Tags: adoption, autodiscovery, email, environment, rip, rss, semantic, software, technology, web, weblog

Environment: The Irish Times reports:

The State is facing a waste crisis that is threatening to bury the country, according to the Minister for the Environment, Mr Cullen. He said yesterday every person in this State was now producing 700 kg of household and commercial waste a year.

‘That is three times more than they do in the Netherlands. If this continues, the figure will rise to two tonnes per person by 2015,’ he said.

Landfills in six out of 10 regions in the country had less than three years capacity left, yet people were producing enough waste to cover every single town in Ireland. ‘We have to change. Doing nothing is not an option,’ Mr Cullen said.

Well, duh. So what have they done? They’ve setup a website, raceagainstwaste.com, with a page on recycling replete with techie details of how recycling works, then suggesting such gems as ‘if they do not already run one, suggest to your local authority that it considers starting a plastics recycling scheme.’

Brilliant. I’m sure they’ll listen. Nice delegation, Mr Cullen!

In the meantime, apparently 92.2% of the ‘waste stream’ is sent to landfills instead of recycling.

I’m not just knocking here — the amazing thing about recycling is that it’s been done right elsewhere. All this wheel-reinvention is totally superfluous. Here’s the details on Victoria, Australia’s kerbside recycling system; it’s pretty simple.

Each household gets 1 large basin-type plastic tray thing, in which you can put washed, unsealed, recyclable plastic containers. You tie up bundles of recyclable paper into another pile when you leave out the rubbish. And finally, you get a wheelie bin for the rest; stuff that really is rubbish. The bin guys then keep the 3 types of rubbish separate when they pick it up.

Yes, it takes a little bit of time to wash the plastic containers and tie up the paper into bundles. But nobody minds; they’re doing the right thing! It’s a hell of a lot better than chucking the lot into a single container and hoping that some expensive machine at the far end can sort it all out again.

It’s also better than the current Irish and US systems, where we’re expected to bring certain kinds of trash to a centralized drop-off point ourselves. First off, this is very impractical unless you’ve got a car to do it in — and sufficient motivation to do so; and secondly, the bulkiest rubbish — packaging, paper and plastic — is not included, just glass.

Tags: bin, country, environment, household, paper, person, plastic, recycling, state, thing, waste

Science: EU broadside at GM firms’ ‘lies’ (Ananova):

‘They tried to lie to people, they tried to force it upon people … it is the wrong approach and we simply have not accepted that and European citizens have not accepted it. You simply cannot force it upon Europe.

‘So I hope they have definitely learned a lesson from it and especially when they now try to argue that this will try to solve the problems of starvation in the world. After all, why didn’t they start with such products, so they could prove to the world that this was exactly what they were interested in doing?

‘It will solve starvation among shareholders, but not the developing world unfortunately.

That’s the EU Environment Commissioner, Margot Wallstrom, launching a broadside against ‘US biotech companies’, accusing them of ‘forcing’ unsuitable GM technology onto Europe.

Ouch.

It’s interesting to note that much of their biotech companies’ tactics seem to work well in the US, but overseas, the tactics play out predominantly as blatant strong-arming, astroturfing support, and being ‘economical with the truth’, as the phrase goes.

Some rethinking of their strategy might be helpful — although really, IMO, some thought as to how to make their products relevant to consumers, instead of money-spinning for their shareholders, might work best of all. Making some moves towards the much-vaunted ’solving starvation in the developing world’ might just be the best way to that.

Tags: ananova, approach, broadside, cannot, commissioner, environment, force, lesson, science, starvation, world

EU broadside at GM firms’ ‘lies’ (Ananova):

‘They tried to lie to people, they tried to force it upon people … it is the wrong approach and we simply have not accepted that and European citizens have not accepted it. You simply cannot force it upon Europe.

‘So I hope they have definitely learned a lesson from it and especially when they now try to argue that this will try to solve the problems of starvation in the world. After all, why didn’t they start with such products, so they could prove to the world that this was exactly what they were interested in doing?

‘It will solve starvation among shareholders, but not the developing world unfortunately.

That’s the EU Environment Commissioner, Margot Wallstrom, launching a broadside against ‘US biotech companies’, accusing them of ‘forcing’ unsuitable GM technology onto Europe.

Ouch.

It’s interesting to note that much of their biotech companies’ tactics seem to work well in the US, but overseas, the tactics play out predominantly as blatant strong-arming, astroturfing support, and being ‘economical with the truth’, as the phrase goes.

Some rethinking of their strategy might be helpful — although really, IMO, some thought as to how to make their products relevant to consumers, instead of money-spinning for their shareholders, might work best of all. Making some moves towards the much-vaunted ’solving starvation in the developing world’ might just be the best way to that.

Tags: ananova, approach, broadside, cannot, commissioner, environment, force, lesson, starvation, world

Over on Boing Boing, Danny O’Brien notes

People who know me well enough, or google well enough, to uncover out my weirder behaviours will know that I can’t drive. It’s not some high-falutin’ statement about the environment. I’m just not very good at remembering which pedal does what.

Well, it’s good to hear there’s one more out there; me neither. It’s become a bit of a worry recently, since I may be moving to LA, which is notoriously one of the most ped-unfriendly places in the world (Antarctica excepted).

But why, you ask? I don’t know — but I think it’s a combo of these factors:

• owning a car in Ireland is phenomenally expensive: due to bizarre traits of the insurance biz over here, it costs about $100-$140 a week to drive a car. That’s quite a luxury. For that price, you might as well just take cabs everywhere and let someone else do the hard work.

• I live more-or-less in Dublin city centre, so walking and cycling does the trick nicely.

• Dublin’s got good public transport for when the weather’s bad (see also cabs above).

• er, laziness.

I guess it may be something I’ll have to sort out, at some stage, maybe. Eventually. (Damn that laziness!)

Tags: bit, boing, car, combo, environment, google, statement, weirder, world, worry