MIT Nano Battery

Ahhh, Energy. Hot topic these days. Complex topic in fact. Unnecessarily complex if you ask me. Many people in the general population either haven’t had education in physics or don’t recall from high school. What is energy?

There are many definitions for energy as there are for most things, however this is my favorite:

en·er·gy (ěn’ər-jē)
n. pl. en·er·gies
1. The capacity for work or vigorous activity; vigor; power.

Notice it doesn’t say anything about volts, watts, joules, oil, hydrogen, electricity, or anything of that nature. This definition reinforces the idea that energy is just the ability to do work or acquire a desired change. That at it’s root is what energy is. You may drink a sugary coffee to gain enough energy to get through the morning, you may fill your car with gas to get to work, you may plug in your iPod to charge it up so you can listen to music. Every time you want a result, you provide some kind of input in some form of energy.

In my mind there are two primary problems today with energy as we know it.
1. Generation
2. Transportation

Generation
We don’t have a sustainable method of generation no matter how you look at it.
Coal will run out.
Oil will run out.
Uranium will run out.
Plutonium will run out.
Natural gas will run out.

Keep in mind that there will always be deposits of these resources that we either won’t find, or can’t extract. It is inevitable and to ignore these facts is, as the Borg would say, futile. So where are we headed in generation? A better question is where SHOULD we be headed in generation? It’s my opinion that the only sustainable energy source available to us is solar, which I’ll explain further later.

What about wind, wave, geothermal, etc?
For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction.
For energy to be obtained, energy must be removed.
I am of the opinion that wind is a TERRIBLE idea, not only are large wind farms the equivalent of a cheese grader for birds, but you are removing kinetic energy from the wind. How does this impact weather patterns? We don’t know, but I don’t like the idea of messing with a delicate balance like the planets weather patterns and function. Of the above renewable energies the only one that I believe we could harness with minimal impact to the system it interacts with is geothermal. Based on the studies I’ve seen thus far however it is not efficient enough to be valuable.

Now, short of finding an alternative energy source, solar appears to me to be the best option. Does removing this energy affect the system in which it exists? Absolutely. We’re harnessing power that otherwise would heat the surface of the planet and our atmosphere before some of it eventually bounces back out into space.
I am of the opinion that with sufficiently efficient solar cells we could harness the power of the sun without significantly affecting the system in which we live.
Where are we at now? Not far enough. Your typical residential photovoltaic solar cell is in the neighborhood of 9-15% efficiency. Some groups have recently released research and prototypes showing as much as 42.8% efficiency. Mostly using ultra rare metals that would not be feasible on a large economic scale.

If you ask me, instead of all the bailouts happening, dump some money into something useful like solar R&D. Under typical terrestrial conditions the sun lays down a lot of energy per square foot. If we could make solar cells with 70% efficiency we could make SERIOUS dents in our non-renewable resource usage. Alas, not enough research is being done. Just like everything else research costs money. Alas there is not enough money being put into research. So here we are chugging away on the non-renewable energy sources, hoping they’ll last until we at least have passed on and we’ll let our children worry about finding their own energy.

Transportation
What about transportation? Batteries suck. They’re messy, they’re big, and they don’t hold enough energy. What do I think is worth researching? Ultra capacitors. This term is used loosely for everything from high energy batteries to the more typically understood concept of a capacitor. I don’t know a lot about what’s currently under study but some form of ultra capacitor is necessary for the future of energy use. It’s necessary for transportation, home use during times when solar is not available, etc. Imagine a capacitor the size of a college textbook that holds enough energy to move a 4000 pound car 100 miles. Now put four or five of those in there and the transportation energy crisis is SOLVED. Done. Fin. Over. Thinks it’s not possible? Run the numbers. Energy density of that kind IS POSSIBLE. It exists in nature. The hard part is figuring out how to do with the the available technologies we have.

Anyways, this post is much longer than I wanted it to be. I had to paint the whole topic with a very broad brush and without much supporting evidence. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a tree hugger, but I am an air breather. Forgetting completely about the carbon dioxide output from oil sources, which I really don’t care about, I don’t like the other associated pollutants that result. I’m not a big fan of polluted foods and air. Anyways, one can only hope that things will line up and we as a country will head in a different direction. With enough energy, anything is possible. Anything.

I have become of the opinion that Sun Microsystems is an AWESOME company with AWESOME products. So what’s the problem? CONVOLUTION!

They have a ton of technologies, a ton of software, and a ton of great products with a ton of really creative names. This gets confusing! Making your way through their marketing talk up on each of their products/technologies and actually figuring out what they are, what they do, and how they work is a chore to say the least. I am of the belief that they are limiting their customer base because of this.

Quick example. A few weeks ago I finally decided to look into GlassFish. Sure there’s plenty of information for people who are already very familiar with Sun offerings and Java. However I am a PHP/MySQL kind of guy. I haven’t programmed in Java since my sophomore year of college! I want to know how to use GlassFish to help me achieve my goals without reading through 100 pages of white papers and sifting through marketing balony. Eventually I got the gist of it but I was very dedicated to sifting through the information and reading documentation. Most developers in my position would have said, “Screw it. I’ll stay with what I have.”, several days ago.

The same can be said for many of Sun’s products. Which is a tragedy because after reviewing a lot of their products I can see that they have a ton to offer the IT world.

Wake up SUN! Show the world what you have!

Sun's MySQL

I have already ran a scenario in my head to work around this problem. It’s should be as simple as setting up triggers to enforce database relations that should be either added, removed, or denied based on the relationship. Definitely NOT the preferred way to do this but another way to accomplish the same, without handling it in the application logic, escapes me at the moment.

I came across a stumbling block the other day that I thought I would share, since the information is not readily available via a Google search.

Problem:

1. You have a 64-bit linux operating system (CentOS 5.2 x86_64 in my case)
2. You’d like to use XAMPP (which currently doesn’t have a 64-bit compiled version)

If you don’t have the right fix applied or the right libraries (32-bit) installed XAMPP will fail to start

[root@localhost lampp]# /opt/lampp/lampp start
XAMPP is currently only availably as 32 bit application. Please use a 32 bit compatibility library for your system.

The solution here is two part, some people in Ubuntu have had success just installing the 386 compatibility library with apt-get and the script is reportedly functioning as intended, aka starting up the various daemons.

However some of us, aka CentOS5.2, even when the compatibility libraries are installed

yum install glibc*

or

`sudo apt-get install ia32-libs`

if you’re in Ubuntu per Tim

it will still report that it can’t run on a 64-bit operating system.  Well this is just plain false. The built-in check in the lampp script is not sufficient to establish whether or not the 32-bit daemons will function or not. My solution? Well, being very sure that all the necessary dependencies are present, I just commented out the check.

nano /opt/lampp/lampp # I use nano, but you can use the editor of your choice

and we’re off and running.

[root@localhost lampp]# uname -a
Linux localhost.localdomain 2.6.18-92.1.22.el5 #1 SMP Tue Dec 16 11:57:43 EST 2008 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
[root@localhost lampp]# lampp start
Starting XAMPP for Linux 1.7…
XAMPP: Starting Apache with SSL (and PHP5)…
XMAPP: Starting MySQL…
XAMPP: Starting ProFTPD…
XAMPP for Linux started.
[root@localhost lampp]#