Solar power - 6 months on.

6 Months On is an article up on Slashdot about someone that installed solar power on their house in Northern California and some statistics about how the power generation is working for them at the 6 month point.

I'm back to trying to get the money together to get solar installed...Here's hoping it works.

Vote!

Get out there and vote! It's a very important part of the function of our government and maybe if more people voted regularly we could force some repercussions on politicians who do the wrong things.

64 bit flash plugin for firefox 3

I have had a ton of trouble getting the flash plugin to work for 64 bit firefox 3. I'm using opensuse 10.3.

It turns out the trick is that nspluginwrapper only works on the actual library, not the link to the library. Most instructions I've seen on the net point to running
nspluginwrapper -i /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libflashplayer.so
but that didn't work. It either gave no output or it said something about it not being a valid NPAPI library or something.

The finally solution for me was this:
# nspluginwrapper --verbose --install /usr/lib/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so
Install plugin /usr/lib/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so
into /usr/lib64/browser-plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so

Restarted firefox and it worked perfectly.

Solar cell revolution.

A 12 year old in Oregon has developed a 3D solar cell that he believes uses 500 times more light than a standard 2D cell and 9 times as much light as a standard 3D cell. 12. I was pretty damned bright when I was 12, but I sure as hell didn't do anything as cool as this with it.

Solaris 10 restore

Here's one that surprised me quite a bit. I had a server that was toast and had to burn it down and rebuild it. The first restore I did wasn't set up right, but I didn't know that at the time. When the server eventually came up, it seemed to work just fine. It's an all in one server so it does apache, coldfusion, mysql, dns, sendmail, and some other apps. All of those appeared to be functioning correctly, so I went on to work on other stuff that was switched as part of the disaster recovery plan. Then I went to check something on the production server and found that in the local zone running the webserver and most of the rest of the stuff, I was missing some pretty seriously important and low level commands from the OS. Things like vi, touch, uptime, and a bunch of others. Baffling. Most baffling for me was how it was running at all with so many low level OS bits missing.

Turns out with netbackup I needed to check "overwrite files" and "rename hard links" but not the softlinks. The hard links hadn't been checked the first time through, so it didn't restore any of the hard link files. Or at least, thats the nearest explanation I can come up with, because checking that and redoing the restore (which was a nightmare in its own right that I'll write up later) seems to have fixed everything just fine.

Solar links

Here's a nice informative website with a great solar calculator. It'll tell you roughly how much potential your roof has for generating solar energy. It doesn't take into account shading, but other than that it's pretty accurate at least for my situation. Roof Ray


And here's a little article about nanoantenna solar collectors which may be a great technology to look into soon.

There's also some great news from MIT about using colored filters to make current PV technology drastically more efficient.

And a great new solar concentrator system that should be much more efficient than the old style systems.

Solar financing

Well. I finally heard back from my mortgage guy. He got me better deals than I could get from anywhere else, but he still was short $9,000 of the minimum I needed to do the solar installation. So...until the housing market goes up again or I somehow drastically increase the equity I have in this house I'll have to wait to get solar installed. It's sad, but it was likely to happen.

In November there will be a vote in congress to continue the solar incentives. If that fails then it's likely I won't be getting solar installed for a very long time, but everybody seems to think that it's a shoe in. I'm just so used to be ridiculously disappointed by all politicians that I can't really bring myself to believe it'll continue.