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.

solar and roof readiness

I had a roofer come out and check out my roof. He said it is 2 roofs, and that the newest one was in a really good shape and pretty new. He also mentioned I should get an extra downspout in my huge long north roof. Probably a good idea. So that means that as far as my house and everything go, I'm set to get solar installed.

Confirmed that REC Solar installs their systems on posts which are flashed to the roof, so when the roof needs to be re-done they can just take the panel frames down, re-roof, then put them right back on the same mounting poles they were on in the first place. Good to know. The roof will likely need to be replaced before the solar.

I still need to figure out what to do with the black walnut tree next to the house, so I'm going to try to get a tree specialist to come take a look at it and let me know how much it would cost to move it, trim it, cut it down, whatever.

I was discussing with a friend what I should do for shading on the south side of the house, especially if I have to cut the tree down. One of the things we came up with is to put in trellis mounted to the outside eave facing. Then I'd have trellis and some sort of vine growing along that side of the house. It has the disadvantage of blocking the house somewhat from sunlight during the winter, but in the summer it would work great. Another option is putting solar water heating along the wall, but while I'd like to have solar water heat also it wouldn't really do what I want it to do for shading the whole wall. For either solution (or some combination of both) I still need some sort of shading arrangement for the windows so that they are shaded all summer, but receive sunlight all winter. I'm not sure what I'm going to about it. Either way...those aren't on this year or probably next years agendas...unless I suddenly become very wealthy.