Monthly Archive for March, 2007

Zero pollution car suitable for highways

Published on March 19, 2007 in Environment. 0 Comments

It looks like we’ll soon have a car that produces no pollution but doesn’t skimp on top speed or travel distance (see the gizmag article or the official web site for details). From what I’ve seen, cars that use alternative power sources such as electricity or solar energy have traditionally had low top speeds, making them suitable only for city driving, or short distances between recharges, making long road trips impossible. With a top speed of 68 mph and the ability to go 200 to 300 km between fill ups, the air car solves both problems.

The air car should soon be in the production phase and will apparently be available for US$7300. It’s also incredibly fuel (air?) efficient at US$3 a tank. I’m looking forward to seeing some of these on the road as the world finally starts realizing that gas-powered cars are no longer the most efficient vehicles on the road. Hopefully we’ll start seeing compressed air refill stations popping up soon.

Companies writing open source

Published on March 2, 2007 in Open source. 0 Comments

I read an interesting article linked from Slashdot the other day entitled “Who wrote 2.6.20?“, which details the approximate percentage of code that people and companies had contributed to version 2.6.20 of the Linux kernel using various metrics based on lines of code (while this may not be a perfectly accurate representation of the amount of work that went into the contributions, it is at least an approximate measure).

I found it particularly interesting that over 65% of the code was contributed by companies (see the article for how this was measured), which shows that a lot of people are paid to write open source kernel code.

If you’re interested, as I am, in writing open source kernel code for a living, I would suggest checking out the companies that contributed a large percentage of code according to the article. Of course this should not be your only way of determining who to work for. I would also consider how much of this code is useful to the general public versus how much is specific to a certain piece of hardware that most people don’t use.

Richard Stallman talk at UCSD

Published on March 2, 2007 in Open source. 0 Comments

I recently went to a talk by Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation, at the University of California, San Diego. While I don’t necessarily endorse all of his views, I think he’s got a lot of good things to say. Stallman is a great example of a person who is not afraid to stand up for what he believes in.

You can view the pictures and video I took on the pictures/videos page and the notes I recorded on the notes page.

For those of you in the Waterloo area, you may be interested to know that Richard Stallman will be speaking at UW on April 11. For more details see the CS Club’s description of the talk or the FSF’s description.

Notes from SCALE talks

Published on March 1, 2007 in Open source. 0 Comments

I’ve finally got around to typing up my notes from the talks at SCALE. Here they are for anyone who’s interested.

Some talks that I found particularly interesting:

I would highly recommend looking at all the talks to see if there’s a talk that’s particularly interesting for you.