Matthew Botos

I saw something scary on the second-level info screen of my Tivo tonight:

Due to the policy set by the copyright holder, this recording:

Cannot be transferred to VCR, DVD, or any other media device. For more information, visit www.tivo.com/copyprotection.

One of the horsemen of the apocalyse predicted to ride in with digital and HDTV was the ability of enforce Digital Rights Management (DRM) all the way down the wire into your living room. In actuality, it’s not the Tivo enforcing this, but the CableCard from your friendly local cable monopoly.

The principle of it bothers me more than the practical implications. With 300 hours of storage, I’m not terribly concerned with offloading programs, and despite (unknowningly) having had this on two Tivos going back 4 years, it’s never been a problem.

I’ll even concede that some of the restrictions are reasonable. Since I’m already paying for content and the Tivo hardware, though, I expect to be able to record it and timeshift it as I wish, two freedoms that can be taken away by this scheme.

I’m working through a photo course seen on Digg, and this is my “homework”. The idea was to look for more unusual compositions and angles, which I found surspringly many of around the house. Experimenting found some interesting images, including these, though I probably learned as much from the ones that didn’t turn out.

View the Composition and Angle photos

As promised, here’s the code for making a tag timeline from your WordPress blog:

Download WordPress Tagline Generator

Since it requires a newer version of PHP (5) than my web server has, it’s not a plugin, but a two part process:

1. Use tagline-data.php to extract all your blog posts in xml.
2. Generate the tag timeline either on your web server or another machine.

This release also includes an addition to the templating code that will refelct your color choices in the legend. Thanks to Chirag Metha for releasing his original work under the Creative Commons license; this is released with the same terms.

I’m watching the State of the Union with a healthy Tivo delay, but without playing the drinking game, so I might as well make some commentary. I expect a lot of it to be posturing that won’t necessarily be followed through, as many news organizations have shown in checking up on the promises from the 2006 State of the Union Address. But on with the show…

• This must be a fun gig for cameramen, scanning the audience for Democrats with particularly bemused expressions.
• Budget: This reminds me of someone maxing out their credit card and then deciding they really ought to pay it off.
• Health care: Leveling the tax playing field would be a good first step; having to buy insurance on the open market with taxed money is a real double blow.
• Guest worker program: This is just reality catching up; this nation can’t function without additional labor, much less have any hope of funding social security.
• Energy: One point for mentioning Plug-In Hybrid Cars.
• Iraq: It seems clear that this is nothing but a long haul now. If we’re sending additional troops, though, how many additional Iraqis are going to come forward to take control of their country’s destiny?
• Troops: +92,000?! No wonder Rumsfeld and his “smaller, leaner” vision finally were shown the door!
• Darfur: “Awaken the conscience of the world” sounds like lip service.
• 49 minutes and 62 applause interruptions according to NBC

That’s it; I don’t think the hour of post-speech analysis and rebuttals will be of much interest. More interesting is the number of comments the Fark thread on the address is getting; even if it degrades into the usual flamewar, at least people are thinking about politics tonight.

The Wall Street Journal featured a US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud today to lead up to the State of the Union address. Looking at tag clouds over time has become one of my tasks at work, so I found it to be an interesting approach from the technical point of view. The author also made the source code available, and being in PHP it seemed to be a natural fit for a neat WordPress plugin!

Unfortunately, my host doesn’t have the required version 5 of PHP, so I had to jump through some hoops to run it on my home machine. Tweaking the WordPress loop, I was able to get all my posts into the XML format desired by the Tagline Generator. The hard part, as always, was formatting the output templates to match the rest of my site. Here’s the final product: a tag timeline for my blog.

I’ll be cleaning up my modifications and releasing them under the Creative Commons License as the original author did.

Reaing a bit more of Travels with Samantha, I found some more relationship quotes to add to the one about Transactional Relationships:

Ken’s attitude reminded me of Socrates’s advice: “By all means marry. If you have a good wife, you will be happy. If you have a bad wife, you will become a philosopher.”

We parted warmly, even if our reunion underscored a friend’s philosophy: “We need to see ex-girlfriends occasionally so that we remember why we aren’t with them anymore.”

The two most destructive forces in the universe are man’s desire to be with woman and the automobile; disaster is certain when the two are combined.

I recently saw An Inconvenient Truth, in which Al Gore makes a compelling scientific case for global warming. I’ve been a bit skeptical of past global warming claims because the environment is such a large, complex system and the measured changes so small. Despite being a logical person, even the scientific evidence in the film wasn’t what really convinced me.

Like most people, I’m more swayed by personal anecdotal evidence than broad scientific results. In particular, the consistently unseasonably warm winter we’ve had in the northeast this year. It’s tough to deny something has changed when January has multiple 65-degree days and the local ski resorts are bragging about having 2 trails open.

The sad thing is that outside of fellow skiers and boarders, people don’t seem to mind and most actually enjoy the warmer weather. Until rising sea levels start to drown beach-front houses and the edges of Manhattan, I don’t think there’s going to be much of a reaction. To cite a similar situation, consumers basically ignored cars’ fuel economy for decades until faced with steady gas prices above $3 a gallon.

It’s not totally pessimistic, though. Congress has introduced a number of climate change bills, and there are a number of actions we can each take individually.

One of the interesting and less-considered points Who Killed the Electric Car? raised was how much you spend - and the automotive industry profits - from repair and maintenance of the gas engine in your car. This year was a particularly expensive one for me when it came to car expenses: over $2200. My Maxima, while generally reliable, is 9 years and 87,000 miles old, and parts are simply wearing out.

What’s amazing is that all but $65 of those parts and expenses are directly related to the gas engine, its fuel system, and the exhaust system that keeps it from completely destroying the environment. This year was more expensive than most, but the pattern holds that the majority of expenses are engine tune-ups, fluid changes, and obscenely expensive electronic exhaust sensors.

Compared to $2000-3000 every five years for a battery pack, an electric car could easily break ahead of a gas one in terms of maintenance expenses. Hybrids will likely offer a middle ground, with a smaller and less-used gas engine or generator costing less to maintain than a large, primary engine.

The film Who Killed the Electric Car? takes a hard look at the demise of GM’s EV-1 electric car. It concludes car and oil companies, with some help from the federal government, pushed it aside in favor of a more status-quo friendly hydrogen car further in the future. I generally agree with that conclusion; these entities have already proven themselves capable of some pretty amazing feats when they choose to do so. More positively, it touched on the concept of a plug-in hybrid that allows pure electric power to be used for shorter trips, boosting gas mileage over 100 mpg.

It’s a solution that solves the range problem of pure electric cars, which ranges from 50 miles for a do-it-yourself conversion with lead acid batteries to 250 miles for a Tesla with expensive lithium-ion batteries. In contrast, gas cars typically have no problem meeting consumer demand for a 300 mile range. In my previous Electric Cars post, my personal interest was aimed more at a second car for local driving that makes up 90+% of my mileage, which is typical for many people.

Once again, you can’t drive a plugin-in hybrid off the lot, but conversion kits are available for the Prius. At $10,000 for reasonable weight and range, it’s a hefty premium on top of the existing $3,000 premium you pay for a hybrid. That said, there’s already been demonstrated consumer demand for the EV-1 and Prius, and car buyers routinely spend thousands more than the base price of a new car in accessories.

The costs are largely due to batteries and electronics, which recent history has shown are quickly lowered with economies of scale. Even a limited production run on a Tesla or Prius scale would start this process. At the same time, growing demand for other battery-dependent consumer products including laptops, iPods, and digital cameras will also drive battery technology and lower prices.

It really comes down to a matter of time and effort; if the government gave large companies the right incentives to start developing production plug-in hybrids and pure electric cars, economies of scale would make them a viable option within years instead of decades.

I rang in the new year with the King of Prussia Ski Club at Stowe, Vermont. We swapped odd leftover Christmas gifts on the bus ride up, and I walked away with Dave’s excellent marshmellow blow gun. Our first day at Stowe was clear and perfect for pictures. The next morning we woke up to falling snow that lasted all day. The early birds got the worm as slippery conditions on the mountain road trapped many in a two-hour two-mile traffic jam. Hopefully the new lodging at the base of Spruce Peak will make things safer in the future.

There was also plenty of action off the mountain. We checked out some of the restaurants that are earning Stowe a “Vail east” appellation, with the crowd favorite being the obscenely expensive organic beet salad. The crew also sparred no effort preparing for the New Year’s bash at the Rusty Nail, with Rebecca even managing to borrow a pair of shoes from a woman she met on the shuttle bus.

View the Stowe photos