Last Friday, British Columbia’s Premier, Christy Clarke announced a new energy policy for BC. Clark is going to develop infrastructure to turn BC into a liquid natural gas (LNG) exporter [times colonist]. With this energy plan, Christy Clarke has turned BC into a petro-state akin to Alberta, Texas, and Saudi Arabia. She stated that “this is an opportunity to establish an entirely new industry in British Columbia. This is not something that happens every day and it is not even something that happens every decade.” She is absolutely correct about that. BC is going to build Canada’s first LNG plants. The first export plant is expected to open in Kitimat by 2015 with two more to be built by 2020.
For those who don’t know about LNG, here is some background on LNG. First off, natural gas is not clean. Even though it is cleaner that conventional oil, it is still a non-renewable fossil fuel. Modern science still doesn’t have a process that can polish up turds. Condensing natural gas down into its optimal form for export is an energy intensive process, as the gas needs to be cooled down to -160C to be loaded into bunker oil burning tankers before they depart for China. Cooling the gas so that it can be transported requires a huge amount of energy. “To meet the demand of shale gas, new mines and LNG plants, forecast to increase by between 2,600 and 3,250 megawatts, BC Hydro said it would require at least a 20-per-cent increase over its current capacity. That scenario did not include a third LNG plant [TGAM].” LNG exportation will essentially mean game over for BC’s plan to be energy independent by 2016.
Recently for a school project, I was required to work on my school’s lab computers because my program had to run in their unique network environment.
There were two problems with this. First, the school’s computers are unbearably slow and their keyboards are those big Dell ones that are impossible to type quickly on. Secondly, It’s a huge waste of time to trek into school just to do some coding, when I could spend my commute time actually getting work done at home.
The only access I have to the school computers is through SSH. Since Mac OS X Lion came out, support for SSH filesystems has been somewhat lacking and I could not find any decent instructions on how to get it to work. I have taken the time to figure out how to do it, and I would like to share it with you below.
There are two programs that you will need: OSX Fuse and Macfusion. Follow these instructions:
1. Downlaod OSX Fuse at http://osxfuse.github.com/. OSX Fuse is the successor to macfuse, which is no longer being maintained.
2. When installing OSX Fuse, make sure you select the MacFUSE Compatibility Layer option. This is important because macfusion relies on it. This is the main gotcha of the whole process. It took me a few tries to find this out. Once OSX Fuse is installed, you will not need to touch it again. It is just a dependency for Macfusion.
3. Download and install Macfusion app from http://macfusionapp.org/ .
4. Launch Macfusion app. In the bottom left-hand corner, there is a plus button that has options to mount SSHFS and FTPFS drives.
5. Have fun working from home!
It just struck me that TEDx Victoria is only a few days away and I am going! I have never been to one of these conferences before, but I have watched a large majority of the TED talks that are up online. TED seems to get it right by having really interesting speakers. Talks on subjects that I am not even really interested in are good.
I am pretty excited for Derek Jacoby’s talk titled A hackerspace for biology. He sounds like a pretty interesting guy, and like myself has a strong interest in both computer science and biology. Another speaker that got my attention is Beth Campbell Duke, who is giving a talk titled School is a Waste of Time. That is something that I am starting to agree with as I am spending more and more time self-educating and less time on my actual school work.
As someone who finds lectures in school to be almost unbearable, it’s weird that I’m excited to sit in lectures for a whole day. See you on Saturday….
If you are using Google Chrome, which you should be, you may be missing out on an awesome feature. I was. Google Instant is a feature that pre-fetches pages as you type in searches or addresses. It intelligently guesses what site you will be going to, and will have the page downloaded by the time you hit enter. I have been using it for about a day, and I am already so used to it that I can not go back.
The Google Instant product page claims that it can save between 2-5 seconds/search. On my big days, I am performing over 100 google searches, so this could save me up to 8 minutes a day.
The only snag with Google Instant is that it is not enabled by default. To enable it, go into preferences and check the checkbox as shown below:
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