Austin Bay has a good analysis of the Hezbollah attack on an Israeli corvette. It appears to have been a well planned and executed attack, indicating that Hezbollah will be a tough nut to crack.

The Tesla Roadster has been unveiled. It demonstrates that you don't have to be an ascetic to be green. I'd love to have one, but $100,000 is a bit steep for me.

Today was Ride to Work Day and I did ride, as I have been on most days that the ground isn't covered with frozen precipitation. We had a pretty good turnout at work, filling up the motorcycle parking areas, but no better than usual this time of year. Most riders are probably unaware of the event.

Twisted is an asynchronous, event driven, network application framework for Python. It's used in a number of projects, including BitTorrent and the IPython1 refactoring.

Glad to see that Discovery landed safely. While we need a safer, more efficient replacement, she's still a grand bird.

We just got back from a couple of days camping at Jackson Lake State Park. The weather was clear and warm, highs in the low 100's and lows in the mid 70's. The kayaks were fun, as usual. Our camp site was close to the water, but unfortunately there wasn't easy access from the campground. You have to negotiate a rock levy, steep and loose enough to make for challenging footing, so we elected to haul the kayaks down to swim beach at the south end of the lake.

FuXi is a package the extending RDFLib Python library with rule based reasoning from RDF facts. It uses the Pychinko inference engine to match rules with facts. This would be useful for web agent applications.

My pocket briefcase has arrived. I plan to use it for on-the-go note taking and todos. I've carried a PDA for years, currently a Zaurus, but find that the calendar and address book are it's most useful features. I don't like to take notes on it and don't always feel like dragging my laptop to meetings. We'll see how this works.

The Bigelow Aerospace Genesis-1 has been successfully launched for another step toward space settlement. Genesis-1 is a prototype inflatable space habitat. Successful demonstration of automatic deployment in space will be a major milestone to the day when people can routinely live, work, and play in space.

Aluminum foam promises better helmets and side guard door beams. What else?

D3 is a nice GTD implementation in a web page. Based upon TiddlyWiki, it's portable, easy to use, and offers good performance for most operations. The exceptions are initial page loading and search, which are rather sluggish compared with Emacs org-mode.

There's been a lot of angst over energy prices recently, with may people looking for The Answer in some government action. Glen Reynolds points out that there is no technological silver bullet that can replace oil and meet all of our energy needs.

There are, however, a lot of good old lead bullets that can help. Market pricing of energy is the best signal to help individuals decide whether they should drive less, invest in a more efficient air conditioner, commute by motorcycle, or whatever strategy meet there personal needs. It can help investors decide if new energy sources or more efficient technology is worth investing in.

Since reading GTD a few months back, I've been looking for an implementation that works for me. I'm doing much better at keeping on top of my email, but am still struggling with all of my actions. I've been keeping Next Actions in the ToDo application on my Zaurus, but this isn't completely satisfactory, so I'm looking at other tools. I want some that works on both Linux and Win32, so that narrows my options. I've been playing with Leo and org-mode to see how helpful they are for organizing things.

Leo is a nice outliner and literate IDE which can be used for GTD in a manual manner thanks to it's outline node cloning capability. Writing a GTD plug-in to automate this should be pretty straight forward. Emacs org-mode is an outline based organization tool that provides substantial GTD support. The "plain text" format (actually minimal markup) is somewhat limiting, but it works amazingly well. I've been using both, but org-mode seems to be winning. This is partially because I'm already an Emacs user, but also because it really is good.

I was sorry to see the DC-X program canceled. It promised the kind of incremental "run, break, fix" approach to space flight that made the early X programs successful. The spirit of DC-X is being revived in Blue Origin's Shepard Reusable Launch System They plan to begin low altitude test flights of a prototype this year near Van Horn, Texas. Worth watching.

We've had a quiet fourth, attending the annual 4th of July Longmont Symphony concert and returning home to find that STS-121 has reached orbit for a successful return to space. Now that's a Fourth of July celebration!

Turning from electric cars to electric motorcycles, the rMOTO concept is interesting. Electric scooters like the Vectrix will make it to market first, but I think sport bikes will follow. Touring bikes are a tougher nut to crack and electric propulsion will probably rely on either hybrid or fuel cell technology.

Ralf Bennett debunks the Who Killed the Electric Car? conspiracy theory over on TCS Daily. He's right that physics and economics limit electric cars to niche applications at present, but he seems too pessimistic about their longer term prospects.

The cost, weight, and limited storage capacity of batteries results in a short range that eliminates electric vehicles from consideration if you need one general purpose vehicle. Most families have multiple vehicles, so an electric commuter vehicle could work as one of these, but people prefer more versatility. Better batteries are being developed, and fuel cells are promising, but for the near term, they're burdened with a short range that is exacerbated by lack of infrastructure.

While it's easy to recharge an electric vehicle when it's parked at home in your garage, try that while running around town and you've got a problem. And you can pretty much forget about long distance travel. Careful planning can make it possible to venture farther from home, but most people simply will not bother, given a choice. Parking spaces with charging capability at locations where people leave there cars for extended periods for work or other activities would make electrics more attractive for short term use.