Category Archives: fun

Facebook Solar Array Demonstrates Impotence of Solar Power, Importance of Power Management

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The debate over the so-called “environmental impact” of data centers provides an easy target for environmentalists to pick on — big creepy corporations like Facebook and Apple.  While these folks sleep at night with their hot water tanks cranked to the max and half the lights in their houses still turned on, companies that run big data centers get needled for using a lot of electricity.   Yet just try to take away these people’s iPhones and Facebook games–then stand back and watch the intellectual dishonesty spill out like a broken water balloon.

The answer, of course, is solar power. Clean, silent, low-maintenance, and emissions-free.  Well, sort-of.  But Wired tells us today that solar farms aren’t efficient. Based on their figures, I decided to extrapolate a few solar farm scenarios.

Facebook’s data center is a 100-megawatt consumer, and its solar array, which spans acres and acres in the Oregon outback, puts out a mere .05 megawatts at an average energy conversion efficiency of about 14%. Apple’s planned N.C. solar farm will cost 180 acres of God’s green earth and will put out just 3.5 megawatts at typical efficiency (Apple will require at least 70 MW at their N.C. data center). Using those ratios, and keeping in mind that these are the best, most efficient solar generators on the planet, we could estimate that:

  • A typical .3 kw household would require 0.154 acre of this top-of-the-line solar technology. That would fill a typical suburban lot, and leave no room for the house. Underground housing, anybody?
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  • A typical 3.5 acre city block, containing 16 households, would require 2.5 acres of solar array. Yep–two and a half football fields. (BTW, forget about trees in that neighborhood.)
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  • New York City, some 325 square miles in size, if it were filled only with these houses, would require a solar array the size of Chicago, which weighs in at about 250 square miles.
  • The United States would require about three states the size of Texas filled only with solar farms and nothing else to fulfill its electricity needs. The distribution system for this electricity (power lines, AC turbines, etc.) would require a further two states the size of Colorado.

My conclusions:

  • Mass-market electrical consumption cannot be serviced by solar generation without regulated rationing. Most Americans would not be in love with this idea.
  • The obsession with solar energy has as much to do with politics as it does with shrinking the fossil fuel industries.
  • Data centers should concentrate, if they believe fossil and nuclear power generation are harmful to humanity, on reducing their consumption of electricity.

Ruminations on Finally Recording First Record

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Well, check that off the bucket list.  I’ve recorded in the studio many times, both here in Cleveland and back home.  But I never walked away from the project with a commercial recording, a rock album of original music, with my name on it.   This little E.P. record (OK, it’s a CD [OK, it's an iTunes download])  has been one of my dreams for many, many years. And it’s done. And it’s awesome.

But I am thankful that it’s done, that the release party has come and gone, and that I can refocus my energies on things that I’ve needed to work on more: my I.T. consulting company, my teenagers, and my messy house.  It is very easy to underestimate the time and commitment necessary for an artist to record, produce, promote, and perform an album.  Every minute spent tweaking a vocal track or tuning a session instrument is a minute spent not doing something else, after all.

Those interested in the recording can check it out at http://www.poutband.com.

Wind Efficiency Vs. Gas&Oil: What I’ve Learned

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As a business owner, I define high-efficiency as the ability to get things done with either the highest operating margin or the lowest operating loss.  With this in mind, and considering the amount of philanthropic hubbub surrounding wind power and the equal-in-volume guilt talk surrounding the use of fossil fuels, I decided to get to the bottom of the efficiency question.

Because for me, the debate begins and ends with three points:

- No fossil energy source appears to be in short supply.  According to reputed agricultural economists, the supply of crude in the U.S. is somewhere near 180 billion barrels, with more not discovered. At our present rate of consumption, that’s a sufficient supply for nearly 40 years, assuming no non-domestic sources were to be used during that time period.

- The ultimate decision point for energy production isn’t energy diversity, or even the environment (read the excellent current thinking on “carbon-in-carbon-out“), but the ability of energy to be harnessed at a low cost in human effort and a likewise low cost in human damage.  Diversity, on the other hand, is a false rationale for wind because it attempts to apply a social-science paradigm to a non-social process, while the environmental impact of fossil fuels is a false rationale because it isn’t fully understood, and environmental impact (large electromagnetic fields, noise, and visual impacts) of wind turbines and transmission systems is largely ignored and improperly dismissed as harmless.

- Fossil fuels, most notably natural methane and propane gasses, are institutionally mislabeled as nonrenewable, despite the natural occurrences of what many scientists agree are in fact, spontaneously-sustainable natural deposits and man-made sustainable gas tactics such as biogas. I would prefer the industry to begin referring to gas as semi-renewable until a better understanding of its supply system is developed.  The most notable example of propaganda covering potential gas renewability is the CNG (compressed natural gas) movement.  I have dealt personally with those invested heavily in this budding industry, and they agree that the estimates as to a tight natural gas supply (10 years or less) are blowhard figures motivated more by “science-for-political-gain” than by any form of truth.  These guys wouldn’t be investing so heavily in CNG if they thought they’d be out of business in 10 years.

Ted – Why Don’t You Blog VoIP Any More?

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1. Divorce made me realize I needed more time with people.  Writing takes away face time, and as shrewd as that is, it’s true.

2. My business took off. 6 employees now. Microsoft partner. Digium partner. The list goes on.  Time commitment issues again.

3. My tweeners became teenagers.  More driving around, more emotional guidance, more interaction with them daily.  They have become awesome musicians!

4. I started a band in Cleveland called pOUT (pronounced “pout”), which has, in the span of about one year, become one of the top 10 club bands in the rock capital.  Time commitment.

5. I realized that, despite my preoccupation with converged business communication, the bulk of my real earning potential was in general I.T. consulting and networking, because I live in Cleveland and not San Jose or Boston.

6. Still getting plenty of VoIP press despite having been relatively disengaged from the VoIP crowd for nearly two years now.  I was the coverboy for ChannelPro SMB last month for their VoIP feature.

7. My vocational obsessions only last a few years, it seems.

Horn-toot: I predicted a PC app store a long time ago

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Apple’s introduction of an app store for the Mac is not only the right thing to do, it’s also long overdue.  I’ve been predicting it since August of 2008.  The last time I wrote about it, I suggested that opening an app store for Mac (and even Windows) would remove barriers to bigtime software distribution while driving down prices.  Both ultimately good things.  I’m glad to see that ol’ Steve finally saw the light.   Wouldn’t have been something if Apple would’ve created the first app store for Windows, too?

“Implications for Google”… Wait, can’t we just agree that Italy made a mistake?

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The New York Times is reporting that the Italian judicial decision to convict Google executives of violating content rules by disseminating search content that this Italian judge found objectionable has resulted in a rethinking of Google’s role in the future.  People are beginning to worry that search is going to change and that content is going to be inaccessible.  There’s a real sense of worry.

Poppycock.  Listen, the judge is wrong.  And even if 90% of the world agreed, what American official is going to get caught with blood on his hands for extradition?  Let’s stop worrying about how we’re all going to have to behave different in this Orwellian digital future and just suffice to say the guy’s an uninformed moron who made a mistake.

This is all much ado about nothing. Can somebody back me up?

More Kind Words for “Switching to VoIP”

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I came across some very kind passages regarding my book, Switching to VoIP.  This first one contrasts my book with the VoIP for Dummies book. He also mentions “Asterisk: The Future of Telephony”, for which I provided O’Reilly a technical review. That’s an awesome book, too.

This book is focused on the key elements of telephony and the migration to VOIP – primarily as a cost saving measure. The first 2/3 of the book deal with the VOIP technology – as an adjunct to and eventual replacement for traditional (legacy) telephony. By the 2/3 point, the author is talking about cost analysis, benefits and justification.

I would more likely title this book “VOIP for management”. This is not a put-down or insult, as the book’s primary objective is to educate the mostly non-technical person on what VOIP is, and how it might best fit into an existing picture, and one moving forward.

Being primarily technical myself, this book was good as a preliminary introduction to a subject that I wasn’t familiar with – but I immediately moved on to the O’Reilly books on the subject – “Switching to VOIP” by Ted Wallingford and “Asterisk” (Leif Madsen, et al). Someone who is responsible for managing such a transition would find it much more useful than I did.

Also, Tech PRose was kind enough to add Signal Noise as a favorite telecom blog.

iPad/iPhone platform takes the shimmer off OS X

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I couldn’t help but wonder what the iPad hype machine is going to mean for OS X in the long wrong. Sure, OS X is the development environment for the iPhoneOS, but is there enough *there* with the mobile OS to make it the de facto environment of choice for folks like me?

As it is now, iPhone OS does a whole lot of things OS X does not–platform-wide UI support for multi-touch is just the beginning of the list. Still, it seems Apple has gone to great lengths not to cannibalize desktop PC sales, if not overtly saying so. No, iPad is not a desktop replacement, yet.  For starters, it synchronizes with iTunes, meaning that it doesn’t actually run iTunes, so its calendaring and music apps are still very mobile in nature. I also wonder if the lack of a user-facing camera was a design scheme to keep the iPad out of the desktop space, as opposed to a financial consideration to keep down manufacturing costs.

But the brushes app seems like an impressive utility with the potential to offset some productivity that’s normally reserved for the desktop.  And as I type this on a Macbook Pro, I realize that the iPad will never be suitable for video production, or for audio mixing. Even still, I can imagine great uses for multitouch in these kinds of apps.

Without the UI goodies, OS X shimmers less, and I believe it’s only a matter of time before touch-enabled desktop gear starts shipping from Cupertino.