With the upward trend of fuel prices, people are finally seriously looking at diesel which used to be less expensive than gasoline (not anymore) and lasts farther than gasoline. But there are limited choices for diesel in the market. At the car segment there was only the Ford Focus TDCI and a bunch of Hyundais (Elantra, Accent, Getz). The last two were small cars and the Elantra didn’t really succeed in the market and is now replaced by the i30. Unfortunately, the i30 suffers from the same problem of high price. Sure it looks good, but it’s only has a 1.6L displacement compared to the Focus’ 2.0L.And it falls behind the Focus in other ways. Will it suffer the same fate as the Elantra? I hope not. We need more diesel vehicles.
Google has released the beta of Chrome, their own browser. Chrome joins the ongoing free-for-all browser war between Firefox (my personal favorite), Internet Explorer (the current leader by virtue of its being pre-installed along with windows), Opera, and some other smaller players. Looks like this is going to be a pretty exciting next few months.
First impressions: Most visible is the slick minimalist UI whose most notable feature are the tabs being above the address bar. This does make sense if you think about it. As for the way it displays web pages, there seems to be nothing markedly different compared to say Firefox. This is not surprising since they’re supposed to be using the same rendering engine. But its primary selling point is that it is supposed to be faster. A longish narrative about that and more here. Not sure if I’m just imagining it but it does seem just a bit so.
Not bad. But what else are you expecting from Google?
Been refreshing my Java and UML. Next up would be Hibernate then Spring. And it’s fun!
Although for now the price of oil has gone down and the fuel companies are doing their rollback charade (increase price rapidly, decrease price slowly), there is no illusion that the price of oil is on an upward trajectory. Because of this, people are finally waking up to the benefit, albeit only the cost benefit, of alternative fuels. This is evident in the the queues to E10 fuel pumps. That is when it is available.
But not all alternative fuels are equal. Take two off the more popular alternative fuels: biodiesel and ethanol. Biodiesel is a direct pour-in replacement to diesel whereas ethanol blends higher than 10% requires modifications to the vehicle’s fuel system. Biodiesel can be extracted from plants like Jatropha that grow in land that can’t usually be used for food crops whereas ethanol is derived from sugarcane grown in land allocated for food crops. Biodiesel is definitely better for these reasons.
This is why my next car will hopefully be diesel. So should yours. Now if only the manufacturers and the government can do something about the high prices of diesel cars…
There are many reasons to love Linux. But there are also many reasons to hate it. And this is one of those reasons.
I’ve been trying to refresh Selene, my Thinkpad X22, since I returned my office-issue Thinkpad T60. I figured Linux would be a good idea as it had Kubuntu before and I was reasonably fine with it. Unfortunately, the only Linux installer I have on hand is Fedora Core 4 (circa 2005). It installed without a hitch BUT I was stuck with Firefox 1.0 which doesn’t support a lot of those Web 2.0 stuff out there.
I tried automatically updating Firefox but apparently the FC4 repository is no longer being maintained. It only contained a point release. My next recourse was to manually download and install Firefox 3.0. But it flat out doesn’t work. Missing library or something. I tried updating the library but, you guessed it, the repository is no longer being maintained.
I turns out that once a new version of the distro is released, the old version’s repository is available for only about a year and then that’s that. This means you need to reinstall your OS once a year! I could probably get things manually updated and working one way or the other but it would just be too much hassle.
Now contrast this with the much older Windows 2000 Professional which installs fine, gets updates fine, and runs Firefox 3.0 just fine, thank you. Now if only I can get rid of the damn spyware that keeps infecting it.