There was a time where everything was possible…

I could do anything. I could fly with the birds. I could swim with a hippo. I could kill a mermaid or two.

Sigh! I miss my childhood!

There I am between four walls in front of my laptop worrying about my progress report. How can I escape?

I am relatively surprised by the lesser degree of openness/freedom as originally anticipated in a research environment.  Its been now 2 months that I am into research for my MPhil in Energy Modeling and I have come across stumbling blocks:

Research papers embeds knowledge that the research community share by publishing the same in Journals or presenting them in conferences.  Number of times have I tried to search and access certain papers but I have been asked to pay for the same through subscriptions.

I am required to analyze existing energy models. There are numerous models implemented and most of them, unfortunately, are proprietary, meaning I am required to pay to use them. Some do give access to the restricted/academic or even full versions but there is no or limited access to the source codes.

Finally the standard modeling tools to be favored are proprietary and requires licenses.

Is this just an impression or is it that portion of the research community not as open as one would have though? Maybe its too early to make a precise opinion. Let us wait and see.

One disturbing aspect to be taken into consideration when measuring effects of energy efficiency campaigns is the rebound effect.

That is as energy efficiency of some process is improved, the same process gets cheaper and that provides incentives to its increase of use. The total consumption of energy changes less than proportionally to changes in physical energy efficiency. The rebound effect is quantified as the extent of the deviation from the proportionality. [1]

This would mean for example, people would consider having two efficient cars in their households instead of one. Another phenomenon for example is the increase in garden lightings with the introduction of efficient bulbs.

It has been suggested that ironically, the amount of waste is insensitive to improvements in efficiency.

Read more:

Wikipedia The Rebound Effect

[1] Kenneth A S, Kurt Van Dender (2007), “Fuel Efficiency and Motor Vehicle Travel: The Declining Rebound Effect”, The Energy Journal 28 (1)

This is truly annoying. Since the last week, I have been trying to find something to blog about. Each day I sit clueless in front of my laptop and I try to start something but each time I end up pressing the backspace key. What’s got into me? Lack of inspiration? I feel that my mind is  somehow cluttered and the ideas wouldn’t flow.  Hmm.. no its not the ideas. I guess that I want to present my ideas in a structured manner and I have no idea how to go about.

Maybe I should try to free my mind and write my usual bullshit at random and be myself. Its like ejaculating ideas and let the readers swallow. Hehe!

I need some fresh air.

The majority of us Mauritians hail from immigrants, people from different continents, people from different cultures. Many of these immigrants were workers, slaves or indentured laborers. They traveled far away from their homes to face the unknown. They suffered the worst kinds of injustice, they were often made to work like animals for a meager pay if not at all. These people undeniably are the very foundations of what our country is today and our good standard of living. Their suffering and sacrifice are the basis of our success.

Likewise today we have thousands of foreign workers coming from China, India and Bangladesh who have come to win their bread in our country. They are behind the progress of some sectors of the economy like textiles and increasingly, constructions. Foreign workers are doing the dirty jobs for the Mauritians. Fair enough.

But I cannot help from condemning the way a few of the locals behave with respect to foreign workers. Its a real contrast with the “legendary” smile tourists get. Many times did I see people make fun of these workers just because they speak or dress differently. Many times did I see the bus receiver taunting the working foreigners just for the fun of it.

How can people forget so easily? Our forefathers have gone though the same humiliation, the extend may be different but humiliation it is. Would it be that portion of Mauritians suffer from Xenophobia? If so, they simply do not deserve to be called Mauritians.

Sun has been showing some keen interest with Rails lately and I start to ask myself; could it be that Ruby would eventually replace Java as the language of choice for enterprise grade applications?

Had been working on trying to make Java Apps work on J2EE platforms in my previous position. Although very fascinating and enjoyable, I have always been asking myself why there were so much hassle trying to make simple things work. There were tons of configurations hidden in obscure XML files. Substantial amount of time was spent sorting these out, when I could spend the same time doing the fun part of it all, coding.

Then comes Ruby and the Rails framework. Simple, no big hefty configurations, most of the things are defined by conventions. Most of the time, the only true configuration you may end up doing is to define your database settings. No sweat and tears. Its simple and guess what? I happen to like simplicity. But simple stuff would not be enterprise grade? would it?

Think again, Sun, to say the least, has been showing some keen interest in rails.

• Sun has hired the developers of JRuby. A 100% pure-java ruby interpretor.
• Netbeans 6.0 supports Ruby and Rails, and is becoming the preferred development environment for the same.
• Sun was the diamond sponsor of the last RailsConf Europe 2007.
• Sun’s Craig McClanahan, creator for Struts and Java Server Faces, admitted that developing web applications in Java after working with Rails would probably not be a pleasant experience for him.

JRuby on Rails is already in production in a number of companies and the possibility of using Rails as a simple WAR file to be deployed on your J2EE container of choice is even more attractive.

People are more productive on Ruby and Rails, add that to the convenience of having it run on your enterprise application server. Undeniably Rails is to penetrate the enterprise on a much larger scale.

Read more:

• Sun surprises at RailsConf Europe 2007
• JRuby in Glassfish Screencast
• Netbeans Rails IDE
• The significance of JRuby and GlassFish
• Sun Hires JRuby Developers

This week I read about one interesting aspect of Energy Economics: Energy Poverty. Fatih Birol, Chief Economist and Head of Economic Analysis Division of the International Energy Agency, underlined this often disregarded threat [1]. The world is busy with 2 other aspects, namely energy supply disruptions and environmental impacts of energy use/production, that they completely forget about a large portion of world population that are deprived of modern forms of energy.

1.6 billion people, mostly from Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, have no access to electricity. 2.5 million people rely on biomass mainly in the form of wood for their daily cooking.  Each year 1.3 millions of people, mainly women and children die from inhaling fumes from in-house wood stoves.

It is estimated that unless substantial efforts are made to alleviate energy poverty the trend will continue and UN millennium development goals are not to be met.

[1] Birol Fatih (2007), Energy Economics: A place for energy poverty in the Agenda, Energy Journal, Volume 18, Number 3

Number of times did I expect change from people but that always lead to unhappiness.Because people rarely change. You can try to influence them, coerce them, do emotional blackmail and whatever. Its of no real use.

Accept people as they are. That is the golden rule. Never attempt to change them because you will remain unhappy. Change if any must be driven by the person himself.