Ctrl-Backspace
I was just informed by MikeD (about 2 minutes ago) that much like Ctrl-arrow which you can use to jump around typed text, you can also use Ctrl-Backspace to delete whole words at a time. I suppose this is not too different than using Ctrl-Shift-arrow to select text and then hitting Delete or Backspace, but it is more key efficient.
I wonder what other neat keyboard shortcuts are lurking out there...
Pandora
A few friends had mentioned Pandora to me a long time ago, but I had never followed up with a visit to the site until a few months ago. Pandora is a cross between an internet radio station and a music recommendation service. You enter an artist or song that you like, and it plays similar music for you. You can then rate (thumbs up or down) songs as they play to refine the music it plays for you. Different sets of music can be created by separating your preferences into different 'stations.' The flash-based interface works in most browsers and is very easy to use. The service is ad-supported, but you can pay a fee to have the ads removed.
I listen to mostly American rock music from the past 50 years, and Pandora has a pretty solid selection of tracks to choose from in that regard. It has a tendency to replay tracks or artists over a long period of time, but you can skip several songs an hour to work around that. You can also block specific songs and artists from being played for a month which can eliminate that problem all together. Overall I've found the site a nice change of pace compared to my normal listening habits, since it takes effort to make a decent playlist. Parker and others pointed out that the Genius feature of the newest version of ITunes does a similar thing using your own music.
So if you are tired of queuing up your own music, have trouble picking what you want to listen to like I do, and get tired of the radio, try Pandora. Just go to the site and type in one artist or song and it'll start playing music.
Soundcard Oscilloscope
I found an Oscilloscope for soundcards yesterday while searching for a way to analyze the output of a tone generator I was helping to make. The software is simple and straightforward, its features resemble what you would expect of an oscilloscope, and it doesn't require any special hardware or drivers. Just a soundcard and your input into the mic or line in. The frequency analysis function (like a realtime fourier transform) was really useful in debugging the tone generator.
The software written in National Instruments LabVIEW isn't freeware, but it's free for non-commercial use. It also has a function generator and a sound recorder built in. Works great for low voltage signals in the 0-20kHz range. You have to make sure that you don't blow out your soundcard by connecting too high a voltage to it.
The picture happens to be me saying "aaaaaa."
Automatic Update Prompts
If the box that pops up asking if you want to "Restart Now" after Windows XP installs an update annoys you, there's a quick way to get rid of it without changing any permanent settings. Go to the Services section under Computer Managment (right-click on My Computer and pick Manage) and open the properties for Automatic Updates. Stop the service and the reminder goes away. The service will restart the next time Windows starts, so you won't miss any updates, and it will still finish installing the updates when do restart.
So yes, I haven't made a post in a while. Motivation is low. Maybe I'll find some more soon.
Kyoto: To sign or not to sign?
A long time ago Parker asked me if I had opinions on the Bush administration's policy with regard to not ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, since I'm an environmental engineer. I'm a water treatment person, and I haven't really done much with outdoor air, let alone global climate science. So I don't have any 'expert' opinions in terms of the science.
A few years ago we had a seminar in our department by Gerry Schwarz. (Video link).
The whole thing is pretty long (1:30), but the part about global warming is from about minute 14 to minute 23. It's covered by just two slides (3 and 4). It's worth 10 minutes of watching if you are interested. The point of his lecture is that dealing with politics and engineering is a complex issue. His conclusion about Kyoto is that it's a 'badly flawed political solution to an extraordinary complex problem.' He says that Kyoto puts an unfair burden on the United States to reduce its emissions. Regulation in the 70s and 80s brought CO2 emissions down in the US and many of those policies were ahead of other countries. The wording of the Kyoto Treaty says that each nation has to reduce it's CO2 emission to a certain fraction of its 1990 levels. The problem from the US's point of view is that it already spent resources lowering CO2 levels prior to 1990, and it is even more expensive to reduce emissions further. Other nations that had large emissions at the time have to make simpler, cheaper improvements to see the same reduction, which is economically unfair to the US.
There's another viewpoint from Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth in which he says that he would have pushed to ratify the treaty had he been elected president. One of the ideas Gore tries to get across in the movie is that we need to make serious efforts to reduce worldwide CO2 or the effects of global warming will be significant very soon. He says those effects (and subsequent environmental and economic losses) will be so severe that it is worth the cost to make emissions reductions now. It's reasonable considering that the US produces a large fraction of the CO2 emitted in the world, and has an extremely high per capita emission rate.
So where do I stand? I'm not completely sure, but I do believe that global warming is a problem, and some effort needs to be taken to slow down whats happening at the moment. I don't know that the Kyoto Protocol is a great answer, but I can't imagine it's a horrible one. We'll have to pay the cost to reduce emissions at some point, and if we put that money into research now it'll pay off in the future.
