kinderman.net

I've been gathering information for a software project that involves calculating greenhouse emissions. I'm pausing on this project for the time being to work on something else, but since it took me a while to gather useful information, I thought that I'd share what I've found so far, in case others are interested, and to help me remember where I left off when I get back to it.

• EcoTourism.org - Understanding the Calculation of Airplane Emissions - Great write-up on existing programs that calculate emissions estimates and even the cost of offsetting those emissions (PDF).
• AtmosFair.de Online Emissions Calculator - Allows people to calculate their flight emissions, and even send in money to cover the cost of offsetting the environmental impact they made for a flight.
• ICAO Aircraft Engine Emissions Databank - Downloadable data on aircraft engine emissions. Can possibly be combined with flight performance data, Breugot Range equation, et cetera for specific aircraft models to determine actual fuel consumption.
• FuelEconomy.gov - Downloadable data on automobile MPG ratings and such.
• NASA Virtual Skies Aeronautics Module - Good background information on aircraft and flight, including some useful aeronautical calculations. Geared towards grade school students, but useful to a newbie like me.
• Denmark / Improved Overview of Aircraft Pollution and Fuel Consumption - Talks about how Denmark computes air pollution in accordance with international guidelines.

Despite the fact that "Republican" and "Democrat" are political parties in the USA, while "Conservative" and "Liberal" are social/cultural viewpoints, the term "Republican" has become seemingly synonymous with "Conservative", and "Democrat" with "Liberal". Can anyone out there with a better grasp on American politics than I explain this phenomenon? It annoys me, because I agree with what I know of the core Republican philosophy (about as much as I agree with any single philosophy, anyways), but I definately do not consider myself to have conservative viewpoints. As a result, although I'm a swing voter, I tend not to vote Republican as a result of the strong conservative nature of most of the candidates.

From what I've been able to discern, the Republican philosophy is grounded in a belief that "the private sector and/or the individual are better suited than the government to control their own lives" (Wikipedia). According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, "[t]he term Republican was adopted in 1792 by supporters of Thomas Jefferson, who favoured a decentralized government with limited powers." In contrast, the Democratic philosophy posits that "that government should play a role in alleviating poverty and social injustice, even if that means progressive taxation and a larger role for government" (Wikipedia) Nothing in either of those descriptions seems to indicate a liberal or conservative predisposition.

To further analyze the situation, let's define "liberal" and "conservative." The WordNet Search provided by Princeton University "liberal" as "a person who favors a political philosophy of progress and reform and the protection of civil liberties" as well as "a person who favors an economic theory of laissez-faire and self-regulating markets." It was hard to find a definition of "conservative" that doesn't sound negative, but the best that I could find is "a loosely defined term indicating adherence to one or more of a family of attitudes, including respect for tradition and authority and resistance to wholesale or sudden changes" from the Glossary of Philosophical Terms. Another fairly good definition of "conservative" is "... to favor things as they are and to be cautious. To be conservative politically is to respect traditional institution and distrust government solutions to problems." This definition, oddly enough, comes from the Warrensburg School District of Missouri's iAdventures program.

Given these definitions, I'm sure someone could hammer out a link between the terms and their associations, but I think it'd be a weak link at best.

On a side note, I would just like to point everyone to a ground-breaking revelation, made by an AOL subscriber, that I encountered while doing research for this article: Proof that The Democratic Party Mocks God!! By the way, this guy's a medical doctor. I'll be sure to avoid anyone named Frank Joseph if I ever need an operation on something.

I believe that amongst the chief traits of highly-productive computer users is the ability to manage and manipulate a number of different applications at once, and effectively switch between them (also known as "multitasking" by some, but I find that term misleading). This ability often includes an aversion to using the mouse. A seasoned developer, for example, would rather ALT+F4 than reach for the mouse to close a window. Using the keyboard requires much less knowledge of a display's spacial relationships, the consideration of which distracts from what a person is often using a computer for to begin with: to get work done efficiently.

Work on a computer often involves focused attention on information in a specific problem space, with information in that space being spread out between numerous applications. When these applications are invoked, you may be interested in cross-referencing information in one application with that of another application, or comparing one set of data to another. This kind of work seems to be characterized by temporal relationships, as opposed to spacial ones, in that a user is more apt to remember the last application they worked with or referenced than where that application was located on the desktop or task bar, because the latter is not related in any way to the work being done.

For example, if someone is downloading desktop backgrounds from a web site, and is comparing images on the web site with those that they've got on their local hard drive, they're more likely to realize the need to switch from their local hard drive image display (the one they're working with now) to the web site display (the one they were working with before) than to remember that the hard drive display's icon is left of the web site's icon on the task bar, or that the hard drive's window's left edge is to the left of the web site window's left edge. As another example, let's consider software development, which I have personal experience with. As a developer, I'm constantly going from some electronic reference documentation to an editor of some kind where I am typing my code. Often times, I've got two or more sets of documentation up, coming from various help systems, web pages, and so on, and am editing multiple sets of code. I personally remember these applications in relation to when I last used them. Therefore, there must be an effective way to switch between all of these different tasks and sets of information temporally.

I'd wager that many if not most developers and Windows power users are aware of the ALT-TAB shortcut for task switching (not sure what the shortcut standard is for Macs, sorry guys). This shortcut is indispensable for people who work with a number of applications at once. However, there is a problem with the default task switcher in Windows, in that after a certain number of applications are open, it becomes difficult to remember what you were doing in which applications, because all you see when you switch from one task to another is the application's icon and title which, unfortunately, is not always enough to distinguish one task from another. This is where a snapshot of the task window might help.

There are two options that I know of for switching between tasks which display a snapshot of the task window: Microsoft's PowerToys for Windows XP Alt-Tab Replacement and NTWind's TaskSwitchXP Pro. Both of these applications display a small snapshot of the application's window. However, the snapshots in TaskSwitchXP load a lot quicker than the Alt-Tab Replacement, and are bigger images, so it's easier to identify what you were doing. Additionally, TaskSwitchXP displays your desktop background behind the application you're switching to. This is a nice little bonus for me, since I've often got so many applications open that I hardly ever get to see my desktop background. Another feature of TaskSwitchXP is that, since it already includes your desktop background for each snapshot, it also shows your application window's actual position against the desktop, providing yet another way to identify an application window.

At long last, I've finally got my blog up using a decent engine. I started off using WordPress, but the PHP made my little object-oriented heart ache. I would like to thank Matsumoto San, for bringing us Ruby, David Heinemeir Hansson for Rails, and Tobias Luetke for Typo.