Alternative materials

Part of the use modern industrial society gives to energy is to gather and synthesise disperse matter into complex materials. Due to their solid state and relative stability at room conditions, metals have always had a central role in industrial societies. The processes of mining, transport, refining and casting are vital in the modern economy and demand huge quantities of energy. And this energy demand is proportional to scarcity and dispersion of the raw material in the Earth's crust. There's an interesting post by Ugo Bardi on this matter for a deeper review.

The energy transition modern societies are undergoing today can also be (and most likely will be) a transition into a different way of using matter. A possibility that has been explorer since the 1960s is the usage of carbon fibre composites to replace metals in a variety of applications. Strong and light, they have been promising a new Industrial Revolution for a long time. But while carbon fibres dispense much of the energy consumption of mining and refining processes, they still require relevant amounts of energy in its fabrication process; barring relevant innovation on this aspect, carbon fibre won't become an everyday material.

It so happens that Nature itself fabricates materials not that different from carbon fibre reinforced polymers. Trees produce their own polymers, cellulose and lignen, that are bound together into a material that has great resistance to compression and tension: wood.

Legal questions on the Ubuntu Shopping Lens

Several developments have followed the announcement of the default inclusion of the Shopping Lens feature in Ubuntu 12.10. What seemed at first a surreptitious inclusion of adware in Ubuntu turned into a full blown row when Mark Shutleworth, founder of Canonical, the company that coordinates the Ubuntu development, lit afire the blogosphere claiming that the company had administrative access to every computer running Ubuntu. From there we got to know that even the users that could benefit from the feature are not happy, since the results can not be filtered or customised. A further consequence of this is the possibility of adult oriented products showing up in the results, which puts at risk Ubuntu's usage by children and in professional environments. Answering to all the backlash, Canonical has decided to include settings that allow the user to switch off the Shopping Lens, but it will still be switched on by default.

Actually, this may be just the tip of the iceberg. The inclusion of this commercial oriented feature, more over by default, has the potential to open an unheard of conflict in the FOSS universe.

Update:In consequence of the questions raised in this post I created a petition addressed at Canonical requesting the removal of automatic data collection features.

September 2012 - a turning point for Portugal

This blog entry is an experiment. Instead of the usual text there's a sound recording to listen to. Below the fold are a few relevant links on the topic. Enjoy and please leave feedback on the feasibility of this blogging mode.

A last good bye to Paul

Over the years I made a fair good number of "friends" over the internet. I use quotes because these are not the kind of folk you talk to when life is hard or with whom you go for a pint or two after work; most of them live thousands of kilometres away. These are folk with whom I exchange e-mails and forum comments, and by one reason or another mutual respect builds up to the kind of complicity that exists between real friends. I had the fortune to meet a few of them along the years, filling the gaps in my perception of their personality, many times in unexpected, but always positive, ways. But at best I get to see each of these folk once a year.

Earlier this week I learnt that one of my internet friends passed away. It was a news that left a special kind of void and logging in me.

Ubuntu sailing into uncharted waters

Every time a new Ubuntu release is out there is always some controversy on this or that new quirk the developers of this distribution decide to take. With a release cycle of only 6 months that's all to be expected for, if you're willing to use the latest Ubuntu you simply have to accept the fact that you're by default also a tester. That's pretty much one of the tenets of FOSS, more so with a product that tries to be as innovative as Ubuntu. About 18 months ago, when the new desktop environment was introduced a good deal of backlash came up. Indeed the first Unity versions were difficult to understand and buggy; but today, after absorbing its logic and with most bugs dealt with, I can only say it clearly improved my productivity over Gnome 2. That's just the way it is: the latest Ubuntu release is a bleeding edge product and you are part of its maturation process; if you don't like it you can always opt for an older release.

But only one month away from the introduction of Ubuntu 12.10 a new Unity feature has been made public that can potentially change all this.

Loose notes from a conference

Earlier this month I went to an Environmental Modelling conference in Leipzig to present an article on my current professional endeavours. On any field, conferences are mostly important for the networking you build, meeting people from literally all continents and finding new projects to work on. This particular conference was no exception on that regard, but apart from that, there were some interesting points in terms of software worthy of note. Below the fold is a loose collection of thoughts I brought back.

Bundes-Europa oder Tod

Since early age I've been fascinated with politics and the eternal melee around the steering of the common future. In many ways it resembles chess, a game that I much appreciate, were each side lays a series of tactics supporting a final strategy. Last week we had a display of political chess at its best, justifying once more my passion. In chess sometimes a player that had been losing material and apparently getting cornered to his half board can pull out an unexpected play that by exploring some weakness in the opponent's back defence can give him back the initiative. It was more or less that that Angela Merkel achieved by directly calling for a European Federation last week, exploring the fact that François Holland, her main opponent today, had to associate himself with euro-sceptics in his road to the French presidency.

Irrespective of her faith in her words, as usual Angela Merkel got the timing wrong. She says the federation has to be built in the next 5 years, but Europe doesn't have even 5 months, it might not even have 5 days. This call for a European Federation should have been issued 4 years ago, in the wake of the credit freeze. The elections in Greece this Sunday may just mark another moment when events overcome Angela Merkel, sending her back to the defensive.