Quote of the day

"You cannot deny this gorgeousness, you can only hope to handle it."

-Get Fuzzy

Tesla!

Thanks to Autoblog's exhaustive coverage (here, here and here), I now have a new car to drool over. The Tesla Roadster is a fully electric supercar (as fast as a Porsche 911 Carrera S to 60 mph), in the spirit of a Lotus Elise, that will sell for approximately $80,000. It goes 250 miles on each charge, recharges fully in less than four hours and looks fantastic. I may not have the 80 grand to lay down on a hedonistic machine like this, but if I did and was so inclined, I can't think of a good reason to buy anything else. For starters, it's right in the running with every other car for this price, and it does all its work silently. To me, that's as cool as the symphony from a Ferrari's pipes. Moreover, there's no reason any sports car of this caliber should travel more than 250 miles from home without being trailered. I'm sorry, but highway miles on a Lamborghini just don't make sense. But most of all, $80,000 for a sports car of the traditional persuasion is, well, boring; been there, done that (metaphorically, of course). It's high time to try something new.

Top 6 percent baby!

Check this out, apparently I'm in the minority of bloggers; I don't primarily preen rhetorically for my electric audience. You could say I'm a bit political (though my contributions are so often lame, I excuse myself from this class). That puts me firmly in the technology and spirituality sections, making up 6 percent of all bloggers. The top 6 percent, of course.

Materazzi

By now everyone knows and has spouted off on how the World Cup ended: Zidane is insane, Italy won but must now face charges of scandal and what exactly did Materazzi say? But what no one has mentioned, and which I guess doesn't make much of a news story, is that Materazzi was the key Italian player in every one of the three major events in the final: he "fouled" a French player to set up Zidane's penalty, he leaped over Vieira to head one into the net and, of course, he managed to get under Zinedine's skin, possibly winning the game for Italy by sidelining the legend just before penalty kicks. To my mind it's crazy that one guy had so much impact on the game in such disparate and unlikely ways.

(Update: Someone else did notice.)

jEdit, force quit and the world's most advanced operating system

Recently I've been looking for a good text editor on OS X (as XCode just didn't seem to cut it), specifically to write numerical simulations in Fortran. Since this isn't one of the mainstream languages for computer programmers, and I like a usable GUI, it was a bit difficult to find a really suitable one. It had to have customizable syntax highlighting, but beyond that I didn't need much. Browsing the ol 'net I found jEdit, a sleek Java based text editor that claimed to work with Fortran and also be customizable. From the beginning it worked great on my Mac (OS 10.3.9), except for one simple but really annoying bug, which I will get to in a minute. jEdit works great with Fortran, is simple but meets my needs, looks and works the same across platforms (since it is Java based) and has numerous plugins. My favorite is jDiff, which graphically compares two files and shows the differences.

The bug, however, still remained. What would happen is this: after using jEdit for awhile, with the Mac OS plugin installed and set to put the jEdit menu bar in the OS X menu bar (as is usual with Mac applications), the menus would cease working, essentially disabling the program (I hear jEdit might work from the command line in this state, but that's still not acceptable behavior). I would have to force quit and relaunch the program, with the potential for losing some work. But, through the magic of the internet I found a solution. It turns out the problem is not jEdit but OS X. The world's most advanced operating system (at least version 10.3.9 with Java 1.4.2) has a bug in Java. Turning off the option to put jEdit menus in the Apple menu bar seems to fix everything, and I'm back in love with jEdit. A simple fix, but to me, a mere engineer with little real programming knowledge, it was a bear to find.