Blue Sky Engineering

Koenigsegg, those mad Swedes beloved of Top Gear make supercars that arguably demonstrate some of the most incredible real world engineering skills on the planet, seem to have lost the plot somewhat and started drinking some serious hallucinogens.

They’ve just announced an electrically powered “eco” supercar with the rather oddball name of “The Quant”. Possibly they’re making some in joke swipe at their usual customer base and this is just an early release of an April Fool’s joke but the numbers linked to this magical beastie are pure fantasy - “Blue Sky Engineering” as its called in the space business.

Some key "performance” claims and characteristics of the components they claim they have developed or that are near completion:

Top Speed 171mph, 0-62mph: 5.2 seconds , Range 312 miles, Power 381kW/512bhp / torque 715nm / 527 lb ft. Mass 1780kg.

So far so good. Those are probably doable in something shaped like a supercar although it’s definitely not getting 312miles doing 171mph speeds but they don’t specifically claim that so we’ll let them off.

The battery\energy storage system they claim they will use is called the Flow Accumulator Energy Storage (FAES) from some crowd called NLV. This amazing widget will provide the energy storage to facilitate the aforementioned 312mile range. Interestingly it also claims that it has a volumetric energy density of 600 Wh/l and can store a full charge in 15-20 minutes. The amount of energy it would take to hit ~300miles is going to be as near as makes no difference to the amount of productive energy produced by a petrol engine in a similar standard car with the same range. Let’s say that would be about 40 litres of petrol which has a volumetric energy density of about 9600Wh/l. Petrol engines are pretty inefficient so only about 25% of that potential actually gets converted to useful energy so that sort of range requires something like 90,000 Wh. To put 90,000Wh into a storage system in 20 minutes you have to push in 3 times that amount of Watts ie 270kW. That’s a lot of juice – even with industrial grade 380v 3-phase power you need to push almost 240 amps of current into it. Frankly I can’t see how you would be able build a power handling system into a car sized system that could handle that without using something like 5kV input voltage and that brings its own serious safety issues (not that 380V 3phase is exactly safe either but 5kV is distinctly dangerous especially when it would still be delivering 15-20A of current).  On the plus side if they actually have that miracle power system then they should be able to store that amount of energy in something like 200litres of battery which is nice – most current electrical cars currently need 5 times that volume.

Impossible? Probably not impossible but quite unlikely and certainly totally impractical today.

The part that sets my alarm bells going though are the “invisible..high efficiency Pyradian thin film solar cells” that (according to el Reg) has a conversion efficiency between 38 and 50%. I don’t think so folks. The very best hand made multi-junction monocrystaline PV cells barely hit the bottom end of that range and they cost a fortune by any measure. Thin film tech is currently languishing around with conversion efficiencies in the mid to high teens and I’ve never seen any evidence of serious work on multilayer (presumably multi-junction actually) thin film PV. Assuming they have this other wonder material though what good would it be? They say the whole car is covered with it, so at 4.8*2*1.3m that’s about 25m^2 of PV cells that could (in theory) yield about 1kW of power on a reasonably clear day in summer time at these latitudes. Even under ideal conditions (Sun directly overhead in California in Mid Summer) that would be worth about 3kW. That would make some sense – give it 8 hours in the California sun and you’d have enough juice to drive 100miles or so. Unfortunately, as I said, the PV conversion capabilities of thin film PV is less than half the claimed number and even in California you don’t get 8 hours of peak sun per day so the actual amount of power such a system would give you would probably only give a Quant owner a useful range of around 30-40 miles under ideal conditions and more like 5-10 miles per day in most places (on a good sunny day too).

I’m hopeful that I’ve got some of the numbers wrong here because I’d love it if this was all real but I suspect that it’s basically a better version of the Tesla, possibly with some technical improvements but without any of the tectonic technical advancements that are being claimed for them.

Better Management and Getting stuff Done.

I spent about four years as a manager at one stage in my career and it’s one of those things that I’m very glad I’ve done, as it was very rewarding in the end, but I’m even more glad that I don’t do now because it was probably the hardest, or at least the most stressful thing I ever had to do.

In my case (as I recall at least) – I generally scored average on internal managerial skills reviews. For a couple of years I tried to modify my behavior in response to my manager’s feedback in order to improve those reviews. That helped a bit (my manager was happier at any rate) but the improvements were small. I had pretty much accepted that I was an average manager and I’m not happy with average so I decided to go back to being an engineer, something I knew I could be great at. In the six months my transition back to being an engineer took I gave up on looking after my manager (and his manager and so on, hierarchy is a bitch) and decided to focus on working for my team. My final managerial skills reviews just before I left showed a dramatic improvement. That will be no surprise to any good managers out there, I’m sure.

Anyway the key thing in all this was that I learned a useful managerial trick that year – I spent my time looking after my team not (just) my boss, we all got a ton of really great stuff done, morale was way better and everyone (including my manager and the company) was better off. I also learned (finally) that you can actually learn to be a better manager, although I still think that really great managers need traits that can’t be taught.

This has all been a roundabout way to lead in to a great article I came across today that makes this very point and provides a very succinct set of guidelines on how to be a good manager. Truly great managers probably can’t be made from total muppet starting material but for the most part anyone having to “manage” people in anyway can become very good at it by following the advice here. For everyone else you should start demanding that your managers follow advice like this – life will be better for everyone if they did and a lot more stuff will get done.

Non Hierarchical Management – Aaron Swartz.

That reminded me of an earlier link I found. It’s basically an over the top call to create a culture of adventurous achievement by doing one simple thing – get stuff done rather than fucking about. It flies in the face of bureaucracy, “process”, safety and stability but bloody hell the world would be a much more interesting place if we adopted its basic idea – get stuff done. Wouldn’t it be great to work in a place where this was the “mission”?

Cult of Done Manifesto: – Boing Boing.

10 Angry Men – Anglo’s “Golden Circle”

[Re-posting this - I wrote it in early 2009 and took it out when I thought the blog had gotten too political but I thought todays news warranted resurrecting it given the trouble the Quinn Group is now in and also to reminisce a little about how small these sums now seem to be in light of NAMA]

Before I start ranting let me just say that when I started digging into this I thought this was a clear case of conspiracy to commit fraud but that doesn’t seem to be the case now that I’ve really looked into it. I’m pissed off that along with every other taxpayer in the country I may have to cough up a couple of hundred Euro to clear the debt these clowns got us all into but to be honest I now doubt that there’s anything illegal in what we’ve learned about so far. However the issue regarding the write off of the unpaid part of the debt is a huge issue for me – I think we all need to demand that it is either paid in full by those involved or that they are forced into personal bankruptcy if they fail to clear it completely with no exceptions.

The basics of what happened is not quite as bad as the Anglo\Irish Life & Permanent scam which I still believe was nothing short of fraud but on general principle it seems clear to me that having a bank try to artificially bolster its share price on a massive scale by issuing loans for the purchase of its own stock is a very bad idea even if it is not illegal. Given what we now know about the fundamentals of Anglo’s financial status in the middle of last year it was certainly quite bad form on the part of Anglo to get the “Golden Circle” involved in this deal but they were all financially savvy, rich and successful business people so that side of things is between them and David Drumm, presumably they wont be inviting him over for dinner so often in future.

Anyway on to the meat of the thing. Here’s how we Irish taxpayers ended up with a €375m debt because a bunch of guys decided to help a friend out when his company was in danger of having its share price collapse.

The saga started with Sean Quinn. Quinn had dug himself a huge financial hole by July 2008 on the order of a Billion Euro or so by using long Contracts-for-Difference (CFD’s, something I will be ranting about at some point in the future) to help fund the acquisition of a significant chunk of Anglo. He had taken out CFD’s on something in the range of 15% of Anglo over the previous year and a half. Quinn’s gamble had gone badly pear shaped by mid 2008. He had acquired the CFD’s when Anglo averaged about €16 per share but by July 2008 they had dropped to €4 per share and he was now being forced to meet margin calls from his CFD provider (Credit Suisse). In order to meet those calls he would have to buy the shares from Credit Suisse and then pay them the difference (between the €4 buy price at the time and the average €16 of the CFD contracts). In order to cover those losses (estimated at between €600 and €900m at the time) he would have to offload about 10% of Anglo’s shares very quickly. Since Quinn had made his problems publicly well known in July 2008, Anglo knew that a very large block of its shares would end up being dumped on the market at a time when Anglo were the target of serious negative sentiment so there was an undeniable risk that Anglo’s share price would completely tank if Quinn tried to sell such a large block of shares all at once.

To be fair to Anglo that was a very big problem and it’s not at all surprising that they wanted to prevent that happening.

The idea was that they would find a bunch of “long standing clients” (now called “The Golden Circle” for reasons that escape me) who they would help buy up the 10% of Anglo’s shares Quinn needed to offload in order to prevent them simply hitting the market and sloshing around massively depressing the stock price. The “Golden Circle” would put up 25% of the stake (€100m or so of their money), Anglo would loan them the remaining 75% and the customers would then use the total to buy up the 10% of Anglo that Quinn was offloading. We are currently being told that their names can’t be disclosed because they are entitled to the confidentiality that covers banks dealings with their clients. While that maybe so, I think that the rest of us have some other rights that should trump that confidentiality and if not then we should have, like being able to recognize people who should not be trusted with significant amounts of our money for a start. More on that later.

So the 10 coughed up their cash and Anglo used the miracle of fractional reserve banking to turn some of that (probably only €30-€40m given their reserve ratio) into the €450m or so of shiny new money that was used to cover the 10% of Anglo that Quinn needed to unload. Not only had they got a way to buy the shares but they got some additional reserves too – score! Anyway the “new money” was used to buy shares, presumably on the open market, that might have come from anyone who was holding Anglo shares and wanted to sell them at the time but certainly most of that money eventually went to Sean Quinn as he disposed of his 10% share. He presumably then used it to clear some of the losses on his CFD contracts with Credit Suisse. I’m assuming all that happened more or less in the open, if it didn’t I suppose there may be problems with that but I’ve no reason to think that part of the whole exercise wasn’t pretty much above board.

Note all of this was then used to buy Anglo Shares at around €4 per share. The “Golden Circle” now had a 10% stake in Anglo and while the money used to buy those shares was money loaned out by Anglo that had just created it out of thin air, the “Golden Circle” seems to have parted with €100m of their real money in the process (I’m not 100% sure of that to be honest, if not it only makes the whole thing worse). Unfortunately for all concerned the plan made little difference and Anglo’s shares tanked so much that the government took over a 75% interest in November and it was eventually fully nationalized in January 2009. By the time that happened the “Golden Circle’s” 10% stake in Anglo had collapsed in value to something in the range of €20m. Since it has been nationalized the shares are now worthless so they’ve pretty much lost their own €100m stake outright. Apparently €83m of the total loan has been repaid at some stage but Anglo supposedly can’t (or wont) chase them for the other €370m because that is mostly underwritten by the now worthless shares. I’m curious about the limitations of that liability – surely the bank could (in theory) just go after its former saviours and see if it could force them to liquidate some other assets. It would be very rude, of course, but basically it seems that they really should be able to. If I defaulted on a mortgage the bank in question would come after me for the shortfall after repossessing and disposing of the house underwriting the loan, even if I’d originally taken out that loan after having been persuaded to by one of their aggressive mortgage specialists so why should this particularly large underwritten loan be so different? And if they can’t be chased then the rest of us should certainly be looking for those sort of loans in future.

The €83m of the €450m total loan that has been repaid raises its own questions. It’s odd as it means at least some of the 10 probably disposed of the shares they bought before they tanked completely in November. I suspect that it means that almost all of the shares in question were disposed of and that was all they were worth at the time. If so then it would mean that they were probably sold sometime in September when all the other shenanigans with IL&P and global financial meltdown had just started and it seems likely to me that those in Anglo who had thought up the plan had to have been fully aware that this disposal was going on. I wonder if the 10 had been given any indication at that time about how the remainder of the debt might be treated and if so whether our financial regulator was aware of the status of those loans especially since it is now a non trivial part of the toxic Anglo debt Irish taxpayers have taken over. I’m very curious to find out more about that as I can’t believe that any of the “Golden Circle” sold any of their shares without Anglo being aware. Still it is possible that no shares were sold and that some of the “Golden Circle” just wanted to clear the debt and get as far away as possible from the problematic aspects of the deal as they could. Either way there’s a lot that we have yet to find out about that part of the story and it’s unlikely to make anyone involved look good.

So here we are now as taxpayers furiously getting to work with the bailing buckets. Anglo has this €370m or so bad debt on their books now that is (hilariously) a toxic debt because the asset it is backed by is the bank itself and so is worthless. We poor Irish taxpayers have to cover this debt because the money that Anglo created in order to fund this scam was used (mostly) to pay Sean Quinn for his 10% of Anglo (in August\September or whenever) and he used it to get Credit Suisse off his back. Hopefully that whole exercise helped keep him solvent, because I’d be gutted now if he still ends up totally screwed while we owe money due to his personal financial carelessness, albeit indirectly.

So in an effort to help out their good buddy David Drumm 10 business men have lost quite a lot of their own money in a very short period of time but it is important to remember that they were, and probably still are, very rich people experienced in matters of high finance who took a risky bet that failed. They were in a position not to be stupid with their money but they made a very bad call and they lost (quite a bit of) money. That’s unfortunate but that’s capitalism and so I don’t think we should worry too much about that part, if they’d made a killing on the deal they wouldn’t be giving any of it to us after all either. And you can be sure that they thought they would make a killling when they agreed to the deal. The big problem is that this exercise has now left the cozy circle of Anglo and it’s “Golden Circle” and the rest of us now actually have to deal with the €375m of additional debt that, frankly, I never asked for. Despite the fact that they may be technically entitled to some privacy regarding the loan deal I think it is very important that we all know who the fuck they are so we can keep an eye on them in future and make sure they don’t get a chance to screw something else up so badly that we end up acquiring yet more debt that we didn’t ask for at some point. The whole exercise demonstrates just how woefully incapable they were of making sound financial decisions at a difficult time and their error means every last one of the rest of us has to eventually pay a couple of hundred Euro to cover their error and we deserve to know who it is that has taken that money from us.

Finally with regard to the recovery of the remaining €375m I heard some interesting stuff this morning regarding personal bankruptcy in Ireland. Apparently we have some quite archaic bankruptcy laws:

• When a person becomes bankrupt all of their assets are transferred to an Official Assignee who then handles the disposal of those assets in order to clear as much of the debt as possible and those assets can include the family home.
• They are restricted in terms of availing of any form of credit and specifically cannot get credit over €630 without declaring the fact thay they are bankrupt.
• They cannot act as a director or participate in the management of a company.
• If they are employed then their salary can be ‘attached’ in favour of the Official Assignee for use in clearing outstanding debts.
• Any new assets (including property) acquired by the bankrupt after being declared bankrupt must be handed over to the Official Assignee.
• Bankruptcy status (ie the above constraints) will not be discharged until 12 years has elapsed since the date of the bankruptcy order.

I think that we should offer all those who still have outstanding debts in Anglo (including the 11 above and the 15 others who have more than €500m outstanding each) the option of either coughing up the cash post haste or initiating the process of having them declared personally bankrupt. Seems only fair to me. I suspect that if faced with that as an alternative a lot of people would suddenly discover they actually could cover those debts.

Some background links:
The UK Sunday Times names 4 of the 10 members of the “Golden Circle”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article5781014.ece

Irish Independent – July 16 2008, Quinn says he will “convert” his 15% CFD stake into ordinary stock. Since he had a long stake CFD in Anglo the margin calls meant that he had to buy the stock outright but in order to cover the loss he would then incur he needed to sell two thirds of them in order to cover his losses. Hence the large volume of shares hitting the market that had Anglo worried.
http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/quinn-to-plough-on-with-anglo-despite-83641bn-loss-1433770.html

Contracts-for-Difference
Basically you put up a stake (anything from 1 to 30%) of the total value of a block of shares, agree to a financing charge to cover the ongoing funding of the difference between your stake and the total cost of the block of shares, and you bet either long (the shares will rise) or short (the shares will fall) and you then get the difference in value between the contract price and the current price as profit if the shares move in the direction you bet or have to cough up the difference if you’re wrong. If the difference exceeds a maximum amount the contract provider can make a margin call which basically forces you to buy the shares at the contract price. That’s what happened to Sean Quinn as far as I can tell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_for_difference

iPhone App Store Hits 500 million Downloads

Apple are now advertising that the App Store passed the 500million download mark recently which is a pretty impressive number no matter how you look at it.

I’m always suspicious of these sort of claims because (naturally)  any company will try to put as positive a spin on numbers like these as they can so I dug a little bit to see if they give a breakdown of what the number actually means – unfortunately Apple don’t really publish enough data to really figure out what that 500million actually means but there is just about enough other data out there to work it out for ourselves.

There are various estimates in the Blogoshphere of 16-18 million iPhones sold to date. That seems reasonable as there’s solid info from Apple that there were 4 million total to date at the start of 2008 and TMO showed that at least 10 million were sold or in the distribution channel by the end of September 2008 so 17 million seems like a good estimate of the total. There is very little info on the total number of iPod Touch sales but there are some hints – notably that the iPod Touch now outsells the iPod classic and that the average selling price for all iPods is in the $150-$160 range with a total volume of around 40million units for the year. A reasonable total number from that would be 6million or so iPod Touches for the year and something like 8 million in total. So overall we’re looking at about 25million potential iTunes App store users as of the end of December.

That would give us 20 downloads per user which is a remarkable number. Power users on high end Symbian\Windows Mobile phones would have downloaded some apps but on average a typical mobile phone user rarely downloads and installs any applications at all, for Apple to have created an ecosystem where the average user downloads 20 apps over a period of 6 months is incredible.

Looking at my own iPhone I have a total of 53 separate apps downloaded. Digging a bit deeper that breaks down into 18 paid apps and 35 free apps. Looking at the invoices from the iTunes Store it appears that I have a total of 74 downloads recorded which means that in addition the the basic downloads for new apps I’ve had 21 update downloads. That seems a bit low to me but it’s possible that it’s right and it’s definitely not significantly off the mark as most apps never seem to get updated. I’ve spent a total of €65.22 on the 18 paid apps. Now I’d say that I’m probably more likely than most to pay for apps so let’s assume that the average user (with 20 downloads) breaks down to 15 apps in total, 3 of which are paid apps with a total cost of ~€10 at an average cost of around $3-$4 each.

That should then mean that the App Store would have pulled in about €250m in 2008 with 30% ($75m) of that going to Apple. Those numbers are in the middle of the range of the $50-$100m estimate from Silicon Valley Insider at the start of December which was based on total downloads of 300m. I think they overestimated the percentage of paid apps (at 33% versus my guess of about 20%) but the average price is certainly right at $3 per paid app.

It’s useful to compare this reality to Eric Schonfield’s June 11 2008 TechCrunch article on projected iPhone App Sales for 2009 where he was tearing down a prediction of $1.2billion revenue from iTunes Apps in 2009 by Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster. Schonfield correctly predicts that at least 70% of apps will be free and that the average price will trend towards $3 or less per paid app. He then also correctly estimates that the total number of iPhones by the end of the year will be around 16million and estimates the total iPhone sales for 2009 will be 25million at most. In fact the seems to think that the cumulative iPhone numbers by the end of 2009 will be somewhere between 25 million (ie 10 million new sales in 2009) and 50 million (the more optimistic but still realistic upper end estimates from other analysts) and implies that total revenues from the App Store are therefore likely to be between $150m and $300m. What he got dead wrong is that the average user appears to be downloading at a rate of around 30 apps per year and paying for around 6 of those. There’s no shame in that to be fair, I don’t think that any rational commenter at the time thought the App Store would be as popular as it has turned out to be.

I also think that he failed to factor in the iPod Touch which appears to be a very significant factor for the App Store and I personally I think the total number of iPhones\iPod Touches by the end of 2009 will almost certainly be close to 55m (the existing 25 million + about 30 million new sales in 2009). As we now have strong evidence that the average App sales number appears to be about $10 per device over 6 months (and it’s accelerating remember, not slowing down yet) so that total revenue projection of $1.2bn for the App Store for 2009 actually looks like a good bet right now, despite the recession. 

More On Windows 7

So after three days using Windows 7 in anger in a consumer sense I’ve got to say that it’s a fairly impressive offering for a Beta, it’s certainly going to become my default OS at home and probably at work too now that I have the option to switch to it.

I’ve been using it on my XPS M1330 at home in full Windows 7 mode, Aero interface with all the eye candy turned on and also at work in a VM where Aero doesn’t work. The difference in usability surprised me – I’ve always found Aero on Vista to be pointless overhead but in Windows 7 the eye-candy is actually useful and the UI improvements with Aero-7 make it a must have for me.

Speed wise and memory footprint wise it’s as fast as and maybe quicker than Vista on the same hardware (full boot+login to a usable desktop takes ~43 seconds from cold on my M1330 (2.2GHz Core Duo\4GB RAM), Vista takes ~44). Memory footprint for both Vista and Windows 7 on this hardware is about 1GB RAM with a pair of browsers (IE8 & Chrome) open. On the VM on my work laptop (a Dell Latitude D630 with a 2.2Ghz Core Duo and 2GB RAM) Windows 7 boots in about 60 seconds including logging in but uses only about 500Meg RAM of the 1GB assigned to the VM with the same two browsers running. Interestingly VMware Workstation 6.5’s “New VM” Wizard handles Windows 7 seamlessly giving a completely zero touch installation that took about 35 minutes to install from the DVD.

No crashes so far on either system and the only glitch has been that I can’t find a way to disable “Tap to Click” on the touchpad on the M1330.

There’s quite a nifty blog entry here  from Tim Sneath at Microsoft that lists a bunch of the new features which includes a couple of things I’d missed on Monday – most notably the CTRL+WIN+Left/Right arrow for moving maximized windows between monitors on a multi monitor display, ALT+CTRL+TAB for tabbing between windows within a single app, CTRL+Shift while clicking on an icon to launch with elevated privileges, WIN+Space for peaking at the desktop, Shift+Right click on a folder in Explorer adds Open-in-New-Process and Command-Prompt-Here.

Digging deeper I went scratching around for further changes within apps and came up with the following initial list for those curious about the command line environment that Windows 7 delivers. There are a few but on reflection the number of changes are quite small.

Robocopy:  Additional switch options not present in Windows Vista Version.

• /EFSRAW :: copy all encrypted files in EFS RAW mode.
• /DCOPY:T :: COPY Directory Timestamps.
• /SECFIX :: FIX file Security on all files, even skipped files.
• /TIMFIX :: FIX file Times on all files, even skipped files.
• /SL :: copy symbolic links versus the target.
• /MT[:n] :: Do multi-threaded copies with n threads (default 8).
•              n must be at least 1 and not greater than 128.
•              This option is incompatible with the /IPG and /EFSRAW options
•              Redirect output using /LOG option for better performance.
• /FFT :: assume FAT File Times (2-second granularity).
• /DST :: compensate for one-hour DST time differences.
• /XJD :: eXclude Junction points for Directories.
• /XJF :: eXclude Junction points for Files.
• /BYTES :: Print sizes as bytes.
• /UNICODE :: output status as UNICODE.

Netsh: Additional contexts not present in Vista version

• branchcache    - Changes to the `netsh branchcache' context.
• dnsclient      - Changes to the `netsh dnsclient' context.
• namespace      - Changes to the `netsh namespace' context.
• trace          - Changes to the `netsh trace' context.
• wcn            - Changes to the `netsh wcn' context.
• wfp            - Changes to the `netsh wfp' context.
• wwan           - Changes to the `netsh wwan' context.

Ipconfig: Additional ipv6 options, drops “compartments” concept

Diskpart: Support commands for Virtual Disks (Attach, Detach, Expand, Merge..)

Sc.exe: Adds support for service triggers \ trigger queries

Setspn.exe:  Register custom Service Principle Names in DNS

Tzutil.exe:  Enables scripted timezone changes

 

New Apps / Features:

Isoburn.exe: Compact GUI app for burning an iso to a CD\DVD

PSR.exe: Problem Steps Recorder.

Resource Monitor: Significantly enhanced version of the Resource Monitor that was previously available only from within TaskManager->Performance tab but is now also in the Start Menu.

Includes additional summary features for each heading using a tabbed interface in particular providing a very useful Physicial Memory utilization graphic.

Private Character Editor: Roll your own customized characters\fonts.

Admin tools now has a more logical home in the Start Menu -> Maintenance menu in addition to being buried inside the Control Panel.

Aero Shake: Pretty nifty clutter clearing – minimizes all other windows when you grab a window title bar and “shake” it. Additional gestures are supported elsewhere – left click+hold and then an upward “swoosh” gesture on the taskbar opens the right context menu (it’s more intuitive than it sounds and great on a touchscreen)

Smart Maximizing\restore\tiling by dragging a window to the top of the screen it automatically maximizes, by dragging it to the left or right edge it grows to fill a tile that takes up half the screen set flush against which ever side you drag it to. Dragging the title bar away from the edge restores the window to it’s former size.

Fonts Subsystem has been given a whole new look, no more windows 3.1 Add fonts dialog. Yaay.

Windows 7 Public Beta

I’m an unapologetic fan of Vista so I’ve been following the whole Windows 7 thing with interest but without feeling a desperate need to get a copy using any means necessary. The whole [very] public Beta appealed to me though so I duly downloaded it yesterday, hacked out a 30GB partition from the system drive of my M1330 (using a GParted Live CD, Windows Vista still can’t reliably shrink a system volume that has been in use for any reasonable length of time) and installed it.

First impressions were pretty underwhelming. I thought the look and feel was a bit flat and didn’t notice anything significant apart from the tweaked Task Bar.

After some digging I found that the installer had left me with a “customized” theme that basically turned off a lot of the UI enhancements. Once I switched to a full Windows 7 Theme it started to look pretty good and then I got digging in earnest and actually found some stuff that I quite liked. Seems like a very nice set of bumped up features at this stage without too many downsides, although this is after just a couple of hours nosing about so I’ll be revisiting this in a week or two to see what I think of it then.

There are some nifty improvements:

• The new style Taskbar is actually quite nice and seem like a sensible UI improvement. Items on the takbar have more intelligent context menus and Win 7 aware apps display a lot of extra info in both the taskbar icon itself (e.g download progress in IE, Presence status info in Messenger) and awareness of tabs within the mouseover previews.
• The “mouse over the end of the taskbar to temporarily display the desktop” trick is simple but useful and effective.
• “Sidebar” is gone but gadgets now have a proper place to live – on the desktop, shich is conveniently now easy to get a quick look at.
• There seem to be quite a few extra “Windows Key + X” shortcuts - Win+P brings up a tab ribbon for handling connectivity to a projector, Win+Arrow keys tell the current window to maximise,minimise,dock to the left or dock to the right. Win+G brings all the Gadgets temporarily to the foreground. Win+T cycles through the Taskbar items. Things like Win+E (Explorer), Win+D (Desktop), Win+F (Find), Win+R (Run) remain as useful as ever.
• Powershell V2 is included by default ( finally )
• There’s quite a nice quick shortcut in the Start Menu that directly brings you to a new “Devices and Printers” control screen that sort of kind of makes it easier to get to most of the setup screens for your “add-on” hardware.
• UAC seems to have been given a major dose of common sense – user initiated tasks that require elevation no longer trigger a UAC confirmation but program initiated actions do. Seems like an excellent balance to me.
• WLAN’s are detected during the OS install and immediately used to download patches and updates. That’s a good idea.
• The concept of file system “Libraries” is introduced – these are collections of files and folders that are presented and used as a single unit without needing to move the underlying files around. Finally we’re getting towards a sensible way to add proper classification structure to collections of files. I very much like this idea.
• We still have dear old Edlin.
• All of the hardware on my laptop was detected and got up to date drivers installed (that includes the Video driver for the Geforce 8400M GS, Intel 3945ABG WLAN, Ricoh SD\XD\CF Card Reader, Creative Labs Webcam, Touchpad..
• The install was quick (20-25 minutes at most) and required very little interaction.
• There appears to be a new higher security layer (facilitated by the Homegroup services) added in to the network places structure by default to ensure that some level of protection is applied to all those easily hacked into Home Networks out there.
• There’s now an option to link your Windows login with an online account. This is a very interesting development and should enable more seamless utilization of online services and sharing\sync across machines. The option doesn’t do anything yet but I’ll be keeping an eye on that feature for certain.
• Once again we have the ability to create a System Recovery Disc (as we did in Vista SP1 Beta but not in the full release of Vista SP1 for some reason)
• We finally have the option to create a full system (Image) backup natively with a Windows OS. 
• All saved credentials seem to be stored in a single location called the Credential Vault that can be selectively backed up and restored. Individual items within it can be selectively removed too. Very, very good ideas.
• Location Sensors (GPS) and location awareness are now configurable as a standard item via the Control Panel.

Performance wise it seems to match the existing Vista install pretty closely apart from having a noticably slower hard drive – but that is entirely due to the fact that I’m using the last (and thus slowest) 30GB of space on this drive for the Windows 7 boot partition.

Everything I’ve tried to run so far runs without a hitch (My XP\Vista portable apps collection all works fine, Firefox 3, Google Chrome, Dropbox Sync + its Explorer plugin, Shockwave\Flash, GTalk’s video plugin).

On the negative side (comparing to Vista remember):

• Finding things like the Advanced Display Settings dialogs, or the properties of a NIC or where to change your TCP/IP Settings and so on remain just as obnoxiously awkward as they are in Vista.
• That default Theme I ended up almost turned me off the thing right at the start – maybe I caused that but it really did give me a very bad first impression.
• Contrary to rumour it doesn’t have a smaller footprint at least on this system but I would only expect that to be evident on very small\low powered sytems if it is true and this is not one of those systems.
• IE8 is pants, nuff said.

So overall it seems like far more pluses than minuses and there are some very, very interesting things hinted at in the features that have been exposed at this stage.

Top Gears Electic Car Tests

I was very happy to see Clarkson & Co get stuck into testing some real electric cars in last Sundays episode of Top Gear but like many I suspect I was disappointed that the Tesla failed to withstand their thrashing on the track. To be fair though I was impressed that the Stig managed to get it to post a time that beat the 911 GT3. We're still on the bleeding edge of electric vehicle technology but it seems that good electric cars might now actually be possible even if they aren't quite there yet.

I was rather disappointed with the final segment where James May sang the praises of Hydrogen Fuel Cells without actually taking the time to be the nit picking pedant that I know he can be and in the process failed to identify the major flaws in the arguments being put forward by the Hydrogen Economy evangelists. I'd love it if they were right but frankly I can't see H2 being the answer to our fuel problems. Fuel Cells are wonderful technical marvels but those that use H2 are hamstrung by the fact that H2 is godawful stuff from a mechanical and practical perspective.

So while I appreciated the praise of Fuel Cells in the segment I can tell you now with 100% confidence that we will never see Hydrogen as a common vehicle fuel in our lifetime, it will certainly never be used as a direct replacement for petrol\diesel in an internal combustion engine (H2 combustion is fine but suffers from the same Carnot cycle inefficiencies as all other internal combustion engines so it's a dead end IMO) or (as is the case with the Honda) as a fuel source for direct electric conversion fuel cells.

My initial reaction to the aricle was that I was disappointed that they didn't dig into how much the Honda's fuel-cell\H2 containment system cost\weighed and how long it could store it's full tank of fuel because I suspect both answers would have been very disappointing. Also while the Tesla might take 16 hours to charge, at least you can get electricity in most places - H2 fuel pumps exist in about 4 places on the planet so good luck if you are an early adopter outside of SoCal, Iceland or Germany. That detail was entirely glossed over.

And then (as I tend to, I got carried away ranting to myself) so in case anyone is still reading here are my arguments against Hydrogen as a vehicle fuel.

Hydrogen may be ultra clean, carbon free and able to fill a pressurized fuel tank in three minutes but it has a couple of insurmountable or damn near insurmountable problems:

1) Density and by direct correlation Energy Density. Pound for Pound (or kilo for kilo for the metric inclined) it's more energy dense than (say) petrol by a factor of just over three (so three kg of H2 has as much potential chemical energy as 1 kg or so of petrol) but in terms of volume it requires a _lot_ of space. A kg of Petrol takes up about 1.3 litres of space, a kg of liquid hydrogen takes up about 14.5 litres of space. The problem with liquid H2 is that it needs to be either cryogenically stored or stored under immense pressure. The best pressure\cryogenic H2 fuel storage systems weigh about 10x what a fully loaded tank of petrol weighs that would contain the same amount of convertible energy. That additional weight and volume alone make H2 uneconomical.

2) H2 does not transport or store easily. Look at any rocket on a launch pad - the plumes of vapour that comes off those is a combination of the O2 (at -173C) and H2 (at -250C) boiling off because it is just not practical to keep them well enough insulated or pressured to avoid boil off. Petrol\oil evaporates at room temperature but at about 1 billionth the rate that O2 does and about 100x less again than H2 does. 

3) To make H2 you still have to have power in the first place and creating H2 from cracking water is not an efficient process (25-40% at best) no matter how efficient your initial energy generation is. It's a hard thing to do, hard in the sense that it wastes energy that ends up not being recoverable from the Hydrogen that you produce so it's vitally improtant to tackle this part of the system honestly. Ironically almost all of the commercially produced hydrogen today is produced by steam reformation of hydrocarbons so basically at the moment most hydrogen comes from oil that has the Carbon removed (and vented as CO2\CO into the atmosphere) by combining it with steam produced by (you guessed it) burning oil, coal or gas which gives it about 2-3x the carbon footprint of just burning petrol in the first place. Interestingly some nuclear power plants can actually generate "clean" H2 rather than electricity but then all of us nucleophobes will have to change our minds about nukes to embrace that method of generating fuel for cars (mind you, mine is pretty much changed already, sorry Greenpeace).

4) Compressing H2 into a liquid (or freezing it, it's basically the same process) adds a not insignificant additional power burden to the process because of the difficulties in reaching -250C or 700-1000 atmospheres of pressure _and_ keeping the damn stuff in that state while you store it and move it across continents.

5) An accident involving a H2 fueled vehicle has a non trivial chance of being an instant bomb. It is quite simply not a safe fuel. Sure much has been done to make more robust fuel tanks but right now I would no more get into a car on a public road with a H2 tank in the boot than I would play Russian Roulette with a revolver with 6 full cylinders. Especially on roads full of the sort of people who need to be reminded that objects in their mirrors may be closer than they seem. Safer H2 fuel tanks == stronger tanks == heavier tanks == more expensive tanks and no doubt they are making huge progress there but all of those efforts detract from efforts that should be being made into making the fuel delivery and conversion processes more efficient. And most importantly those safe but big,heavy and bulky fuel tanks make the vehicles they serve significantly more inefficient at the point where it matters most - on the road.

6) James May claimed that in the glorious fuel cell'ed future he foresaw of the car with no moving parts (eh? what about the wheels? suspension? high pressure\cryogenic fuel pumps?!!)  would need no servicing but any vehicle that has a high pressure (700 atmosphere) fuel tank containing the smallest molecules in the universe (and that are explosive when leaked into our atmosphere) is effectively a dormant bomb and as such will need very, very careful proactive maintenance on a very regular basis in order to avoid turning into an actual bomb. 

7) Long distance (more than a couple of km) bulk H2 transportation systems leak about 70-90% of the initial H2 because the molecule is so bloody small and the pressures are so high that it just leaks out of every single joint, valve and connection like water through a leaky tap. Stored H2 in cylinders escapes at about 10x the rate that more normal gases (like CO2\N2\O2 do), the tanks have to weigh more and are so burdened with transportation restrictions due to safety concerns that I cannot see that anyone will ever produce an economical H2 version of our large scake existing petrol distribution mechanism. The physical challenges involved in storing and transporting liquid H2 are not the sort of things that lend themselves to massive changes due to innovation and unless it can be made 10x or more easier (ie cheaper) it will not be efficient enough to be realistic.

That said I do think that the Fuel Cell car idea is the right track but the "clean" power source of the near term future is far more likely to be Fuel Cells powered by methanol ( which is basically just another hydrocarbon). In the fuel cells themselves it runs to about 30-50% the efficiency of pure H2. The fuel handling mechanics are vastly simpler - there's no need for cryogenic\high pressure storage at any stage in the proiduction\distribution chain and the fuel can be stored\transported as simply and for as long as petrol. The challenge is producing methanol cheaply from air - again all you need is power at the front end (to convert 2 CO2 and 4 Water molecules into 2 CH2OH molecules and 3 O2 molecules just add enough power)  and you have an energy storage fluid that is totally "clean" given that you got the components from the atmosphere in the first place. From the numbers that I've seen methanol will always be 2-3x easier to produce from scratch than H2. Note in both cases the "fuel" is really just a transportation mechanism for energy produced elsewhere so where that initial energy comes from is the real green challenge in any case.

Another couple of source fuel options for fuel cells are either Hydrides (in some liquid or fluid powdered form) or Hydrated Clathrates (ie somewhat frozen slushies of some material with lots of H2 dissolved in them) that might beat out petrochemicals but given that liquid petrol (or methanol) contains about 50% more hydrogen atoms (at 116g of H atoms) per litre than pure liquid H2 (at about 70g of H atoms per litre) I honestly cannot see anything better than the evil petrochemicals at storing energy that will be chemically extracted from Hydrogen. And again the clathrates\hydrates need some practical source and distribution mechanism for the raw H2 that they contain and so share many of raw H2's drawbacks. They dont look like winners to me but at least they have some good answers to the worst of H2's problems.

Finally the FCX Clarity that James May waxed lyrical about has a total H2 storage capacity of 5kg of compressed H2 (about 171 litres at 350 atmospheres pressure) in a car weighing 1.7tons.  The fuel cell generates 100kw (134 horsepower) although it does so with a conversion efficiency about 3x a typical car's ability to turn petrol into power so the 5kg of H2 is equivalent to about 45 litres of Petrol. The Fuel Cell alone though is insufficient to power the vehicle in a sustained sense so it too includes a couple of hundred kg of the LiION batteries to store additional juice so that it can actually climb hills and actually accelerate so in that sense it is hampered by the weight of those fat batteries that the lads had so much trouble with in the Tesla. I've tried to find out the total mass of the fuel storage\handling\fuel cell of the FCX but Honda haven't made that easy to find, I suspect it's more than 60% of that total mass though. By comparison the the Tesla can convert energy to deliver about 248 hp (185kw) at the wheels and weighs in total about 1.1 tons. 

Personally I don't see that the difference between the two is as much of a quantum leap as the lads made out - what it needs is a runabout scale DMFC to replace about 25% (say 50-60bhp) of those batteries, a battery improvement of about 25% in efficiency and possibly a bank of improved ultra-capacitors to capture a higher percentage of regenerative braking power to turn it into an actual practical car running on a practical fuel which the FCX will never be while at the same time being a reasonable sports car. And of course a drop of 75% in the price tag will have to happen whether we're talking about the FCX, the Tesla or any of the others in the current array of first generation genuine electric cars.

Even without any major improvements in efficiency a DMFC (Direct Methanol Fuel Cell) would be about 2-3x less energy efficient at the fuel cell point (20-30% vs 40-60% for an efficient pure H2 Fuel Cell) but H2 has the transport and storage losses that are as I've said somewhere from 70-90% whereas methanol has transport\storage losses measured in the fractions of a percent over continent wide delivery distances and months of time so unless someone comes up with a magic way to handle H2, something like Methanol will easily beat out H2 as long term sustainable fuel. And it's just as safe as petrol and can be delivered using the same infrastructure too.

Just my 2cents.  Well 2002 cents I suppose. Now I need to get back to reading about SAN storage and earning a living.