Ken Dyck

Philip Greenspun writes about early retirement. Although I’m not in any position to be considering it, I found it an entertaining read:

Suppose that you are retired. At this point, your one job is the pursuit of happiness. If you are not happy, therefore you are a failure at your job and in your life. But how can you be happy 24/7? Perhaps if you moved into a hotel in Orlando and went to Disneyworld every day you would be pretty happy. But if you retain the responsibilities of home- and car-ownership, much of your life will continue to be mundane, boring, or unpleasant. Will you wear a big smile on your face as you change the lightbulbs in the hall? Will you be delighted paying bills or begging the plumber to come over and fix the shower? Will you be ecstatic when it comes time to get your car inspected?

Dan Crawford reports for the Republic, “Vancouver’s opinionated newspaper,” from a talk by Dave Hughes of Natural Resources Canada that there is only eight years of natural gas left in Canada:

Consumption trends and patterns were also explored. In every case, the phenomenal growth rates in our economy show a complete disconnect with the reality of the resources currently supporting them. Canada, for example, has 8.1 years left in natural gas reserves.

This isn’t entirely correct.

According to the latest annual review (pdf), as of January, 2004, there were 68 Trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of proven natural gas reserves, 171 Tcf of discovered resources, and 366 Tcf of undiscovered resources (check out the 2000 review for detailed definitions of these terms). In 2004, 5.9 Tcf were extracted.

The prediction of 8.1 years is quite obviously based on proven reserves.

If you include discovered reserves — the ones that are drilled and known with certaintly, but are too far from existing pipelines to economically extract currently — that number more than triples. Once you add to that the undiscovered reserves — known to contain gas, but not yet drilled — the number grows much larger.

So we have more than 8 years before we’re forced to replace our furnaces and water heaters with something else, although it’s easy to point out compelling reasons to switch sooner.

When I opened the latest Maclean’s magazine yesterday, I was surprised to see this article by Jonathon Gatehouse, entitled When the oil runs out:

The Four Horsemen have upgraded to SUVs. Not the hybrid ones either, but those gas-guzzling, bunny-crushing behemoths that Arnold Schwarzenegger favours. In oil-rich Babylon, whores are so thick on the ground that it’s a little hard to pick just one. Although everyone can agree on what the Antichrist is up to — running a multinational petroleum company. Yes, the End is nigh, if you believe the consensus that has been brewing in the halls of academe and the non-fiction aisle at the local bookstore. Starting in 2010, no later than 2020 or 2030, according to the latest vision of secular apocalypse, global oil supplies will peak, and the world will begin to unravel at the seams.

It seems that the idea of peak oil is making it into the mainstream, and that’s a good thing. The more awareness there is of the issue, the greater the chance that we will prepare for a world with expensive oil, then for a world without it. I believe that a soft landing is possible, but only if we face it, and plan for it.

Stanley Reed reports for BusinessWeek on the new reality of oil prices:

Everyone knows it: oil prices have gone through the roof. The price of benchmark crude rose 11% this year alone, to about $67 per barrel, before pulling back a little. But many in the industry have always figured that prices would sooner or later simmer down. One indication: Even when short-term prices soared to alarming levels, the futures market had until recently valued oil much more modestly. As new supplies came onstream, traders figured, prices would drift back down to their long-term average, which for years was about $20 per barrel. This thinking still influences the big oil companies, who have held back from investing massively in new projects.

But the futures market is now sending a radically different, and disturbing, message.

The Undecided: I wish I’d known about this site before the election. It’s a flash application that works like a taste test. They give you a choice of selecting from any of the parties’ positions on a particular issue without showing which party holds it. Then you can rank the issues to find out which one(s) you most agree with.

It wouldn’t have had any effect on how I voted in the election. It mostly told me what I already know: I don’t agree strongly with any of the national political parties of Canada.

If you live in Canada, like me, you probably missed the best part of the Super Bowl: the ads.

Reading The Long Emergency left me completely freaked out about the world’s energy situation. Kunstler predicts a catastrophic collapse of all the world’s social, economic, and political systems as the it moves past the current peak oil production into a period of continuing decline and uncontrollably rising costs.

While I agree with Kunstler’s fundamental premise — we’re all going to have to learn to live with less in the very near future as oil prices begin rising — today’s Treehuger post on switchgrass gives me some hope that it might be a softer landing than Kunstler predicts:

Here are the highlights: it grows eight or nine feet tall, native to the US. Generally, it’s very hearty and will grow in nearly any climatic variation, from the Gulf Coast into Canada. As a crop, it has a very high yield per acre (five to tens tons) with little use of pesticides, and a low production cost, which are two keys for economical production of alternative fuels. Switch grass can net up to 100 gallons of ethanol per ton, which is more efficient than corn, it’s better-known counterpart, and switch grass also uses the whole plant for making fuel, whereas corn uses just the grain. Sounds almost too good to be true, but we like what we’re hearing so far.

In the comments for the Treehugger post, Odograph points to the Dell-Point pellet stove, which can cleanly burn wood pellets, corn or wheat to heat a home for less than half the price of natural gas. Combined with the Alberta oil sands and a possible 9000 megawatt build-out of Ontario’s nuclear power capabilities, the future doesn’t seem nearly as dismal as I was dreading.

Support for C and C++ is officially supported in Eclipse by the C/C++ Development Tools (CDT) project. It offers a plethora of features for the language, including a C/C++ editor, a debugging environment, content assist, makefile generator, and parser. If you are building an Eclipse-based IDE for an embedded processor, is it the right choice? Or are you better off starting from scratch with the base platform? That’s the question that I’ll be examining in this post.

With all the features that the CDT offers, already designed, implemented and tested, you might wonder why anybody would choose not to base an IDE for their embedded processor on it. It’s a no-brainer, right? Especially when you consider how much effort you’d have to spend to replicate even the most basic features it provides out of the box.

This is a deceptively tough decision, though, and a lot of it depends on what you want out of the IDE.

Do you want your IDE to be different?

The CDT offers a full-featured standard platform on which to build a C/C++ development environment. The key idea here is standard. When you choose to use the CDT, you are accepting all of the design choices that went into it, and limiting the range of possibilities for customization.

To be sure, there are ways that you can customize a CDT-based C/C++ environment. But the possibilities are much narrower when you base your environment on the CDT rather than the base platform.

When do you need it?

While choosing the CDT reduces the range of design choices, it also reduces the length of the todo list.

If you need to get a C/C++ development environment out the door quickly, the CDT can get you there. Most of the hard work has already been done by the CDT developers.

The time-to-market benefit is especially noticable if the processor you are targeting is already supported by the GNU tools, in which case there is very little work to do. I’ve heard of IDEs built in a couple weeks this this way.

Market Fit

The CDT is a huge piece of software. It solves problems that I never even knew existed. Out-of-the box, it sports its own disassembly view, code completion, and an extensive build system, among other things. However, in the course of building all these features, the CDT developers committed to a host of decisions about how it would work.

These decisions, though, might not coincide with what your end user expects or wants. It could be as superficial as their being more familiar with the look and behaviour of another development environment or as fundamental as the CDT not supporting some essential debugging feature.

At AMI Semiconductor, our digital signal processors are so resource-constrained that it only makes sense to program them in assembly (we don’t even offer a C compiler). A highly-tuned assembly programming environment, then, was essential for our customers, and something we found lacking in the CDT when we first considered it.

Opportunity Costs

The do-it-yourself option is an expensive one. And in more ways than one. When you choose against the CDT, you end up devoting considerable resources to recreating features that already exist in the CDT, and in many cases falling short of their mark. What’s more, all that effort spend on re-inventing the wheel could have been spent tayloring the CDT to your processor.

If you are planning to build an Eclipse-based IDE for an embedded processor, you have some important decisions to make; decisions that will set the stage for all of your future development.

In this series of posts I’ll discuss 10 of these decisions. I’ll identify some of the factors you should consider in making them, and tell you how we, at AMI Semiconductor, decided for our IDE.

These are the decisions I’ll address:

1. CDT vs. DIY
2. GNU tools vs. DIY
3. ant vs. make
4. stable vs. latest
5. coordinated vs. independent release schedules
6. branch and fix vs. wait for Eclipse developers
7. replace views vs. live with it
8. stand-alone product vs. set of plug-ins
9. open source vs. proprietary
10. join Eclipse Foundation vs. work independently

[Disclosure: Mark Melvin and I are slated to give a talk at EclipseCon on this topic in March. Any comments or feedback you can send our way before the February 17th content deadline would be greatly appreciated.]

Dave Pollard explains why republicans want a huge national debt:

So now you know why Bush is not only unworried but actually pleased with skyrocketing deficits. They give him the excuse to cut government services and programs (if you read the harsh rhetoric of his annual budget he makes no bones about the fact he sees only defense and ‘homeland security’ expenses as essential), and to sell off ‘priceless’ parks, national forests and other public lands inexpensively to Republican campaign donors.