Zandra and I bought a hybrid car to replace her car about 3 weeks ago. The decision was somewhat accelerated after her Volvo got hit in the parking lot at Costco, causing enough damage to need fixing, but not enough to call the insurance company about (i.e., about equal to our deductible).

We had long been considering getting a larger vehicle to replace her Volvo S40 - we had purchased the Volvo when we were a family of 3. As a family of 4, the car was tighter and taking along a stroller or any amount of kid stuff effectively eliminated our capacity to bring anything else home. Our Ford Freestyle is wonderful as a family car, but sometimes, it was just *too* big (I think our eyes were bigger than our stomachs when it came to deciding how much capacity we really needed...) The Mini Cooper, of course, is just for fun.

But, with gas prices doing what they are, we wanted something relatively fuel efficient. We'd always been interested in getting a hybrid, and that's what we ended up doing. I won't mention what kind of hybrid we got though.

The hybrid has been living up to our expectations (and then some) when it comes to mileage. For an SUV type vehicle, we are averaging about 28 miles per gallon. Not bad for 4400 lbs. of car. We are now driving it almost everywhere, averaging about 400 miles/week in various errands, etc. It's comfy, quiet, and pretty good on power too.

Of course, I was curious to figure out how long it was going to take for us to pay for the difference in the price of the car over a non-hybrid. I calculated we paid a hefty $4500 premium for the privilege of owning a hybrid over a gas model. Here's the math.

For the gas version of this car: 15000 miles/year / 22 miles/gallon == 681.81 gallons of gas per year.
For our hybrid version, assuming our mileage stays the same: 15000 miles/year / 28 miles/gallon == 535.71 gallons of gas per year.
I save 681.81 gallons - 535.71 gallons == 146.1 gallons each year.
At $3.50/gallon of gas (what it *currently* costs for premium unleaded where we are), this works out to roughly $511.35/year in savings.
$4500/$511.35 == 8.8 years to pay the difference.

A less optimistic calculation is if you compare it to the 22 mpg we average on the Freestyle (which uses regular gas).
681.81 gallons * $3.25/gal == $2215.88 per year versus 535.71 * $3.50/gal == $1874.99
This results in a savings of only $340.89 per year, or 13.20 years to make up the difference.

If the price of gas changes, however, the time decreases. Let's say I go up 20%. Using the Freestyle calculation:
681.81 gallons * $3.85/gal == $2624.97 per year versus 535.71 * $4.20/gal = $2249.98
This results in a savings of $375/year or roughly 12 years to make up the difference.

Worth it? From an environmental point of view, yes. Dollars, it's probably a sacrifice. I may revisit this calculation later in case of errors or other new interesting data....

(Followup on 3/31/2008 - I forgot to mention that even though the $$$ may not add up, having twice the space is definitely not to be forgotten! -- JH)

Tags: Technology

Portholes have returned. And it's not a good thing.

Many years ago, Buick added what were called "portholes" to the front fenders of their vehicles. The more portholes your Buick had, the more "prestigious" your model of car was. The portholes went away for awhile, but were recently reintroduced by Buick. See the photo below of the Buick Lucerne to see what I mean.



(photo from Buick, annotations by me)

Now it seems the latest stupid car modification rage is fake portholes on your car. Like the free-spinning wheel covers and the fake Mercedes Benz hood ornaments on everything, we now have....portholes. On everything. I've seen them on a Chrysler LHX, a Honda Accord, and even on a Chevy 1500 pickup truck!

Pulllleeeeze. Why do people think that these things make their cars look cool? It's just stupid.

I recently started a project to upgrade my stickman.org server. What I thought would be a few nights work has turned into a true ordeal.

Most of my issues have centered around the web server. I prefer to use Apache - and I grabbed the latest 2.2.8 server from apache.org. All seemed to go well until I tried getting the https side of the server working. I kept getting strange failures from Firefox about an incorrect mathematical response or something of the like. Turns out, it was a problem with OpenSSL 0.9.8 which I had compiled. And it wasn't a problem with the source. It was a problem with the *compiler* - the Sun Studio 11 compiler to be exact.

I was getting, running make test:

*** Error code 9
make: Fatal error: Command failed for target `test_evp'

Turns out it was a known problem - writeup here: http://forum.sun.com/thread.jspa?messageID=99121

I chose to just get the newest Studio12 compiler. Thought I was done.

Um....nope not yet.

Now I kept getting:

Syntax error on line 78 of /usr/local/apache2/conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf:
Could not resolve address '255.255.255.255' -- check resolver configuration.

Arrrghh...this is the virtual host entry in the ssl config file that defines: What's up with that?

So the manual says, this means DNS isn't getting consulted. Well....it is. Everywhere. But guess what? My old friend nscd is to blame again (a great idea, but one that has killed me so many times...) nscd apparently has problems dealing with lookups to anything other than files. Doing an svcadm disable name-service-cache and then starting the web server worked great! Except, there are some efficiencies to be gained by using nscd. I'd like to try to keep that running if possible.

So....off to install 127111-11 (latest as of this posting). And its prereqs. All in an attempt to try to resolve bug 6612782 which appeared to fit my problem. Still no dice. Apparently some major changes went into Solaris 10 08/07 have, again, left nscd somewhat non-functional.

So I'm bypassing nscd for a bit until I can sort this out further. Actually, I'll probably file a bug....this seems to be a regression from Solaris 10 06/06.

Tags: Technology

So as I turn 40 years old today, a whole bunch of random thoughts passed through my mind.

Mid-life Crisis? Probably not - I borrowed against it two years ago to get the Mini Cooper S Convertible with the personalized license plate.

They are still debating, 40 years later, about who shot JFK.

We haven't cured the common cold. Or cancer. But we're making progress at least.

My eye sight stinks. Memo to self - need to make another appointment with opthamologist. Probably need bi-focals.

I can claim that I'm only 28. If you're counting in hexadecimal of course.

I've had a number of 40th birthday "reminders" in the last two weeks. My second cousin's family very thoughtfully got me a cake and celebrated when they were all over here (I'll post a picture at some point). We skipped the second chorus of Happy Birthday which goes "How Old Are You?" though. Tonight, Zandra and I had a date night and went out Morton's of Chicago. Made me realize I can't eat like I used to - I used to be able to eat everything on my plate without splitting anything....Everyone remembered to send me a card this year it seems.

A good friend of mine pointed out that wine gets better with age, why not me? Good point!

Anything else running through my head about this topic? Yes. I'm thankful to have reached 40. I'm thankful for all the things I have at 40. And I'm looking forward to another 40 years at least.

Only 10 more years until I get to join AARP!

A couple of years back, I passed up the chance to get one of the first MacBook Pro laptops with an Intel instead of PowerPC chip in it. I purchased a refurbished PowerBook G4 at a huge discount and was very, very happy with the decision.

So for my birthday, my wife allowed me to upgrade my old trusty G4. Apple also decided to nicely cooperate by releasing new MacBook Pros which meant that the now previous generation refurbs went into fire sale mode. Just what I had been hoping for!

I picked up a refurb MacBook Pro 2.6GHz system for $1849 plus tax. A full 33% off the new price from the week before. The system arrived in the traditional refurb plain brown box, but is otherwise pretty much perfect. It came pre-installed with Leopard and after about an hour of downloading updates and such, had a nice and quick new system.

The big motivation to the new MacBook Pro was to leverage virtualization to run Solaris (working for Sun, I really need to use Solaris a lot). I chose VMWare's Fusion product with Solaris 10 Update 4 (Solaris 10 08/07). It loaded up without issues, right off the DVD and I have the virtual machine running as its own separate IP address from my laptop on my home network.

It works so well in fact, that I have removed my old Dell AMD64 dual core system from my desk along with one of its monitors and hooked up the 22" ViewSonic monitor to my MacBook Pro. This has freed up a *lot* of desk space, and will probably save me a few bucks on electricity. I haven't had this much space on my desk in years!

Truly this has to be progress through technology!

Tags: Technology

Set aside about 20 minutes total to watch both of these videos if you are so inclined. And be prepared for a major mood swing between the two.

The first one is called Treeless Squirrel. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k22oHm0O3Sg The squirrel in this video is the son of a good friend of mine (who also does other advertising design when he's not busy being nuts (sic)). This one is funny.

The second one is one you may have seen. http://video.stumbleupon.com/#p=ithct48cqw Randy Pausch is a CMU professor dying of pancreatic cancer. Given I've lost a couple of friends to this disease and know currently of two others with it, it's a very interesting view on living life. http://download.srv.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/ is his website which folks should visit for more information. This video may lead you to tears. The full length video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo .

Tags: Humor

WARNING: Technical Rant ahead. If you don't care about email handling, skip this entry.

For the last 72 hours, I've been suffering from collateral damage from a massive spam attack.

When you receive spam, the "From" address is almost always fake. Some random domain gets inserted. One of my domain names came up on the roulette of spam death this weekend.

Combined with thousands (tens of thousands?) of stupidly configured mailers, and that amounted to my guess almost 100,000 emails that my poor server was forced to bounce back to the stupidly configured mailer.

Symantec firewalls/anti-virus scanners were the biggest offender. Followed closely by Barracuda firewalls. Followed by Exchange servers. What it appears these servers were doing was accepting the mail, running it through a scanner which determined it to be spam, and then trying to politely return the email to the faked address. Arrrggghhh.... At one point, I was rejecting emails at over 1 per second. I generated close to 200MB of log files recording the mail bounces.

Further, there are just flat out non-compliant email servers out there - those that don't understand 550 5.5.1 permanent failure codes. Those that don't send emails with valid domain names. And so on.

We wonder why the internet is such a mess. Too many systems administrators who shouldn't have a license to be on the internet.

Makes me want to get off.

Tags: Technology