Welcome to khan.org

Bored Geek with Photoshop

So I'm sitting on a site post, and the conversation goes something like this:

[Bob] the sites not up yet... :)
[Bob] it just started restarting about 5 minutes ago
> Aren't the suns like the old AT's?
> Is the Turbo button depressed?
[Bob] it comes with Turbo enabled by default
> Have you tricked out the E25K with neon lights and peltier coolers?
[Bob] and 22"'s
> sweet! with the spinny rims?
> we should totally photoshop a tricked out sun box

Fifteen minutes later, and voila, you get this.

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Touchy Feely

I get a strange kind of satisfaction out of being (non-clinically) obsessive compulsive. For example:

• I can't stand typos, particularly my own
• Blosxom dates/orders blog entries by last modification date, not creation date
• I'm a bit neurotic about having my blog entries reflect the time/date/order they were actually created

What do you do when you notice a typo in your earliest blog? (Note to self: It's spelled "blosxom" which I realized only when I got a surprisingly small number of responses from google when searching for "bloxsom" vis-a-vis "blosxom")

With the thought that I'd have to find some way to hack the blosxom source to make it do what I want, google pointed me towards a much more elegant solution: "touch -t [timestamp]" will allow me to revise the entry for typos, but maintain the original creation date. Amazing what one learns via RTFM.

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How to RSS-enable your Blosxom blog

At first I was stumped about how to RSS-enable my blog for Safari. After doing a little bit of research at Apple.com, the fix is pretty simple. All you have to do is add a "<link>" tag to your HTML header, like below.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="feed://www.khan.org/blog/?flav=rss" />

Substitute your own URL for the href (again, if you're using Blosxom, appending ?flav=rss to your URL will suffice), and you're set.

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Car Quandry

As many readers know, I'm a huge VW/Audi nut. My trusty Passat's lease is coming due in March, and I'm starting to weigh my options. What might my next car be (if not the Passat)? It's a pretty decent car. It has SUV utility with a huge cargo area, it gets just under 30mpg, and has V6 AWD power.

But there are political and environmental considerations that make me question if 30mpg is really good enough. Yet, there are no vehicles from Audi that provide better than 30/30 mpg of fuel economy. The closest is the Audi A3, and it's borderline at 25/31 mpg. As for VW, they only get into the 30+ range with the variety of diesels they offer in the Golf, Beetle, and Jetta lines. Without a hybrid strategy in the US market, and a meager offering of options, the German automakers are ceding the US fuel economy vehicle market to makes like Honda and Toyota.

Yet fuel economy is only one facet of the ideal vehicle I look at. One feature I tend to appreciate a lot is the sure-footed traction provided by full time all wheel drive. Combine a diesel with AWD, and you end up with exactly zero vehicles available in North America for the brands (and prices) I typically would be inclined to buy.

Audi? No luck with Audi bringing the A4 3.0 TDI Quattro to the US (even so, MSRP is north of $50K).

VW? Sadly, no Golf GT TDI 4Motion or Passat 3.2 V6 4MOTION DSG for the US.

BMW? No announcements to bring the 530xd (pictured) or any other diesel to the US.

Mercedes? Well, they ship the E320 CDI, but alas, no 4MATIC AWD and it, like it's 530xd competitor, retails in the $50K range. (At least it gets 27/37mpg and does 0-60 in 6.6 seconds!)

To be fair, Honda and Toyota don't offer AWD systems on their hybrids, and this isn't altogether surprising considering the extra battery and transmission weight that such a vehicle would have to contend with. In fact, it can be safely assumed that few, if any, cars in North America perform better than 30mpg and offer AWD for this reason.

So perhaps AWD, at least in this generation of vehicles, is incongruous with fuel economy. Yet even when I lower the bar on fuel economy, I still don't end up with affordable AWD makes from the German automakers. The least expensive options are the Audi A4 2.0T Quattro, BMW 325xi, and Mercedes C280 4MATIC, and all tip the scales > the $30K mark.

Dropping below the $30K mark leaves only the Jetta, Golf, Beetle, and A3, none of which are currently offered in an AWD configuration. At this point, it starts to come down to the utility of the vehicles, since they all share the same basic family of platform and engine technologies.

My test drive of the A3 Sportback left me impressed with DSG, and it's very reminiscent of driving a Corrado. On the down side, the gas mileage isn't stellar, and the price can push just below $30K comfortably equipped. On the plus side, with the A3 you also get the utility of having a hatchback.

The Golf offers hatchback utility, but no DSG. Meanwhile the New New Jetta isn't offered in a wagon configuration, which means to get a DSG means no hatch. And the Beetle only offers the meager selection of TDI.

So, unless VW will ship the Jetta wagon with DSG, TDI, and (keep your fingers crossed) 4Motion, it seems I'm going to have to make some sort of compromise because I'm not going to see a sporty, economical, inexpensive, German, AWD vehicle shipping in the US by March 2006.

And, faced with that reality, perhaps I ought to cast a wider net, and take a closer look at the likes of the Prius, Civic, Accord (hybrids, naturally), and the Smart fortwo (assuming it gets released in North America beyond Canada). If I'm not particularly impressed, I might just keep the Passat-- after all, the only things missing in the Passat equation are the lack of super fuel economy and less than exhilirating performance-- both of which seem like minor inconveniences considering the alternatives have their own drawbacks.

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Blogging from a cell phone

One of the benefits of having a familymember who works at a celco is getting neat toys to play with...

So as I sit, waiting for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to begin, I decided to use the Nokia 9300's ssh client to log in and type this entry on its small but capable keyboard.

I don't think people who even use "vi" on a daily basis appreciate the keystrokes vi saves you until you're logged in via GPRS and with a tiny keyboard.

Apparently these 9300's will come built-in with word, spreadsheet, browser and presentation software. Rumor has it they will also have cameras and GPS. With freely available ssh (putty) and IM software, that's an amazing tool at practically any price!

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First Post!

Well, my blog is finally online. It's been over two years since the the word "blog" appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary, and here I finally am.

Shout out to Gavin, whose own blog was the final tipping point for me to get off my ass and get a blog going.

Being the geek that I am, surely you did not expect me to blog about anything other than the blogging software I chose to go live with... did you? Well, I've been grappling with this decision for a while. My friend Tom Bridge suggested I go with MovableType or WordPress. Gavin was using the same hosting provider as I do (go go Geckowerx!) and MT as well, so that was my first choice.

That got derailed quickly because the folks at Six Apart can't seem to ensure their download links actually resolve to the appropriate tar.gz. *shrug*

I don't get motivated to do personal technology projects very often (c'mon, it's taken me years to even start looking at blog software), so I wasn't going to let Six Apart's snafu stop me from blogging. I started to do some digging, and ended up at O'Reilly's perl.com site, where contributor Simon Cozens mentioned fellow O'Reilly contributor Rael Dornfest's Blosxom blogging software.

From an "MVC" perspective, Blosxom's "model" is the text file, the "view" is the header/footer HTML snippets I already had from the rest of the stuff here on khan.org, and the "controller" is the blosxom cgi. Simple. Elegant. What more could you ask for? (Actually, it sucks to have to login in order to blog, but there are plugins that promise to extend "control" via Web browser and email so when I get that set up, I can blog from anywhere!)

If all that sounds complicated, the point is that this blog entry is as simple as writing a text file that looks like this:

First Post!
Well, my blog is finally online. It's been over two years since the the word "blog"
<a target="_new" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weblog">appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary</a>,
and here I finally am.<br />
...

It didn't hurt that Rael promised I'd have my first entry up in under 15 minutes (or my money back). This beat the list of items I'd have to go through for MT (and presumably a whole host of other blogging utilities), including setting up a MySQL database, installing a raft of Perl libraries on a box I only have root access on as a courtesy, etc. etc.

I haven't dug into the code, but Blosxom seems to be written and designed the way I was tempted to write my own solution until I stumbled across Blosxom. Thank goodness I was lazy enough (as in the "Three Virtues") to run across Blosxom before re-inventing the wheel!

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