Asa @ 22 Off

Ethanol Demand Is Boosting Food Prices Worldwide

"The rising demand for corn as a source of ethanol-blended fuel is largely to blame for increasing food costs around the world, the CBC reports. Increased prices for ethanol have already led to bigger grocery bills for the average American — an increase of $47 US compared to July 2006. In Mexico last year, corn tortillas, a crucial source of calories for 50 million poor people, doubled in price; the increase forced the government to introduce price controls. The move to ethanol-blended fuel is based in part on widespread belief that it produces cleaner emissions than regular gasoline. But a recent Environment Canada study found no statistical difference between the greenhouse gas emissions of regular unleaded fuel and 10 per cent ethanol-blended fuel. Environmental groups have argued that producing ethanol — whether from corn, beets, wheat, or other crops — requires more energy than can be derived from the product."

I wish some of my friends who are big ethanol proponents would read this article. Net energy loss + more expensive food + more starving people != environmental goodness, but rather more polution, inflation, and death. Contrary to misconception, ethanol is a big money maker for oil companies and therefore I am not biased against ethanol, rather, I should be biased toward the use of it. However, weighing the impacts of this new ethanol equation I have to lean against the industry line.

Jason and the Trophy Carp

Jason smoked this carp going around a buoy on the slalom course at 32MPH. When Jason's ski fin hit the 32" fish it tripped him causing Jason to flip over and crash. Since the fish was killed by the incident I guess you could say the fish won the battle but Jason won the war. Jason 1, Fish 0.

Investing in a Sustainable Future Webcast

Watched Investing in a Sustainable Future Webcast (by E&Y).

Notable quotes:

"In the past 18 months high oil prices, fears over fuel security and global warming concerns have resulted in rapid growth for the biofuels industry with over US$400m invested in 2006 and analysts predicting a compound annual growth rate for the industry of 30% in the medium term."

Ethanol
"The US produced more ethanol than Brazil during 2006, for the first time and research continues in second generation, or cellulosic, technology."

Biodiesel
"Germany's first place follows a long history of Government support has grown the biodiesel market to such a level where over capacity is a concern."

Lots of renewable energy webcasts are available from E&Y.

Marathon and The Andersons have a joint venture to build a 110,000,000 gallons of ethanol per year plant in Greenfield, Ohio.

I ask myself if I will recognize when there is a biofuel bubble. With so much money and government help chasing and rewarding biofuel resources and infrastructure I need to tap into this arena and get out before the biofuel bust.

Ruby on Rails / Gruff Graphs II

Several of my non-geek friends had trouble discerning my last post. I am currently working on stock charts for my trailing stop software (which is currently undergoing alpha testing). These stock charts were produced using gruff and they allow easily visualization of a stock relative to your exit strategy. Below are the charts that I generated for Anglo American aka AAUK with a 15% trailing stop:


theme_37signals



theme_keynote



theme_odeo



theme_rails_keynote

What is your favorite theme for the AAUK stock chart?

Ruby on Rails / Gruff Graphs

Gruff is a nice tool to build graphs using Ruby. I kept receiving an unusual permissions error (associated with RMagick.so file) when installing gruff on my win32 box. It turned out that I just needed to close all my command windows (cmd.exe processes) and start with a fresh command prompt and the gem install worked perfectly:

gem install rmagick-1.14.1-win32.gem --local
Successfully installed rmagick, version 1.14.1

I did a quick test of gruff via fruit code sample and it worked as expected!

Original win32 installation instructions for Gruff:
Download the rmagick-win32 gem from the RMagick project page on RubyForge, unzip it into a temporary directory, and follow the instructions in the README.html file you'll find in the package. I would just add the step of closing all open command windows to the Prerequisites section within the README.html file.

Corn Based Ethanol

"Measured over its lifecycle -- taking into consideration the energy needed to plant, cultivate and transport corn, and then refine it into ethanol -- a British thermal unit (Btu) of energy from corn-based ethanol has equal or greater carbon emissions than a Btu of gasoline. Until a better biofuel is invented -- cellulosic ethanol or even butanol from corn and switchgrass seem the most likely successes -- biofuels are not a panacea."
Strategic Forecasting, Inc.

Software Development

XEmacs (editor), Ruby on Rails (MVC platform), SVN (source code management system), and Capistrano (automated deployment tool) make a killer software development suite. I have now quickly and easily developed, built, tested, versioned, and deployed 100s software builds using these tools.

VS

Microsoft's offerings: VisualStudio.NET (integrated development environment), .NET Framework (platform), Visual Source Safe (source code management system). Completing the software lifecycle under the Microsoft umbrella is much more difficult, manual, and subject to err. VisualStudio.NET offers Intellisense and lots of editor niceties. However these come at the expense of a bloated user interface, lack of easy keyboard shortcuts, and even the smallest programming endeavor requires a massive amount of files and structure. Visual Source Safe (VSS) is the worst source management system that I have ever encountered. VSS stores its data in the file system. In order for users of VSS to have proper security to use VSS they must also have powerful privileges to the VSS file structure. Just delete a couple files here and there and VSS is toast, not what I would call a respectable repository for valuable source code. The miserable lack of build, testing, and deployment tools within Microsoft’s suite is beyond frustrating.

If Microsoft fails to get and keep developers using the .NET Framework their Windows monopoly will become extinct. Based upon the development tools Microsoft is providing developers these days, it fortunes won’t be so good in a couple decades.