Batteryless Electric Cars

John Peterson wrote an interesting article "It's Time to Kill the Electric Car, Drive a Stake Through its Heart and Burn the Corpse", which provides some numbers arguing that electric cars can never become widespread because of the limited amount of battery-making resources available in the world. Last weekend, I was in San Francisco and wondered, "why can't we make an electric car without batteries"? Why can't a car be like a trolley bus, and run off of the grid, literally? Behold, the trolley car:



Some issues to be solved by smarter people:

• The existing power lines can handle the load of the small number of buses. Can it handle the increase in load if cars became trolley cars? The load of trolley cars is also heavier than what is needed if all cars became battery-based electric cars, since batteries can be charge at a slower rate.
• You will need to go off of the grid and onto highways, especially in sparser population areas. The trolley buses may have batteries for this purpose, but perhaps a car could just go with a combustion engine. It will be a different kind of hybrid car.
• How to automatically reach for the power lines and connect / disconnect as needed and stow away the connectors when not in use. I'm sure the trolley buses already need to deal with this, but perhaps they have more time to do so and fewer drivers honking at their slowness.
• How to correctly account for usage and charge costumers.
• How to make it not ugly (the cars, and perhaps the cities).

Well, there's the idea. There is also the issue of the electric motor itself. Does that use resource-constrained resources?

Nicole Scherzinger - Poison / TWEWY - Twister

A bit of a pointless post, but I noticed that the beginning of Nicole Scherzinger's Poison


samples from The World Ends With You:


There is even a guy with headphones at the beginning of the video =)

gdb instruction traces

> gdb [exe] --batch -x debug.cmds > trace.log 2>&1

with debug.cmds containing:

[prelude for misc setup including probably "b main" and "run"]

disp/i $pc

source stepiN.txt

and stepiN.txt containing N copies of "si\n" (Anyone know of a loop capability in gdb?). I tried to use this to get a good trace of an execution that happened to trail off into oblivion (executing "code" where there is none).

Other ideas for scripts:

[prelude]

b func_you_care_about

source cont_bt_N.txt

where "cont_bt_N.txt" contains N repetitions of

c

bt

i r

...

This will let you know the contexts in which "func_you_care_about" is reached.

This can also be done more simply by setting "commands" after setting the breakpoint (see http://johnnyjacob.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/gdb-scripting-short-article-for-internal-magazine/).

Misc: Just saw a talk on LLVM's lldb. It is also really scriptable. It provides scriptability from python and the ability to evaluate pretty complex C/C++ statements once a breakpoint is reached (e.g., a for-loop with printf to look through an array). One audience member commented that you could pretty much do Valgrind with these tools, but perhaps with higher overheads. Getting good traces with multi-threaded programs may also be a problem. I tried the instruction-by-instruction "stepi", and unfortunately, the trace got stuck in a CompareAndSwap loop.

Mugetsu

Lots of people reading Bleach =). There are no relevant links on the front page, but if you click the trends link then you will see many relevant blogposts:

Pretty cool.

Scripts Mysteriously Updated

We had a (locally downloaded) python script that needed to be given execute permissions. Mysteriously, this month it lost its execute permissions. The modification date, obviously was also some time in August. How did this happen?

XYZBBQ> How did it change? Who touched it?
jvoung> Maybe it likes to touch itself. Late at night.

Sigh.