For anyone interested in technical details (or having difficulty with their own blog) the fix simply involved recompiling PHP with the xmlrpc use flag.

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Unlike the “live” stats image back in my first boinc post, this one is static as a celebration of this milestone. If you’re interested, you can read a much more comprehensive summary of my activity over at BoincStats.

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Already this page is definitely faster, and I hope that it will be able to operate more consistently from this point. I think I have managed to import essentially all the content that previously populated this blog, but if you find any glaring omissions feel free to let me know.

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The BOINC client gets computational jobs to do from the project server, and works on them when it notices that you are not using your computer. Participants all over the world create an giant distributed “super-computer”, and idle computers do something useful.

I decided to try it out, and installed the client on my laptop about a week ago. I’ve been very impressed with the way that it does its stuff in the background, and have not had it interfere with any of my computer usage. It’s even smart enough to know not to run when I’m operating on battery power!

I’m participating in the Spinhenge@home project, which is researching “nano-magnetic molecules”. This field is somewhat related to my own research.

Here is a snapshot of my statistics so far:

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A quick web search led me to this good summary of low-memory configuration options for MySQL and Apache. I’ve tried some of the suggestions in my.cnf, and we’ll see if it makes a difference.

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So here we are, back on air again at lachlan.rogers.name . Hopefully more reliably connected than we have been for the last few months.

I have tweaked things a bit, as you may notice. With the change of hardware, I did an upgrade of my WordPress installation. I’ve also switched to a new theme, and at the moment it has a very minimalist appearance (which I like quite a lot, to be honest). I may have a go at “colouring it in” over the next little while. More importantly than appearance, however, is the fact that this new theme is easier and more efficient to use.

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Bioenergy is chemical energy stored in biological systems. an obvious example is wood, which can be burned for heat (for example). Burning biomass like this does release carbon into the atmosphere, but it is carbon which has only recenly been captured from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. This is fundamentally different from fossil fuels, which release carbon that has been out of circulation in the biosphere for a long time.

Bioenergy makes up about 11% of the global energy consumption. Systems range from internal wood combusting fireplaces used for heating individual homes, all the way to massive powerstations that supply electricity and heat to cities. One of the largest biomass-capable powerstations in the world is the Avedøre-2 power plant in Copenhagen, which is able to “supply district heat to about 180,000 homes and provide electricity consumption for 800,000 households.”

Power stations like this are often designed to burn fuels like wood pellets (compacted sawmill waste), as well as straw and other dry bio waste forms. In fact, some of these power stations can operate on 100% coal, 100% biomass, or any mix in between! Burning dry biomass in these sort of power plants makes for very cheap clean energy, because the infrastructure essentially exists already.

It is also possible to produce liquid and gas fuels directly from biomass. Ethanol and biodiesel are well-known examples of this. Australia produces about 170 MW of landfill gas energy each year, which is simply harvesting the gasses given off by domestic waste in landfills. This gas may be used to produce electricity, but it can be used directly; 15 000 vehicles run on biogas in Sweden – including busses and even a train!

I’m particularly excited by projects such as the Camillia anaerobic digester, a large commercial venture in Sydney. It is situated close to the Sydney fresh food markets, and is designed to recover energy and fertiliser from 51,000 tonnes/year of food wastes from supermarkets, restaurants and food industries. The facility generates approximately 3.0 MW of electrical energy while utilising the waste heat to produce high quality organic fertiliser.

This fertiliser is a good illustration that bioenergy is not just an energy system; the waste from using “waste” to generate energy is rarely useless. Burning wood produces much less ash than burning coal, and wood ash is non-toxic (unlike coal). Ash from wood furnaces can be used to enrich soils, and can even be sprayed back into the forests that supply the original fuel.

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The second thing is a fantastic example of what OSM has to offer. Flickr, the amazingly popular photo-sharing site, has wonderful tools for geo-tagging photos and then browsing interesting photos by their position on a map. A week ago, coinciding with the start of the Olympic Games, Flickr introduced OpenStreetMap coverage of Beijing to their geotagging map. This was not just done for fun; the fact is that the OpenStreetMap of Beijing is far more complete than the Yahoo map (which is used by Flickr for the rest of the world).

Interestingly, this reveals a remarkable symbiosis between OSM and Yahoo. A while ago Yahoo agreed to let OSM contributors freely use their aerial imagery to trace features. This enabled people to contribute significantly to the OSM project even without a GPS device, and a lot of OSM data has been obtained this way. Now Yahoo (who own Flickr) are able to use the OSM dataset to enhance the geotagging service that they provide. Yet another example of how opening up access to information invariably leads to win-win outcomes.

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I found this advice on WordPress backups and this quick guide to upgrading WordPress particularly useful and easy to follow.  Luckily, the upgrade process went smoothly and I didn’t need to use my backup.

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An example is this “pine cone” that neatly folds flat. This sort of research could lead to applications ranging from foldable drink bottles to “light sails” and antennae on spacecraft. Being able to fabricate rigid core structures from a flat sheet could also significantly reduce costs. Also, as Ian Stewart points out in the Nature article,

The mathematics developed along the way could also feed back into a better understanding of nature’s own origami: the growth and development of leaves, buds and insect wings.

Stewart coins the term “origamics” for this new field of study.

The article reports on a recent presentation by Taketoshi Nojima that describes folding a surprising range of “tubes, conical shells, circular membranes, movable/shape-changeable models and highly rigid 3-D cores” from flat sheet materials. Scroll through to the last few pages of the presentation manuscript to find pictures of some very serious origami indeed.

Reading about this research reminded me of my discovery of modular origami a few years ago. It might not have quite as many technological applications as origamics, but uses multiple sheets of paper to create very impressive structures. My long-standing favourite is the C-60 buckyball, and I’ve included a picture. Unfortunately, I’m yet to complete one of my own.

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