Wind Powered Cargo Ships

I’ve done a lot of reading on the topic itself over the last few months, and I really like it. Cargo vessels that are powered by the wind. All modern cargo vessels are powered by conventional fuel sources, and I believe only a handful of commercial fishing vessels are under sail. There have been several attemps at building and deploying sails that are really gigantic kites on cargo ships, as sort of a bolt-on solution, however there would be a large amount of computer control required because of the complexities of wind at such a high altitude.

NewsDaily is carrying a piece on a new Sail powered vessel. One of the biggest impracticalities is the extra cost in building the ship itself, as well as concerns that a drop in fuel prices might make it even less practical.

Democamp Vancouver 4

Democamp Vancouver 4 was held today at the now infamous workspace.

Things started off with a hilarious session of BattleDecks, where two opponents square off against each other with slides prepared by an unknown 3rd party. The winner was a girl, whose name I am ebarassed to say I don’t know. The runner up was Jordan Behan. To his credit, he didn’t have much to work with.

While the numbers were high for attendance, only a few people ended up presenting ideas, including

AdHack

Vancouver Expert Financial

Momentum Magazine, and

NetHooks

AdHack is a great idea, and was by far the best presentation. Momentum Magazine has some great ideas and propaganda regarding bike culture, all of which was positive, beneficial information, and NetHooks fumbled the ball a little, but it will be interesting to see if their LinkedIn replacement is worth all the effort. One person made the obvious Facebook remark – How do you get away with starting a social networking site in this day and age? The answer came down to focus, and that they were gearing the site more towards young professionals who are looking for internships / etc. I still think a Facebook application has that potential, but the search features need a little tuning.

After the presentations it was off to Flux for everyone but me, of course, as I had to deal with my day job.

The next Democamp is slated for sometime in early January. I’m hoping to have something to present, now that I’ve seen what the process is like. I’m off to continue work!

Project Blackbox in Vancouver

I went to see Sun’s presentation on Project Blackbox today at the Westin Bayshore in Vancouver. The presentation consisted of a 20 minute talk / discussion session (too short IMO), as well as a brief tour of the container itself.

For those of you not in the know, Project Blackbox is the internal Sun name for their Data Center in a (20 ft) shipping container. While the concept isn’t entirely new, what’s impressive about the concept is the ability to rapidly bring up new computing capacity for lots of different tasks. Here in Vancouver, the Olympic committee should look into something like this, rather than setting up and tearing down temporary computing nodes to run the games in some of their many locations.

However, like in any data center the power requirements are pretty steep, and because the container uses closed-loop water-based cooling, you’d also need to find a chiller unit that can handle your environment. I did ask what the operating range for the system would be, and while you can run glycol instead of water, the system still has an operating range of -32c to +46c. While thats enough to handle most places, you’d still hesitate to run one outside in Calgary in the winter. It’s important to note is that Google has received a patent on the concept itself.

One solution that I really like but wasn’t discussed was disaster relief for circumstances like Hurricane Katrina, where it makes sense to have a distributed communication infrastructure. The Blackbox itself doesn’t have any modules for wireless connectivity, so it would be up to any team deploying one to build one on their own. I’d love to see a Blackbox with some satellite uplinks and wireless mesh capabilities.