Car? On Tracks?

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It hasn’t been a day for rail travel: a car fell onto the tracks at Silver Spring Station, and both Penn and Camden lines were tied up in both directions by heat restrictions and Amtrak engine problems, effectively blocking my two main routes home. So, I was on the MARC Penn Line for almost three hours again, at one point sitting idle just ten miles out of Washington for about 45 minutes, waiting on a stalled Acela Liner at the New Carrolton interlock which was blocking rail traffic all the way to Philly. They eventually got the nonfunctional engine off the interlock with a gentle push from a southbound MARC Local train.

Now I’m home, in a room without airconditioning, holding steady at 90°F. At night. With the fan running on high. It’s like I’m back in Manila.

Update: Washington Post photo of the offending car, and corresponding story.

iBook Battery Problem

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(Update, Aug 2006: Info on the Apple notebook battery recall here. This entry is about an older issue.)

iBook batteries are being killed, and the culprit for many (1, 2, 3) seems to be the OS X 10.2.4 upgrade. My own iBook (8 months old this 30th) is a recent victim as well, and its unplugged lifespan has, in a matter of weeks, deteriorated: from three hours, to one hour, to thirty minutes, to five. Since my refurbished unit is not covered by the standard Apple warranty (Silly me, I still have three months left on my refurb warranty after all) I’ve had to try every trick in the book, but to no avail.

As far as I can tell from previous discussions, (my own technical knowledge is limited, but I know a few practical things about Li-Ion and NiMH batteries from my Globe days) the OS X 10.2.4 upgrade seems to have irretrievably affected something in the battery’s own power management unit, so that it reports a full charge when in truth it is still at dangerously low levels. The undetected deficiency catches up with the portable user with a sudden sleep/shutdown at what still seems like near-full battery capacity.

X-Charge screenshot, showing sudden jump in battery's reported charge.

This X-Charge screenshot shows the sudden jump in the battery’s apparent capacity from just above 10%. I think it’s safe to assume that its true capacity is still stuck at around 10%, and it is just not increasing because the battery’s own firmware (?) now reports that it is fully charged.

From here, I’m unsure as to whether I should address the issue by purchasing a new battery. Perhaps it would be wiser to just wait till I can buy a mid-range Powerbook with Panther (hopefully with less buggy power management) later this year. For now, I’m stuck with a small, white, portable desktop machine — which, in truth, is still more than I could ask for.

Ionospheric Luminescence

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East-coasters, watch the skies tonight for high, glowing clouds, as NASA fires rockets carrying combustible chemicals into the sky to study our planet’s ionosphere. (Via Spaceweather.)

Update: Webcast page.

Update 2: Oh, bah. Launch scrubbed till tomorrow night.

I’m reminded, just a bit, of Projects Argus and Starfish, a series of tests in the 1960’s, in which nuclear devices were set off at various levels in the upper atmosphere (including a megaton-yield suborbital device detonated at 400km) to test the possible effects of nuclear detonations at high-altitude and in outer space. These ionospheric chemical-burning tests are far less explosive, of course.

Vitaminaffeine Water

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Glaceau has a good branding strategy going with their packaging: each variety of “vitamin water” has a witty description under its single-word name. Right now I’m drinking “Revive,” which tells me, among other things:

active ingredients – see contents on label.

inactive ingredients – see contents on your couch.

Unlike Gatorade or V8, Vitamin Water has 0mg sodium. The catch is, the bottle doesn’t tell you how much caffeine is in there. Apparently, there’s a lot. No wonder it’s so good.

Misererail redux

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I’ve updated Miserere and Rail a bit. Miserere’s sped-up sound should now sync with the Latin text, and both pieces now have preload counters: a simple implementation of FlashMX’s getBytesLoaded() and getBytesTotal() functions.