Still Not Perfect

I finally finished reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (except for one 50+ page monologue – just too much of one thing). I started reading it way back in August and got about half way through its 1100+ pages on a vacation trip. But once we got back home and life returned to normal (meaning too busy) my reading rate dropped off considerably.

Like many of my favorite books (George Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World) Atlas Shrugged carries a strong political message, or at least acts as a commentary on the state of politics, freedoms, and economics in our age. The book is really a vehicle for Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism (a philosophy that some say often influences the American Libertarian Party platform). That said, it is still quite a good story. However, if you are looking for a more concise presentation of Rand’s ideas, or maybe a piece of work that develops story and plot better, many people suggest The Fountainhead. (more…)

Flickr has enhanced their already rich API even more by adding methods for creating, editing, and deleting “notes”. I’ve been waiting for this so that I can integrate notes features better into my Flickr Gallery WP plugin.

The preliminary plan is to try to use FotoBuzz as an optional interface for adding notes to your Flickr photos through my plugin. This will require a bit of work because I will have to re-write the open source back-end (released under the LGPL) of FotoBuzz to store notes on Flickr instead of embedding them in the image files. To do this I have to figure out how to talk to the front-end of FotoBuzz, which is just going to take some experimentation because the Flash (yuck) GUI part of FotoBuzz is closed source (but still free to distribute because it is released under the CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 license) and undocumented.

Hopefully I will get some time in the next few days to work on this a little. I’m pretty excited about it.

Other features I’ll hopefully be adding to the plugin in the next few days:

• Ability to create human-readable (or at least more friendly) URIs with the help of mod_rewrite and .htaccess files
• Options to show the CC license photos are released under
• Options to choose which visibility level to display (public, friends, family)
• Probably a couple more bug fixes (as my rag-tag band of testers find bugs)

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Living on Earth mentioned an Oregon DOT sponsored project to track the mileage that motorists drive on Oregon roads and use the data to institute a use-based road tax to replace the hefty state gasoline tax. Oregon, like all other states, charges a state tax on every gallon of gasoline sold on top of the $.18 federal tax per gallon. The states use this money to fund the maintenance of roads and bridges. Many states are noticing decreasing revenue with this model due to the increase in hybrid and fuel-efficient car sales.

Oregon DOT has been funding a project at Oregon State University (also mentioned in GPS World) as a potential solution to the decreasing revenue from gasoline taxes. The proposed program uses a combination of existing GPS and radio technology to tax the motorist for the miles driven every time they refill their fuel tank. This is how it works:

• The GPS receiver and the odometer are used together to determine how many miles were driven inside Oregon’s borders
• A radio transmitter transmits the mileage data to the gas pump when you fill up
• The mileage data is used to calculate your usage tax and you are charged the usage tax instead of the flat per gallon state tax

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