How to save F1

Posted by Shane – May 14, 2009

For those who haven’t been keeping with the wacky world of F1 politics, here is a short primer:

First you must understand the current geography of F1. There are three major bodies involved, the FIA (the rules), the FOM (the money) and the FOTA (the teams). All three would like to reduce the costs associated with operating an F1 team, but they don’t necessarily agree on how to go about it. Currently the FIA and FOM have put forth rules that will allow teams to operate based on one of two strategies. Either you get to have unlimited budgets but limited technical freedom, or you can have a limited budget with more freedom from technical regulations. This may seem like a best-of-both worlds strategy, but I don’t think that it is.

Imagine an F1 world where Renault, Ferrari, McLaren, BMW and Toyota are spending upwards of $200 million dollars a year to compete with teams who have budgets of only $60 million dollars. The big boys will be spending enormous amounts of money, constrained by an overburdened set of technical regulations while the budget teams may be able to beat them with their greater technical freedoms. I can’t imagine Ferrari would be to happy with Lola coming into F1 and being able to run circles around them for a fraction of the cost.

So why wouldn’t the big boys want to run under the currently proposed budget cap? Well, I suppose it doesn’t seem like a worthwhile effort to them. The big name teams are in F1 to express their technical expertise on the world’s grandest motorsports stage. This season in particular has proven to the F1 world that pouring money into your team does not guarantee success. BrawnGP and RBR have begun to run away with the championship lead while the traditional front-runners are floundering. It isn’t because BrawnGP or RBR have spent more money, it is because they are simply doing it better. They are what F1 is all about. A dedicated team of engineers, mechanics and drivers that have crafted a car capable of amazing feats of speed, endurance and reliability.

So how does one fix the current debacle? Easy, at least I think it is easy. Simply begin to transition the cost savings measures from a technical regulation model to a budget cap model. Over the course of a number of seasons allow the teams more technical freedom in exchange for reduced budget caps. But don’t start with $60 million dollars, perhaps that number is attainable in five or more years, but the teams simply cannot be forced into it next year.

One thing I would love to see in F1 is a removal of technical regulations regarding the engine, in conjunction with a reasonable overall budget cap. Currently the engines are 2.4 Liter V8s, limited to 18,000 RPM. Additionally, development on these engines has been frozen for 5 years. That doesn’t seem very F1 to me, F1 is all about development. I would rather the FIA mandate a maximum amount of fuel per race and a restrictor plate. Allow the teams to use any displacement and configuration they want to achieve maximum performance from a specific amount of fuel and air. The size of the restrictor plate should be equal to the current intake volume of the 2.4 Liter V8 running at 18,000 RPM. That way a team could use a 4 cylinder, turbocharged boxer engine if they felt that it provided the best performance, or a supercharged 1 liter, inline 3 cyclinder. The point being that engine development would be a primary differentiator in performance. One other added benefit would be that the teams would be focusing a massive engineering effort on efficiency and fuel economy, something that the motoring public would directly benefit from.

Updating Ruby on OSX Leopard

Posted by Shane – May 13, 2009

Quick and easy method for updating, or rather installing an updated version of Ruby on OSX Leopard (10.5) from Hivelogic. Ruby ships with OSX Leopard which is great, but the version included is outdated in regards to the recommendations of the Ruby on Rails folk.

This method seems to be the best way because it doesn’t overwrite what Apple has shipped with OSX, rather it just tells the computer to keep the older version, but use the newer version in it’s stead. Of course, this does require some command line shenanigans, but once you get started it really isn’t all that difficult. Besides, if you are concerned about using Ruby and/or Rails you should be comfortable using the command line!

Some Git goodness

Posted by Shane – May 11, 2009

A project I am working on has a configuration file that contains a few variables for using Microsoft’s Active Directory to authenticate to a Ruby on Rails application. This is working great, but I was banging my head against a wall trying to get Git to not track changes to the configuration file. I didn’t want my username and passwords tracked in GitHub for obvious reasons, but I did want a generic copy of the configuration file in the repository.

While searching for a solution today, I ran across this little gem of an article titled “GIT: ignoring changes in tracked files” from Pagebakers.nl, the salient code is below:


git update-index --assume-unchanged <file>

Pretty Fords

Posted by Shane – April 3, 2009

Ford Fiesta

I never thought this day would come, but I am realizing that a US car maker has actually made a few cars that I don’t hate. Specifically the Ford Edge, Ford Fusion and forthcoming 2011 Ford Fiesta. The Fiesta is getting a lot of buzz right now, and I think it may actually be deserved.

I had long since given up on any US offerings from the “not so big 3″. Up until now they have utterly failed to excite any of my senses. There are a few holdouts from years past, but they aren’t the mass market cars that normal people can afford or that are practical for everyday life. That being said, Ford looks positioned to be rather successful in the coming years as both GM and Chrysler spiral ever downwards towards their inevitable end.

Ford Edge

Now all Ford needs to do is embrace clean diesel technology with both of these cars and I may line up to buy one. Unfortunately, Ford doesn’t seem to planning to offer either of these with a fuel-sipping diesel. The european market Fiesta ECOnetic, with the fantastic little diesel engine gets 65 MPG! 65! That easily best the fuel economy of a hybrid drive system like in the Toyota Prius or forthcoming Honda Insight without the environmentally unsound use of NiMH batteries. While the diesel engine equipped Fiesta is certainly no rocket ship (it only has 88 HP), it would get me back and forth to work on 1/2 of a gallon of gasoline!

Ford Fusion

So, Ford, wake up! Don’t let your middle-America biased, all placating, uninspired market research teams and penny-pinching accountants turn your otherwise exciting products into something resembling your offerings from the past quarter century. Do something bold, be a leader. Offer the American people a car that they don’t know they want! Show them that you are capable of designing a good looking, fun to drive car that is environmentally sound. Market them as vehicles that will decrease American independence on foreign oil and help free us from it’s shackles. Do this and I think you will begin to see more Ford’s on the road than at any time since the Model-T era.

Add weekdays in Ruby on Rails

Posted by Shane – March 9, 2009

I am working on an application where I need to be able to add 3 week days to today’s date. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any built-in functionality for this in Ruby, so I needed to roll my own. At first I searched Google hoping someone had already solved the problem for me, which is most often the case. Not so with this problem. I did however come across this post on Platte daddy, which provided a good starting point, but was designed to simply add 1 weekday, not any number of days that I want.

I ran through a number of iterations until I came up with this helper method:


def add_cwdays(date, n)
#Add number of weekdays plus necessary weekend days
date += n.days + (2*(n/5.floor)).days
#If the above lands on a weekend, keep adding days until it is a weekday
date += 1.days until (1..5).member?(date.wday)
date
end

This was added to my ApplicationHelper.rb file and is called for adding 3 week days to today via:


add_cwdays(Time.now, 3)

I created a helper to DRY the method and I wrote it so that the starting date and the number of workdays is variable. The helper has only 2 lines of code (after some re-factoring), which reduces the readability a bit, but it still makes sense I think.

The first line simply adds the desired number of weekdays, plus any weekend days that would be within the range of week days. If we wanted to add 8 weekdays, we would need to add 10 total calendar days (1 weekend). If we wanted to add 23 weekdays, we would need to add 31 total calendar days (4 weekends). If we wanted to add 4 weekdays, we would need to add 4 total calendar days (no weekends). The weekend addition is made with the (2*(n/5.floor)).days bit of code. Basically take the number of days “n”, divide by five, strip off the decimal and multiply by 2 (for Saturday and Sunday).

The second line of code deals with the eventuality of the first line landing on a weekend. If this happens, we simply add 1 day repeatedly “until” we reach a weekday.

This seems to be working well, if anyone looks this over and sees anything wrong or if there are any opportunities to re-factor and simplify, please post comments.

Make Safari’s windows behave properly

Posted by Shane – March 4, 2009

via: MacLife

I have not used Safari as my primary browser in OSX primarily because I prefer the tab behaviour of Firefox. This was true until I found this interesting article (See #4) on MacLife about changing the way Safari handles tabs.

Simply open up the Terminal and enter the following:

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool TRUE

This little gem tells Safari to open new windows in new tabs instead of in an entirely new window, just like Firefox does. Hopefully Apple will make this simpler in the future via an option in Safari’s Preferences, but until then I think this will suffice.

Now all I need Apple to do is to get auto-complete of URLs working like Firefox…

USF1

Posted by Shane – February 24, 2009

via: Autoblog

USF1 has officially announced plans to compete in the 2010 Formula One series. There has been a bit of speculation throughout the interwebs of late regarding this, but nothing official until now. The team will be based in Charlotte, NC and they plan to operate more like a skunk-works than a traditional F1 team. Seems reminiscent of Super Aguri, which saw limited success with a tiny (comparitively) budget.

Of particular note is their intention to be open and accesible to their fans. Traditionally, F1 is a super-secret society, shielding all news and developments from prying eyes. It will be interesting to see just how open they will be.

Google Sync

Posted by Shane – February 9, 2009

Google has added Sync! What does this mean, well if you own an iPhone or other compatible device and you have a Gmail account you can now wirelessly and automagically sync your contacts and calendar with your Gmail contacts and Google Calendar. This is a really nice feature which makes the iPhone + Google combination every bit as capable as the BlackBerry and Microsoft Exchange combo. With this latest release from Google, an enterprise is no longer tied to Microsoft Exchange and RIMs Blackberry for enterprise class mobility.

A telling little change?

Posted by Shane – January 20, 2009

via: Digg

Kottke.org has an article “The country’s new robots.txt file” that shows what will hopefully be the first of many, many changes to the way the President of the United States of America executes the duties of his office.

Basically, the Bush administration was blocking search engines from finding information on the official White House website (almost 2,400 individual blocking statements). As soon as the Obama administration changed the site, all of those restrictions have been removed. Hopefully by the end of Obama’s tenure he will not find it necessary to try so hard to hide information from the people he serves.

Linux server instructions

Posted by Shane – January 20, 2009

Slicehost has some really nice tutorials and instructions for setting up a Linux server to get a website up and running. I just followed the tutorial for setting up a Ruby on Rails site being server by Apache using Passenger. If this sounds like a foreign language, well the names for software in the FOSS world can be a bit confusing but once involved in the process they become more familiar.

There are four basic steps that I followed:

1. Install and configure the server’s operating system (parts 1 & 2, Ubuntu 8.10 (aka Intrepid Ibex)
2. Install Ruby, Ruby Gems and Rails
3. Install Apache and Passenger and configure them to serve up a Rails site.
4. Make a website

Not too difficult, well, except for step #4! Ha! All told, the entire process takes about an hour (most of that spent downloading, installing and updating the software).