Lilypond - music notation hard core

GarageBand for MacOSX comes with some great free music lessons.

I've been working my way through the piano ones, and they're excellent for keeping up the focus and motivation by giving some quick results, and in the "Play" section rewarding you with an accompaniment for your efforts that makes even an average performance sound pretty good.

Trouble is, when you have a minute or two with the keyboard and just want to practice some of what you've learned going back to GarageBand and firing up the lesson, scrolling to the part you're having trouble with is quite a pain.

It would be really handy to have some way to print out the score - but there isn't.

Well there is a tool that makes it pretty easy to code up musical scores, especially ones that have lots of repititive sections like the GarageBand lessons.

Its called Lilypond, and although it requires some command-line fu, to get it to do your bidding the results are nothing short of spectacular.

The first step is to go to the Lilypond site and download the version for your computer.

When you first run Lilypond it will show a sample file with a short scale. The section with "Welcome to Lilypond" is bracketed with %{ and }, so its treated as a comment - the rest of the sample file is lilypond music notation!

Choose select all, and delete the contents of the sample file, and replace it with your own notation.

Get started quickly by picking one of their templates that is close to the result you want, and modifying it rather than starting with a blank slate.

The notation may look a bit daunting at first, but its actually pretty simple and you can learn just enough to achieve your goals by following the excellent documentation.

I laid out my notation with the treble staff first, and then the bass - all with one measure to a line. That allowed me to quickly find the measure I had made a mistake on (since lilypond conveniently numbers your measures).

Once you have your text file prepared, you run the "Typeset file" command from the "Compile" menu and the PDF of your music appears.

Here's a screenshot of the final result.

To start working really effectively with Lilypond, you should understand that at its heart its a simple command line tool, designed for one job - taking Lilypond files, called something like "my-music.ly", processing them, and producing musical score as a result.

Here's how to run Lilypond from the command line, assuming its installed in MacOSX's /Applications folder:

/Applications/LilyPond.app/Contents/Resources/bin/lilypond -o "~/Documents" "~/my-music.ly"

The ~/Documents is the folder where the resulting files will be dropped.

Given that Lilypond is really a command line application the GUI program that you get on MacOSX or Windows is kind of tacked on and really isn't needed - in fact the editor that comes with Lilypond is really meant to be a "get you past first base" kind of thing.

I personally use the VIM editor, which is hard core - not for everyone. If you're a fan of vim however, you can find a set of indentation and colouration files inside the application:

LilyPond.app/Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/vim

Copy those into your .vim directory to get nicely indented and syntax highlighted editing inside vim.

To work with lilypond from the command line, on MacOSX download a handy script, and run it from the terminal. The script has the above lilypond invocation inside, and will wait for you to pass the path of your file to it, and then present you with the result. You then get the option to either run lilypond again on your file (presumably after you've made some edits) or to quit.

Good luck with your next great score!

Hot, Flat and Upgefscked

A day or two ago I donated to GetUp's campaign to fund billboards on Abbot's "business as usual" climate policy.

I hope the campaign is successful not just in shaming the coalition into action, but also in waking up our elected representatives; currently making a hash of their only marginally better policy on climate change.

The opposition keep name-calling, hoping that their slinging of the dread word "tax" will stick to Rudd's cap-and-trade policy.

The irony is that a tax would be the best policy of the lot - David Victor, Stanford University Professor and expert on international coal markets:

I think we have vastly oversold the role of the market in the solution to this problem...

As Dr Victor grudgingly admits, ETS schemes are failing and only a tax would be a strong and clear signal - fixed and away from the vagaries of the market, so that Australian clean technology entrepreneurs, as well as all other green innovations and measures are actually economically viable.

Why would you catch a clean green bus, when your car is cheap to run on petrol? Why would you pay much more for an electric vehicle, when your gas guzzler is so cheap to buy and register by comparison?

This is 2010 - the year of the electric car, but we won't see any of them in numbers Australia because our governments are completely failing to create policies to make it attractive to manufacturers to ship them here. In the UK tax on new cars is figured based on their emissions ratings and thus EV's are very attractive there - zero emissions vehicles finally competing on a level playing field. In the USA tax credits are available for zero emissions vehicles - for example resulting in a $7500 saving on the Chevy Volt.

Why are electric vehicle entrepreneurs in Australia struggling to get off the ground?

Because here we just dig stuff out of the ground and ship it over seas. That's what we do, that's our plan for the future.

The Smart State? The lucky country? Nope, we're the Idiocracy. If it wasn't bad enough that we have Senator Fielding, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy and Attorney-General Michael Atkinson. Now we have Abbot and his ludicrous non-policy.

The problem for Australia with regards to climate change is that we've completely failed to realize the urgency, and the Abbott's of this nation are just lowering the average climate intelligence quotient right across Australia.

The heatwave conditions in Feb 2009 which filled the morgue in Victoria and spread wildfires were the pre-saging of more to come, according to the Australian Bureau of Meterology, thanks to climate change.

But more heatwaves when they come will not be our biggest problem here in Australia.

I've just read (on pg 80 of) Thomas L Friedman's "Hot, Flat & Crowded" (2009 edition) that the Sigma Xi group, commissioned by the UN to report on climate change, said in their February 2007 document "Confronting Climate Change" that the relatively small increase of 0.8 degrees C since 1750 has been "accompanied by significant increases in the incidence of floods, droughts, heat waves and wildfires".

But more fires and droughts when they come will not be our biggest problem here in Australia either.

Our bigger problem is that when the effects of climate change hit the countries most vulnerable to its effects, when their crops fail and disease spreads and generally things are looking like the four horsemen of the apocalypse have moved in for good: where do you think those refugees are going to go?

Here is where they'll go: the lucky country. While we battle bushfires, and raging ignorance, and compete to see how far we can stick our heads in the sand, desperate refugees will be arriving here in force. At the same time, our armed forces will be called on for international relief efforts, much as they were for the tsunami disaster in Banda Aceh in 2004.

While we turn up our air-conditioners, and argue that climate change is bogus because of some emails from East Anglia, the evidence of climate change will be arriving on our doorstep in ever-increasing numbers.

Oh, and Tony, good luck reanimating some the policies of our old dark lords with a return to "turn back the boats" policies - these people will have no country to go back to.

Apart from refugees, the other problem dwarfing fires, drought and heat that climate change will bring for Australia is that if we keep being as backward as we are regarding clean technologies is that soon no-one will want the stuff we're digging out of the ground.

China is investing massively in clean technologies, and indeed some of our top talent in solar technologies have gone there - others to the USA - due to the clear state commitment to controlling climate change with high-tech solutions, especially compared to the dismal picture here.

When these large Chinese plants come on line in the next 5 to 10 years their own local reserves of coal will be more than adequate to meet the needs of their dwindling coal plants.

By then it will be too late for Australia to turn around and beg those scientists to come back and start trying to foster a clean tech industry - we'll be sitting on a pile of worthless black dirt that no-one wants, and lagging so far behind the technology race that we don't have a hope of catching up.

Swamped with refugees and becoming a backward third-world country. That's not what I want for my Australia.

Come on K Rudd - show Abbot what a real forward thinking climate policy looks like, and make us the lucky country once again.

Gloves come off as Copenhagen nears

Computer files were delivered to a climate change sceptic, BBC weather personality Paul Hudson. These files - it was claimed - are evidence of malfeasance by scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit.

For example in one of the files the writer, allegedly a CRU scientist, talks about using a "trick" and also refers to "hiding" some values.

The story first unfolded on Hudson's blog where he says he can confirm that some of the files are actual East Anglia CRU emails, because he was involved in those email conversations.

Although he received the files on the 12th of October, suddenly with Copenhagen around the corner the apocryphal files have been beaten up in the last 48 hours, into a smoking gun, 11th hour expose by this tawdry conspiracy anorak Hudson and a handful of other journalists who ought to have known better.

Hudsons involvement and the provenance of these files reeks. Any ethical journalist would not have touched the affair with a barge pole.

Note that these are not paper documents, they're electronic files. Already if one follows the link from Hudson's blog to the small sample of the alleged emails it can be seen that the emails have been altered by replacing the authors email addresses with xxxxxxx.

Clearly any of the text of the alleged emails could easily have been altered in subtle ways to make the contents appear suspect. Certainly East Anglia University has not verified that the alleged emails are true and correct, and without alteration.

What makes this appalling lack of journalistic rigour by those promoting this beat-up even worse is that there is no global warming conspiracy in these emails, even if they were true.

As the RealClimate web forum puts it:

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, ... no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords.

These files are not even close to any smoking gun, and just amount to the same back-and-forth that you'd find in the email servers of any professional organisation.

As RealClimate points out - a trick does not mean something underhand. If you're a professional in any sphere, a handy technique that quickly gets the job done but produces valid and ethically sound results can be called a "trick" - a valuable nugget of experience.

Everyone from surgeons to auto-electricians have handy tricks they use to get their job done, without any implication of malfeasance.

Certainly cherry-picking the computer files for phrases that could imply anything is meaningless without reading all the files in context.

I write software for a living and there are often vigorous disagreements both within our company and between members of the software engineering community and our own engineers about the quality of code, the viability of our approaches and a range of other topics. But none of this detracts from the fact that we produce the deliverables, and the results are well engineered and professionally sound.

Just the IPCC report - the work of several hundred scientists from all over the world - is sound and so and the science behind it and other peer reviewed studies which reach the same conclusions.

A few dozen emails out of months and months of correspondence of one research center and all they could come up with is a "trick" being used?

Don't worry - there will be more dirty tricks from the right wing media and their mud slinging brigade in the lead up to Copenhagen.

The Future of Energy

In a very timely conjunction, I went to a great panel discusssion of five experts, all of whom were speakers at the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering 32nd Symposium held just recently in Brisbane. The title of the symposium was Future-Proofing Australia - Rising to the Challenge of Climate Change.

I say timely because the panel discussion was a face-to-face demonstration of a real conviction in the scientific and engineering community that ways are immediately available to move forward into cleaner energy for Australia.

Perhaps for me one of the most surprising moments in the proceedings were when a straw poll was taken of the audience on whether they would support nuclear power generation in Australia: the result was a resounding "yes".

Myself I'm used to being in the minority especially amongst my greenier friends when I advocate for nuclear power.

After the event I talked to one of the panelists, Peter Meurs, about his Blade EV which Peter charges from a very impressive solar array at his home. A real world example of zero emissions EV driving.

Of course if you have read my previous posts, a future of greener power generation has great implications in electric vehicles. If EV's have only relatively small takeup - and optimistic projections say 20% by 2030, then the impact on the grids emissions will likely be negligible.

But with clean power we can look to a future with close to 100% EV penetration in the national fleet - with all the zero tailpipe emissions that that would entail - without having a coincident increase in emissions from coal fired power plants.

Why this is critical is that many EV manufacturers are only going to deliver their limited EV production to countries that provide decent governmental support, with infrastructure spending if possible, but also with taxes or other incentives that make the EV's competitive with petrol powered cars. And governments will do that if they know that EV's will definitely reduce greenhouse gases.

While at the panel discussion I also spoke to another of the experts, John Loughhead of the UK Energy Research Center, who told me about the UK system of incentives and programmes for low-emissions vehicles in the UK. John told me about the UK excise on vehicles that have higher emissions of greenhouse gases, which as an example usage of the VED calculator places a duty of 405GBP (around $730 Australian) on the 4.2l V8 Ranger Rover for its 376 g/km.

When vehicle buyers are paying for their polluting ICE vehicles at a rate that reflects their actual cost to the environment it makes the extra upfront costs of zero emission EV's and low emissions PHEV's comparable on a level playing field.

The aim of the long tailpipe crowd is to spread confusion and disinformation in order to derail that message and kill off the electric car by making ICE's stay at their artificially cheap current day prices.

I'm seeing a lot of activity around the "long tailpipe" issue at present. Of course there is the E&T report which I critiqued in my last post, and before that the GAO report in June. I dismissed that report at the time as it made no negative findings about EV's.

However it was quoted in a number of articles since under headlines like "GAO: Electric Cars Won't Reduce Carbon Emissions". This is a bit of a stretch from what the report actually says which is that electric vehicles charged from coal fired power will only be 4-5% better.

Update: I contacted Mark Gaffigan (Director of the Natural Resources and Environment Team at the GAO, and lead author of the report) for comment:

The bottom line regarding your questions, per our report, is that plug in electric vehicles could result in reduced emissions of greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants but the environmental benefits depend upon whether the electricity used to power plug ins emits fewer greenhouse gases and pollutants than the fuel it replaces.

What Mr Gaffigan is carefully saying is that EV's could result in reduced emissions - not that they definitely won't - and that whether they do or not depends on the grid.

I am at a loss to understand the cynicism of attacks on the EV, which wilfully misquote reports and studies, and use other dirty tricks.

Do these people really believe that we can just keep driving in petrol powered cars?

We should have fixed this 30 years ago when the first oil shock occurred, when we realised the dangers of being hooked on oil and beholden to its curators, a who's who of enemies of reason and western democracy.

Here is some good science that provides yet another example of how personal management of EV charging provides the opportunity for great reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. There is no such opportunity with petrol powered cars, including conventional hybrids.

Its great to see some real science and engineering working on getting solution that work now rolled out for the benefit of all our futures.

EVs Speed Climate Change? WTF??

Now that climate change is firmly on every country's agenda, lobby groups and think tanks everywhere are jumping on the band-wagon.

It seems like there are million of these wise-ass organizations trumpeting green advice for public consumption, and producing policy statements and reports for government.

A very common factor in many of these statements and reports is the well-to-wheel analysis which talks about electric vehicles producing greenhouse gases. Below I go into a detailed discussion of why this type of analysis and its conclusion (EV's produce greenhouse gases) are just plain wrong.

But first a prime example of how misleading this type of "report" can be.

Clean vehicle website Autoblog green is carrying a press release from the Environmental Transport Association, quoting from a new report by a group called Transport & Environment stating that:

Switching to electric cars could speed climate change

There are other groups such as the National Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Law and Policy Center saying:

Plug-in cars could actually increase air pollution

Wait!! Oh, my God!!

You mean my electric car, which I thought was definitely clean and green, could actually bring on climate change? Panic! Hold the presses!!

Could, might? Its lurking down there in my garage, and on the toss of a coin, the roll of a dice, it might decide to start spewing greenhouse gases into the environment! There's a chance??

No?

So what the hell are they talking about then?

Are these guys some sort of oil industry goons, talking down EV's?

No, they're mostly not - but they're also not scientists (like the IPCC) or governmental agencies (like the US Department of Energy). They have their own particular hobby-horses to ride.

The ETA for example is a company that makes its living in the United Kingdom by selling green transport services, like insurance and roadside assistance. Its name - Environmental Transport Association makes it sound official, but its a commercial organisation, and it has to pay the rent just like any commercial organisation. Every EV owner who believes that their vehicle generates no emissions is one less customer for ETA's carbon offset service.

NRDC does not like coal, and - rightly so - is keen to jump on any chance to point out that increasing dependence on electricity in states that depend on coal has to be coupled with a corresponding commitment to reducing the use of coal in its power generation mix. As the NRDC rightly points out so-called carbon capture and sequestration is not a "technology" it is a branch of science fiction, and is not to be relied apon to clean up coal-fired power generation.

And of course since most of the states in the mid-west rely on coal for power generation (see table A1 in the DOE's figures), the ELPC (a mid-west specific environmental organisation) is keen to see that the new-found governmental interest in EV's does not push aside concerns about pollution from coal fired power generation.

There is a completely valid point to be made here that coal fired power generation is an environmental hazard, and that clean power generation has to be a top priority in the fight against climate change.

What is not valid is to connect uptake of EV's to an increase in coal fired power generation.

Let's unpack this Plug-in cars could actually increase air pollution statement.

See the could here, is not that there is some chance or possibility. Green EV's are not suddenly going to start producing greenhouse gases on some percentage outcome.

Electric Vehicles never ever produce greenhouse gases.

All of this confusing scare mongering is just another repackaging of the good old long tailpipe argument that we've heard so many times before.

Let me just say this again slowly.

Some power plants produce greenhouse gases. Not EV's - power plants.

An EV is not a power plant, and EV's don't have tail pipes at all, or chimneys, or in fact any way at all to produce smoke or pollution.

Well-to-wheels - in depth discussion

How this mischief has come about is that the good ol' boys that we love for coming up with the "Hummer is more economical than the Prius" and other great "analyses" and "reports", just could not except that EV's produced no pollutants. They said "You have to look at the big picture - you have to do a well-to-wheel analysis".

As a result the EPA and also european equivalent organizations have come up with measures based on gCO2e - which means in English grams of CO2 equivalent, used to analyse things like the total impact of renewable fuels. Stretch that analysis over vehicles and you have gCO2e/km, which results in completely bizarre statements like the GM claim of 230 miles per gallon for the Volt PHEV.

Don't get me wrong - the Volt is a great design and will be a great vehicle for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But 230mpg is rubbish - its meaningless. Why? Because equivalents just do not work when you start powering vehicles with electricity.

How you drive, when you drive, when you charge, how you charge - all of these things are drastic game changers for the sums behind the report that the ETA is quoting from.

I contacted the ETA's press officer and on request was promptly given a copy of the 51 page report. The report is actually written not by the ETA, but by the European Federation for Transport and Environment. Yet another official sounding group, T&E is actually an industry organisation representing around 50 different bodies mostly with a environmental focus. The report is not new facts - it is an analysis of existing studies and of yet more reports. The main focus of the report is on the European Emissions Trading Scheme and the impact of European government taxation schemes on electricity generation for EVs.

The T&E group wants stronger government action to tighten taxes and legislative incentives to produce cleaner power - something we all should wholeheartedly support. But since EV's are so high on the agenda of governments, T&E is hitching their message about cleaner power to EV's by saying EV's could "produce more emissions" unless power is cleaned up first.

This is where T&E stretches the friendship, by making claims that there is no science to support.

So what does T&E base its claim on, if its so wrong?

Well, the sound bite that heads up ETA's press release, and which is trumpeted in the introduction to T&E's report is referenced (on pg 27) to a study by Kromer & Heywood. In fact several large portions of the T&E report are verbatim from Kromer & Heywood's study.

Take note before going on, that the plugins could speed climate change statement has actually lost some context as it appears in the sound bite: the Kromer study is actually saying that if power is coming from coal, PHEV's like the Chevy Volt will be marginally more emissive than a hybrid vehicle like the Prius.

I think you'll agree that this is far from saying that EV's will increase climate change, but its still wrong, and its potential for misquoting means that it must not be left to stand.

The Kromer study was funded by companies including Shell, and the Ford Motor company. The latter via yet another research group called the Alliance for Global Sustainability. It is wonderful that Shell and Ford are getting involved in funding research into sustainability, and not for a minute do I suggest anything but the highest standard of intellectual rigour in the methods of Kromer's study but again it is not new science. The methodology is to take existing figures and using a computer model develop a number of scenarios to predict future figures.

All of these scenarios are based on the idea that CO2 equivalents can be fairly calculated for the electricity used to charge EV's. In fact the methodology uses a straight energy content calculation, and goes further by doing such things as adjusting to allow for transmission losses via the grid, comparing these to the plant-to-tank costs for transporting conventional fuels.

These foundation assumptions for the well-to-wheel (WTW) methodology employed are just plain wrong. WTW is the long tailpipe argument in academic guise. The methodology comes from an existing energy sector that is clinging to its existing structure with oil refineries as central points of distribution.

But notice that while no company, save the oil companies, can currently refine their own petroleum to drive their cars, everyone has the potential to generate their own power to power EV's.

This is the first breakdown in the WTW assumption. Electric grids world wide are right now being transformed by local power generation from a vast number of solar panel installations. Solar panels are going on rooftops all over the world.

While I was working at Google last year, the many electric vehicles on the campus were being charged from the solar array on the Google rooftop. Here in Australia houses all over are sporting solar rooftops thanks to the governments incentives.

There are zero transmission losses here - the power is generated right where it is used, and that power is 100% clean.

Oh, but wait - those amounts of power are still tiny compared with total electricity consumption!

Yes - but so are the amounts of power being used by electric vehicles! EV's require very small amounts of power to run, and we have so few EV's that the process of renovation of the grid is more than keeping pace with EV uptake.

While many of these environmental reports are talking about "technologies" such as carbon capture which are right now just science fiction, EV's and local power generation is here and now. Its already working.

Along with local power generation from solar panels, there is also a large amount of activity in co-generation, demand side response and active power market participation.

When I was at the AEVA Electric Vehicle Festival in October I met and talked with Dean Spaccavento, Enabling Technology Manager with Energy Response. Their service involves enabling companies to take an active part in the National Energy Market, by responding to energy demand as reflected in real-time updates of energy costs via DSR. The software and hardware systems that Dean is involved in building go into Australian industries and reduces their total energy bill, whilst at the same time reducing the impact on total energy generation capacity requirements and the environment.

Companies that produce energy as a by-product of their operations can generate electricity on site, to both provide their onsite electricity requirements, and also sell back into the grid. There are a increasing number of co-generation sites in Australia right now, such as Coopers Brewery in South Australia. Power companies are getting into the act, enabling and welcoming co-generation as a way to reduce load on power generation capacity and also reduce environmental impact. Using software like that produced by Dean Spaccavento's company they can benefit financially by responding to the local market with their co-generation capacity.

This is working, right here, right now. Zero transmission losses with power being used on site, and with EV's in that companies fleet parking lot their charging is not reflected at all in any central coal fired power station.

The future for co-generation has much greater promise, with waste products being used for domestic level power generation instead of going into landfill. South Australian company Micro-Cogen have developed a small scale cogen unit suitable for the basement of your house which they say will be shipping in 2010.

Smart grid technologies also have matured and will form an integral part of the EV take-up phenomenon. As we see our grid as mentioned above becoming cleaner, it will also become smarter with software and hardware from a whole range of companies, including industry giants IBM, and other new startups competing to provide the best savings in electricity generation capacity.

EV's are inextricably bound up with this future since they are ideally situated to be charged at times when it is cheapest for their owners, and also lowest impact on the grids generation capacity.

When the dinosaurs of the energy world, the oil companies threw up their hands in horror at being compared to EV's they were right to be afraid. Their well-to-wheel analysis tries to portray a negative impact via the long tailpipe argument for EV's on the basis that a "whole lifecycle" model is the only fair way to compare EV's with internal combustion engines (ICE's).

But we have had 100 years of internal combustion engines, and now the landscape is covered with petrol stations, pipelines and petrol tankers - the infrastructure to support the plant-to-tank mentality that the dinosaurs are still clinging to.

The only fair way to compare EV's to ICE's is to look at what the energy distribution network will look like with these real current technologies - smart grids, solar, co-gen and local power generation - feeding into the EV picture.

Forget about gCO2 equivalents which assume the moment you plug your EV into the wall, a power station somewhere is instantly going to produce smoke directly in proportion to the energy used at the socket.

Those analyses were bogus when the oil companies first proposed them, and they are bogus now, even though many producers of reports who ought to know better have swallowed their marketing story.

But surely all these smart grids and co-generation are going to take time to ramp up, and in the meantime if every body goes out and buys EV's isn't that going to put pressure on the existing electrical grid causing more pollution from coal fired power stations?

But the reality is EV uptake is going to be slow. It will take years for early adopters to convince the middle of the normal curve that a switch to an EV is a good idea. Even with Nissan producing its new Leaf EV in production volumes next year, going forward EV's as a percentage of the national fleet will by even the most optimistic of projections still be down at %15 by 2030.

And the good news is that our existing grid infrastructure can easily accommodate the loads generated by these levels of demand without generating any new pollution at all. The charging can be done out of surplus capacity, meaning that even in places where coal is being used for generation, no extra generation will be done as a result of the EV's plugging in.

A study in 2007 by the Pacific National Northwest Laboratory found that surplus generation capacity in the USA could support 43% market penetration of electric vehicles, based on charging being done during the night. Interestingly this same information is actually quoted by Kromer, and Kromers quote is produced verbatim in T&E's report, yet they both fail to draw the obvious conclusion that projected levels of EV uptake are not going to have an impact on power generation. The PNNL report mentions a case study of San Diego where night time charging would allow up to 60% of the San Diegan's becoming EV drivers before any generation impact was felt.

Of course the T&E report claims (page 30 and 31) that as EV ownership increases, quick-recharging facilities are demanded and

"...substantial daytime charging will also occur..."

however they offer no support whatsoever for the claim of substantial daytime charging. Whereas the PNNL study examines night time charging as the obvious mode, there is no support in any actual studies for T&E's claim.

Does it make sense then? Will people charge during the day rather than at night?

You can only charge a battery if it is empty, or partly empty. And EV's are always plugging in where-ever they go. You arrive home from work in the evening, plug into the wall socket, and during the night the battery is topped up to full on cheap night-time rates.

Then during the day you head out to work, and maybe your employer has a charge point to plug into. If you're an EV owner you definitely have a charge point at home, but maybe your employer has one for the EV owners on staff. Then on the way home you stop at the supermarket for 30 minutes, and maybe there is a charge point in their car park.

And of course since the majority of drivers make relatively short trips, their EV's are going to be nowhere near empty when they plug in during the day.

Also day time charge points are going to be supplied by a company like Better Place, and will involve a charge via your credit card. Even if its like iTunes, where you make micro-payments for the small amounts of electricity topped up into your EV's its going to be much more attractive for most consumers to get their power from the socket at home where it just appears on their power bill. Or doesn't appear, if they have a solar panel or co-gen.

So these day time charges are going to happen, but due to:

• cheaper night time rates
• ubiquity of home chargers
• slower rollout of charging points at other locations
• small trips by driving majority meaning day time battery levels are high
• charging account costs with daytime power compared to home charging

all meaning that the claim that daytime charging is going to be substantial does not make sense.

I am sure daytime charging at Better Place style charge points will be a very important part of the EV landscape, especially when EV ownership levels are as high as 20%, but even then daytime charging will not represent a substantial amount of kilowatt/hours put into EV batteries.

Instead daytime charging will be a part of the modality of EV usage, that you top up in small amounts so that you never have to worry about being low on juice.

Conclusions - EV's (still) do not "produce" greenhouse gases

Current levels of EV usage do not impact at all on coal fired power generation, and so EV's being charged today, are thus not generating any additional greenhouse gases.

By the time the EV landscape has progressed to 30% ownership, for the range of reasons discussed above, power generation will have changed how electricity delivery takes place to the point that EVs will still not require any additional power generation from coal fired or other centralised power generation sources associated with greenhouse gases.

GarageBand Lessons missing sounds

Music is fun - and Garageband can make it especially so.

That is, when it plays fair and doesn't give crazy "Audio file Piano!@#$%!@#$!.caf Not Found" error messages.

Here's the whole story.

I've been using Garageband 09's new Lessons to teach myself to play my new Yamaha e413 keyboard (right, set up next to my trusty MacBook Pro). The lesson contents are great and I love how once the lesson content has sunk in, you can switch to "Open this Lesson in Garageband" mode to record the basic plinking-and-plonking alongside a pro backing track.

Besides having the feature that the instructors playing does not intrude (or give you a crutch), in "Open this Lesson in Garageband" mode you can check that lesson off as done, or give yourself a critical assessment by listening to your recording.

Trouble is I started getting these crazy errors. I resorted back to my desktop machine - an 09 iMac that had started out with Leopard before going to Snow Leopard and iLife 09 back when it came out. No errors!

Another weird issue was that I got similar error messages when I was trying to record our band at work using the laptop and my mixer - more missing caf files, from some earlier project I was working on.

So, how to fix the MacBook pro!

I found a useful post on teh Interwebs but while seeming to be exactly my issue, the suggested fix did not supply a cure.

But it got me thinking - maybe the MBP, which had a life (with Tiger) before Leopard, has some issues with the format of these working copy and cache directories that the post had mentioned. If so, nuking and reinstalling might just fix it.

And it did. Woot!

So my fix was:

• 1) Back up the MBP to an external drive (Time Machine will do this)
• 2) Put in my original Leopard DVD (not the Snow Leopard) and reboot the MBP with the "C" key held down - this will cause it to boot from the DVD
• 3) Click "Customize" on the install target screen and tell it to reformat the hard-drive (I chose journalled, non-case-sensitive).
• 4) Proceed with the installation.
• 5) Once done, insert your Snow Leopard install disk and install as normal.
• 6) Reinstate your files from the backups

Note that you can reformat with Snow Leopard's disk utility as described in another post but the above worked for me.

Now no more Garageband Lesson glitches!

Infrastructure, schminfrastructure

Recently plenty of electric car enthusiasts, environmentalists and all other folks turned up in the Canberra rain and cold for the first ever National Electric Car Festival, organized by the Australian Electric Vehicle Association.

For me it was an incredible event - a chance to meet and talk with figures from the landscape of EV's in Australia, and to see a new reality of clean, fuss-free and efficient personal transport.

In the picture I'm standing next to the 1915 Detroit Electric, one of two that were on show, and of many that tooled around the streets of Australia nearly a hundred years ago.

Do we need infrastructure for electric vehicles to take hold and begin to provide great clean transport for Aussies? Clearly not, seeing these vehicles - the demonstrations of ingenuity and relevance going back over the past century puts the lie to the idea that special preparations are needed before we can start with EV's here.

However to capitalize on all the promise of clean air, efficient transport and smarter energy that EV's are part of then there are lots of other great innovations which work alongside EV's.

I spent a bit of time chatting to Ben Keneally, Head of Marketing and External Affairs for Better Place Australia, at the Better Place stand. Ben assured me that the distinctive blue Better Place charging bollard was no mere concept mockup, but a real prototype.

If we don't need infrastructure to bring on electric cars, why Better Place?

Well, here's my take on it: electric cars are inevitable, and good job too since we need them to help save the planet. Early adopters, tech geeks and those concerned about the environment are queueing up to buy EV's and for the most part this vanguard is happy to just plug their new wheels into the fast-charging 240V AC outlets we have in Australia.

But if we have EV's and don't have a Better Place then we're losing out on a raft of other great benefits that can come with pure electric personal transport.

As Ben explained Better Place is really in the business of being a demand side energy management company. An EV driver is a energy demanding kind of person. And for all of the great convenience, efficiency and utility that running cars on electricity can give, you need the partnership between the two.

So what are these benefits?

Before I start - let me just say that this is not a feature report or a sales pitch for Better Place. Although I definitely want to see them succeed, I don't pretend to know what they offer and what they don't. But more importantly, here I want to talk about what companies like them could bring to the EV party, in the ideal world.

What a great EV oriented demand side energy company do for the new cadre of electric motorists can be summed up thusly: just-in-time energy inventory.

JIT is the efficient practice that made industry giants out of companies like Dell. Its closely allied to Lean Manufacturing which made Toyota king of the hill in vehicle manufacturing. Its tenets are own and hold only what you need, just when you need it. Eliminate waste wherever possible.

When I fill up my current dinosaur burning Prius with petrol, I am carrying around enough fuel to drive to Sydney. It sloshes around in my petrol tank and does no-one any good, weighing the car down and actually costing me in energy to transport it, and in the opportunity cost of owning the fuel when I don't need it. And then a month or more later when I finally get through all that petrol, I go and fill it back up to full again.

When you think about it like that it is incredibly wasteful. If I took the approach of only filling up at the gas station when I actually needed it, and put the balance of the money into my mortgage instead I'd save thousands.

So why do I waste thousands of dollars this way? Why does everyone? Because with petrol you have all of the inconvenience of driving in to a petrol station, and waiting in line to fill up before queueing to pay. I don't want to repeat that charade any more than I have to so I pay thousands over all the years for the convenience of being able to carry around a lot more petrol than I need.

With electricity you get all that convenience for free - if you have a Better Place around to make it possible. Smart charging points, micro-energy accounting, energy market aware charging policies, and smart grids: all things that make for EV's that can take an active role in their own energy use. Vehicles that work for us, to our command, charging up just as needed, when its best saving us money, at the same time as saving the environment.

Just-in-time energy for transport is the promise of demand side EV power management, and companies like Better Place are stepping in to fill a great opportunity in this niche, by supplying the charging points, battery swap facilities and other paraphenalia that people and corporate entities might want to cater for the EV revolution.

But above all the physical manifestation of this sort of hardware infrastructure is the software infrastructure: all the business solutions that need to be in place so I can buy automatically $0.85 worth of electricity while I'm parked in the supermarket carpark.

We don't need infrastructure to have EV's - but we'd be mad not to get infrastructure to make EV's be the best they can be.

I like the convenience that I now enjoy with buying songs from iTunes over the internet: I look forward to that coming to my personal transport, and me not having to do anything special to enjoy it - certainly not queueing up in a dirty malodorous petrol station.