Craig Mayhew’s Blog

After upgrading to Google Earth 5.1 I now get the following error when starting from command line. Error: ./libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.9′ not found (required by ./libgoogleearth_lib.so).

It’s also worth noting that if I click the Google Earth icon it just sits there with no errors.

To fix this simply remove or rename libstdc++.so.6 and libgcc_s.so.1 in the installation directory.

For some people this will be:

cd /opt/google-earth/

For others (me included) this will be:

cd ~/google-earth/

To rename the files:

sudo mv libstdc++.so.6 libstdc++.so.6.orig
sudo mv libgcc_s.so.1 libgcc_s.so.1.orig

Now Google Earth should start without the error!

Fusion power should finally fulfill the promise of cheap and abundant electricity. Current worldwide energy supplies (stuff we haven’t yet pulled out of the ground) are like so:

Oil: 43 years
Uranium: ~150 years
Gas: 167 years
Coal: 417 years

This is not great, coal fuel is the longest lasting but also the dirtiest fuel. It’s also worth noting that these fossil fuels can be in very unstable countries. Only 1% of the worlds oil is located within Europe for instance. What we need is fusion, a completely different kind of power source.

So what does a fusion reactor need as fuel?

You need some Deuterium and some Tritium. Deuterium can be harvested from sea water and tritium is made from Lithium. When heated to 150 million degrees, the fusion of Deuterium and Tritium gives us Helium, a Neutron and loads of energy. That spare neutron can then be fused with Lithium to make more Tritium. So the main fuels are Deuterium and Lithium, with a little tritium to get the whole process started.

We have enough Lithium on Earth to support the entire human races energy needs for 30 million years.

What progress have we made so far? JET has been running since 1983, ITER will be functional in 2018 and DEMO will begin pumping energy into the grid some time in the 2030’s.

What can the average man do to make this technology happen faster?

Learn more about and teach others about the merits of fusion technology. There is a common misconception that fusion will create hazardous waste like our current nuclear reactors. It will create some but there will be far less of it and it will become harmless within decades as opposed to the hundreds of years for current nuclear power stations. I can’t stress enough that fusion reactors are completely different to the fission reactors that people are used to, in the way they work, safety and the waste they would produce.

For an example of misinformation, here is a Greenpeace article on the matter that doesn’t cite any sources http://www.greenpeace.org/international/press/releases/ITERprojectFrance. They state “Fusion energy – if it would ever operate – would create a serious waste problem, would emit large amounts of radioactive material and could be used to produce materials for nuclear weapons”. I usually have a lot of respect for Greenpeace and the good they do, but they really dropped the ball on this one.

Sources:
Steven Cowley on TED.com
ITER website
ITER Presentation on Nuclear Waste
ITER and beyond
Fossil Fuels – Oil
Fossil Fuels – Natural Gas
Fossil Fuels – Coal

These factors can be used to show the environmental and financial impact of inefficient HTML.

1. A core 2 duo e6600 uses ~30 watts more when under single core heavy load than when it is idle. 30 watts = 0.03 kWh.
2. Assuming 10p/kWh then 1 computer second costs 0.00008333 pence.
3. Assuming 0.54055 Kg of CO₂ emissions per kWh for the average UK grid electricity then 1 second of additional computer processing time creates 0.0045g of CO₂
4. 3600 seconds in an hour

Financial Cost = (pencePerkWh/3600) * 0.03 * renderSecondsPerPageView * pageViews

Examples: (using 1 million page views, each taking 0.25 seconds)

Financial Cost = (10/3600) * 0.03 * 0.25 * 1000000 = 20 pence
CO₂ Emmissions = (0.54055/3600) * 0.03 * 0.25 * 1000000 = 1.12Kg of CO₂

As a Virgin Media customer I’m not a fan of the new page that now appears when I misspell a domain name. This is mostly because it takes longer to load the Virgin Media branded Google results page than a simple “Server not found” error. In a quest to rid myself of the slower page I found the opt-out page:

https://my.virginmedia.com/advancederrorsearch/settings

Simply select “No – I would not like to use the advanced network error search” and your back to the faster error pages!

CUPS had me chasing around for a while to fix this issue. Whenever I tried to print I realized there were no printers and going to “System -> Administration -> Printing” caused the error “There was an error during the CUPS operation: ‘httpConnectionEncrypt failed’” when I tried to connect to the local CUPS service. The “/etc/init.d/cups” file had completely disappeared and reinstalling the cups package didn’t fix it! In the end I marked the cups package for “complete removal” which also removes the configuration files. After this I then reinstalled CUPS, “/etc/init.d/cups” reappeared and it worked once again. Unfortunately I had to reinstall my printers on this machine.

Steps were:

1. Complete removal of CUPS package including the configuration files
2. Reinstall the CUPS package.
3. Start the CUPS service with “sudo /etc/init.d/cups restart” in the terminal.
4. Reinstall your printers
5. Print stuff!

Run this code to install the sensor package and the applet.

sudo apt-get install libsensors3 sensors-applet

Then run:

sudo sensors-detect

This will prob your hardware for sensors.

Next, add the applet to your ubuntu bar by right clicking on the bar and clicking “Add to Panel”. Finally add the applet called “Computer Temperature Monitor”.

You should now have a temperature indicator in your ubuntu bar! There are further options if you right click on the indicator and edit “preferences”.