Musings: Why is the price of oil so high?

I've been reflecting back to a conversation that I once had with a fellow co worker, a geologist who once worked for Marathon Oil. The conversation was about the price of oil, at the time, he then explained to me that price of oil was not only drive by the demand for fuel for vehicles. Oil is used is so many products plastics, paints, etc. and the price of oil is But it was something that he said that caught me by surprise. He state that Marathon calculated that the worlds oil reserves would be exhausted by the year 2015 or possibly 2020. I asked him to clarify if he meant "oil reserves on hand already extracted from ground?" His reply shocked me he stated no he meant "the entire reserve of oil in and out of the ground." With that rattling around my mind, as I watch the price of oil climb it makes me wonder if there is another reason for the climb in price. I've heard many investment brokers state that correct price of oil, based on supply and demand, should be some where around $80-$90/barrel. My thoughts are this "What better way to make the world shift to alternate fuels then to make fuel so expensive that the public would be willing to except change on a mass scale."

Upgraded Laptop to Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy

Well I took the plunge this morning and upgraded my Dell D820 laptop from Gutsy to Hardy. Many thanks to fellow Ubuntu NM LoCo-er protonchris for building a new version of vpnc that fixed vpnc timing out every 5min. All in all the process went smooth, i opted to upgrade by downloading the alternate CD and upgrade from it. I only ran into a couple issues. First less than impressed with the new Pulse Audio sound system. The sound quality is less than perfect but I expect that this will change with time. Ipod issues. It seem that I can't use my ipod with any other app (i.e. banshee, hipo, etc) until Rhythmbox Music Player sees it first then other apps can see and access the ipod.

All and all a painless upgrade.

New System

Over the past year I've changed my computing habits. I've gotten away from using a full workstation pc and migrated to a more mobile computing life style. I'm looking to purchase a new laptop and a couple of the finalist are:

The Alienware Area-51 m15x

The Dell XPS M1730

Or the Apple MacBook Pro

I'm leaning heavily towards the Alienware but I need to do a little more research to see if it will be fully compatible with Ubuntu.

What you need, without the nonsense

While surfing the web I stumbled across Glom.

With Glom you can design database systems - the database and the user interface.

* Glom has high-level features such as relationships, lookups, related fields, related records, calculated fields, drop-down choices, searching, reports, users and groups.

* Glom keeps things simple. It has Numeric, Text, Date, Time, Boolean, and Image field types.

* Glom systems require almost no programming, but you may use Python for calculated fields or buttons.

* Each Glom system can be translated for multiple languages and countries.

The design is loosely based on FileMaker Pro, but with a separate database server. Its simple framework should be enough to implement most database applications. Without Glom these systems normally consist of lots of repetitive, unmaintainable code.

Glom uses the PostgreSQL database backend but it can not edit databases that it did not create, because it uses only a simple subset of Postgres functionality.

Cool Laptop Mod

Well kinda.

While looking for something to help prevent my laptop lid from getting

scratched up I stumbled across...

http://www.schtickers.com/

for $20 you can order custom laptop lid designs. I ordered two.... =P

one for...

Power Ubuntu

and another for...

Don't Panic

Ubuntu LTSP Environment

At work we are looking into migrating to a Thin Client environment. With hopes of using our Citrix, Terminal Server, VMWare ESX, and possibly a VMWare VDI environments. One of our goals is to reuse existing hardware converting them into thin clients. I've looked at a couple vendors for the Thin Client conversion, 2x (http://2x.com/) the one with the most promise but not without issues. We are demoing 2x but we've not been able to get the ThinClient to work with our Citrix Farms. production or dev.

I've started to look at building and Ubuntu based LTSP environment under ESX. I'll post my progress as I go along.

Google Docs Offline Access Rollout Starting Today

Google Docs Offline Access Rollout Starting Today

Very cool! Yet another nail in the coffin for Micro$oft. Starting today Google will be allowing offline access to Google Docs via the Google Gears browser plugin.

Google Docs Offline