The exercise bike has been around for decades now, and its popularity is testament to the great ideas that it embodies. Want to watch TV in your living room, but feeling guilty about being inside and growing fat all day? Use an exercise bike, and you can burn up calories while enjoying your favourite on-screen entertainment. Feel like some exercise, but unable to step out your front door due to miserable weather, your sick grandma who needs taking care of, or the growing threat of fundamentalist terrorism in your neighbourhood streets? Use an exercise bike, and you can have the wind in your hair without facing the gale outside. Now, how about adding one more great idea to this collection. Want to contribute to clean energy, but still enjoy all those watt-guzzling appliances in your home? Use an electricity-generating exercise bike, and you can become a part of saving the world, by bridging the gap between your quadriceps and the TV. It may seem like a crazy idea, only within the reach of long-haired pizza-eating DIY enthusiasts; but in fact, pedal power is a perfectly logical idea: one that's available commercially for home use by anyone, as well as one that's been adopted for large and well-publicised community events.
The human body is a self-sustaining and self-repairing entity. When you cut your hand, when you blister your foot, or when you burn your tongue, you know — and you take it for granted — that somehow, miraculously, your body will heal itself. All it needs is time. However, there are many injuries that are simply too severe for the body to repair by itself: in these cases, help may be needed in the form of lotions, medicines, or even surgery. Why is this so? With all its vast resources, what is it that the human body finds so difficult and so time-consuming in healing a few simple cuts and bruises? Surely — with a little bit of help, and a lot more conscious concentration — we should be capable of repairing so much more, all by ourselves.
The upcoming Drupal 6 has a very small but very useful new feature, which went into CVS quietly and with almost no fanfare about 6 weeks ago. The new feature is called "useful SQL error reporting". As any Drupal developer would know, whenever you're coding away at that whiz-bang new module, and you've made a mistake in one of your module's database queries, Drupal will glare at you with an error such as this:
user warning: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'd5_node n INNER JOIN d5_users u ON u.uid = n.uid INNER JOIN d5_node_revisions r ' at line 1 query: SELECT n.nid, n.vid, n.type, n.status, n.created, n.changed, n.comment, n.promote, n.sticky, r.timestamp AS revision_timestamp, r.title, r.body, r.teaser, r.log, r.format, u.uid, u.name, u.picture, u.data FROMMM d5_node n INNER JOIN d5_users u ON u.uid = n.uid INNER JOIN d5_node_revisions r ON r.vid = n.vid WHERE n.nid = 1 <strong>in C:\www\drupal5\includes\database.mysql.inc on line 172.</strong>
That message is all well and good: it tells you that the problem is an SQL syntax error; it prints out the naughty query that's causing you the problem; and it tells you that Drupal's "includes/database.mysql.inc" file is where the responsible code lies. But that last bit — about the "database.mysql.inc" file — isn't quite true, is it? Because although that file does indeed contain the code that executed the naughty query (namely, the db_query() function in Drupal's database abstraction system), that isn't where the query actually is.
In Drupal 6, this same message becomes a lot more informative:
user warning: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'd6_node n INNER JOIN d6_users u ON u.uid = n.uid INNER JOIN d6_node_revisions r ' at line 1 query: SELECT n.nid, n.vid, n.type, n.language, n.title, n.uid, n.status, n.created, n.changed, n.comment, n.promote, n.moderate, n.sticky, n.tnid, n.translate, r.nid, r.vid, r.uid, r.title, r.body, r.teaser, r.log, r.timestamp AS revision_timestamp, r.format, u.name, u.data FROMMM d6_node n INNER JOIN d6_users u ON u.uid = n.uid INNER JOIN d6_node_revisions r ON r.vid = n.vid WHERE n.nid = 2 <strong>in C:\www\drupal\modules\node\node.module on line 669.</strong>
This may seem like a small and insignificant new feature. But considering that a fair chunk of the average Drupal developer's debugging time is consumed by fixing SQL errors, it's going to be a godsend for many, many people. The value and the usefulness of this feature, for developers and for others, should not be underestimated.
Modern economics is infinitely bizarre. We all know it. I'm not here to prove it; I'm just here to provide one more example of it — and the example is as follows. You're an educated, middle-class professional: you've lived in a developed country your whole life; and now you've moved to a developing country. Your work is 99% carried out online, and your clients live all over the world. So you move to this less-affluent country, and you continue to work for your customers in the First World. Suddenly, your home is a dirt-cheap developing nation, and your income is in the way of formidable developed-nation currency. The result? Well, I'm no economist — so correct me if I'm wrong — but it would seem that the result must be a paradise existence, where you can live like a king and still spend next to nothing! Could this be the next big thing in employment, that we should expect to see happening over the next few years?
There are a great many people in this world — particularly in third-world countries — that spend their entire lives performing jobs that are dangerous, labour-intensive, unhealthy, and altogether better-suited for machines. I've often heard the argument that "it's better that they do what they do, than that they have no job at all". After visiting the hellish mines of Potosà in Bolivia, I disagree with this argument more strongly than ever. I'm now 100% convinced that it's better for jobs as atrocious as this to disappear from the face of the Earth; and that it's better for those affected to become unemployed and to face economic hardship in the short-term, while eventually finding newer and better jobs; than to continue in their doomed and unpleasant occupations forever.
For all of the most memorable moments in life — such as exotic vacations, milestone birthday parties, and brushes with fame — we like to have photographs. For some people, photography is an art and a life-long passion: there is great pride to be had in capturing significant occasions on film or in pixels. But for others (such as myself), taking photos can quickly become little more than a bothersome chore, and one that detracts from the very experiences that you're trying to savour and to have a memento of. For those of us in the latter category, wouldn't it be great if our cameras just took all the pictures for us, leaving us free to do other things? Judging by recent developments, this may not be as far off as you think.
For the past century, humanity has fallen into the habit of wreaking ever-more serious havoc upon the natural environment, and of conveniently choosing to ignore any and all side-effects that this behaviour may entail. Our daily lives are a crazy black comedy of blindness: each of us is like a blind butcher who carves up his customers, thinking that they're his animal meats; or like a blind man in his house, who thinks he's outside enjoying a breeze, when he's actually feeling the blizzard blowing in through his bedroom window. Finally, however, more and more people are taking off the blindfold, and realising that they do actually exist in this world, and that closing the window isn't the answer to stopping that breeze from getting warmer.