Having managed to blow the 140A fuse in my Lexus RX 300 by hooking up the wrong battery (thanks Kragen!), I wrestled with how to replace it for quite a while. It’s complicated and I didn’t find any good explanations on the web, so I’m writing it up here:

The 140A fuse is bolted into the fuse box, so no matter how hard you try to pull it from the top it won’t come off. You’ll need to disassemble the fuse box, remove the bolts, and then replace it.

First disconnect your battery to prevent any accidental shorts or sparks.

The fuse box is attached to the body of the car with 2 bolts, and there are multiple latches connecting the top portion of the fuse box to the bottom portion. Remove the bolts, then insert a flat screw driver head into each latch, pushing it apart to let the latch release. The top of the fuse box lifts up, so you’ll see each latch get free and be able to move up. There are 4 or 5 latches all around, including one semi-hidden one where the fuse box lays against the body of the car. You’ll only be able to see it when you remove the bolts.

Once the latches are open, pull the top half of fuse box up and move it around to give yourself some room to maneuver. You’ll see lots of wires connected to it. You may want to open up the air filter to open up more.

Now you need to remove the top panel in the top half of the fuse box. This is where I wasted a lot of time – it just didn’t seem to want to come out.

The trick is to push it down and get it out from the bottom of the top part of the fuse box, not to try to pull it up. Look for the latches around the top of the panel where the 140A fuse is – there’ll be little openings that a flat screw driver head can fit through. Put the screw driver in and free up the latch so the top panel can slide down towards the bottom of the fuse box. Once you have all the latches freed the top panel comes out fairly easily.

Now all you have to do is to remove the blots that hold the fuse in place. Replace the fuse and put everything back as you found it. The trickiest part is getting the hidden latch back in place, but once you have that you’ll be set.

Good luck. It’s tricky, so hang in there. I spoke with several mechanics, including a couple of mechanics from the dealership, and none of them could give a good explanation – in particular, 2 of them told me the top piece of the panel would come out from the top, and that the housing would probably break when removing it. Not true – it comes out from the bottom, and there’s no need to break anything.

At first I thought the arguments justifying Apple’s ban of non objective-c development by claiming that resulting apps would be lower quality were absolutely moronic (and hence the people making the arguments either blinded by religion or morons). After all, it’s not like there isn’t a review process already in place. But the more I think about it the more I see where they’re coming from.

I think we should apply the same model to the Web . Imagine if we all had to use the same development environment and tools, and that there was a single entity who could decide, arbitrarily, if the thing we just spent months building should see the light of day or not. Wouldn’t that be awesome?

If the internet has proved anything, it is that a closed, tightly controlled environment based on uniformity of tools and development environment, and a benevolent master overseeing everything is the right way to go.

I’d tried to use Google Wave on several occasions as a tool for remote collaboration. All attempts had ended in various degrees of disaster, so I didn’t have high hopes for this round. In fact we tried Google Docs, Zoho Docs, and even Etherpad as alternatives first, with Etherpad being the most effective solution. That is, until we tried Wave again.

It turns out effective remote collaboration for document authoring requires two distinct things:

• A shared document with:
  • near real-time updates for everyone
  • an indicator of who’s editing what and what’s recently changed
  • the ability to view and restore earlier versions
• A separate communications side channel

Wave provides strong shared document capabilities, as well as very nice communication capabilities via chat.

The problem, however, is that the “chat” can and often does take place within the document. The “chat” quickly becomes graffiti all over your nicely formatted document, and you have expend serious effort cleaning it up .

The solution is to separate out the discussion or chat mechanism from the document completely. In this case we used iChat with voice and video for all participants. I’m no fan of video conferencing, but I have to admit even the video was useful – particularly to gauge the level of engagement of each person at any point in time.

It is also very useful, by the way, to have multiple screens available. The document can live on one screen while the talking heads occupy the other.

I was surprised at how effective the setup was. We will definitely be using this again in lieu of travel.

Quote from Steve Jobs, via Miguel de Icaza:

We have to let go of this notion that for [us] to win, [our purported competitor] has to lose. We have to embrace the notion that for [us] to win, [we] have to do a really good job. And if others are going to help us, that’s great. Because we need all the help we can get. And if we screw up and do not do a good job, it is not somebody else’s fault, it is our fault.