It appears to be "difficult but not impossible" to use the alcohols, with a bit of added human ingenuity:
http://www.saeindia.org/Home/alcoholindieselengines.html
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3165/is_n9_v27/ai_11320815
Interesting. Looks like the alcohol is vaporized and compressed with the air charge and just a little diesel is injected after compression to begin the combustion. Many performance diesel engines today inject water, water/alcohol, propane or nitrous in the intake manifold as a means of supercharging the air with oxygen and other combustibles. This is done so you can burn more diesel and generate more power with lower exhaust temps. Whereas the article you linked is looking to achieve economy.
The first diesel farm tractors were hybrids as well. You started the engine on gas and then switched it to diesel after it was running and warmed up on gas. It did not burn the fuels together though. The reason they did this was because they did not have an electrical systems that could crank start a diesel due to the high compression ratios.