random neuron misfires

Sun Jun 10 01:52:37 PDT 2001

Mountain YIKES!

deekayen, good choice ditching the RapidFire shifters. I’ve never run them, and never will. I’ve heard too many problems with them. For trail riding, it’s probably fine. Once you get sand and grit into the nested discs which stop the detents from working properly, misfire-city. Useless. Also, if you drop the bike while riding, your chances of breaking off the shifters themselves are very high. I have GripShift, and I love them. Dialed in perfect, never missed a shift, even when I used to run a Shimano 600 Ultegra road dérailleur on my older mountain bike (the best dérailleur I’ve ever run on a mountain bike, hands-down, is that 600 Ultegra road dérailleur).

Wait until you start doing 2′ and 3′ hops, using small protruding roots and rocks as a launching point. I preload the shock (drop my weight down, 165lbs.), then as it releases, pull up on the clipless pedals, bam! 2-3′ air. Clipless pedals definitely help, and road shoes, none of those soft, squishy off-road shoes for me. Maximum power to the pedals, please.

I have a Trek Y-22 from 1999, and just about the only thing original on it is the frame, rear shock, and front fork. I’ve replaced everything else because I’ve either broken it, or worn it out. I love doing drops, jumps, pretty aggressive singletrack, anything hardcore. I’m on it.

Before moving to California, I dropped some coin on these sweet Race Face cranks and Shimano XTR brakes. I was noticing some “sway” in my bottom bracket when I hammered, and thought it was the frame giving out. I plopped these babies on, rock solid ride again. I gained so much power back in my stroke. I spent the extra dollars and special-ordered the nickel-plated rings to go with it and the linkless chain.

Next thing I replace is the fork. I’m looking into some more carbon parts too, but I’m not yet sold on the carbon seat-posts and handlebars yet. I’ve got GripShift, ESP9 carbon derailleurs, and a nice clamped-down set of Deore-XTR brakes front and rear. Sweet setup, shifting is imperceptibly silent, braking is hard and responsive (not squishy).

I have to think about purchasing another road bike for myself (lost my Specialized Cirrus (not a picture of my bike, but the same bike I had) custom when I moved out of “psycho’s” house in CT). I used to love that bike, and put a solid 40 miles a day, every day, for 3 years on that sucker. I have to think about getting another road bike for myself and get a bike for Erika. Not sure if she wants a road or a mountain bike yet. We’ll have to field-test her on that.

Anyone know of some good hardcore rides in the Bay Area? (Marin, South City, San Bruno) Is there a riding club or anything like that out here?

Jim Henry

In other biking news, I see an old friend of mine, Jim Henry is still going strong | these days, beating able-bodied riders, even though he has only one arm to ride with (He’s on the far right here). He was always an inspiration when I used to ride with him (or when he’d pass me during a long ride). One thing I’ll always remember him saying to me was:

“…hills are nothing more than flats, at an angle…”

…as he sped past me up a hill, and I was huffing to keep up. An amazingly positive person, despite his handicap. Keep pumping, Jim!

Swordfish

I just got back from seeing Swordfish at the local cinema. It was packed, and I mean no more than 5 empty seats left in the place. I just have to point out three things that caught my attention in the first 10 minutes:

“..Axel Torvalds..”

“..number one hacker..”

“..finnish consulate..”

Come on now, that’s just a little TOO lame.

At least they spat out some of the buzzwords I’M used to hearing, ipchains, portmap, sniffer, DS3. Some of it was entertaining, and very Matrix-esque (and in fact, Joel Silver produced both the Matrix and Swordfish), but it had that “Tarantino” feel to it. Interesting plot, “mostly” technically accurate (no uploading a trojan to the mothership with zmodem on a PowerBook from within a stolen alient craft here (ala Independence Day), folks). It’s probably worth the $8.00 or so.

Ok, back to more CVS hackery…the weekend isn’t over yet!

Coding for HTML standards

Four words: I hate Internet Explorer

I spent more time that I should have trying to code around the deficiencies in IE today, just to stop the IE users from doing direct linking to one of my site pages. $ENV{‘HTTP_REFERER’} isn’t sent or supported in IE, so that stopped that,
which also stopped me from using SetEnvIf and friends.

I found this article on Microsoft’s site which states:

“…When linking from one document to another in Internet Explorer 4.0, the HTTP Referer header will not be sent when the referer is a non-HTTP(S) page. The Referer header will also not be sent when linking from an HTTPS page to a non-HTTPS page…”

So I had to use… wait for it… cookies! Bleah!

So now I’ve put it on my long-term plate to write a whitepaper detailing how Internet Explorer is simply a file manager which can (poorly) render HTML content. (I have another one called “Bill Gates Has a God Complex”, but I’ll save the synopsis on that for later) IT IS NOT A BROWSER. It doesn’t support MIME types, doesn’t send proper (or complete) headers, and about 23 other deficiencies. It even fails getting to a site like: http://www.domain.com/foo where ‘foo’ is a directory. You actually have to append the trailing backslash onto it, for it to work because it thinks ‘foo’ is a file that it wants to load in some local application binding (probably MSWord or some other locally installed application), and not send you that dreaded internal “Page could not be loaded” error.

When you lock up the browser itself (which is quite often), you can kill it from the Task Manager (ctrl-alt-del), but then your entire desktop reloads, oh, but minus everything that’s a global in the SysTray. How thoughtful of them.

Such an utter piece of trash.

Nailed down a few more bugs, and learned more than I should have about cookies, and how to get them working in both IE and normal browsers (which of course, aren’t the same)

if ($ENV{'HTTP_USER_AGENT'} =~ /MSIE/) {
        do something completely non-standard;
        check that it actually did what you expected;
        check it again, just to make sure it didn't change;
        print "Please use a web browser, not a file
manager";  
} elsif ($ENV{'HTTP_USER_AGENT'} =~ /any other browser in
the world/ {
        follow the normal procedures;
        return;
}

Advogato Deficiency?

Why can’t I change my password here on Advogato? There’s no option under /acct to change it. It was that time of the month again, to change my passwords, and I found I couldn’t change it here. Hrmph!

Scope Creep

When deadlines aren’t allowed to slip, why are requirements allowed to be constantly changing, and new things allowed to be added? I’m not going to sit here and work 20+ hours a day (12 of which are unpaid, of course), and then have to begin scheduling my own mealtimes and bathroom breaks, just so I can meet this impossible deadline.

I’m not.

I’m tired.

No time for anything anymore. Why did I move here again?

Wireless Fun

In other news, I managed to get my wireless gateway to do dial-on-demand to my ISP, and handle DHCP and NAT for my internal wired and wireless machines. Pretty slick and fast. No more cables. Locked down tighter than a drum (not that anyone within a 2-mile radius would even know how to hijack an IP, let alone speak my native language here).

Now if I could only get my hands on some telemetric power units…

LWN Errors

http://lwn.net/2001/0607/desktop.php3

“…The bad news overall is that pilot-link may or may not be supported any further. While gnome-pilot seems to use an upgraded version, there doesn’t seem to be a web site anywhere with updated information on the status of the package and the pilot-unix mailing list is apparently dead.

The last word from David Desrosiers, the most recent Pilot Link maintainer, was that Pilot Link was being rewritten to clean up lots of old cruft in the source and provide a cleaner distribution. Note that the SourceForge site for pilot-link is ancient – the project was moved away from there some time back and the new web site is simply a CVS dump of file activity…”

Michael, please make the necessary corrections I’ve emailed you, before too many people see that and get discouraged from a very active open source project.

Wed Jun 6 01:30:10 PDT 2001

oops!, that could have been ugly right before a release. Thanks n9mtb for spotting it so quickly and to my 120+ wpm fingers for being able to patch the roughly 113 files required to fix it within the hour.

irc is such a great collaborative tool, I wish more people would embrace it.

Tue Jun 5 00:04:57 PDT 2001

perl -MTELEGRAM::Start -e `advogato`

Plate still overfull. stop

Learning XML, protocol stacking, IrOBEX. stop

Reverse-engineering != fun. stop

Authoring the Embedded Linux Course. stop

No time left for other things. stop

R.I.F. Reading Is…

Feeling in a rut, I decided to load up CATB on my Palm and do some reading. Two quotes stuck out and are immediately relevant to my current growing workload.

Open Source

“…I had another purpose for rewriting besides improving the code and the data structure design, however. That was to evolve it into something I understood completely. It’s no fun to be responsible for fixing bugs in a program you don’t understand…”

Work

“…A happy programmer is one who is neither underutilized nor weighed down with ill-formulated goals and stressful process friction…”

my $retention = Lather::Rinse->Repeat;

Interesting cardiac problems have arisen of late. Scary 9-1-1 call involved.

I have 5 weeks to complete $(PROJECT_1), and if I keep getting interrupted, that will not get done (listening?). The end date is not slipping to compensate for these interruptions.

I won’t finish $(PROJECT_1) if I keep getting requests for rand($USELESS)

“…I am being nibbled to death by ducks…”

SUCCESS!

YES YES YES!

I can’t say any more at this point, until I get the code pulled into the project, but I have to thank a bunch of people for pushing and prodding me into the right place. mbp, overcode, n9mtb, judd, n1ffo, BobC, and kroah. Thanks for the inspiration.

Now to architect a solution involving what we’ve figured out.

I just love being able to do what I needed to do with a combination of pi-nredir, ethereal, -DDEBUG, and some other tools.

“..storm the castle walls…”

Ugh.

Tedious work, manually documenting every function in a codebase. Definitely well worth it though, for “What Is To Come™”.

0.9.5 Release Is Imminent

sneakums, I know what the GPL stands for, but I was curious why he generalized it in such a fashion, nothing more.

“our business” is in giving users a choice. I’ve had to correct dozens of people who view GNU/Linux as a competitor to Microsoft. We are fundamentally nothing more than an alternative, albeit a better one. Competing on a business or financial level is secondary to providing a more functional, robust solution for the users that use GNU/Linux.

Microsoft has a financially-driven business model, and clearly view the GPL and what it stands for as a threat to maintaining that revenue stream. (notice he did not use the term “Free Software” in his speech anywhere. It’s clear they want to keep pushing the “GPL == open == linux == that hacker that stole your password” mentality in the general user populous). The Free Sofware community is a socially-driven business model. It turns the whole monopolistic practices of a company like Microsoft on their head.

Education should be our next task. Educate the users, and not by slandering Microsoft, but with good, concise, down-to-earth examples of where GNU/Linux and Free Software is really benefiting the advance of technology, business, and the spread of information.

We’ve demonstrated that we can stand together to develop software to benefit the community, rallying together to advance the development of GNU/Linux. Now we must stand together as a non-technical community and begin our task of re-education where it really matters most.