Posts
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Jesus Delivers
Fyxomatosis has recently been one of my favourite websites. Cool photography, combined with musings about fixed-wheel bikes and courier life. The design of the site is brilliant, easy on the eye, and with a gallery that is fantastically well thought out.
The best bit has to be his t-shirts. I ordered a small ‘Jesus Delivers’ shirt in gold on burgundy. Andy’s communications are great, and he helped greatly in choosing colors from his available stock. Each shirt is hand-made to order, with your choice of ink and shirt colours. At only £14 including delivery to the UK, I’d say the shirts were a great bargain!
For those interested in sizing, I ordered a small, which is a smidge tighter than my medium Howies shirts, but I’m always borderline between the two sizes. I’m sure Andy will be able to help on sizing should you require it.
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We're Back!
On friday morning our router in the flat decided to have a small fire to itself. It does now mean we have a shiny new wireless router with more toys, so we are all up and running again.
Only problem I’ve noticed so far is that the loading of my main blog page is painfully slow, with generation times of around 2 seconds being reported. Not so good! I’ll have a look at finding out what is causing this once the stress of exams is over.
Got the Hope floating disk rotors I mentioned in my last post, I’ll have a picture of them up soon.
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Evening Summer Sunshine
Had a cracking ride up the Pentlands yesterday evening, good to see so many other bikers out enjoying the dry conditions.
Did one of my favourite loops up over Maidens Cleuch (Drainage Ditches/Rocky Mountain 1) from the Ranges Road singletrack, up Back Glen, then down Beach Avenue (Exponential), then down the long woodsy singletrack to Balerno. Near the bottom of this last piece of singletrack there is a muddy patch that is impossible to avoid, and slows your speed down from about 20, to 5mph.
I spied a new line yesterday, so decided to give it a go. Towards the left there is a pile of small rocks and big branches, and I thought I could scoot straight across the top of them. I misjudged it, and having not slowed like I normally wood, I ended up being ejected over the bars to land on my feet. The front wheel was totally stuck in the mud, and the frame had swiveled round so the rear wheel was touching the ground on the non-driveside.
I was laughing, and took a picture to laugh at later. Then I went to move off…the back wheel wouldn’t go round, it was locked solid. I could move it backwards some of the way, but it would always jam at the same point. Turns out that my rear brake rotor had been smashed against one of the aforementioned rocks, and had split on the outer edge (see pic above). Not having a 4mm allen key to remove my pads, I had to bend the rotor back by hand to get it in a rideable state.
All the rubbing was creating lots of extra work for me, so thanks to Murray and Vo who I met at Bonaly, and who gave me a loan of an allen key to remove the pads and allow my wheel to run freely.
I’ve now ordered a pair of Hope floating rotors, so hopefully no more rotor troubles for a while.
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Cycling Scotland Ingliston Criterium 2006: Race 1
Round 1 of the Cycling Scotland Ingliston Criterium season was my first proper race on a road bike. I had a fair idea of what to expect; 45 minutes, riding a road bike, in a bunch on tarmac. As advertised really. I was riding in the support race, which meant that I shouldn’t take too much of a beating, but could still look on it as good training.
I was riding the support race along with 58 other riders. For the most part we sat at as a bunch, chasing down the few attempts at breaks. I tended to sit in the middle of the bunch, and stay out of the headwind that was hurtling down the back straight. Towards the end I came to the front to chase breakaways, sitting comfortably with a small group of riders on the last lap.
Somehow I lost the wheel in front of me on the last hairpin, and could do nothing to catch the 3 riders in front. I came in fourth, with a good gap behind me judging by the lack shadows in front of me. I was pretty chuffed with my performance, and am certainly looking forward to the next round in two weeks.
Pic was by Dave Moran, and can be found in the ERC Gallery. Full results for the support race can be viewed on the Stirling Bike Club forum, with full results hopefully appearing on the ERC Ingliston information page soon.
The gallery for this will be back soon.
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Ladybank to Edinburgh
Yesterday Vo and I decided to grab the train to Ladybank in Fife, and cycle back to Edinburgh. Was a nice ride, except from the 45miles of headwind we got before we turned at the Bridges for the last leg back into Edinburgh. Total distance was around 60miles, including some rather amusing off road on the fife-coastal path, and lots of going the wrong way at the start.
The picture to the right is one of a few I took, but was by far the best. I was trying to take a picture of Crammond Island from the train as we crossed the Forth Rail Bridge, but ended up getting these workmen in the picture as we passed. Pretty neat. Click on the image to see the full size version.
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More Mac to Linux Streaming
Ok, after putting a post up on MacOSXHints I was pointed in the direction of Rogue Amoeba Software. The do a great little app called Nicecast which can take the audio output of a single app, and stream it out as an mp3 stream. After the initial setup (and opening port 8000 on my router), I was able to download a .m3u file, allowing me to listen to the stream on my linux box.
Problem solved? Eh, no! Nicecast comes in at $40, and I’m not really up for paying that much for lots of extra functionality that I’ll never use. I think I may have to look at making my own iTunes plugin. I smell a summer development project…
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SXC Round 1 - Laggan
Sunday saw the first round of the SXC Series at Laggan. A great course, consisting of a big climb and a stunning rocky descent, and the sun making an appearance, led to happy faces all round.
Iain Nimmo (Stirling Bike Club Wheels of Callander) won the masters (>30yo) race by only 36 seconds, with Greig Walker (Edinburgh Road Club) coming in second. Prasad Prasad (C21 Multisport) suffered a mechanical, and was unable to finish the masters race. Kenny Kently (Team Velo Ecosse) continued his domination of the veteran (>40yo) series from last year, with a convincing lead of several minutes.
For the second season I was competing in the Expert/Elite category (The fast boys). After my not so stunning performance at the BUSAs, I wasn’t really expecting too much from this race. The short course meant that we had been given six laps, meaning a race time of around two hours.
I started well, sitting in the second group for the first lap. I dropped the group on the second lap, with Calum Thomas (Pedal Power RT) joining me on the third lap. By the fourth lap Calum had made the jump to the wheel of Chris Murley (Sandy Wallace Cycles) up ahead. By the time I caught Chris going into the final lap, Calumn had made his moves and was now up ahead on his own. A last lap effort prevented Euan Pope (Rockhard Mountain Bike Club) and his teammate Barry Crumlish from catching me.
I finished in sixth place, something I am pretty happy about. The race was won by Ross Creber (Evans RT), with Any Barlow (The Bike Chain) in second, and James Fraser-Moodie (Pedal Power RT) in third.
Thanks to the organisers and all the supporters at the race, especially Iain and Janet Nimmo who made me laugh going into my last lap. Oh, and not frgetting my mum for the lift.
Full results are available in PDF format”. The Next round is at Fort William, so should be another good race.
Pic courtesy SXC website.
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Mac to Linux Streaming iTunes Using Skype
Since there isn’t a Linux version of Apple iTunes, I’ve been looking into other methods of streaming music to my workstation.
I basically want a system that works similar to what the Airport Express does. I want to control the music from my iBook, and simply stream it to my workstation over LAN. The workstation is connected to my speakers in another room, and would simply decode the stream.
After giving up the search, I was looking for something else, when I came across this Engadget how-to covering a method of accessing your itunes music library on your mobile phone.
I took the basic idea, and came up with this for streaming iTunes to my Linux workstation:
- Install Cycling 74’s SoundFlower onto your system (Mac OS X Only). Make sure you restart after the install. It’s a small system plugin that appears as a sound device in the sound pane of System Preferences. Set both the input and output device in this pane to ‘Soundflower (2ch)’. In this way the Mac is fooled into using whatever sound would usually come out of the speakers as an input instead of the microphone.
- Now install Skype on both your Mac, and your receiving system (This can be any OS that accepts Skype). Make sure you are signed in with two different Skype accounts.
- Dial one machine from the other, what way round doesn’t matter.
- Start iTunes or any other audio producing app on your Mac. Now any sound that you play on your Mac will be played on the speakers attached to your other system.
I tried this out with my iBook running OS X 10.4, and my workstation running Fedora Core 5 Linux. The sound quality isn’t the best, not as good as it could be, but bearable. Perhaps a LAN only audio streaming app would be better, as this would have a higher bitrate codec. Any suggestions?
Update
I thought I might be able to use VLC to stream the audio over my LAN, but turns out UDP unicast from a device isn’t supported under the OS X version. Would work fine from Windows → Linux etc, but not Mac → Linux. The search is still on…
Update 2
I’ve now tried Darwin Streaming Server, the open source version of the Apple Quicktime Streaming Server. This turned out to be way too bloated and complex, and would only let me point to files that the client could stream, rather than pushing a stream taken from a device (In our case the Soundflower ‘device’).
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Downtime
My webserver was down for about 20 hours last night and today, this was while I updated it to Fedora Core 5. The update was successful and everything is back online.
I did have a few difficulties though; MySQL wasn’t liking one of the queries I use on my blog, i figured it must be something to do with the new version not dealing with lower and uppercase named columns in the same way. I re-wrote the query and now it works fine. Secondly, every time I logged into this site, it logged me straight back out again! I soon discovered that this was due to the server not being able to save PHP Sessions, as the folder pointed to by the session path didn’t exist! After creating the folder and setting the correct permissions, everything worked fine.
While I was at it, I took the liberty of naming my iBook, my workstation and my server, so as I can log into them without having to remember their individual IP addresses.
Update
For some reason YUM isn’t playing nice with me, so I don’t have GD image resize support at the moment. If any images are missing on any of my pages, it is because of this. I’m working to fix the problem now.
Update 2
Found a workaround for the problem (For those interested, the $releasever variable was returning Null to the .repos files, causing Yum to return errors. Solution was to replace every instance of the variable with a 5 in the repos), which has now allowed me to install GD. All running fine and dandy now.
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New Workstation
People who know my opinions on computer hardware will probably be quite surprised to see the logo to the right, but yes, I do now have a Xeon workstation!
With two Xeon 1.7Ghx Processors onboard, and 768MB of RAM, it should buzz through the 3D work I have planned fairly quickly. As I demand more from the system, it will likely get a pair of 2.8Ghz or thereabouts processors, and more RAM. I currently have Fedora Core 5 Linux running from a 10GB hard drive I had lying around, but the plan is to buy a pair of 18.2GB 15,000rpm SCSI drives, and create a raid array of them.
When I first ran the machine, I was surprised at just how much noise it made when idle. I don’t mean it was just humming, it was competing with the tumble dryer in the next room! When I tried running two instances of Prime95 to stress test it, I was getting system errors reporting overheating on processor 0. Oh dear I thought, then I remembered that on inspection, one of the CPU heatsink clips had appeared to be broken. A quick modification of the broken clip, and a clean of the CPU and heatsink surfaces, and the machine now runs with no errors, and at an acceptable noise level even at full bore!
Update
I had a lot of trouble getting the Nvidia drivers to work on my machine due to troubles with the earlier Fedora Core 5 kernels. If anyone else is having trouble, or is just wanting instructions on the driver installation, check this thread for full instructions.