February 08, 2010
James McPherson — Slight kink in the road bike plans
For most of Saturday's ride I kept hearing a rather annoying clunk, and couldn't quite figure out where it was coming from. Eventually I realised it was probably within or closely associated with the rear hub, and was sad -- servicing would be Required, and sooner rather than later.Took the roadsteed off to Chain Gang for a service. Fortunately or unfortunately they are all backed up until Thursday, so I just asked LBSG what he could think of as possible causes for the clunking. He spun the wheel a few times, noticed that some of the spokes were loose (that'll have been killing the wheel true), saw that there was more play in the freehub than he would have expected, that the smallest cog on the cassette was badly worn, and then another LBSG came over and looked at the shifters.
"Oh, those are the 8speed RSXs [wiggle wiggle, with force].... they're buggered, you'll need new ones. Cost you about $400."
[insert sadface here]
As it happens, I had noticed that it took more and more wiggling to get them to shift for the cassette, and they just weren't moving enough for the chainrings either. A bit of googling later and it seems pretty obvious that these have a design lifespan, and 11 years post-installation is pretty much past it.
I'm hoping Scott's buddy Rohan can give me a second opinion, but I'm now starting to look into whether I can move to a 9 or even 10 speed cassette and shifter set. All that will just have to remain on hold, though, until I move past ENOCASH (for bike bits at least). Just when I was starting to get things going! Guess I'll have to put the slicks back on the mtbsteed and keep trundling.
Pat Nichols — p220
Do not use.
Clinton Roy — Ignite Brisbane
Ignite talks are five minute lightning talks hosted by popular
technology publishers O’Reilly. Brisbane’s first Ignite night is
coming up in March and I’m giving a talk on Open Source.
I see this as an excellent opportunity to advertise all the different open source groups in Brisbane, as well as our premier upcoming event, Linux.Conf.Au 2011.
My talk is based on the all the reasons everyone should know and like the open source ideals. It’ll be based on the keynotes at this years lca. I’ve got time for twenty slides, I’m thinking one slide with the logos of all the different open source groups in Brisbane, and one slide for lca.
If you’ve got ideas for one of the slides, or an open source group
based in Brisbane, please mail me the details.
February 07, 2010
Pat Nichols — p221
A crochet pattern Bek will try and copy.
Pat Nichols — p222
My new car.
Pat Nichols — p223
The gate sign at Lang Park.
February 06, 2010
James McPherson — 1st week of making the km target
I did a 57km ride today, with Chip, Tim, Ingrid and Elspeth. Took a bit longer than I wanted - made some wrong turns trying to remember the route we took on Australia Day, but we got there in the end.Managed to sustain a decent pace (about 35km/h by the handlebar computer) along Brisbane Corso, and really enjoyed the espresso (Guatamalan single orchard) from Cup on Russell St in West End. Really enjoyed it.
The new year goal was to be riding at least 70km every week, and this week (Sunday to Saturday) I've actually managed it. Tuesday was the day my tyre blew out, so that was a bare 6.5km (half was walking home), then Wednesday 20.24, Thursday 23.55, Friday 17.03 and today 57.17. Total: 124.49km.
I'm expecting that to radically improve starting in about a week, because Elissa got a job based in West End and is planning to ride to and from several days every week, and asked whether I'd like to join her. Of course I would! Every day I do one of those will be at least 36km, possibly even 40. Should be able to get my stamina up very quickly as a result.
Then there's the small matter of the Coottha Challenge, but now Tim has his bike back from the fixitman, that shouldn't be such of a problem to get out and train for. I hope!
Sarah Smith — Hot, Flat and Upgefscked
February 04, 2010
Greg Black — Another Look at Version Control Systems
I’ve been using version control systems for ever—well, back to the days of SCCS anyway. Every few years, I survey the scene to see if there’s something that better fits my current needs. That way I came to use RCS instead of SCCS. Then I found CVS and, after some hesitation, migrated all my RCS repos to CVS. And then I found I hated some of the weaknesses of CVS and migrated back to RCS.
There things stayed until Subversion was ready for real world use. I chose not to migrate old work, but just started using svn for new projects and then for new work on old RCS-managed projects. That went pretty well and served me for some years.
But, as Subversion was hitting its stride, other people were working on distributed revision control systems and I started watching those projects. From time to time, I would spend a few days having a good look at the obvious contenders. A couple of years ago I felt there were a few that were ready to be considered: Git, Mercurial, Darcs, Bazaar all seemed interesting. After some consideration, I chose Mercurial and I have been happy with it.
But Bazaar, or bzr as it’s called on the command line, had been a close second in my assessment. Bzr was let down by some performance issues and also appeared to have a few other minor concerns.
Recently, I’ve had another look at the various DVCSes as part of another project and I think there’s very little to choose between Git, Mercurial and Bazaar. It comes down to comfort with the command structure and support for the workflows that you might want to adopt. For me, Git is still too clunky to use—it takes more typing to get the same result. But I think Bazaar has just moved ahead of Mercurial in terms of workflow options and it seems to have caught up in the performance area.
So I’m going to use Bazaar for a couple of new projects and I’m also going to convert a couple of active Mercurial projects over to Bazaar. And, in a few months, I’ll have an opinion about the wisdom of that choice and I’ll write about that in due course. I know I haven’t exactly explained my choice, but that’s deliberate because it really is a fine distinction and I’m pretty certain that Git, Mercurial and Bazaar are all fine systems.
Greg Black — OS X Fails to Please
I’ve been using Apple laptops for a number of years in order to have access to some specific capabilities, but I have always found it hard to come to terms with the limited functionality of OS X as a work environment. Nevertheless, when I acquired my MacBook Pro recently, I decided to just go with the flow and learn to use Snow Leopard as it was meant to be used. And that has worked out quite well for the purposes that I normally use the MacBook for—email, IRC and web browsing while on the road.
But I recently had a reason to use it for my normal work stuff. I had needed to visit a Mac retailer for some minor item and stopped to look at the 27-inch iMac, where I became entranced by the display and, to a lesser extent, by the neat overall package.
This led to thoughts of possibly buying one of these things, which in turn led to thoughts of discomfort with OS X.
So I decided to try out OS X on a decent-sized display instead of the teensy thing on the 13-inch MacBook. I hooked the MacBook up to a 24-inch display to see how things might work. This brought me into contact with Apple Fail Number 1—the ability to get stuff onto the display you want it on is a black art and in some cases it’s only possible to start an application, see where it lands and then drag it to the desired display. That was hugely unimpressive, but wasn’t the point of the exercise, so I tried to ignore it while doing my testing.
I believe I succeeded in applying my attention to the factors that would be relevant with a single large display running OS X. To give it a fair go, I used this setup for three days as my desktop environment. But that was as much as I could stomach. Gnome—whether under FreeBSD, or OpenSolaris, or Linux—is just so much better to work with than OS X that it’s really not even a contest.
The upside of this is that I’ve saved $3k that I had put aside for the iMac which I could now partly apply to the bicycle that I’ve been thinking about buying as part of my fitness program. Another upside is that I won’t be constantly chafing against all the annoying little restrictions that Apple impose on their customers. So, although I will slightly regret the decision not to add something shiny to my desk, I think I’m probably more pleased than sad.