A photo of the new wheels:
Still currently geared at 39×16. I did survive Stanton Avenue, but I don’t want to do that every day. I should I have 18 tooth cog for the rear wheel by week’s end, which will make things a little easier. This is essentially the bike I bought for $50. I painted it myself ($7), and purchased a smaller chainring ($10). That’s it. Good deal. methinks.
Basic Specs
Specialized Allez frame (mid 90s)
Specialized chromo fork
Shimano 105 components (hubs, headset, cranks, brakes)
Shimano DX cog
Specialized bottom bracket (old skool adjustable cup)
Wobler and Araya rims
Profile Stoker Bars
Nitto track stem
Dia-compe TT brake levers
Posted on 4 August 2003
In case you think I was over the edge before with my rant about the roads in my fine city, I’m not the only one who thinks this way:
I strongly urge any football fan to take a trip to see this camp. It’s about as pure as anything in this mega-jillion game can be. Just fly to Pittsburgh, rent a car, drive through the monstrosity of a traffic pattern that is downtown Pittsburgh, and go 50 minutes east on Route 30 into the heart of Latrobe.
This is a quote from Peter King’s weekly football column on Sports Illustrated. Thanks Peter.
Posted on 4 August 2003
Piracy Rings Hurt the Music Industry More Than File Sharing
I wonder when the RIAA will just admit this? This is like Microsoft going after folks that got a copy of Windoze from their friend instead of purchasing it. I used to work with a Pakistani fellow, and one day he asked us if we needed any software for the office. We shrugged and said bring in what you have. The next day he came in with a hundred CDs with every imaginable piece of proprietary software on them. With license keys. And this wasn’t stuff he burned at home — everything was nicely packaged. He said he could get CDs like this at home for $5 each. These were obviously the work of professionals, not somebody just cranking out CDs in their room.
In America, we not really aware of this sort of piracy, but it occurs everywhere. The media and the RIAA would like you believe that that copy of the latest Madonna album is keeping her from feeding her kid, but truthfully, it’s the pirates in other countries that are killing the industry. When will the EFFstart their own campaign to really fight the RIAA? Sure, they’re trying to fight the RIAA, but they’ve got use other ammunition. Show the RIAA the piracy statistics.
Posted on 4 August 2003
Two new software installs this weekend:
1. Mandrake 9.2 beta 1. I had a whole 20GB drive sitting in my machine at home with a lame Gentoo install on it, and I read that beta 2 will contain the newest 2.6 kernel, so I thought “what they hey” and installed beta 1. Very nice. Gnome is actually a bit faster, probably due to the fact that it is tweaked a bit for Mandrake. I guess that’s the disadvantage of using a roll-it-yourself distro like Slackware.
2. Ximian Desktop 2. I had tried this once or twice before without success, but I just let the installer run at work over the weekend, and when I got in, poof, there it was. Very nice. There were some bugs in Gnome 2.0 that sorta got on my nerves, so it’s nice to have a desktop based on Gnome 2.2. Very clean interface, and the fonts look a bit sharper too.
In other news, the new bike hit the road this morning. I’ll snap a photo this evening and post it tonight. It’s nice to be on skinny tyres again. Currently, it’s geared at 39 x 16, and that didn’t hurt too much, but I may try to pick up a 18 tooth cog at lunch, and that should allow me to climb up Stanton to get home.
Posted on 4 August 2003
Let me rant for a bit on the sorry state of the infrastructure in Pittsburgh. Simply put, our street/highway system is not good. How bad can it be, you say? Well, let me give you a list of the worst bits of road in the city, and you can decide for yourself. These aren’t necessarily in any order, but the worst of the lot is closer to the top.
1. The Parkway East (I-376)/Squirrel Hill Interchange:
This has so much going for it. If you entering I-376 heading east, you join the highway approximately 20 meters from the exit ramp, so you have roughly 5 seconds to cut across the exit lane and into the traffic. Add to the fact that the Squirrel Hill tunnel is another 40 meters up the road (which brings with it the Pittsburghers fear of all things tunnel), and it just gets worse. If you’re exiting heading east to go to Squirrel Hill, you’ve got deal with people trying to get on the Parkway, as well as traffic that has looped around from the westbound exit ramp. All in all, good fun.
2. Route 28:
Route 28 is such a bad stretch of highway, it contains several pieces of civil engineering stupidity. Let’s see….
* The interchange with I-279. Take a look at map of Pittsburgh sometime, and find the interchange of route 28 and I-279. According to a high level map, it looks as if getting from one highway to the other would be quite simple, as route 28 goes right over I-279. Looks can be deceiving, however. If you heading south (towards city) on route 28, you have to go through a minimum of 4 lights to get on I-279 north, and 3 to get on I-279 south. Now, this may not seem to ludicrious, but if you continue on route 28 past the I-279 exit, you will soon find yourself driving between the lanes on I-279. Yes, that’s right, I-279 was built around route 28. I can spit out my window on the interstate, but it takes at least 5 minutes to get driving it on route 28.
* Route 28 and the 31st Street Bridge. First….route 28 is one of the major arteries into downtown Pittsburgh. So you’d think it would be a wide highway, devoid of lights. Well, you’re wrong. Not far from the I-279 debacle, there is a traffic light where the 31st Bridge deposits its traffic. Now, one redlight isn’t a bad thing, but the intersection includes a ramp coming from River Avenue. Of course, the ramp intersects the bridge before the intersection with route 28, so there is an additional traffic light at the top of the ramp. The word on the street is if you miss the green light on that ramp, it 15 minutes until the next one. And this is during rush hour.
* Route 28 and the 40th Street Bridge. This would be the fastest way to get from our house to I-279, except that you can sit at the traffic for close to 10 minutes at the end of the bridge. Just plain stupid.
To add insult to injury, last year the city closed the 16th Street Bridge, which come from downtown to intersection of route 28 and I-279. That’s fine, right? You’ve got the 40th and 31st Street bridges to compensate. Then the city says, “oh, by the way, we’re going to limit traffic on those bridges as well to do more construction.”
3. Crosstown Blvd:
This stretch of road must be frightening to out-of-towners. This cuts through the upper part of downtown, with traffic coming from all directions at high speed. The mess is due to lots of poor planning and the addition of several other major roads into town.
4. The Homestead Highlevel Bridge/The Waterfront:
This hasn’t completely blown up in the city and county’s collective face yet. The Waterfront is an enormous shopping plaza built on the site of an old steel mill (that’s “still miwl” if you’re from the ‘burgh). It is immensely popular, and while you can access it from other points besides the bridge, the bridge is the primary entry point if you live in city. The Highlevel Bridge is old. It looks old, it sounds old. It will need work sooner rather than later. But I don’t think the owners of the Waterfront will be pleased to see the main thoroughfare into their mall closed. Can’t wait to see that one.
5. The Fort Pitt Tunnels, Inbound:
Again, following the classic “put the exit ramp right after the entrance ramp” scenario. Except the entrance ramp is 2 lanes of highway, and brief stretch of three lane road the ramps create becomes a shooting gallery of cars trying to get on and off the interstate. Thankfully, though, this important piece of highway has been under various stages of construction for the past few years, so the problems are a bit more, uh, sporadic.
6. The West End Circle:
This stretch of route became the primary detour during the Fort Pitt construction. After you cross the West End Bridge, you do a little cicane around a railroad overpass. The county decided to wait until the Fort Pitt construction was nearly finished before straightening this section of road out (which would have alleviated even more traffic). Gee, thanks.
Posted on 2 August 2003
WRC Drivers Caught Speeding at Rally Great Britain
Actually, quite a few drivers (including some big names) were caught speeding by police cameras on public road sections between stages. This highlights one of the little known facts of rallying — the cars actually do drive around to get from stage to stage (remember when Seb Loeb got lost?). And they are expected to follow all traffic rules (in fact, I remember seeing a photo of Richard Burns, sitting in his Peugeot 206, passing some coins to a toll booth operator). The cases won’t go to court til after the rally season ends, but expect the FIA to help crack down on this.
Posted on 1 August 2003
How to start a flame-war of misinformation on the internet in three easy steps:
1. Reverse engineer the firmware of a Linksys wireless and find that it uses open source, GPL‘ed software.
2. Write an entry on your O’Reily blog claiming that the company is in clear violation of the GPL because you can’t find the source code for the firmware on the company’s website.
3. Suggest a story to Slashdot about this blantant disregard of the GPL.
It’s sorta fun to watch these happen when it’s slow at work. The post hit Slashdot sometime mid morning, and I was interested just because we have a Linksys router/hub at home, and I wondered if I could glean anything about how it works. I won’t go into too many details, since everything is now available on the O’Reily blog, but here are some highlights:
Actually, let me briefly explain the GNU Public License, so you don’t have to sift through the legalese…basically, the GPL protects open source, free software code from being used and modified without re-releasing the source code. A simple example:
I write a brand new web browser, and release it under the GPL. My friend Matt decides he likes the web browser, but thinks it could use some other features. I have to make the source code available, either with the distribution of the software, or from a publically accessible website, or by request, so Matt can just download the source, make his changes, and release his modified version. Here’s the catch. Matt is required by the GPL to release his modified code with his software. This is why the GPL is often called a “viral” license…as long as you’re releasing software using GPL code (no matter how large or small the secion of GPL code is), you have to release the modified source code). Ok, enough of that….
1. Don’t Overreact
Rob Flickenger had noble motivates trying to protect the GNU Public License. But he really jumps the gun. His first stated reason for a violation of the GPL:
By opening the firmware file directly, as well as by making queries through the makeshift ping interface mentioned earlier, we noticed that the zebra running on the WRT54G doesn’t use the standard configuration file locations. This means that it must certainly be a modified binary.
As many, many Slashdot posts pointed out (and as Rob admits in an update to his blog), configuration file locations are generally defined as parameters in a ./configure used to build source code. Has Rob never built a piece of software on a *nix box with make?
2. Jumping the gun, part 2
Again, from Rob’s blog:
And evidently, I’m not the first to notice that these binaries are compiled with a modified GCC (with a signature string of “GCC: (GNU) 3.0 20010422 (prerelease) with bcm4710a0 modifications”). That bcm4710 refers to the Broadcom chipset that this AP is actually made from. If Broadcom is using a modified GCC for their reference design, and are making this available to their developers, aren’t they bound by the GPL to make the source code to those modifications available as well?
There could be a GPL violation here, but it’s not by Linksys. Broadcom, since they are releasing a modified version of the GCC (the Gnu C Compiler), have to release the source code to Linksys, but since Linksys isn’t distributing the GCC with the router, they are not obliged to release that code.
3. Do your homework
If you read his blog update, he’s basically recanted everything he’s said. Linksys provides a GPL source code repository on their site, and Rob downloaded the source for the router in question, and it did, in fact, have modifications made for their router. But, according to the GPL, that’s just fine, since the source was available for public download.
Yeesh. Do your homework. Even without all the Slashdot input, Rob should have at least looked closely at the source that was available before claiming GPL violations. Not only did he publically claim that Linksys was essentially breaking the law, he got the Slashdot community all riled up for no good reason.
Posted on 31 July 2003
Wow. Our kid is cute.
Posted on 31 July 2003
In case you haven’t noticed, the website when *poof* for a day or so. I’m still waiting on more details from my host, but they said a hard drive failure brought down about half their sites. My guess is it was a firewall or gateway machine that went down, since I could still ping my site. On the bright side, their email server didn’t go down.
Other Stuff
James Woods Interview. He seems to be a pretty bright guy. Also a bit arrogant, but hey, he’s an actor, what do you expect. It’s definitely worth clicking through the Salon free day pass ads to read his exchanges with his interviewer.
We are in for quite a political ride. Bush has condemned the concept of homosexual marriages. I read an interesting editorial a few weeks ago in the print edition of the Post Gazette critiquing the idea of legalizing homosexual marriages from a purely political perspective (well, at least mostly). The bulk of the arguments centered around the increase in government services that would be required (using countries in Europe that have legalized homosexual marriages as examples). Even as a Christian, my libertarianism tends to poke through here. If this won’t require the government to grow exponentially (thus raising my taxes), have at it. Christians who deny the obvious fact this isn’t a Christian nation and try to rely on the law of land to change people’s hearts are misguided at best.
The president did, however, say something right during the press conference:
“Yes, I am mindful that we’re all sinners,” the president said Wednesday when asked for his views on homosexuality. “And I caution those who may try to take the speck out of the neighbor’s eye when they’ve got a log in their own.”
The federal government should stay out of this for moment and let the states decide what they want to do. If the people of Virginia don’t want homosexual marriages, that’s fine. If the people of Maryland do, that’s great as well.
Posted on 31 July 2003
Well, I learned a couple of things about the NYC school (see below). Enrollment is not limited to homosexuals. Here’s an excerpt from their mission statement:
The Hetrick-Martin Institute (HMI) believes all young people, regardless of sexual orientation or identity, deserve a safe and supportive environment in which to achieve their full potential. HMI creates this environment for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth between the ages of 12 and 21 and their families. Through a comprehensive package of direct services and referrals, HMI seeks to foster healthy youth development. HMI’s staff promotes excellence in the delivery of youth services and uses its expertise to create innovative programs that other organizations may use as models.
Ok, great. If they’re trying to foster a supportive environment, I think that is fantastic. But then why include any mention of homosexuality? Again, this just seems like a way to solve one problem (homosexuals getting mistreated in public schools) with something that’s going to cause more problems.
I really want to stress that I think this should be, as described in the mission statement, a private school. Public schools should be just that — public. Open to anyone. There are exceptions to that, though. The Pittsburgh school system has the concept of magnet schools — academically rigorous schools that don’t limit enrollment based on geographic location. If you’re smart enough, you can go there regardless of what ward you live in. But…..anyone from the ward where the magnet school is located is still accepted, regardless of academic standing. There’s also special education units, but is this special treatment? These kids have physical problems that prevent them from learning in the same manner as everyone else. They would lilkely fail out of the typical public high school.
Posted on 29 July 2003