sjh - mountain biking running linux vegan geek spice - mtb / vegan / running / linux / canberra / cycling / etc

Steven Hanley hackergotchi picture Steven
Hanley
About

email: sjh@svana.org

web: https://svana.org/sjh
twitter: https://twitter.com/sjhmtb
instagram: https://instagram.com/sjhmtb

Other online diaries:

Aaron Broughton,
Andrew Pollock,
Anthony Towns,
Chris Yeoh,
Martijn van Oosterhout,
Michael Davies,
Michael Still,
Tony Breeds,

Links:

Linux Weekly News,
XKCD,
Girl Genius,
Planet Linux Australia,
Bilbys,
CORC,

Canberra Weather: forecast, radar.

Subscribe: rss, rss2.0, atom

←September→
Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun
    1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30      

←2004→
Months
Jan Feb Mar
Apr May Jun
Jul Aug Sep
Oct Nov Dec

Categories:

Archive by month:

Thu, 02 Sep 2004

Panic over dns, what work for lca this week (where are we going today</plagarise>) - 21:29
Last night I was writing various lca information and on checking the links worked I found linux.conf.au did not appear to resolve. Fortunately it was not off air, simply munnari.oz.au was playing up and not properly responding to queries. I imagine this is just another in the line of many panics I will have, whether well founded or not, leading up to April 23rd (the end of the conference) next year.

As for where we are going today (rather poor deliberate plagarism), we had another meeting and again it appears we had more people than actual jobs to do at the moment. This could be a good thing, when there is a lot of work to do we should have the people available for the work. I still need to work on letting go a bit and allowing lca crew members to do their own thing more and just being around to ensure things get done.

As for media wise, Rusty has volunteered to be the media contact person for the conference. This is cool as he has the gift of the gab (kissed the blarney stone or similar) in the context of media and people in suits and the like. Also he knows the guff about linux.conf.au pretty well.

[/lca] link

The WSMTB N-ZO 12 hour commeth. - 09:52
This morning I had my normal thursday morning jaunt, one and half hours of mtb riding in Majura Pines. Mike Burden accompanied me this morning, distance and time on my bike computer are 25.6 KM and 1hour 31min respectively.

So there is a 12 hour mtb race this weekend in the western sydney area. I have competed in this race both in 2002 in mens pairs with Andrew Rowe and last year (2003) in mixed pairs with Heidi Flaxman. The race is held between Richmond and Springwood on the edge of the Blue Mountains in Yellomundee National Park. Every year the course has been a heck of a lot of fun, with interesting technical obstacles in places around the course, good flowing single track, basically a huge variey of really good mtb terrain, lots to look forward to :)

Heidi is one of the fastest female mtb riders in Australia, so having her on my team last year was a good thing, the plan had been to win. We thought we had, heck they gave us first place on the night of the event. A few days later when the results were put online we discovered we had in fact come second by 3 minutes. (which after 12 hours is pretty close I suppose)

So this year we intend to learn from our mistakes and see what we can do better. Last year there were a few obvious blunders we made, though I think I can lay the blame for the three minute loss at the end on my preperation for my final laps.
The obvious mistakes were

  • Not checking the results often, especially as night hit and being complacent with our lead.
  • Due to the above mentioned complacency Heidi and I both decided to ride slower laps in the night, thinking we need not push so hard any more we started lapping the course about 4 or 6 minutes slower than we were capable of doing (during the day we had both been doing 36 to 39 minute laps, neither of us slow down more than 2 minutes in the dark and yet ended up doing 42 to 46 minute laps for all our night laps)
  • The big mistake was on my part, I had been hoping Heidi would want to do our final lap crossing over to 9pm so had eaten enough food for doing one lap at the end of the race rather than two. When I ended up doing two laps in a row to finish the day off I had not eaten enough and "Hit the wall" (ran out of energy), my last lap of the day was 53 minutes, 7 minutes slower than any other lap I had done all day. The second placed team had been slowly clawing back the 15-20 minute margin we had over them ay 6pm and then my final lap was when they were able to overtake us.
So learning from the above, do not ever get complacent, keep hammering at full tilt for the entire event, and prepare for doing extra riding or other similar eventualities if need be.

So Heidi has flown in to Australia from where she is now living in New Zealand, and we are getting ready to try to make up for last year. What ever happens though it should be a great weekend with some really fun riding :)

[/mtb/events] link

Issues with blosxom's files and timestamps - 09:42
So one of the problems I have noticed with blosxom for this diary is that due to the fact it simply uses files in a directory hierarchy for all diary entries, the timestamps on the files are used for sorting entries.

A problem with this arises if you need to update or modify an entry, or maybe when recovering from backups or various other similar actions. If the timestamps change, the diary entries are rearranged.

Fortunately as Mikal pointed out, blosxom is a 444 line perl program so trivial to modify. My plan is to use a time stamp in an html comment somewhere in each diary entry file and make blosxom use those to sort the files. Another option is simply using those time stamps in a post processing step and that step can read them and use date (1) with the -d option to ensure they are in the correct order for blosxom. It is not a difficult problem to get around.

[/various] link

home, email, rss, rss2.0, atom