two-wheeled fun

Now that I have some idea how far and fast I am going on my bone shaker, I took a quick spin today: 13.6 miles. I used the speed information to gauge what cadences and gear combinations felt comfortable. I found 14/15 mph to be pretty easy to ride along at, but I couldn’t push myself much faster than that. I could have the cyclometer set wrong as well. The wheel size is 26 x 1.5 and the tire size is 26 x 1.95. While I think it makes sense to use the tire size, I’m not sure if I’m right.

But in any event, an hour’s steady work can’t be bad. I’ll worry about the finer points as I go.

the march of progress

A Computer’s Eye View (from 1972)

How far has computer technology advanced since this was written in 1972? In the proceeding chapter, Kemeny describes the then-new GE 635 machine that ran the Dartmouth Time Sharing System: the “dual processor system is capable of some 10 million multiplications per minute.”

That works out to be 166,166 multiplications per second. (I’m assuming these are “fixed-point” multiplies: no decimals allowed.)

A Pentium 4 can do at least one multiplication per clock cycle; for a 1.7GHz P4, that’s 1.7 billion multiplications per second. Rounding a bit, that 2002 Pentium 4 is about 10,000 times faster. (And if that GE 635 cost 10 million dollars

The question I have to ask is, where has all that power gone? On what have we spent all the speed? Do we do anything 10,000 times faster or even 10 times faster? Or do we instead use this tool more than the other (pen and paper, sliderule, calculator, ledger book), thereby soaking up the capacity?

As much as it seems we should have a surplus, when you look at examples like the one above, there still seems to be the demand for more.

reluctant evangelists

I was doing some shopping at my local Fred Meyer and as I left, I was greeted by a fellow handing out flyers, saying something about a “burger giveaway.” As a vegetarian, I’m not going to be interested, but rather than get into that, I took the flyer and dropped it into the cart. As it left my hand, I saw the word “baptist” and realized this was actually an invitation to visit a local church, burgers provided.

The early Christians were willing to face the lions or the griddle, any number of horrific fates, for their faith, while today’s evangelical Christians seem unwilling to risk a polite refusal or disapproving glance for theirs.

While some are reluctant to publicly profess their faith, others are assassinating their enemies and then fleeing, rather than standing up for their beliefs. I know of no recent violent acts, planned or committed, against religious leaders here in the US.

That seems hypocritical to me. It suggests a lack of real conviction: not that I condone or encourage killing doctors or blowing up healthcare facilities, but commiting the act as a declaration of your faith and then hiding is not the act of a true believer, merely a murderer, a criminal, and a terrorist.

Is the fellow hiding his church’s fellowship meetings behind free burgers evil? No, I don’t think so, but what is there to be afraid of? I suppose some could claim my reluctance to engage him on burgers and vegetarianism constitutes a lack of conviction on my part, but I’m not evangelizing. I could suggest pizza as a more ecumenical approach, food-wise, but that’s another matter. The bottom line is, I’d rather see someone be open about what he’s doing.

feed the geeks

Matt Stephenson, the maintainer of the samba package for OS X, liked my docs and based on my feedback will move the package into the stable tree. It seems he has gotten no feedback from anyone, and never knew if it just “worked for him” or just worked.

So send an email to the author of that port, package or utility you use daily and tell him what it means to you. In the gift culture that is the open source world and to some extent the internet, that kind of thing really counts.

Do it now.

my existential novel

“Mother died yesterday. Or was it today?”

So runs the opening of Camus’ “l’etranger”, variously translated as “The Stranger” or “The Outsider.”

It was today, somewhere between 1 and 2 am, that my mother died. We hadn’t spoken in any meaningful way in 30 years, so we weren’t exactly close.

The best summation I have for how the past 48 hours have gone for me is that I feel bad that I don’t feel worse. After all, losing the person who brought you into the world is a milestone for most people.

I first learned she was gravely ill Friday night, about 11 pm, in a rather roundabout way: an aunt with whom I have never had a close relationship telephoned from England earlier in the day to say she wanted to speak to me personally. When the timezones permitted, she told me what was happening: cancer everywhere, no hope of recovery, thought I might want to know.

The best case was that she might last the week, but her suffering ended just a day later.

home-rolled engineering

I ended up returning my cycling computer/odometer this weekend and getting a new one. I have the Sigma BC 400, a really basic one.

It turns out the first one may have been OK, but Sigma evidently cuts corners (and costs) on the parts. The salesguy at REI mentioned that sometimes the magnets are duff, so when this one worked when I tested it, but didn’t on the bike, I simultaneously figured out how it worked and why it didn’t, if that makes sense.

I pulled a super-powerful ceramic magnet from a box I had on hand from another project (doesn’t everyone have some of these?) and lo, it worked fine. The new magnet has about the same dimensions as a hearing aid/button battery, so some packing tape to hold it in place on top of the other one (it has a fitting to clip onto a spoke) and all is well.

I’d include a URL but the folks at Sigma are so clever, their site is all Flash-driven: must have used all the cash they saved on useless magnets . . . .

The way it works is simple: the computer is about the size of digital watch and connects to a little sensor mounted on your front fork. Once you set your wheel size, the magnet passing the sensor sends a signal to the computer which then calculates speed, records distance, etc.

now with Apache2

I decided to migrate to Apache 2. No compelling reason. I noticed that a portupgrade run had done something nasty to my existing Apache 1.3 installation and decided I’d rather switch than fight.

I think it’s more responsive but it could just be that new car smell . . . I’m sure I’ll never put it to the test.

translation tool needed: pkgdb rpm database

I like rpm even less than netinfo, but FreeBSD supports it, in a way, through its Linux emulation layer.

I was trying to install KRSS and after running into the usual issues with KDE apps not being able to find the QT libraries (the most popular query in the KDE support forums), I decided to try the rpm approach.

Well, it almost worked right out of the box. I needed a symlink:

ln -s /usr/compat/linux/var/lib/rpm /var/lib

Then I discovered the insurmountable opportunity.

error: failed dependencies:
libDCOP.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libfreetype.so.6 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libGL.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libGLU.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libjpeg.so.62 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkdecore.so.3 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkdeprint.so.0 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkdesu.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkdeui.so.3 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkfile.so.3 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkhtml.so.3 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkio.so.3 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkjava.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkparts.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkssl.so.2 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libksycoca.so.3 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
liblcms.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libmng.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libpng.so.2 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libqt.so.2 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libXft.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libXrender.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.1.3) is needed by krss-2.6-2.6

Obviously, I have all this stuff installed, but in my FreeBSD database (actually just a bunch of ASCII files). Some way of making rpm and the pkgdb aware of what each other is keeping track of would be a Good Thing.