Band on the run#
Thu, 01 Nov 2007 02:31:49 +0000
Very nearly finished putting my new bike together. It still doesn't have
- bar tape, nor will it have until I've tried riding it to find out if the brakes are in the right place
- anything to stop rain running into the steerer. I do have a star-fangled nut, but am decidedly unimpressed with the concept - it requires significantly more brute force to make it go in than I think is consonant with good engineering - and will probably instead be getting one of those expander bolts that carbon steerers require.
- a front derailleur. The plan up until about an hour ago was to borrow the band-on mech from the old bike, but it turns out they have different seat tube diameters. That should have occurred to me already.
- wiring for a computer, mount for the rear light
The first and fourth of these are, I think, essential for Saturday. The second, only if it rains. The third, well, for a mostly flat course I reckon that if need be I can stick it in the big ring and leave it there.
telent.not#
Thu, 01 Nov 2007 15:03:28 +0000
ww.telent.net is temporarily down, as we've cancelled service on the machine that used to host it. Backups exist and sooner or later I'll restore them somewhere, but in the meantime you may notice that my old blog is offline, and probably there are some missing images here and there on this one.
I got a letter from the Government the other day#
Thu, 01 Nov 2007 23:48:08 +0000
Or more accurately, a letter from my MP, yesterday - a reply to my [[email two weeks ago => Skull and cross-Bone]]. On actual paper and everyfink.
I'm not going to type the whole thing, but here are some quotes
- "In conversation with London Cycling Campaign representatives and [...] Emily Thornberry MP, I have been interested to learn that helmets can dehumanise a cyclist and there is some evidence that motorists are more careful if they see a cyclist's face"
- "... I will always stand up for cycling interests. I do not conside that compulsory helmets are necessary, although on the road they are advisable"
- "I am unable to comment on Peter Bone MP's preparation for the debate [...]"
The first quote is a little odd, but I suspect it's a reference to the work done by Ian Walker As for the rest, all sounds fairly positive and it's good to know the LCC (which I recently joined) is doing its thang.
Upper Thames Downer#
Wed, 21 Nov 2007 01:28:20 +0000
An uncomfortably long time - comprising, in part, an uncomfortable
long time - between the attempt and the writeup of my first go at a 200km Audax. It was all going great
until about 70km, at which point I descended a steep hill and rounded
the bend at the bottom on a nice wide line, only to see one of
the group I was riding with take a slightly tighter line and slide out
across my path. Managed to avoid him, but only by means of a sideways
jinking-too-tight maneouvre that made me crash. Damage to bike:
bent gear hanger, small dent in top tube, munged headset bearings.
Damage to me: gouge out of my elbow, bruised knee. Further damage to
bike occured a few km later when I changed down not realising the gear
hanger was bent, heard spoke pinging noises and came to an abrupt halt
with half the rear mech wrapped in the back wheel. This, I felt,
comprised enough of an excuse to retire from the field with honour
intact, so I walked to nearest village, taxi to nearest train station,
and home. Pity, really, it was a very nice ride up to that point ,and
at 25km/h including control stops a respectably fast one too.
I found the next day that the crash had stirred up my chronic groin
strain thingy (some adductor-related muscle/tendon problem probably
caused by vigorous T-stopping when cold) to the extent that walking
hurt. I found out the following Thursday when Condor had had a look
at the bike (wait, this is the good news coming up now) that the dent
in the top tube was not serious enough to worry about i.e. I didn't
break my new frame on its first outing. And not only did they fix all
the bits I'd broken in the crash, but they also finished the bits I'd
never quite got round to when building it in the first place (crimpy
end things on gear and brake cables, handlebar end plugs) and somehow,
I know not how, managed to apply sufficient force to the plug in the
end of the steerer tube that it's actually doing a useful job. So,
nice one Condor.
Since then I tried skating once, but (see groin, above) it hurt - and
stopping hurt double, therefore I (1) am waiting until that calms down
a bit, then (2) will go and see a physio in the hope of getting some
useful exercises for it before I resume. In the meantime,
London->Hertford->Cambridge on the bike last Saturday, first third on
my own at reasonable pace, second two thirds accompanying skaters at
"if I had known we would go this slowly I'd have worn shoe covers"
pace. It was cold and wet and somewhat lacking in traction for users
of small plastic wheels, so progress was not fast.
In something of a "we appear to have come full circle" moment, I
recently did what I should have done last spring: researched
Shimano/Campagnolo combinations properly. A Campag 10 speed shifter
pulls the same length of cable on each click as a Shimano 8 speed
mech/cassette expects to be pulled to shift one sprocket, so as soon
as my latest Parker order arrives I'll be in a position to put the
winter bike back together using pretty much all the original parts
that I took off it in the first place. Plus, I rather suspect, a rack
and mudguards, just to make sure it's unfashionable enough to not be a
theft magnet. Maybe even panniers. Still, now I have a fastish bike
as well I don't feel compelled to worry about the compromise.
Free money#
Wed, 21 Nov 2007 01:57:12 +0000
Oh yes, and yesterday I received a Magistrates Court Summons for non-payment of council tax. Which is on the face of it not the nicest way for Tower Hamlets to remind me I really ought to claim back my council tax overpayment from them (seems they'd lost any record of my moving out of the borough) but it's still pleasant to think I have a few extra quid that I'd forgotten about. So, I'm thinking "turbo trainer", on the grounds that (a) for indoor training, well, it's that or a slideboard and nobody I know with a slideboard has ever mentioned that they actually use it, (b) my choice of music is bound to be better than anyone else's spinning class, (c) even if I don't use it regularly for actual training, at least it'd be useful for getting the !@#$ing derailleur indexing right...
(And I never thought I'd say this, but kudos to LB Tower Hamlets for replying to my email within 24 hours of it being sent. Certainly beats Hackney's 3 week lag)
LTSP - Lose The Splash Page#
Thu, 29 Nov 2007 06:34:47 +0000
Some notes on the LTSP setup in Ubuntu 7.10 ("Gutless Gibbering" or
whatever tf it's called) which may be valuable to anyone else trying
to set up a Dell Vostro 200 as a client given that the whole thing is
a triumph of packaging over pragmatics and the documentation is
infuriatingly crap. If you arrived at this page via Google you
presumably knew that already or you wouldn't have been reduced to
trying random web pages.
I assume a certain familiarity with Unix, but I think that's more
robust than assuming you're an idiot with exactly the same hardware as
whatever the person who packaged it had. If you have, of course, then
it already works for you and why are you reading this anyway?
- The client boot sequence: address from DHCP, kernel and initramfs
from TFTP, then the "proper" root image seems to be served over nbd
(network block device)
- General principle seems to be that the "master" for the client root
image is in /opt/ltsp/$ARCH/ - but in general, changing files in
that tree doesn't change anything until you run some magic copying
script or other.
- The DHCP server config is not in /etc, it's in /etc/ltsp (check
/etc/init.d/dhcp3-server for the entirely undocumented override that
makes that be true). If you have the hardware for it, use a
dedicated ethernet device for the clients and configure it as
192.168.0.1 - then you won't need to change the dhcp config except
to make it ignore your other network.
- Once an address is assigned, the client will load kernel and initrd
from /var/lib/tftp/... One appears to be expected to populate this
by running
ltsp-update-kernels
, which basically copies files of
the same names from /opt/ltsp/$ARCH/boot
- So, if you need to remove the boot splash screen because it's
drawing a progress bar and then hanging with no progress and
absolutely no indication of what the problem is, you edit
/opt/ltsp/$ARCH/boot/pxelinux.cfg/default and do the preceding.
- Or if you need to change the initrd contents (e.g. to add modules)
you first maltreat /opt/ltsp/$ARCH/boot appropriately, then you
chroot into /opt/ltsp/$ARCH/ and run
update-initramfs -u
, then
(outside the chroot) ltsp-update-kernels
.
- I mention this because if you have the same Vostro 200 hardware as I
have, you will need to make it load
e1000-ich8
(network card driver)
on boot, and you do this by adding said module to
/opt/ltsp/$ARCH/etc/initramfs-tools/modules and then following
the preceding steps.
- And the same may apply if you want the keyboard and mouse to work -
let me tell you, even after removing the dumb user
firewall^W^W^Wsplash screen it required significant guesswork to
establish the problems here without scrollback. After booting the
client off a Ubuntu CD and running
lshw
, I added
usbcore
,uhch_hcd
and uhci_ecd
- don't do usbhid
, it makes
the keyboard horribly laggy.
- Once it's got the initrd it will try and get the full root, which is
served by
nbd
. This is /opt/ltsp/images/... which is created by
ltsp-update-image
from the contents of /opt/ltsp/$ARCH/ - so,
whenever you touch the latter, run the former.
- Note that you can ignore the messages you see about
nbd being unable to find its config file, it's optional. Which is
lucky as nbd is yet another daemon whose error messages don't
include the full pathname of the file it's failing to find.
- Eventually it will reach a gdm-like graphical login screen (ldm).
When you supply a username/password to this it will ssh to the
server, so at this point look in /var/log/auth.log for Stuff.
ltsp-update-sshkeys
is apparently relevant at this stage, I think
it's for use when you change the server IP address but I haven't run
it yet except in the course of "I give up, let's run everything that
looks vaguely relevant" Big Hammer debugging.
- and then if it appears to hang on a blank screen (it did when I
tried it), look in ~/.xsession-errors for relevant error messages.
I found that installing compiz (wtf? opengl widow manager over a
network?) and metacity seemed to help, but didn't actually get me
to the point that it opened any windows. Easiest fix is to run tasksel
and ask for the 'Ubuntu desktop' package, which you'd think would
be a dependency of something in this whole mess, but no.
- Ctrl-Alt-F1 will get you to a text console, but the login process
there doesn't auth against the server, so presumably you'd have to
look for or create a local user account in /opt/ltsp/$ARCH if you
wanted to explore the system in text mode.
Which as far as I've got so far.