This Space for Rent

A slow but scenic road

Leif Erikson Drive makes for a nice loop on a warm(ish) January afternoon.

—orc Sat Jan 28 21:13:54 2012

Looks can be deceiving

Take a battered old dynohub, go over it with steel wool to get the rust deposits off, place it into the low trail fork off the gaspipe frame I found last year, and tah dah! it suddently looks as if it was sparklingly new.

Alas, looks can be deceiving.

—orc Fri Jan 27 19:12:44 2012

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Dust Mite shows off a fashionable wristwatch.

—orc Fri Jan 27 19:07:32 2012

Enjoy it while it lasts

This bridge doesn’t have very many sunny January days left.

—orc Thu Jan 26 20:54:44 2012

Needs a little work

At some time in the last 39 years this poor dynohub was left in a axle-deep puddle (or the bicycle it was attached to was left out in the rain) for a considerable period of time. When it finally came into my possession, it was seized solidly shut, and I had to apply copious amounts of cleaning oil before the stator unlocked itself from the field magnets.

The stator is going to have to be cleaned with a wire brush, steel wool, and some sort of non-solvent cleaning solution. But before I do that I’m going to have to fabricate a keeper bar to fit between all of the poles of the field magnet, because S-A dynohubs use an iron field magnet which loses its power just like that if you don’t have something ferrous keeping the poles apart.

I’ll get around to it in a month or so (unless I inherit a CNC mill or a big old industrial lathe.)

—orc Tue Jan 24 23:11:28 2012

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Domestic vermin picture of the day

A bicycle is a useful object even if you can’t ride it.

—orc Mon Jan 23 23:15:31 2012

Trolley picture of the day

A pair of trolleys head west from Gateway Transit Center.

—orc Sat Jan 21 19:22:05 2012

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Dust Mite does a load test on a porteur rack platform.

—orc Fri Jan 20 23:44:28 2012

New Code!

Discount has been pushed up to version 2.1.3 with a small collection of bugfixes and some tweaks to the build process a bit for better compilation with the LLVM C compiler, mingw, and cygwin.

The bugfixes are

1. Stop tripping over tables with leading |s; the first implementation of tables treated leading |s as the end of an empty table cell. 2.1.3 corrects this to properly be merely decoration.

   As a side-effect, you now need to have all the rows of the table either with a leading | or not; you cannot mix and match them, sorry.

2. For some mysterious reason I was treating the <br> tag as a block-level html tag, so my html blockifier would split paragraphs with explicit <br>s in them.

3. The table of contents code was apparently generating bad html (something I never noticed, because I never use that feature, alas!) but Stefano D'Angelo contributed a patch to clean up the generated html to make it correct.

The build tweaks are mainly in the makefiles to stop it from accidentally creating Windows-style nfs (prefixed with //) paths, and to work around a mingw makefile peculiarity where it attempts to apply a default rule to compile version.c (the module that contains the discount version# in a nice string format for programs to display) into VERSION (the text file that contains the version number) but I had to modify some of the source code to make it work with clang, because clang is not gcc-compatable like it claims to be; where gcc whines about float main() being an unnatural function, clang just falls down screaming on the floor. Since clang is what MacOS Xcode uses on MacOS 10.6 (and 10.7?), this means that a lot of people now have the opportunity of seeing their C compiler scream like a baby who just spilled their milk.

And clang is a whole bunch faster than gcc, so the “lot of people” includes me. Siiiiiigh – fine, I’ll use a g-dd-mned int main() like the nitpickers want. I don’t like it, but it’s in the code now.

There are some more far-reaching changes I’m poking at, but I don’t want to light the codebase on fire just yet, so what you see is the New Code! you get.

—orc Thu Jan 19 22:45:47 2012

Snow night

I wonder if this snowfall will last until the morning?

—orc Tue Jan 17 22:55:40 2012

Misuse of a work computer

I’m doing some ipad development these days, and as part of the development process I needed, and was given, an ipad. So I had to test it out, and what better way (short of jailbreaking the thing and putting a C compiler onto it) to verify that it works than to take pictures of the cats?

—orc Mon Jan 16 22:49:54 2012

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Gone shopping

We’d run out of tea, so I had to run up to Kobos to get some more. We had three 1 pound bags and a 6 oz tin for Russian Caravan, so I needed to get all of them refilled, and then we needed some Assam for variety, so I got a pound of that too. While we were there, I also picked up a couple of glass storage containers (for leftovers; it’s a lot easier to stretch meals out if we can put the remains into the fridge for the next few days, and those leftovers are a lot more appealing if the entire meal isn’t scraped into one big container all mixed up) and a pair of cute tiny coffee cups that were bear-sized and on extreme discount.

And then I crammed all of it into my porteur-randonneur bag and came back home.

The porteur-randonneur bag isn’t perfect (the bias tape I’ve got on it is aggressively not water-resistant, and cheerfully wicks up water and tries to carry it into the body of the bag, and I begin to regret not putting a mapcase onto the top of the bag, and and I need to put a big mesh pocket onto the front of the bag to carry stuff that doesn’t need to be protected from the weather) but the triangular flaps on the side really come into their own when the bag is overstuffed. They seem to do well at relieving the stresspoint where the side panel attaches at the base of the lid, and, obviously, they do a good job of keeping the overflow from flopping out the side and plunging to the pavement when I hit turbulence at 20mph.

—orc Sat Jan 14 23:44:42 2012

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

I’ve been cleaning out my basement workshop, which became a horrible debris heap over the past couple of years, and have unearthed an amazing collection of tools. Dust Mite is at a bit of a loss when tossed into the middle of the mass of tools (the pictured pile is about 1/3rd of my tool hoard; I’m going to need to buy a big sheet of perfboard and about 200 perfboard hooks if I’m going to have even the slightest hope of pinning them up in a place where I can get to them when I need them.

But I suspect I’ll need a perfboard shelf for the dust mites, too.

—orc Fri Jan 13 22:00:47 2012

That’s one

I rode Volcanoes vs. Farmland today, and despite being out of shape and fatter due to the holidays I managed to do it in finite time. But the results are deceptive; I only spent 20 minutes stopped while doing this loop, and 10 minutes of that were due to

1. stopping to take pictures of a train in Oregon City,
2. dropping my chain on Harding Road (I was grinding up the steep ramp there when my rear wheel rolled into some loose leaf debris. The chain just hopped! off the chainring when my slow pedaling was briefly converted to a fast spin,)
3. stopping on Buckner Creek Road to take pictures of Willamette Valley Southern artifacts, then
4. stopping to take pictures of a volcano, and finally
5. stopping on Saltzman Road to first fall over (I rode into a debris-filled gully on the path, and the bicycle cheerfully tipped over when I tried to hop it out) and then get a couple of info questions for my Dixie Mountain 100 populaire.

If I’d actually stopped at any of the controls for snacks, this would have been a much longer loop. But then I would have missed dropping down Saltzman Road at twilight, and that would have been a shame.

—orc Sat Jan 7 22:21:31 2012

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Dust Mite examines the nail I found on 136th yesterday morning.

—orc Fri Jan 6 17:54:31 2012

Crappy cellphone photo of the day

The trek sits in front of the Portland Traction/PG&E substation at Golf Junction during a sunny interval this afternoon. If you look at the hugest version of this photo, you’ll see the moon peeking through powerlines as well as all the grain you can eat, because the photo sensor, despite being tiny, appears to only have a thousand or so receptors and when the light levels are low (fsvo “low”) the little Linux cellphone’s brain goes pop and picture quality goes right out the window.

It’s marginally better than the little Nikon CBC I’ve got, which turns on the flash at the slightest provocation, and then shuts itself off after ever picture so it can recharge the flash capacitors :-(

—orc Thu Jan 5 22:29:35 2012

Its days are numbered

The old Sellwood bridge against a cloudy morning sky.

—orc Tue Jan 3 19:30:03 2012

Preliminary results from todays running of the Volcanoes vs. Farmlands 208k permanent

I needed to get ready for attempting to get my children off to school tomorrow morning, so I missed the ride (snif!) but I did manage to be around (even though “be around” meant “ran into the riders when going to the store for lunch supplies for tomorrow” for the last three riders) so I could get the completed brevet cards when all the riders came down the pike.

Rider	RUSA #	Time
ALSUP, William	4377	12h32
ARASMITH, Jeffery	6229	13h45
FITZSIMMONS, Lynne	3821	13h45
JOHNSON, Michael	5429	10h46
ROFFE, Theo	5988	12h08
SCHUR, Maria	7337	11h11
YOUNG,Michal	5475	13h45

(I still need to look at the receipts so I can frown disapprovingly at any irregularities, and then actually submit the results via the RUSA website, but I don’t expect that there will be any changes in the timings.)

—orc Mon Jan 2 23:39:08 2012

Digression of the day

I was in the throes of sewing pockets onto a handlebar bag when the thread started jamming and breaking. I spent a while (growing more frustrated all the time) trying to figure it out before I realized that the needle was actually getting dull and needed to be replaced, but by the time I’d reached that point I was irritated enough so I had to go and do something else to take my mind off it.

Fortunately, I’ve been in the throes of cleaning up my bike/workshop mess, and I’d excavated deeply enough into the pile of junk that I’d unearthed the unbrazed platform for a porteur rack I’d started to work on the year before last. What better way to burn off my frustrations than to take my toy torch and use it to glue these pieces together?

45 minutes (+10 minutes to run to the hardware store for a can of oxygen because the previous one had run out) and a whole bunch of filing later, I’d worked out my frustrations.

And I only bobbled one joint to the point where I have to go in and float more brass onto the HUGE GAPING HOLE where the slat drifted off-center during clamping.

Now I need to make up some struts so I can attach it to a bicycle, braze them on, paint (or powder coat if I manage to win the lottery) the thing, then sew up an even larger porteur bag to make it look like I actually know what I’m doing.

But first I’ll go back to the original handlebar bag, because I feel much more relaxed about the horrible™ thing now.

—orc Mon Jan 2 23:26:44 2012