Category Archives: Cycling

Cycling, Livejournal Imports

2007 Cycling Comes to an End

Finally today was a day where it wasn't raining or snowing or anything along those lines and so I managed to get out for a good ride with the Quad folks this morning. The roads were mostly clear, although some places were wet from yesterday's rain and there were still a few ice patches. Still, all in all, things weren't bad at all. Went up to Concord and then to Fern's in Carlisle and then back home the way we came. About 35 miles at 17 mph which is okay for the end of December in 35 degree weather after a few weeks of barely riding at all. And I really was needing to get a good ride in.

And given that the snow has already started again for tonight's storm (estimated 4-8 inches overnight), I suspect that will be it for riding for the year. That brings the total up to somewhere between 4200 and 4300 miles as opposed to last year's roughly 1800.

  • 3500 miles on Team Quad rides including regular weekend rides, charity rides and races.
  • 300 miles on my old Trek mountain bike (commuting to Alewife and back from July – September)
  • 120 miles on my old Specialized road bike before selling it in the fall. This was purely 3 rides to the office and back over the summer. I guess I really didn't ride it much after buying the Merlin.
  • 400 miles on my new Redline 9-2-5 fixed gear. 100 of this was Quad rides, the rest commuting and errand miles. Bought this bike at the end of September for the latter purpose and am really happy with it. I think that its milage for 2008 is going to be pretty significant.
  • 3400 miles on my Merlin. Almost all of this was Quad rides.
  • Longest ride was Harbor to the Bay in September at 126 miles. In the rain.
  • January and February had the least miles with 120 and 125 respectively. Each month with less miles than my longest ride 🙂
  • Had a good string in the summer with 580 miles in June, 470 in July, 530 in August and 650 in September. So four months were over half the miles.

Given that I'm not sure how much riding I'll have time to do in 2008 with the additional constraint of school, I think that I'm only going to try for 4000-5000 miles again. With the increased amount of commuting miles, I think that it should still be pretty achievable. I'm currently only planning to do one charity ride this year but I may also try a few more races. In any case, I'm pretty happy with my 2007 cycling year and am looking forward to an equally good 2008.

Cycling, Fedora, Life, Livejournal Imports

19 November

Good weekend overall. Went to see the play Brendan Friday night. It was pretty good. The theater that it was performed in was really nice… new and smaller, which made being able to see not even close to a problem. It was also nice afterwards when we were walking to get dinner as I could look at Google Maps on my phone to ensure we were walking in the right direction.

Saturday, I woke up and decided against going for a ride. Instead, spent a little bit of time poking at some non-Fedora work stuff. Went and ran some errands then came home. Played a bit of Guitar Hero while Kara worked on a paper for class. Decided to take it easy in the evening so just ordered pizza and watched some episodes of Dexter and a few other things which had been building up on the Tivo.

Yesterday, woke up and did ride. Did about 40 miles and the weather was definitely the nicer of the two days. Although maybe a tiny bit colder it was a lot less windy making for a more pleasant ride. Not a lot of people out, though — we only had at most 20 people. But I guess that's the norm as it gets colder.

Today has thus far been spent getting a handle on some backlogged bugs and preparing an update for some bugs which people have found with pirut in the first little bit of Fedora 8 being in the wild. Also, responding to some of the feedback on the post of a major refactoring of livecd-creator. Unfortunately, the latter has seen less feedback than I would have liked, but not less than I realistically expected. Infrastructure tools are something that people just want to work — how they work is less of a concern. But the idea is to start having an API beneath livecd-creator that can be used by other tools and also a move towards hopefully sharing more code with anaconda.

Over the rest of the week, I'm hoping to get a little further both with the livecd bits as well as the filesystem resizing code for anaconda. It's a short week, though, so not sure if I'll actually be that successful.

Cycling, Fedora, Livejournal Imports

Fedora 8: Billions and Billions Served

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Had a pretty relaxing weekend to decompress from the Fedora 8 release. Got in some good riding even though the temperature has dropped a bit (highs of the lower 40s). Had missed going out on both days of the weekend due to weather the past few weeks, so it was nice to get back to that. And there was a good group out for riding both days. Saturday evening, went fake (candlepin) bowling with some people for Kara's birthday and then headed back to our place where we played various things on the Wii. Oh, I also made some reasonable progress in Guitar Hero over the weekend 🙂

Monday was spent catching up with mail and bug traffic since I didn't look at it much over the weekend. Mail was a bit busy between discussions of improvements to codeina and some discussion of directions to go with the distribution source control. The former unfortunately spiraled a bit out of control and into meta issues rather than more concretely looking at how to integrate with the packaging system and making it so that users in other parts of the world can have an easy drop in way to get the codecs from their third party repo of choice.

The source management discussion was a little better and there definitely seems to be a growing agreement that a DSCM has advantages. Unfortunately getting people looking at the bigger workflow issues is hard. I think that's partly because there is a large gap between contributors who are developers on the upstream code and want to have an easier time merging patches, rebasing, etc vs those who package and are pretty happy with the upstream archives. I think we currently very much optimize for the latter case. This isn't bad though; we just need to look at ways to have more infrastructure to set up and maintain a more source centric repo while making it easy to move changes back and forth between representations. I bet quilt, stgit, etc will help.

Other than reading through those discussions, I spent the afternoon looking at the inevitable F8 bugs that slipped in. A hang during depsolving and a hand on some types of updates are the big ones and fixes for both are in hand. Still need to fix a problem with kmod updates and also a segv on installs related to pcmcia, but overall, things look pretty good. The problems occur at points where we haven't deleted what's on the disk and that are pretty doable for fixing with updates.

Today I spent working some more on the little project I'm hoping to push for Fedora 9. I've been a little tight-lipped, because I didn't want to raise any hopes, but at this point, I'm pretty comfortable saying that we should have partition and filesystem resizing support in the installer for Fedora 9. Thus far, I've just got mostly prototype code, but it's working pretty well, so it's just a matter of cleaning up a few of the hacks and then spending some time on the UI. Well, and lots and lots of testing. This will be a feature that it will be good to finally land as its been requested for a long, long time. It's just that we now have taken care of the various things which made it impractical to do in the past. Screenshots soon, code to be commited before too long as well.

Cycling, Fedora, Livejournal Imports

Fall is in the air and a Fedora release is on its way out

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As a few other people have mentioned, we finished up Fedora 8 on Friday and it's currently on its way to the mirror masters so that the mirrors should be able to start picking it up tomorrow (just pending getting the export control bits into place) and we'll be releasing on Thursday. Overall, I'm feeling pretty good about the release — we got some good things in and I think that a lot of the improvements should be pretty visible to most of our users. Doesn't mean there are things that could be better or that we could do better from a process perspective. But for the moment, I think I'm going to try to enjoy the fact that the release is done.

Today, spent a bit of time biking — got in a nice leisurely 45 mile ride enjoying the fall weather and leaves. And it was a beautiful day for it. Hope there are still plenty more like it to come before winter arrives. Then, picked up Guitar Hero III for the Wii later in the afternoon… and now, to go spend some time playing it 🙂

Cycling, Fedora, Livejournal Imports

Click, click, click

What's that? Oh yeah, it's the sound that my laptop hard drive started making yesterday. *sigh* Just to add to the fun, no errors had been shown by smart and even today after the drive wouldn't boot at all, smartctl didn't show any errors with a short self-test. The long one eventually did, though. Luckily, the drive was still alive enough yesterday that I could pull a last ditch backup of anything that I didn't happen to have. Now I just get to wait for a new hard drive to come in. While waiting for that, I'm just using one of the random QA laptops with a USB key with a live image of my own creation. It's actually a pretty reasonable environment, especially given that I hacked in a mount of an encrypted /home so that I can have bookmarks and some persistent storage. Still not quite the same as running on my normal environment, although it really does work shockingly well. Would be good to get to where doing this isn't a big deal — definitely would be something that I think a lot of people could be interested in.

Otherwise, been busy working on a variety of different things. Have most of the changes in place so that anaconda can create its second stage images using yum and a little bit of ldd smarts rather than doing rpm2cpio on a list of packages plus a keep list of files. I've also spent a fair bit of time working on getting the presto code into a bit better shape so that we can hopefully include it and enable it by default for Fedora 8. Also continue to do miscellaneous fixes across things that I'm running across just in my regular running of the rawhide tree. I think I've most accurately described my current working habits as “acts of random” 🙂

And then, of course, I've been riding a lot. The weather in the Boston area continues to be gorgeous — there have been some warm days and some rainy days, but overall, there's really nothing at all to complain about. I've been trying to get in 100-120 miles a weekend so that I can be prepared for the Seacoast Safari which I'm doing in a few weeks. It's a ride along the Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine coasts to raise money for Cystic Fibrosis. Should be a fun ride, although I really need to get on with my fund-raising a little bit better.

But, now to try and see what I can get done for the evening.