Highway Code Success

Success. Well at first glance this appears to be success.
According to the CTC
the Department for Motorists Transport have agreed
to change the wording of 40 of the rules in the new Highway code
including the notorious Cycle lane rules. Here is what the CTC claim
the new rules will be:

Rule 61: Cycle Facilities.
Use cycle routes, advanced stop lines, cycle boxes and toucan
crossings unless at the time it is unsafe to do so. Use of these
facilities is not compulsory and will depend on your experience and
skills, but they can make your journey safer.

Rule 63: Cycle Lanes.
These are marked by a white line (which may be broken) along the
carriageway. When using a cycle lane, keep within the lane when
practicable. When leaving a cycle lane check before pulling out that
it is safe to do so and signal your intention clearly to other road
users. Use of these facilities is not compulsory and will depend on
your experience and skills, but they can make your journey safer.

Now the CTC are claiming that
this is “Following a high-profile campaign from CTC”
which is a bizarre way to describe a campaign driven by the internet
and the Cambridge Cycling
Campaign where the CTC has been almost silent. I’m thinking of
joining the Cambridge Cycling
Campaign even though I live in Surrey.

I look forward to seeing the other rules that have been improved.
I wonder if the Helmet advice has been dropped as well. I live in
hope but not expectation. Still the cycle facility rules, if true,
are actually better than the old rules in the code. Fancy that, the
code actually getting better.

Anyway the CTC are still asking people to sign the petition
so if you have not yet please join the 20,856 who have.

Cycle path video

There is still time to sign the petition
and write to your MP about the new Highway code which will
effectively make it illegal to not use a cycle path when possible.

For those who are not familiar with the state of cycle paths check
your this video.
It would be possible for a cyclist not using that “cycle path”
or any other to be prosecuted for inconsiderate cycling. Even the
most leisurely cyclist would find that one a challenge.

Cool job

Now this is a cool job to have. Go around the world and buy bicycles at each location. Use the bike as a form of transport and a way to meet people while you do your research into mobile phone use and then give away the bicycle at the end.

“I buy a lot of bicycles. I have huge time pressures when in these places and I want to engage with the local population as much as possible.

“I find buying a bicycle is a great way to stay in touch with people. We give the bicycles away at end of the study.”

I think the hardest part of the job for me might be giving away the bicycles!

Although given the current state of mobile phones I think they may not have done such a good
job of this three or so years ago.

Five things

Dan tagged
me with the five things blog thing that is going around. So here
are 5 things about me that you may not know about me:

1. My first real job was as a Paper Boy delivering news papers.
   I did the job for five years every day before school, rain, snow or
   shine. I’m always inclined to ask people I interview what job they
   did as a teenager. Newspaper delivery scores highly.

   
   

2. I sang in a Church Choir for 10 years as a child/teenager.
   This included an annual “Cathedral Course” where we
   went off to a different Cathedral for a week, well 10 days, 3 days
   preparing and 6 days singing with one day off, while the real choir
   was on holiday. I sang at: Lincoln,
   Norwich,
   Litchfield, York,
   St Albans, and
   Salisbury. Great
   music, fantastic social life and started me on the road to Atheism.

   
   

3. For my first six years at Sun I did not cycle to work at all.
   In fact for a large amount of that time I did not cycle at all. The
   Company car almost got me. I have got better now though.

   
   

4. My first adult bike was a four speed Moulton.
   (very similar to the Moulton Standard pictured on Wikipedia, it was
   even blue). It was distinctive, great for use on the Paper round but
   encouraged me to get more traditional five speed diamond framed
   “racer”.

   
   

5. I don’t really do chain letters which this is just the modern
   form. So I won’t be tagging anyone else.

   
   

Sun Ray firmware version

Peter gives an
undocumented
way to find out the firmware version of your Sun Ray. I have
three problems with this.

1. It uses an undocumented interface which therefore is likely
   to change

   
   

2. It does not work for me.

   
   

3. It involved Cut’n'Paste when we have nawk
   out there.

   
   

Here is how I would do the same. I look forward to someone from
thinkthin¹
to tell me the correct way:

/opt/SUNWut/bin/utwho -c | nawk ‘$3 == ENVIRON["LOGNAME"] {

system(sprintf("/opt/SUNWut/sbin/utquery %s\n", $4))

}’

Should I worry that I can type this kind of thing into the command
line?

---

1I
know I am down as a thinkthin
author. It is a vanity thing. I was invited to be an author and
accepted the invitation before thinking it through. I use Sun Ray. I
love Sun Ray but what I do day to day, or try to do day to day is
write about things I am expert in, therefore following 50%
of the advice I was given when I started blogging. The thing is
I don’t claim to be expert on Sun Ray. I know enough to be dangerous
so have never felt the urge to post a “Sun Ray” specific
expert article.

Network Auto-Magic

Build 64 has allowed me to enable Network
Auto-magic (NWAM) on my laptops. On my DELL Latitude D600 which
has a Broadcom (bge) gigabit interface with a driver that supports
Link and Interface Events it works well with the wired interface
however with the wireless I have had to increase the
“nwamd/dhcp_wait_time” smf property from 60 seconds to
120 so that it will work reliably. I can plug in the wired interface
in and the wireless interface it taken down and the wired interface
comes up. As it should be.

On the Toshiba which has an Intel network interface whose driver
does not (yet) support Link and Interface Events the laptop always
comes up with the wireless connection, which is less than ideal and
would have been a pain when in Chicago but it is still better than
not having it.

Helmet Cam out with BBT

My first trip out on a Sunday with my handlebar mounted video
camera. Having had problems with the camera it went back twice to the
shop who have finally replaced it with a new one. This one seems, so
far, to work. The old ones would both power themselves off for no
apparent reason failing to save what they were recording and leaving
the SD card corrupt so it had to be reformatted to get back.

It does suffer from the same problem as the other cameras though,
that the output is really boring. When it is approaching interesting,
which is not often and only when travelling at speed, then the
vibrations are terrible. So I hope to not post any showing me being
cut up or pulled out on by cars.

Anyway seven of us rode over Headley then down to Newdigate,
Ockley, over Leith Hill to Dorking then up over Ranmore and then to
the Cafe in Leatherhead. Brilliant weather very pleasant ride.

63 miles, top speed 47mph Average 16mph

Highway Code in the Telegraph

The growing publicity around the disgraceful update to the Highway
code hits the Daily
Telegraph today (I was forwarded this, I have not suddenly
started reading the Torygraph).

Given Robin’s dissection
of the inability of our elected members to understand their own
legislation I should not be surprised that the Department for
transport can’t see a significant difference between “wherever
practicable” and “wherever possible”. Although by
focusing on this they misrepresent the concerns of cyclists that even
“wherever practicable” too prescriptive.

As I have said before I would prefer the Highway code to warn
cyclists of the dangers of using Cycle paths both dedicated and
shared use and make it clear they are not intended for cyclists doing
more than 30km/h according to the DfT’s
own design specifications. Also warn cyclists about the feeder
lanes into Advanced Stop Lines at traffic lights as they can put you
on the inside of Lorries turning left, somewhere you never want to
be.

One Sun Ray for home and work

At last I can talk. With the release of Sun Ray Software 4
Update 2 Open Beta I can at last tell you about the very best (well
perhaps not the best but it is pretty cool) feature that you get with
a Sun Ray 2 at home.

It is not that you no longer have to have some extra box that
gives a VPN to the your internal network though that is very cool as
that box used to generate a lot of heat. You don’t as the new
firmware has VPN built in, but that is not the cool part.

No the cool part is that when you set up the VPN you get to tell
the Sun Ray all the details of the VPN servers, keys, login details
etc. You also get to list the Sun Ray servers that you “land”
on all not very exciting. However if you have a Sun Ray server at
home and you add that to the list when you have the VPN up your home
server clearly is not available so it connects to the internal
servers. When the VPN is off the internal to Sun servers are now
unavailable but my home server is so it happily connects to that.

This means I can use same Sun Ray for both servers. Very cool.

Initial Thoughts on Chicago

I’ve travelled to the United States a lot, but nearly always to
the same area. That being the San Francisco Bay area. Now for a
change I am in Chicago, and no Dave
I can’t “prove” it using plazes which while fun and geeky
I have problems with the idea that anyone would care.

Anyway my initial thoughts on Chicago:

1. Watching the Blues Brothers entirely prepares you for using a
   Taxi here. Research based on a single trip from the Airport which
   well was interesting. Apparently the tyres on cars here really do
   squeal around every corner like they do in the movies. The trouble
   with this is that the other things that cars do in movies is explode
   if there is the slightest crash hence the Blues Brothers being a
   perfect preparation. None of the cars in the Blues Brothers
   exploded. We did not crash, I’m still not sure how.

   
   

2. Don’t trust the Doorman at the Hotel to mark on a map where
   you are. Unbelievably he did not seem to know beyond telling me
   which street I’m in.

   
   

3. The Police use Segways.
   Really. If I had been quicker with the camera I would show you.
   

   
   

4. I wish my Brompton
   I have on order had turned up in time to bring it. The ideal
   vehicle for escaping the Police.

   
   

5. It’s not that Windy, not yet anyway. It is however Pretty and they ain’t got what we got…Sorry getting carried away.