New Highway code published.

It is finally out. It still contains the victim blaming sections
on wearing “bright” cloths and the ridiculous helmet
suggestions (rule 59), and the very bad advice about cycling around
roundabouts (rule 77). At least the sections on cycle paths are
better than the original suggestions (rules 61
& 63).

There is a small furore about rule 148
which appears to ban Smoking while driving, which IMO is a good
thing, if you are controlling a ton of metal then you should
concentrate on controlling the vehicle so that you do not present a
danger to other road users, which includes pedestrians, cyclists and
other motorists. Luckily the smoking lobby was not as good as the
cycling lobby when the Highway code was in it’s consultation phase.

One thing I can’t grasp is why the URL has changed from the easy
to remember http://www.highwaycode.gov.uk
to the not so easy
http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/TravelAndTransport/Highwaycode/index.htm.
I just hope they leave the redirection inplace.

If your business is rubbish your customer service need not be.

And Brabantia’s is not.

Our bin’s lid broke. The bin is ~7 years old I have no proof of
purchase (although they have not been being made for much longer then
7 years, I think) so I went to their web site to see if I could get a
new one. I filled in the form telling them all this and waited for an email saying it was
going to cost X and I would have to do Y to pay them.

No email but a few days later a large box containing a new lid. I
notice the catch has a slightly new, more robust design.

As always a product defect handled well by the manufacturer has
left me wanting to be their customer again and being prepared to say
so.

Train to Luxembourg

Here I sit on the train from Brussels to Luxembourg with the
decision to take the Eurostar rather than fly partially vindicated.
It was certainly cheaper and so far, more convenient. A short train
trip to Waterloo, catch the Eurostar, change at Brussels. Alas this
will almost certainly be the last time I depart from Waterloo
International as the service is moving to St Pancras which will mean
a tube across London. So at least for me the 20 minutes it will knock
of the journey time will be entirely lost by the extra time to get to
St Pancras.

However using a laptop on the Eurostar
was impossible, the lack of laptop power limits the working time to
the life of the battery, which on this both not very long and the not
very predictable. The battery indicator goes from 60% to 2% in one
hop.

Returning…

I am in internet withdrawal, the hotel only had prepaid WiFI
access which since I had not pre paid was no good for me. Another
case of expensive hotel (the cheap ones were full, honest) and yet
the could not throw in an internet connection. I must remember to
check these things next time, not that I really had a choice about
the hotel.

If you are reading this I must have made it home….

Researchers know how a bicycle works

Researchers think they have for the first time worked out how bicycles work.

See http://www.physorg.com/news109513954.html

I wonder if this will indeed result in some different bicycle designs for the UCI to ban?

Via: velorution

Good Morning Build 73

The Lab engineer who used to upgrade our Sun Rays moved onto
pastures new and so there has been a slight glitch in the upgrades
for a few weeks. Thankfully the pastures new are actually within Sun
and in the same lab team but in a different country, well continent
actually, however that allows him to continue doing the upgrades and
now he is back on line I can say:

Good morning build 73:

: estale.eu FSS 1 $; uname -a

SunOS estale 5.11 snv_73 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire

: estale.eu FSS 2 $;

One thing I noticed on my home system was that I did not seem to be
getting the latest developer tools installed and the same appears to
be true here. Live upgrade is correctly upgrading Solaris but not
upgrading the developer tools.

On my home system I ran:

/tank/fs/downloads/nv/73/os/DeveloperTools/install_devtools.sh

Now I have all the tools installed. Need to get the same done in in
my “finish” script before the Boot Environment is live.

Where was everyone?

Only three riders out today and one of those had to be back by 9
to take his Son to rugby.

We went out to West Byfleet and then into a misty Pyrford, Ripley
where we lost the early leaving rider leaving just two to go off to
East Clandon and over the South Downs through Shere and over the hill
to Ewhurst then around to Ockley, Capel, Newdigate and then for
breakfast at Henfold Lakes.

Then home for and early finish. 60Miles, 16.5mph average

Not sure why so few turned up since it was a beautiful morning.

Popular blog?

O.k. so what is going on with blogs.sun.com?
Here is the popular blogs list from yesterday:

So whose been messing with wget?

I’m not complaining though as this made me check the front page of
blogs.sun.com today to see if the effect was continuing. It appears
it is but for a different blog. Jyri
Virkki’s blog is now top with 18432 hits. His blog has a
interesting presentation about Elliptic Curve Cryptography, ECC,
about which I knew nothing until I read that.

Rich Cyclists

From todays
Times:

The richest fifth of the population cycle on average
2½ times as far in a year as the poorest fifth.

and

Studies have shown that regular cyclists typically
enjoy a level of fitness equivalent to someone 10 years younger, and
those cycling regularly beyond their mid-thirties add two years to
their life expectancy.

Now which comes first, the being rich
or the cycling?

Going to Wiggonholt

Today one of our number had a plan. We were off to a Cafe at the
RSPB
centre at Wiggonholt in Sussex. I would map this ride but for the
fact that for a large amount of the time I have no clue where we
were. We went out over Coombe Bottom and then down through Albury and
then some route that saw us ending up at Dunsfold. From there is all
becomes much more hazy however we ended up at the Cafe not a minute
or mile to soon with 55miles on the clock I was definitely ready for
food.

And
food we had. After the initial panic when they said they did not do
breakfasts on at the weekend we managed to get them to agree beans on
toast were not breakfast so were o.k. However it did not stop at the
usual beans on toast. Apparently the cakes were irresistible and you
can see why. One of the riders disappeared inside and came back with
cakes all round. So any pretence that this ride was going to help
reduce my ever spreading stomach was thrown to the wind.

The return journey was as much of an adventure as the outbound and
given that we twice ended up on the A24 I think we were lost quite a
lot of the time. The route became sane when we got to Capel and then
we knew the way home, I think my bike could get home from there on
it’s own!

I’d spent most of the ride desperately trying to hold on to the
wheel of the tour leader who is as on form as I am off form.
Obviously when there were sprints they were contended as best we
could, but any wins were hollow victories since the wheel sucking had
been shameless.

Note to self, get new legs, loose the spare tyre or perhaps a new
bike, yeah bound to be the bike and not the rider….

Ended up doing 99miles and was to tired to just loop around to
make it a round 100, Average speed 17.45mph.

Why Kitchen applicances should be networked.

I’ve
managed to get the two clocks within 2 seconds of each other, which
actually made taking this photo a pain, but it will take hours to
improve on 2 seconds and to make matters worse there is a third clock
that is not shown in the picture. I know that 2 second delay is going
to drive me nuts. Luckily the oven and microwave have options to hide
the clock but I would prefer not to.

What is clearly needed is for them to either network
amongst themselves and run NTP to keep their clocks in sync or if an
external network is available get the name of an NTP server from DHCP
and use that. I suppose they will need a cheap, free operating system
to embed to control it. OpenSolaris
anyone?

So please can we have that? I’ll ask NEFF
and see what they say. It’s just a shame that unless they can
retrofit it we will not be able to take advantage of this in our new
kitchen.