Journal of a Sysadmin

Downtown Bike

North Glenmore park, to Elbow river pathway to 4th St. then down to O’Claire, Edworthy, and points south. First and only stop during the bike was Edworthy, before the hill. I desperately needed water and one of my straps on my backpack ripped out (small pieces of binder wire come in really really handy!).

Total Time 1:14:34
Total Distance 30.56 km
Average Cadence 85 rpm
Average Speed 24.6 km/h
Odo 357 km
Max Cadence 127
Max Speed 51 km/h

Woot! What a ride. Downtown traffic is actually kinda fun when you’re on a bike.

Bike, to the bookstore!

Looking for any excuse to go biking and get others in the house involved. When the idea of stopping at the used bookstore came up just before we went for a ride the other day, I opted for *just* doing that on our ride.

Home, 45th, bike paths to 14th St. and to Fair’s Fair books.
Total Time 1:01:53
Total Distance 15.02 km
Average Cadence 67 rpm
Average Speed 14.5 km/h
Odo 327 km
Max Cadence 120
Max Speed 47 km/h

I’ve added max cadence as I’ve noticed that my cadence has been getting a lot better. I found at one point I was pedalling at 110 rpm and doing about 46 km/h and the cadence wasn’t effecting the ride at all. It seems that I’m able to pump the cadence up higher now without starting to bounce (IE, I’m smoothing my cranking out a lot).

Updated OS on bama.

Updated from FC2 to FC4 on our main server, bama.hardrock.org. This system hosts mail, web, dns, ftp, nfs home directories, mailman, and our gateway (routing, firewalling, and traffic shaping).

Everything seems to work ok except nscd which crashes every few minutes. I’ve taken to leaving it pointed at an ldap server and nscd is dead. OK again, maybe OK… /me sighs

News at 11.

25k bike, hills.

From home, through the area north of Marda loop (back and forth over the hills) to downtown, to Edworthy park and home.

Total Time 1:08:24
Total Distance 25.42 km
Average Cadence 85 rpm
Average Speed 22.2 km/h
Odo 312 km

13.9km bike to signal hill

Nice slow and short ride to let my muscles heal after yesterdays longer ride. It was great!

From home, up 45th to the sarcee walk bridge, then past the park, left till we got to the bike/walk trail. Right and followed trails/streets around until we were at the top of signal hill overlooking the SW. From there over to 17th at Sunterra Market, up to 45th through north glenbrook, then home on 45th.

Total Time 0:55:25
Total Distance 13.93 km
Average Cadence 69 rpm
Average Speed 15.0 km/h
Odo 286 km

Bike, downtown tour

From home, to North Glenmore park, then Elbow River pathway to 2nd St., down to 10th ave, to 3rd St., to Bow River Pathway then to 11th St and MEC (stopped there to look of course). From MEC I went up to 17th, then to Richmond Road and the bike trail there, through Marda Loop to 50th Ave, to the college then home.

A most circuitous route indeed!

Total Time 1:17:11
Total Distance 30.13 km
Average Cadence 84 rpm
Average Speed 23.4 km/h
Odo 272 km

At MEC I checked out bike shorts (yes, my ass gets sore too) and picked up some Clif bars. The bike shorts are expensive (starting at about $50.00) but something I found was a liner only with leg elastics that you wear under your shorts. It has the seat pad and is made of lycra but are actually the ones sewn into their other shorts. I’ll have to look into that (I hate the look of the tight pants most people wear).

While I stood outside MEC in the shade by the bike rack to eat one and drink some water I was thinking, WTF don’t they make the wrappers out of something recyclable or at least something that breaks down easily.

Now, from their web site I learned that they have done a lot of things to reduce their footprint, but as I looked at the plastic wrapped, foil wrapper which is not recyclable I wonder why they haven’t changed that.

I did a few google searches and came up with a couple of ideas.

First, a recyclable polymer over a recyclable (not wax or plastic covered) paper. Yes, it’s more bulky and it may cost more but if it’s 100% recyclable it’s ok. If the cost was five or ten cents per bar I think that would be completely acceptable and I’d still cotinue to buy the bars and feel better about the waste.

Second would be to use a biodegradable plastic wrapper. Of course, this still leads to three issues: methane release (which could be collected but currently likely is not), the requirement of most of these types of plastics to decompose in the light, and of course, if it’s plastic likely it comes from a non-renewable resource although some plastics can now be made from plant based bio-plastics.

The use of non-recycleable plastics shouldn’t even be an issue any longer and I’m not sure why it is. Ultimately we still buy the products and that in itself supports the use of these things… Perhaps that’s something jhb and I need to look at.

Short Bike, 7.2km

Short bike up to Signal hill and back to take pictures of a storm that passed by Calgary last night.

Total Time 0:18:48
Total Distance 7.20 km
Average Cadence 85 rpm
Average Speed 22.9 km/h
Odo 242 km

One more spamish thing

OK, so the secure image doesn’t completely work.

I’ve created a patch and put it at lnxsys.ca/software/wordpress/ which checks the referer and checks the request method.

Maybe this will stop it? More at eleven.

Secure image

So, comment spam officially blows goats, big fat hairy smelly goats.

Comment spam is what happens when some wise ass decides that he or she wants to see their product show up in comments to your journal posts. So you’re thinking just moderate your comments then right? Wrong. When you get one hundered in a week it really really sucks. These people should be shot, wasting my time and resources on their poker ads targetted at people with a real problem.

Anyway.

Yesterday both jhb and myself upgraded our versions of WP (we were running 1.2.1 and they are now up to 1.5.1.2) which has a lot of real good improvements and of course has a favourable licenses unlike Movable Type by sixapart.

So jhb went about finding a solution to her comment spam problems. She came up with Secure Image which is a plugin that generates an image with some obscured text on it that you have to type in before posting the comment. Nice!

The install is, place secureimage.php in the plugins directory then enable the plugin. Requires Imagemagick for the /usr/bin/convert utility which happily is included with fedora core.

Today, for the first time in months, I got to turn on comments again. We’ll see how well it works in the next few days.

New WP!

Upgraded to the latest, greatest, biggest, fastest, racing striped wordpress. Nice, really nice.

Now I just have to get the plugins to STOP THIS F’ING COMMENT SPAM!