Friday, December 11, 2009

A kangaroo walks into a bar...

A kangaroo walks into a bar and orders a martini. The bartender
figures that a kangaroo probably isn't very economically aware, and
charges him $50. The marsupial orders a beer next time, and is charged
$60. Finally, the bartender's curiosity gets the better of him. He
casually remarks, "You know, we don't get too many kangaroos in here."
The kangaroo replies, "At these prices, no wonder."

Saturday, December 5, 2009

Monday, November 16, 2009

Mountain Bike Noises

Strange clicking noise while peddling? What's making that rattling sound? Check out this site:


Really nice list of clicks, creaks, rattles, etc, and what the most probable causes are and how to fix them. Very handy indeed!


Monday, October 19, 2009

PDFCreator

PDFCreator is a free little PDF creator (duh) for Windows. It "adds" a new printer to your system to print to PDF.

I never print anything at home... Mainly because my printer is out of ink and I'm too cheap to by more. However, with PDF Creator, I can print receipts from online purchases to PDF and archive them. When I need a hard copy, I can easily print it somewhere else (*cough* *work*).

Plus, I don't have a bunch of receipts laying around that I never really need.


Friday, September 25, 2009

Use "dislocate" to created a re-connectable process

Use: dislocate

Eventually, use ^] to disconnect. Later on, reconnect to the Linux server, run "dislocate" w/o parameters, and choose the session to reconnect to. Much easier than "screen" for simple situations!

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Upgrade Fedora 9 to Fedora 10

I know... 11 is already out, but I didn't feel like messing with it. Now that 9 is no longer supported, I figured I'd take the plunge.

I got some error about missing dependencies for:

avahi-0.6.17-1.fc7.i386

yum remove avahi-0.6.17-1.fc7.i386


said it erased it, but it was still there.... rpm -e gave an error about the script returning an error...

Eventually, this worked:

rpm -e --noscripts avahi-0.6.17-1.fc7.i386


Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Breaking through a restrictive proxy

I have sshd running on a small linux box at home. This allows me to access my home network from anywhere, except from work... The proxy wouldn't let me through. I tried proxytunnel, putty, and a few other toys, but none seemed to work. Then I found httptunnel :)

On my linux box, I created a new service with the following command:

/usr/bin/hts -p /var/opt/hts/PID -F localhost:22 81

That starts the httptunnel server with:
-p to write the PID to the file /var/opt/hts/PID
-F to forward to port 22 on the local host
and finally it is listening on port 81


Next, on my Windows machine, I downloaded the httptunnel package for cygwin. From a cygwin terminal, I could then execute:

htc -P : -A -F 8888 :81

Where:
-P is the proxy address:port
-A is my username:password for the proxy
-F is the port to use on the local machine
followed by my server:port

Once htc is running on my machine, I can do:

ssh -p 8888 -l localhost

Like magic, htc wraps everything inside some http "stuff", hands it off to the proxy, which passes it to my home machine. hts on my Linux box gets rid of the http garbage and passes the packet on to sshd (and visa-versa).

Very nice indeed! Now I can use ssh to tunnel all kinds of apps, like remote desktop, or even firefox.

As a side note, here's how to use my isp for browsing:

ssh -p -l -D localhost:8889 localhost

In Firefox:
Edit --> Preferences
Advanced Tab
Settings
Select "Manual Proxy Configuration", enter "localhost" in the SOCKS host field and port 8889.

Woo Hoo!


Tuesday, July 28, 2009

More Perl "Hidden Treasures"

Hash::Util

This gives you some very nice options - such as locking a hash so that no more keys can be added! Seems like a very nice way to avoid some typos!

Also look at

Class::Struct

That could come in handy to make some quick little objects without messing around with the constructor and accessors. Maybe it is possible to use Hash::Util with it to make it "read-only"???

See:




Wednesday, July 8, 2009

My First (Semi) Manual!

I got the track stand down pretty good, so I began trying to manual. Normally, I would jerk the bars up as hard as I could to try getting over an obstacle, but I've realized that really isn't the best way.

So, I got a copy of Mastering Mountain Bike Skills and began reading (it's a very good book). Between that and the author's website www.leelikesbikes.com, I finally started to "get" just how to do a manual.

These posts at Lee's blog also helped immensely:


Between those posts, the responses to the posts, and the book, these are the tips that helped me the most:

  1. I lowered the seat to practice. This let me shift my hips back much more easily. I'll practice with my seat at my "standard" XC height once I get this down.
  2. Really focused on using the "third brake" (ie, practically scratching your butt with the rear wheel because you shift your hips back so far). Basically, Lee said you probably aren't shifting nearly as far as you think you are, so I really tried to "over-exaggerate" the entire motion (my over-exaggeration was probably closer to the "real" motion).
  3. Finally, really pushing forward with my arms and driving my legs down and forward.
The first time the wheel came up, it felt like some Jedi was lifting the wheel with the Force! It was a very strange feeling since I was used to muscling it up. The wheel just needs to pop up a bit before your shifted-weight takes over. The more you pre-load and the faster you push yourself backwards, the faster it happens.

So far I have bailed off each time it gets up, but I'll get used to the feeling soon enough and learn to control it. I have found that once it comes up to a certain height I start pulling myself up. I just need to let it happen. It seems like minor shifts of the hips should stabalize it, as well as a few pumps with the legs (you can see the kid to that in this video):


Once I'm better at this, I can finally begin working on some nice, high bunny hops!


Thursday, May 21, 2009

ClearCase UCM Triggers

I didn't realize this page existed on the CM Wiki. Unfortunately the links seem to be broken... If anybody reads this and knows why, please let me know. I'll post if I find out any info.


ClearCaseUnifiedCHangeManagementTriggers

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Google Chrome Proxy Server Setup

Google Chrome uses IE's Proxy settings... However, you can force it to be something different using the "--proxy-server=XXXXX" switch. Or, just use "--proxy-server=" to use no proxy.

This is really nice, because now I can set up two Google Chrome shortcuts - One to fire up Chrome at work and use the proxy, and the other with the "--proxy-server=" switch so I can use Chrome at home!

I like that better than going into the settings of FireFox each time I start it up (I haven't found a proxy plugin that works well yet...). Maybe FireFox has a similar switch?

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Rear Derailleur adjustment

There's some time of black magic behind adjusting the rear derailleur. It's as hard as trying to remember how "derailleur" is spelled!!! When I read some tips on adjusting it, it seems easy. About 30 minutes later, my chain is all over the place on the rear cassette.

Anyways, this seems like about the best article I've found so far. At least my chain shift through *most* of the gears now!!

http://www.parktool.com/repair/readhowto.asp?id=64

http://www.sheldonbrown.com/derailer-adjustment.html

http://garynuke.homestead.com/derailleur.html

*** After some more reading and monkeying around, I realized it isn't quite as hard as I thought... I just wasn't getting it for some reason at first...

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Mountain Bike Technique - track stand

A track stand is something I really need to practice:
http://www.mountainzone.com/videos/category.asp?cid=401645

More related videos here (the "Beginner" section is kinda funny to watch... The lady doing the stuff is just strange)
http://www.mountainzone.com/videos/category.asp?cid=300545

The advanced technique also describes bunny hopping in good detail.

And the drop:
http://declinemagazine.com/visuals/fluidride/fluidride_vol1.htm

Various technique:
http://www.goclipless.com/techniques/


After that, I'll work on these:

http://www.trashzen.com/bunny-hop-blunt.php


;)

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Temp file in Perl

Use the following to generate a temporary file in Perl:


use File::Temp;
my $fh = tempfile;

print $fh "temp data";


Also, this finds the directory of the Perl script being executed:


use FindBin;
my $program_dir = $FindBin::Bin;



This, and some other useful Perl things, are found here:

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2003/05/29/treasures.html

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Auto Repair

Just changed a wheel bearing on the Impala, thanks to this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-TsTn-3ktk

Also came across this good blog:

http://free-auto-repair-advice.blogspot.com/

Thursday, January 8, 2009

perlboot

Beginner's Object-Oriented Tutorial

It's a pretty nice tutorial accessible via 'perldoc perlboot'

As usual, it's also available on the web, for example:
http://perl.active-venture.com/pod/perlboot.html