At the beginning of the year, I added the right sidebar that contains content from my Twitter account. The motivation was to automatically capture tweets I make, most of which are retweets referring to articles I have read. I like that the content is automatically captured (although a lot ends up being redundant), but I do not like that it is in a different “stream” than my blog posts. All of the information is kept in sequence on the feed streams page, but that is not quite what I want. For instance, there is no way to comment here about any of those tweets, so for a while I have wanted a way to get tweets inlined in the blog feed.

Enter Blackbird Pie, which learned about yesterday from here. This provides a simple way to embed tweets into posts, keeping the links in the tweet active. For example:

"Geneagrapher 0.2.1-r1 Released". http://davidalber.net/?p=1031

November 3, 2010 10:35 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@DavidAlber

David Alber

The downside of this is that capturing the tweets is not automated, but given how I am pulling tweets onto this site and tweeting about posts here, maybe that is a good thing. Perhaps some day I will find or write something to implement the cross-posting logic I want, but for now it is not that big of a burden to do it manually.

Here’s the initial plan: I will start embedding tweets, but also will keep using Lifestream for the right sidebar and the feed streams page (I am too busy to adjust the site style right now anyway).

Version 0.2.1-r1, a maintenance release, of the Geneagrapher is now available.

A few tests in Geneagrapher 0.2.1 have become broken since that version was released. This release fixes those tests, but does not change the functionality from version 0.2.1. Existing installations need not install this release.

For more information, please see the Geneagrapher page and the Geneagrapher 0.2.1 release announcement.

Tonight I installed VMware Player on my Windows machine to experiment with a few things. After getting it installed, I downloaded the latest Ubuntu image and created a virtual machine with it. Everything went pretty smoothly.

VMware, by default, intercepts Ctrl-Alt to exit full-screen mode. Switching virtual workspaces in the windows manager in the new Ubuntu machine uses Ctrl-Alt-<Arrow key>, and the VMware keystroke interfered with left and right. It took a while to find it, but Ctrl-Alt-Space followed by Ctrl-Alt-Right , for example, accomplishes the switch, but this is inconvenient. Remapping the keystrokes that switch virtual workspaces is straightforward, but I am too accustomed to Ctrl-Alt-<Arrow key> to do that.

I found how to change the VMware keystroke here. The sixth box on that page had what I needed and changed the VMware keystroke to Ctrl-Alt-Shift. I only used the first three lines because the second block has some syntax error in my version of the Player.

There are thousands of underground coal fires around the world and more than one hundred in the United States (see Deep Underground, Miles of Hidden Wildfires Rage). Most of these fires start due to mining activities, but some fires started are ignited naturally. They are difficult to extinguish, and can burn for years, decades, or longer. Amazingly, there is naturally-occurring coal fire in Australia that is believed to have burning for 6000 years so far (see Burning Mountain)*. According to the article linked above, some scientists estimate that three percent of the annual coal emissions are caused by these fires, but they admit there is a lot of room for error in their estimates.

I have not been very active here lately. The explanation in one word: parenthood.

Michael was born in late August!

A new Chinese supercomputer — Tianhe-1A — has achieved 2.5 petaflops on the LINPACK benchmark. Not bad! Jaguar was at 1.75 petaflops in June’s Top500 list. More information here.

One interesting point, according to the article above, is that the machine has a Chinese-developed network that operates at twice the speed of Infiniband.

I recall when the Earth Simulator came out and perceived a sense of surprise and urgency from certain groups due to the top machine not being in the United States. In this case, it is less of a surprise, but it would be interesting to see how people respond.

I am locked in an epic battle with slugs determined to destroy the cucumbers and squash in my garden. They have taken the initiative repeatedly and struck from the shadows. In fact, I had cucumbers and squash growing in May that were completely destroyed long before I knew what was hitting me.

I have prior gardening experience, but gardening in the Pacific Northwest — with its slugs — is a new adventure for me. We have slugs in Iowa, but they are not even worth mentioning when discussing the shell-less land mollusks living here.

A couple weeks ago I planted new cucumbers and squash (I know, it’s late), and the slugs are back in lesser numbers. I have spent time investigating my options. Did you know that slugs do not like moving over copper? Aside from copper, various types of molluscides are available, but that’s not for me. The most appealing option to me is the judicious deployment of defensive structures, and I found the information in “Slug Fences” very useful.

Unfortunately, I am working with entire hills of plants, so I had to modify the most attractive portions of the slug fence design and installation method. After purchasing the necessary materials and finding a time when nobody else was around, I set to constructing my first fortification. It did not take long to realize the large time investment that would be needed to construct all of the walls, and they would not even be that great when finished! Desperate, I fell back on the beer trap trick: bury a cup (or some suitably-sized vessel) up to its brim and fill half way with beer. It sounds a little ridiculous, and the guy in the grocery store clearly thought so too. Slugs apparently like the smell of beer, fall in, get drunk, then drown. There is no need to tell me that sounds evil; I already feel bad about it. Remember: they started this. Of all of the plants at my garden site, the slugs have a strong preference for cucumber and squash seedlings. Once the plants have grown a little, I will remove the traps.

I deployed the cups and beer last night and checked the traps this morning. Regrettably, the system is not at all discriminating. Of the creatures large enough for me to see, three spiders and one slug were eliminated.

If I ever find myself brewing beer, it will be named ‘Slug Harvest Ale’ to memorialize my worthy, fallen opponents.

Introduction

As I was about to leave for work last Wednesday I noticed that the front tire of my bike was flat. “No problem”, I thought, “just a quick fix.”

This was only the second flat I have had since getting my bike, so doing this simple task takes a little longer than it should. I was “happy” to have the opportunity to rehearse the motions at home before having to do it somewhere else.

My first flat happened within a day or two of getting the bike. The cause for both flats was that the rim tape was in the wrong position. For those who do not know what I am talking about, a quick explanation follows.

Wheels

A bike’s wheel consists of a hub (the thing about which the wheel rotates), the spokes, the rim, and nipples that connect the spokes to the rim. The nipples drop in through holes in the outside of the rim (the outside being the part where the tire and tube go). These holes are drilled through the rim and have relatively sharp edges; sharp enough, at least, to wear a hole through the tube. To keep the tube from deflating due to contact with the holes, some sort of strip is placed along the trough of the rim.

This strip — rim tape — had moved out of place for both of my flats.

My rim tape is a a sort of plastic that does not seem ideal. It is not glued down everywhere. Tension is supposed to keep the unsecured portions in place, but that is where the failures keep occurring. I am going to investigate this a little more and possibly replace the rim tape with a more cloth-like tape.

Extra Trouble

Since I was in a hurry, I swapped in my spare tube with the intention of patching the other tube at work. When I got my tire back on, though, I was having trouble with one of the brake pads always contacting the disc (I have disc brakes on my bike). Before this episode I was not too mechanically familiar with the brakes.

Prior to exhausting all ideas, I looked down through the gap between the pads and the disc and noticed a piece of metal that looked entirely out of place. This gave me cause open the brake assembly and investigate, which was something I would have been doing sooner or later with or without cause. Of course, disassembling something unfamiliar always carries the exhilarating possibility of not knowing how to reassemble it.

I found two bolts that appeared to hold the thing together and was amazed at how much they had been tightened. (Note to self: check if the bolts were tightened to some specified torque and handle as appropriate. The idea of the brake assembly coming apart during a ride is unappealing.)

When I finally got the two bolts out, half of the brake came off (as expected) and then popped into three pieces. Not too bad, but you never know what you are going to get. The pieces’ purposes were pretty straightforward: the external housing, the brake pad, and a semi-springy metal piece that serves a role of limiting the motion of the brake pads. The out-of-place piece of metal that I referred to above was the semi-springy piece. The issue was that one of the “arms” had been bent and was between the brake pad and the disc. I am not sure if it was there before the tire was removed and replaced, but it seems fairly certain that the squeeky noise coming from the brake recently was related to this.

Using pliers, I simply bent the part back into its intended shape. Hopefully that will be the end of that. If that part was between the disc and brake pad for a while, I suspect the pad may have worn unevenly. I did not think to investigate this before reassembling the thing, but I will check it out next time the brake is disassembled.

I wish I had taken pictures of all of this to make it more compelling, but I was in a hurry.

Next Time

Overall, I enjoy this sort of thing. I will, however, be making changes to make the work environment more efficient.

Having a repair stand will make doing this stuff easier and more fun in the future. More space would be nice too. Also, a separate T25 star-shaped wrench would be handy. I have this wrench on my multi-tool, but it was not convenient using it through the spokes to adjust the position of the interior brake pad.

For all of you out there who are wondering where I will be from February 24, 2010 through February 26, 2010, I have your answer: I will be at the SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing (PP10). The conference is being held in Seattle, so really, I will be pretty much where I would have been anyway.

Let me know if you want to meet there.

Now that I am getting more serious about using my bike, I am ready to begin exploring phase two: events. Although I lived in Iowa for 20+ years, I never had the desire to do RAGBRAI while I was there. I am now thinking that I would like to do it sometime (add it to the list of things I want to do eventually).

For those not in the know, RAGBRAI — the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa — is an annual, organized, week-long bike ride across Iowa. They announced this year’s route tonight:

RAGBRAI XXXVIII will treat riders to one of the shortest and flattest routes ever as it winds through northern Iowa from Sioux City to Dubuque.

That combination means the 10,000 riders will navigate a 442-mile route that ranks as third-easiest historically, at least as far as hills and mileage go. Weather remains a wild card. So train well.

It happens in late July.

So, who’s with me?