Rants and Revelations

I upgraded my server from Fedora Core 4 to Fedora Core 5 using yum. After going through all the .rpmnew and .rpmsave files and fixing configuration files, most things are working. A couple of annoyances:

• It no longer puts items in /etc/fstab for usb storage devices, so I have to find what device the disk has been assigned and mount it manually. I’m hoping I can find a solution to that.
• Can somebody please tell me why the people who wrap the PostgreSQL binaries in an RPM can’t figure out how to do a pg_dumpall in the %pre at the beginning of the process, and a restore of the backup in the %post at the end? The init.d script refuses to start up if you have an 8.0.x database on an 8.1.x PostgreSQL, so after the upgrade you have to go “oh, shit, the last backup I made was …” and restore it. If you’re not the sort of person who dumps the database every night to a file on your USB disk, you’re screwed.
• Wordpress was refusing to clear out comment spam because of some index issue, and then claimed that the table had “crashed”. I had to fumble around with mysql_upgrade, mysqlcheck, and myisamchk to get that straightened out.

So far, knock wood, those are the only issues. The PostgreSQL one is, to me, indicative that the Fedora Core team don’t really care about preserving data. I haven’t tried, but I bet you anything the Debian people don’t just say “oh well, if you didn’t back up you’re screwed.”

I went for a paddle today. For a change, I put in at Browncroft Avenue and went upstream. I was hoping to get up to the place where the Elison Park shuttle puts in, but I actually fell short by about 20 feet.

I chose this put-in, because that part of the creek is more interesting than the lower bit - it’s narrow, it’s twisty, it gets shallow and then deeper, fast and then slow, and most of it is covered with trees. There is more wild-life, but paradoxically enough, there is also more human activity - these pleasant tree lined banks go through the middle of picnic areas that seem to be in constant use in the summer. Some of them are family picnics and private groups, but there was also this gigantic party with large barbeque grills set up and loud blaring rap music.

Last week those trees had made it impossible to use my GPS with the “built-in” antenna, but today I decided to try the external antenna. It made a bit difference - I didn’t see the GPS complain about lost signal at all, except under the bridge over Browncroft Avenue. The strange thing is that when it lost the signal that early in the paddle, it decided I must be driving and suddenly I saw it showing me having an average speed of around 80 mph. I reset everything as soon as I came out from under the bridge. It worked great. It shows that I paddled a distance of 4.7 miles (as opposed to Google Maps Pedometer, which says 4.6) at an average of 3.3 mph. On the way upstream, I found that on the sections where I could paddle fast, I could get it up to around 3.9 mph, but my average speed was around 3.0 mph. When I turned around, I was disappointed to find that if I pushed it hard, I could only get up to around 5.4mph, but I was so tired that most of the time I was only paddling around 3.5 or 4.0. I think that means the stream goes about 1.5mph, or maybe it goes faster and I was just more tired than I think.

On the way up, I bottomed out several times, and one time I got stuck so bad that after backing up and retrying 3 or 4 different routes, I ended up getting out of the boat, walking forward about half a boat length, and getting back in. Also, there was a tree across most of the stream fairly early on and I had to paddle as fast as I could and I just barely got through it. And when I was within sight of the place where the shuttle puts in, I could see some people in white water boats playing, but I got into a bit of fast moving water that I just couldn’t seem to paddle faster than. Since I was almost where I’d planned to turn around anyway, and the presence of the white water boats made me think the next rapid would be even faster, I turned around.

There was a fair amount of wildlife around - I saw lots of ducks, including some who were pure white. One duck kept flying down river and landing right in front of me, until I got close enough and then it would fly down river again. After a few times, I found a bit of river that was wide enough that I could pass him without activating his flight reflex. I saw several Little Green Herons, including two together in a tree. And there was a Kingfisher heading downstream, but I couldn’t find that Bruce Cockburn song that reminds me of on the iPod Shuffle. Also saw a couple of American Goldfinches.

Paddling downstream is a lot more fun than paddling upstream. On the way upstream, I tried different depths of skeg - I thought that with more skeg the kayak wouldn’t get caught by the current and turned. Great in theory, but I found that unless I was paddling pretty fast, the current got the front turned quite a bit before the skeg got into the fast water and stopped the turn. I actually had to do a back sweep in a few places to get around corners. Coming downstream is a lot more fun that way - you can use the way the current catches the upstream part of the kayak to kick you around corners, and that’s cool.

I got a phone message asking if I was “Paul Tomblin, the Rochester blogger”, and if so, could I please call WHAM News. I phoned the number back, and it was somebody doing a story about a new law in New York that requires library and other public internet access sites to block access to MySpace and Facebook and other “social networking sites”, and they wanted a blogger to talk about whether private blog sites also would be affected by this law.

I know bugger all about this law, and while I’m usually willing to spout off about any subject any time, I didn’t really think I should be the one they talk to. Maybe if I didn’t think the story would interfere with tomorrow’s Pilots Picnic, I would have volunteered.

I went for a flight today. The main reason was just to try out my new HALO headphones. But the other reason was that it has been a beautiful weekend, only two of the planes have been booked for a few hours each, and I didn’t get my flight to Oshkosh. The maintenance coordinator for the Lance has been his usual uncommunicative self, so I had no idea if it was back from maintenance again. I booked an Archer instead. When I got to the airport, the Lance was there, but when I attempted to change my reservation the ScheduleMaster site was throwing ASP errors. Oh, what the hell, I can fly an Archer can’t I?

While I was waiting for the fuel truck, there was a guy taking delivery of his brand new Diamond Star DA-40. What a beautiful plane! Wouldn’t mind having one of those on the flight line.

I started the plane up, and found that I wasn’t getting any sound in my right ear with the new headset, so I switched over to my old familiar Dave Clark DC10-13.4s (with the Headsets Inc ANR kit). Take off was faster than I’m used to - these Archers are lighter than the Dakota and Lance that I’ve been doing all my flying in. I didn’t have any plan, so I just headed out due west. By the time I got to Batavia, I decided I needed to get the wind farm waypoint back in my GPS, so I headed down in the right general area until I spotted it. And after I got that waypoint, I decided I needed the railway trestle in Letchworth Canyon as a waypoint as well, so I headed down that way.

I was in smooth air with the plane trimmed for level flight, so I thought I’d give the HALOs another try. I put them in, and had the same problem with them as before. But this time I remembered that they have a Mono/Stereo switch. The guy demonstrating them at Oshkosh had a stereo intercomm, but the plane doesn’t. Switching it to Mono cleared that problem up immediately. At first they didn’t seem like they were blocking out the sound very well, but the foam expands pretty slowly and after a half a minute or so they were blocking as well as the Dave Clarks, if not better. It seems like they were blocking different frequencies though. The engine sounded different.

After I got to the trestle, I flew up the Letchworth Canyon. While I was going up, I decided to have some fun and tried turning to follow all the twists and turns of the river, like you see those “low and slow” guys doing in their Cubs and float planes. Of course I was at my usual 4,000 feet. But along the way I thought about my usual ground shyness. If I was going to fly the twists, I might as well try to fly a bit lower. Not down in the canyon of course, but at a nice legal 500 feet above any people or structures. So when I turned to head down, I was down at 2,000 feet, which is probably actually more like 1,000 AGL. Hey, small victories, right? The ground rises towards the trestle, and I crept up to 2,500 feet. It was fun.

When I was in the area, I thought I’d do some touch and goes at Perry-Warsaw. There was practically nothing on the CTAF except a bunch of guys with thick Pakistani accents talking from some place near Toronto I think. I don’t know if it was the narrow runway or what, but I found myself quite high on final both time - the first time I had to slip like hell to get down. And the second time was better, but I still landed pretty hard. I quickly switched the radio over to 121.5 to make sure I hadn’t turned on the emergency beacon (ELT), and was relieved to find it wasn’t quite that hard. That was bad. After that, I decided to come home.

I wasn’t high or anything, but I still have problems with speed control on final. I rounded out, but was a bit high, so I put the nose down a tad, but almost immediately lost all lift. I bounced twice. Oh, that was ugly. Once again I checked the ELT, and it wasn’t on. Phew.

As I was tying down, the DA-40 was coming in. It’s such a nice plane, and I think the fully castering nose wheel would be really handy for ground handling.

I still want to go out in the Lance to try the HALO. Maybe next week.

I decided to do the Ellison Park Shuttle again, this time without Vicki. The weather was perfect, and because of that there were a lot of people out. While I was waiting for the shuttle to leave, a large group left including a woman with a dog in her kayak. The dog had on a life jacket, which is just as well because they weren’t more than 20 feet from the dock when the dog decided to jump out, and the woman had no idea how to get the dog back in. By the time we left she was coming back to the dock with the dog swimming along side. I have no idea whether they got sorted out or not.

On the shuttle with me there were two tandem kayaks, two canoes with two people in them, and one other solo kayak, none of them looking very experienced. I helped the driver get them launched, and left after them. By the time I caught up to them (at the next bend), they were all over the river and pointing in random directions. Two women in one of the canoes rammed me as they spun around and flailed at the water, bringing back some bad memories from when I hurt my wrist last year. I hope they got settled down and pointing in the right direction eventually, because there were some snares later on.

I brought my GPS along as an experiment. The manual says it’s waterproof and floats so I thought that I’d be safe. The idea was to get a better idea of the real length of the course, and also the speed I maintain. But it was kind of a waste - during the twisty part at the top of the course, it kept losing signal, often for long stretches. So distance was even less accurate than my previous attempt using the Google Maps Pedometer.

The river was pretty high after the rain, and moving pretty fast. But the recent storms also left some traps for the unwary. There was a downed tree that blocked most of the river leaving a very fast passage along one side. And then not too much later just past Browncroft Avenue there was another tree that had fallen all the way across, but it’s actually not in the water but above it. There was a group coming upstream under it when I got there, and I was able to also duck under it in one part.

There wasn’t a lot of wildlife out today unless you count hordes of inexperienced paddlers. I saw kingfishers in the twisty wooded bit at the top, and some barn swallows under the bridges, and a few ducks, but that’s about it. I didn’t see the usual swans or geese.

Back at Baycreek, there were a couple of guys paddling around with Greenland paddles and kayaks. That looks like something I’d like to try out some time. I’ve heard they’re better on your elbows and shoulders.

I noticed my backup USB drive wasn’t mounted, so my nightly backups hadn’t been happening for I don’t know how long. And when I tried to mount it, it mounted in USB “fast speed” mode, rather than “high speed”. I tried a few things, and I still couldn’t do it. So what the hell, I thought, it’s been over 6 months since my last reboot - yum has installed several new kernels, this will be a chance to use one of them.

Nice plan, but unfortunately the damn box wouldn’t boot. The first message I saw:

INIT: version 2.85 booting
mount: error while loading shared libraries: libcryptsetup.so.0:
cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
awk: cmd. line:1: fatal: cannot open file `/proc/mounts’ for reading
(No such file or directory)

I booted with a rescue disk, and discovered that the thing it’s complaining about, libcryptsetup.so.0, is in /usr/lib. And guess what: /usr is a different partition than /, so it isn’t mounted before /etc/rc.sysinit runs. After a bit more investigation, I found that /usr/lib/libcryptsetup.so.0 was installed by a weird rpm, and that it’s used in mount and umount. I couldn’t understand why the Fedora team would be so stupid as to disobey one of the first tenants of Unix: that the system should be able to boot without /usr. mount is installed by the util-linux rpm, and I had this strange util-linux…crypt.i386.rpm. That word “crypt” in the name was evidence that it wasn’t a normal rpm. And “rpm -qi” showed that it didn’t come from Fedora. That’s when I realized that when I’d installed the yum repository for “postgrey”, I hadn’t excluded all the other packages from that repository like I should have. And this had dragged in these crappy packages.

The first thing I did was try to “work around” the problem with files in /usr/lib by copying libcryptsetup.so.0 to /lib and booting again. But that failed, complaining about another file. So I went back to the rescue disk and tried the same work around with that file, but this time it complained about yet another missing file. I realized this could be a long process.

So now I had to get rid of the bogus versions of mount and the other files that depended on this stupid crypto stuff.

Next thing I did was go to the proper Fedora upgrade site with my laptop and download the latest real version of the util-linux rpm. Then I transferred it over to the Linux box using a USB pen drive (lovely useful things, aren’t they?). The rescue boot image mounts your Fedora file system under /mnt/sysimage, so I did a “chroot /mnt/sysimage” and tried to do an “rpm -Uvh –force” on that rpm, but it didn’t work. It gave some ioctl error. At this point I really wasn’t sure what to do. I contemplated trying to combine my / and /usr partitions into one big one and making that the boot point, but I didn’t relish the work it would take to stitch everything back together.

I started downloading the Fedora Core 5 DVD image as a backup plan, but Bittorrent was telling me it would take 6 hours.

As a desparation move, I tried booting a Knoppix 4.1 boot CD I had lying around. I manually mounted the disk partitions where they belonged under /mnt/hda6, and chrooted to it, and this time “rpm -Uvh –force” actually worked. Hooray!

I booted, and had a couple of minor hickups - nfsd had taken a socket that spamd wanted, so I was getting no spam filtering until I figured out who had the socket open and restarted everything that needed to be restarted. I also had to restart a ssh tunnel on my linode to get the mail flowing correct. I think everything is working - my blog is up, mail is flowing, news is flowing, I can NFS mount my music onto my laptop, and all seems right in the world.

But I’m up, I’m running, and I’m a little less sanguine about installing new repositories into yum. Time to go to bed.

Within minutes of my last blog post, I got notification of three trackbacks that didn’t get flagged by SpamKarma2 as spam. Each one had a somewhat spammy URL, and the last part was my subject line with “.php” appended. I went to one of them, and it was a blatant copy of my post, surrounded by their crap.

This is a disturbing new trend in the war between spammers and search engines - as well as getting a link from your site, they also copy your site’s content in order to get it indexed. Colour me annoyed.

I didn’t write a summary of the last couple of days of the Tour de France as I usually do because I didn’t actually get to watch them on TV until I got back from Oshkosh, and by that time the news was all about Landis’ failed drug test. I want to reserve judgement about Landis until we hear the full results of the investigation. But one thing I read in several discussions of this whole thing is “we should just allow the athletes to use whatever drugs they want”. This is a damn stupid idea for a couple of reasons, and I’d like to expand on this.

The first reason it’s a stupid idea is that athletes will do anything to get an edge on their competition. If everybody else is using drug X, then you have to use X or you’re going to be at a disadvantage, even if you’re a better athlete than them. The drugs would become just another arms-race situation. The various sports governing bodies have done what they can to reduce technological arms races - they want technology to evolve, but they don’t want it to decide competitions. Back in the days when fibreglas skis were new, the FIS had to step in and say that cross country skis had to be a minimum of 44 mm wide at the widest point, because people were trying narrower and narrow skis to get a speed advantage, to the point where a large number of competitors were breaking their skis in a race - if you didn’t break, you’d gain a few seconds over everybody else. The UCI does the same thing in bike racing with their weight limits on bikes. The limit is arbitrary, but you have to draw the line somewhere. If drugs got to be the next arms race, people would be doing major damage to themselves.

And that’s the second reason why it’s a stupid idea: athletes don’t care about the future. If you told an athlete that if they take this drug they’d win the Tour de France but they’d drop dead two weeks later, but their win would still stand, there would be a line-up around the block for the drug. How do I know this? Personal experience.

Most of my competitive life was in pain. I was pretty sure that continuing to compete would make the pain problems worse in the future, but I cheerfully accepted that trade-off. I’m not as cheerful about it now, but I stand by the decision. And I wasn’t competing for prize money, million dollar endorsements and world wide fame. The sports I was competing in were obscure to the point where most of my friends had never even heard of them. And I wasn’t even winning most of them - I never won a Canadian Championship in anything. In cross country skiing, I wasn’t even in the top 4 on our university team. But I loved the competition against myself, and the feeling of doing my best, and the knowledge that I’d tested my limits and come through them. I basically ruined my knees and condemmed myself to lifetime pain for nothing more than a feeling. Can you imagine what an athlete would do to himself if there was more at stake?

I was going to blog about this, but Mark beat me to it: Information Echo : How not to arrive at Oshkosh. Go there, and especially listen to the audio.

The important things to remember are this:

• The NOTAM is 32 pages long, with detailed diagrams and photographs of the all the arrival routes and runway layouts and radio frequencies and the like. It is available on the FAA web site, on the EAA web site, and on the Airventure web site, or you can phone the EAA and they’ll mail you a paper copy. It’s not exactly hard to find.
• Because of the huge volume of aircraft arriving and departing, the entire process is supposed to be “listen-only” with only air traffic controllers talking and pilots acknowledging by rocking their wings. Trying to talk to tower ties up the frequency and causes other aircraft to have to go-around because they won’t get their landing clearances.
• The airport is totally reconfigured for this event - several runways are closed, one of the taxiways has been converted to a runway, the open runways have dots painted on them and there will be simultaneous landings going on to different dots on the same runway, and you are expected to pull off the runway onto the grass, hold up a sign saying where you are going, and follow the flagmen directing you on taxi routes in the grass.
• Most of us planning to fly to Oshkosh downloaded the NOTAM the day it became available (sometime in April I think) and studied it intently since then - and even so I wouldn’t want to do it without a second pilot on board: one to fly and look for traffic, the other to pull out the appropriate arrival page once it has been assigned, guide the pilot flying along the arrival, and tune the radios.

With all that information, it’s tempting to say “see how many mistakes you can spot”, but frankly I’d be more interested to see if anybody out there can spot a single thing this guy did right from the moment the controller suggested that he go back and get the NOTAM. It’s obvious to me that while he claims he had the NOTAM and left it at home, he never actually read it.

BTW: In order that this guy’s stupidity gets enshired forever, I would like to mention that his aircraft ident was N9553A, a Cessna 172R registered to “Airview Inc, 1360 Queens Dr, Moon Township, PA, 15108-1379″. I just wish we had the pilot’s name. It is my fervent hope that for the rest of this guy’s life, no matter where he flies, somebody will say “aren’t you the idiot who flew into Oshkosh without the NOTAM?”

Back when I first starting looking at the Glastar/Glasair Sportman 2+2 and their “Two Weeks to Taxi” program, I predicted that other kit builders would do something similar as soon as they figured out whether it was legal or not. Today I found this one on the web: US Jabiru’s Four Seats Four Weeks program. It’s very similar, except because it’s 4 weeks long it gets a lot more done, including painting, and starting the flight test program. Looks like a nice little plane too - I wish I’d visited their booth at Oshkosh.

At the Seaplane Pilots Association corn roast at Oshkosh, I spent a lot of time talking to a guy who had built and owned a Murphy Rebel on amphibious floats down in Florida. I didn’t catch his last name, but I think his first name was Jack. He almost had me convinced that I should get a Rebel, but I don’t think I’m the kit plane type.

So today after work I come home and fire up the TiVo, and there is about the only good General Aviation tv show, Wings to Adventure. And there, complete with Murphy Rebel and his flying-crazy dog, is Jack. Cool.