Author: Paul Tomblin

Ellison Park Shuttle Again

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.

Well, that was fun

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.

New comment spam technique

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.

Athletes and drugs

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?

How not to arrive at Oshkosh.

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?”