The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

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.

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?