Month: November 2007

Bicycle Lanes over the new hot lanes on i495

I have been keeping my eyes open about this issue. I even went to the VDOT six year plan hearings at the Fairfax County Building to hear what was being said. I would have stood up and presented my support for improving both bike lanes and side walks over i495 except I was recovering from a cold and I had more or less lost my voice. I did meet Bruce from FAAB who posted an excellent summary of the event. If you have only ever driven along route 7 as it passes over i495 you might not appreciate just what a daunting task it is to either walk or bike across that bridge. For the walkers there is no side walk. if you are lucky the ground is dry and you are not walking in mud but you have to cross two lanes of fast moving cars. For the bikers you have to be 2 lanes out in fast moving traffic to avoid being sucked onto i495. While living in the area I would take the bus the 3 miles to work rather than biking on route 7 over i495. Currently VDOT is looking at creating additional HOT lanes on the beltway, in order to do this need they to rework every bridge and every interchange the HOT lanes pass. So this is a unique opportunity to improve the biking and pedestrian access across those bridges. I just read that McLean Citizens Association has put their support behind the issue and would like to add my support. Tyson Corner is trying to convert itself into a pedestrian friendly zone, but unless they can do something to bridge the major roads in the area Tysons will only ever be a car destination and a metro stop at the mall.

Sad story of a memory leak

One of the DARPA Grand Challenge teams gets hit with a memory leak

On race day, we set the timer and off she went for a brilliant 9.8 mile drive. Unfortunately, our system was seeing and cataloging every bit of tumbleweed and scrub that it could find along the side of the road. Seeing far more obstacles than we’d ever seen in our controlled tests, the list blew up faster than expected and the computers died only 28 minutes in, ending our run.

Though we thought we had cleared all references to old entries in the list, because the objects were still registered as subscribers to an event, they were never getting deleted.

Read the full story

Automount in Leopard

I automount an nfs share from my mac mini to a linux file server. I upgraded the mac to leopard and discovered that automounts are nolonger set in the netinfo app, in fact netinfo doesn’t exist anymore in leopard. Instead you are supposed to use Directory Utility. The only issue was that the original mount didn’t show up in the utility. After some more searching I found this webpage that explains where the mount files are stored in /var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/mounts and you need to update the file to say <key>vfstype</key> instead or <key>type</key>

Blade Runner at the Uptown

If you are a blade runner fan I recommend seeing “Blade Runner, the final cut” at the uptown in DC. The story hasn’t been altered much but they have cleaned up the sound and visuals. I read that they re-shot a scene so you see the real actress running through the glass rather than a stunt double. This was the best version of blade runner I have ever seen and the Uptowns super wide screen was very cool.