Author: Ian

Loose lithium batteries can nolonger be checked

This is a new one on me, According to the Washington Post you can no longer pack loose lithium batteries in checked luggage.

To help reduce the risk of fires, air travelers will no longer be able to pack loose lithium batteries in checked luggage beginning Jan. 1, the Transportation Department said Friday.

If packed in plastic bags, batteries may be in carryon baggage. The limit is two batteries per passenger.

Mmm so does this mean I am allowed to check a lithium if it is still in its original packaging?

The more they make it more difficult to fly the more I wish the US had a reasonable train system or god forbid actually wanting to drive instead.

Bike Stats (new bike)

ODO 512
AVG 14.1
max 25.2
time 23:51
trp 5.6

I have Trek Incite 8i wireless odometer that bought at the same time I bought my bike. I have been getting strange Max speed readings on and off for since i got it. I finally tracked down the porblem. If I put it to close to my mac book laptop the speed indicator goes crazy. I tried switching off the blue tooth and wifi transmitters on the laptop and I had the same problem. So that unit is going to be retired in favor of my new christmas present, a Garmin Edge 305 GPS/heart rate/cadence/Speed/altitude/kitchen sink monitor. The only problem is I forgot to turn it off last night so it died 2 mins into this mornings commute, OOOPS.

I can tell you this much for today
Total time: 2:08
26 cal burned
distance .44 miles
heart rate 131 bpm
max 15.2

Yesterday (on old bike, with hy)
Time 0:46:13
559 cal
6.69 miles
avg 8.7
max 20.2

Petrol Prices

Paying by the liter in the uk taught me to watch gas prices. The washington post is saying that the price of regular has gone down 9 cents a gallon over the last 3 week. I haven’t seen much evidence of that close to our house, but we did get regular for $2.89 a gallon in Baltimore over the weekend which is 16 cents cheaper than the cheapest of the gas stations near our house.

On a related note my car is about 40 miles away from passing the 100,000 mile mark. Maybe I will treat it to an oil change, a battery and a car wash.

Avenue Q

We saw Avenue Q tonight at the National Theater in DC. This was a last minute thing, we had talked about it for a week or so but didn’t get any tickets till Thursday. I had a lot of fun. Definitely not for the kids I think the best song was “The internet is for surfing porn” and I think they should make up a t-shirt for the line “Grab your dick and double click”. So I now have a new mouse mat. I am debating weather I would be able to use it at work.

Avenue Q mouse mat

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>