sjh - mountain biking running linux vegan geek spice - mtb / vegan / running / linux / canberra / cycling / etc

Steven Hanley hackergotchi picture Steven
Hanley
About

email: sjh@svana.org

web: https://svana.org/sjh
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Other online diaries:

Aaron Broughton,
Andrew Pollock,
Anthony Towns,
Chris Yeoh,
Martijn van Oosterhout,
Michael Davies,
Michael Still,
Tony Breeds,

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Mon, 27 Jul 2009

Ouch, good to have other options. - 15:14
I was able to get the CX bike running again, new chain, cluster, hanger and fixing the wheel. I also have a hub, spokes and rim to build a new nicer back wheel sitting in the shed at home. The cluster had a tooth missing on one sprocket, which if it had been ripped off before the hanger broke may have caused the hanger to break as I changed into that gear.

I got it all working again by the weekend just gone as Vikings (with CORC support) were running a Cyclocross race at Stromlo (sponsored by Maladjusted) and I was keen to have a go. Even though the top grade was won by three mountain bikers I think the course was well set up for Cyclocross bikes and the event was fun.

My ouch comes from a crash I had, cornering off the criterium track onto the concrete about to dismount to run up the stairs and my front tyre slipped and I went sliding on my right hip on the cement for a few metres. I have a large bruise and graze on my hip and am unable to put power through my right leg on the bike or walk normally at the moment. I kept going and finished the race (this happened at the end of my 3rd of 7 laps). I did however slow down a lot no longer being able to use my right leg for much more than ballast.

I guess I should be kind of glad I have swimming and paddling to fall back on this week as I am unable to ride hard or run at all for a few days at least. I will try a swim squad session tonight and hope I can get away with doing that. The tour is now over too so we can all start getting reasonable amounts of sleep each night again which helps recovery and ability to go hard in exercise.

Now I just hope I recover enough by Saturday to do the 8 hour Rogaine down the coast without too much pain. Bodalla state forest sounds like a nice (if somewhat hilly) area so it should be fun.

[/mtb] link

Sun, 12 Jul 2009

Snap! - 18:33
Riding to a meeting on Friday afternoon on my CX bike (Jake the Snake) I was turning onto Northbourne and accelerating when suddenly I hear a crunch noise and my back wheel locks up. Looking down as I skid to a stop I see my rear dearailleur jammed into the back wheel. The hanger had snapped, not due to a stick or anything, maybe a tight kink in the chain, very strange.

Getting my hands greasy and black trying to pull stuff off I eventually had to tie it all onto the frame and scooter my way home to grab the car. I bought a new hanger already, the derailleur was a bit bent however I think I have straightened it enough to work, the chain was now definitely bent so I will need to go and buy a new chain, also the back wheel suffered one broken spoke. I think I may finally build a better back wheel for this bike than the stock Aksium it came with, as I have an open pro rim and some spokes that should fit an ultegra hub in the shed I may do that soon.

Also I have just put bars and stem I like more (rather than the cinelli stuff that was there) on to the fixie, along with new black and white grip tape to match the panda on the bars. I fixed the front hub on my main geared mtb yesterday by putting two new bearing races into it, now it is smooth and no longer loose.

The other thing I was just trying to do was to see if I could get any more air out of the rear brake line on the new single speed. When I picked it up the rear brake could be held to the bar while pedalling. So I grabbed some Shimano brake oil and squeezed as much air as would come out easily from the hose last Monday. However the brake still comes too far in for my liking. However when I was working on it last Monday I must have stripped the stupid (anything smaller than 3mm is stupid IMO) allen key screw on the lever for bleeding so I could not remove it to try again today. Need to get a bike shop to swap the bleed screw now (and may be soft and get it bled at the same time)

I competed in the CORC XC race at sparrow this morning on the new single speed, all went well, except my rocking up late so I raced in sport C rather than sport B men. I started riding about a minute and a half after the field started. As I was starting late and riding a rigid single speed I thought it may not be completely unfair to be riding down a grade. However looking at the results I won the race. Ooops, I really should have been in my normal grade. (I could have raced single speed, it did not really occur to me at the time, and that would have been fairer, I would have come 5th or so with my time today)

Anyway Jake the Snake is off the road at least until I buy the new chain and get a new spoke for the Aksium. The other bikes are all reasonably alright though. On Wednesday night I changed the tyres on the new road bike to the Specialized Armadillos as I got sick of the Continental light weight racing tyres flatting so often. I should get back to commuting around the place on the fixie anyway rather than Jake so this is good incentive to do that for a while.

[/mtb] link

Fri, 10 Jul 2009

An easy to use cheap DVB-T USB dongle - 11:35
The other night at home we realised that the tv did not have digital tuning capability, thus with the Ashes starting we could not watch the tour coverage. As I am not at home at 6pm much I could not even watch the highlights package easily (repeated at 9:30pm on SBS2). Although my mythtv box at work can record this stuff, it had been playing up and not making scheduled recordings, and I had not fixed it yet. (finally started an upgrade yesterday, have not had time to see how it went)

Anyway I did not have time to go into town and buy a digital tuner to go with the tv, however the on campus computer shop has USB DVB-T dongles. One they had for sale (rather cheap at $68) is the Leadtek Winfast DTV Dongle Gold, which according to this page at the mythtv wiki works well on Linux. So I bought one, plugged it in, discovered that the driver is already in the 2.6.30 kernel I am running, the firmware linked to on that page first however was buggy, some forum posts suggested running the latest 4.95.0 firmware rather than 4.65.0 and it would work (it did).

After playing around with a few tv programs I settled on simply using xine which can tune into all the channels I scanned for Canberra. I am happy to say this works a treat and only took about 5 minutes to make it work. Of course if I make it to swimming tonight I may try to come back past the shops in Civic and buy a tuner box for the tv in the lounge room so everyone can enjoy the tour at home.

Though I do not watch tv much I have to say it is sort of exciting to have a tuner that only takes up a really small amount of space (the dongle, antenna and short usb cable extension are about the size of a small USB hard drive all up) in my laptop bag and works fine in most places like this.

[/comp/hardware] link

Wed, 08 Jul 2009

One power house with no team? - 20:46
Looking at the photos from the TTT at the tour last night it appears every photo of Silence-Lotto on the stage report has Cadel on the front of the train. So sure we all know he has been let down once more by a weaker team at the tour, I also admit I have not watched the full live coverage of the stage. I do however begin to wonder, did Cadel end up doing a huge amount of the pulls for the whole TTT and then pulled away from most of his team mates in the last km. That appears to be riding harder than the effort by Cancellara at the end for Saxobank.

I really feel sorry for Cadel, now with so many strong Astana riders way up in the standing it looks like it will be a difficult task to gain time.

[/mtb] link

Success with WPA2 - 17:58
After spending far more time than I should have I have finally found a working configuration for the ANU WPA2 secure wireless on Linux. I spent a lot of time reading seemingly endless Ubuntu forum posts going on about problems that could be wpa supplicant, network-manager or kernel driver based issues. Bugs concerning various complaints were being assigned to any one of those three things.

Due to concerns that my driver for the iwlagn driver could be bad I upgraded my laptop kernel to the Debian sid 2.6.30 packages, I also then downloaded the latest wireless kernel drivers and installed them. Also the three programs mentioned, iw (new interface to wireless stack in Linux), crda and wireless-regdb.

Eventually I am not entirely convinced those things helped, many forum complaints for Ubuntu and other systems said network-manager had issues and to try wicd. My initial efforts with wicd failed. Eventually while reading some efforts someone else had made to work out what was happening on their system I saw someone using the rather simple iwlist tool to scan for the capabilities of the secure access points.

When I did this I notice the ANU-Secure access points all advertised the following. 

IE: IEEE 802.11i/WPA2 Version 1
    Group Cipher : CCMP
    Pairwise Ciphers (1) : CCMP
    Authentication Suites (1) : 802.1x

I had previously been trying TKIP and WPA2 when I tried wpa_supplicant alone without a manager on top. WPA2 and RSN are aliases for each other in this instance. Anyway with the new drivers and the sid wpa_supplicant I was able to get a wpa_supplicant.conf with the following to work on ANU-Secure. 

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=root

network={
   ssid="ANU-Secure"
   scan_ssid=0
   proto=RSN
   key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
   eap=PEAP
   pairwise=CCMP
   group=CCMP
   identity="u9999999"
   password="PASSWORD"
   phase1="peaplabel=0"
   phase2="auth=MSCHAPV2"
#   priority=1
}

Then I looked through the wicd templates for one that had the minimum needed and noticed the wicd PEAP-GTC template had the desired fields set. So now in wicd I can access ANU-Secure from the desktop with no problems. I really should test out older drivers and some other configurations, also try out network manager again I think. Works for now though, I can finally stop wasting so much time on this.

[/comp/linux] link

Mon, 06 Jul 2009

Riding, Tour and hanging out in Sydney - 16:07
A good weekend was had in Sydney, got there around 9:30pm on Friday night after passing through Tahmoor to pick up a new bike (details later). Saturday morning I headed out to John and Lel's place where we were going riding, having a bbq, lots of great coffee, watching the tour and saying good bye to JJ and Lel as they are heading off to England.

Getting back to Jane's place around 4am I slept in until 10am when we went for breakfast at Naked Espresso in Newtown. Great food and I am intrigued to try their Vegan friendly pizzas sometime too. Then in the afternoon we made out way out to Bondi and hung around with the cousins (Nick, Jack, Ash and Jack's son Tom) which was good.

[/various] link

Thu, 02 Jul 2009

A regression for WPA2 - 18:20
So for a while I was wondering why I could not use the ANU's WPA2 secure network from my laptop. I had heard reports that some Ubuntu hardy machines had worked. I run Debian unstable and a kernel.org 2.6.29.3 on this laptop.

I thought maybe there was some problem with my laptop hardware and maybe the iwl4965 chipset simply would not do it under Linux. However searching online suggested I should be able to make it do WPA2.

Thinking maybe the Ubuntu people had done it right and Debian was missing something I tried booting a Jaunty live cd. I also discovered the rather neat feature of suspend to disk (hibernate) in that you can hibernate your computer, boot off a live cd, use it, reboot and have your existing session come right back up normally on the next boot.

Anyway I booted up Jaunty and tried to authenticate, still failed in a similar manner to my Debian installation. Out of curiosity as I had heard of hardy working I booted my laptop on a hardy live cd. So network manager and iwlagn driver combined on either Debian sid or Ubuntu jaunty had failed to authenticate. Ubuntu hardy on the other hand, using an older version of network manager and the iwl4965 driver in the kernel worked fine. WPA2 authentication and use on the ANU Secure wireless network.

So now I need to find out where the regression has happened that means WPA2 is broken in more recent releases of the software (kernel drivers, wpa supplicant, network manager) on either Debian or Ubuntu.

[/comp/linux] link

Wed, 01 Jul 2009

Sydney again this weekend - 16:49
So this weekend I will head up to Sydney again. This time for a send off for a friend moving back to England and then hanging out with Jane on Sunday. Last time we found some pretty yummy Vegan friendly food, I hope we find some more new and interesting food this time round. Hope to have Sunday breakfast at Naked Espresso in Newtown as I forgot the name of the place last time and we ended up elsewhere.

Some mountain biking on Saturday at the send off, probably no exercise Sunday (unless we go swimming) (unlike last time), still it should be nice even if I have to deal with Sydney.

[/various] link

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