Bicylcle maintenance

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will be well aware that back in February (on my birthday no less!) my bike was vandalised. Some enterprising mind burdoned, no doubt, by the unending pressures of modern life, decided to releave a little stress by kicking my rear deraileur through the spokes of my back wheel.

I thought breifly about having a bike shop repair the resulting damage but instead I decided I would repair it myself. I bought a new Shimano deraileur unit, a set of Super-B bike tools and a Haynes bike repair manual.

Today I finally got round to working on the bike. Dilligently I cleaned the bike and then used the chain rivet remover to break my chain. Problem number 1. Shimano UG, HG and IG chains use rivets that leave a bigger hole when removed than when put in - I need to buy some special replacement rivets to rejoing the chain. Bugger... still, I pressed on and removed the bucked and broken deraileur, only to find that the deraileur hanger is both hideously bent and the thread holding the deraileur has shredded as a result. So now I need a new deraileur hanger - trouble is, these seem to be very hard to find - in principle every bike can have a differently shapped hanger and the manufacturer of my bike seems not to bother to sell parts.

Big fat arse!

So.. my next best bet is to contact http://deraileurhanger.com - they specialise in selling just this part. Even they don't list my bike (even though it's one of Germany's biggest brands), however, they do let you send them pictures and see if they can find a match.

On the upside I am learning a lot about how modern bikes are constructed and how to maintain them. As a new father in a household where bikes are the primary means of transport for spring, summer and autumn time, I doubt this will be the last time I need to be involved in bike repair work.

Voigtländer Vitomatic II

Voigtländer Vitomatic II, originally uploaded by de ney.

I've purchased one of these on E-bay for the princely sum of 20€. This is essentially the same as the Voigtlaender Vito CL I have been using recently but with a coupled rangefinder and with the meter mirrored in the viewfinder.

Ebay listing suggests it's fully functional, and given the classic West-German build quality of these late 1950s / early 1960s Voitglaenders I have high hopes.

To date I haven't really found the "perfect" 35mm camera. In 120 format I think my Bronica RF645 is the one. I suspect the 35mm camera would be similar. To be a really comfortable, natural experience I need a lightmeter, preferably visible in the view finder, a decent rangefinder and an excellent lens - this Vitomatic might fit the bill. An East German Zeiss Werra IV might also fit the bill, but they're a little rarer and command a higher price so I have not yet had the funds or opportunity to find out. Talking of which, Zeiss-Ikon Contax and Leica M's (and Nikon and Canon copies) are obvious contenders but alas they have names and reputations that carry an unreasonable price. At a push I might one day find the funds to buy one of the new-fangled Besa R4M or R3M models.

Occams Razor

We are amused:




Doubt Occam (a monk!) would have appreciated this use, though it is a perfectly good application of the idea.

If I had a garden this is what I'd grow - 2010-01-09 at 11-28-51

If I had a garden this is what I'd grow - 2010-01-09 at 11-28-51, originally uploaded by tealeg.

This photo seems to be getting a rather staggering amount of attention on Flickr. Once again I suspect that the key to getting Flickr hits is SEO not the photographs inate qualities.

Last time I got this much attention was for a picture that had Fedora and Thinkpad in it's comments. This time around I think it's Lisp and Emacs that are driving the hits.

HTML5 and all that

So..

Firstly a quick update re: clojure. I'm still using it, productively and occasionally frustraitedly. Most frustration comes from my lack of available time and the relative newness of the language. Now Clojure is 2 years old there are often libraries are available to do things in a way idiomatic to Clojure rather than just using Java libraries directly, however there's no a great deal of documentation of examples for these libraries. I suspect these frustrations will only disapear with time. XML parsing and processing in particular seems a little trickier than it should be given the good built in support and the given that XML is almost a LISP datastructure to start with. Ho hum..

Anyhow, right now I am taking some time to make myself familiar with HTML5. So far so good - it seems a sensible, pragmatic and useful upgrade to the the markup and API standards, with several intreging operunities to move away from annoying plugin technology (Flash and Google Gears spring to mind). I come more from the XHTML camp than the HTML 4 camp (though I have been writing HTML since the mid 1990s) so I am a little disappointed that HTML5 seems to move us to a situation where HTML as valid XML is seen a backwards compatibility issue (please let me know if that's a false impression!).

Naturally when looking into these things I am working on small example files, and by extension that means I am using nxml mode in Emacs. That means I need to get a relax-ng setup for HTML5, I started doing this hit a bump in the first few seconds and in the first google search I hit a ready made solution. Edward O'Connor has put together html5-el for which I am extremely grateful. Thanks Edward!

Mac foo I learned today

Long time no post! Ho hum, been busy as ever.

Anyhow, for my own benefit just wanted to write down some Mac foo I learned today.

I was searching for the Mac equivalent of the Linux "eject" command. Lots of people online are spouting off about needing to reboot their macs and hold down keys to eject disks that aren't recognised, but what you really need is:

hdiutil eject /dev/disk1

Some good Clojure news, some bad Clojure news

So... first the bad news.

I've had to drop the Qt port of my little Clojure recruitment database. I was just hitting too many problems using Qt-Jambi and it was taking too long. The client needed a working database ASAP and I wasn't gonna get there. At the same time I also learned to use Apple's Core Data on Mac Os X 10.5 (which my client is running) and I managed to turn the bulk of the project around in an evening. It was one of those evenings where I couldn't sleep and in a way I am just glad to get the database out there and running - especially as "the client" is also my girlfrend :-)

The good news comes in two forms. One, getting the DB off my plate means I have more evening time to play with more interesting Clojure projects; two another Beta version of Stuart Halloway's book "Programming Clojure" came out. I intend to read some of the new chapters, particularly the one on Swing (which until now I have found clunky).