WombatNation

If you have a twisted sense of humor and haven’t yet watched the Emmy award winning (no joke) Robot Chicken, for your own sake please read the Wired article on Robot Chicken, watch a episode on Adult Swim, and then come back to thank me for hooking you up with the best show on TV for people with a twisted sense of humor.

On October 7th I’ll be riding the Mount Diablo Challenge, a timed ride over 10.8 miles with 3,249 feet of elevation gain. The peak is at 3,849 feet above sea level. The ride can’t be handled as a normal bike race due to the number of riders (957 last year), so they time you using an electronic chip that you wear during the ride. Since the only other time I’ve ridden to the top of Mount Diablo was over ten years ago on a mountain bike, I thought I might as well get in one practice ride.

The goal that I plucked from thin air was to finish in under 1 hour and twenty minutes (average of 8.1 mph). Given the average 5.7% gradient, and especially with the final hundred meters being a leg breaking 17% gradient, that sounded reasonable. Finishing in under an hour (> 10.8 mph) gets you a “One Hour” t-shirt, but I had already written off all hopes of that.

After today’s ride, I feel extremely confident in my decision to forget about the t-shirt. Although I beat my goal by reaching the top in 1 hour 12 minutes and about 45 seconds, I don’t see myself chopping off a lot of minutes before the official ride in eight days. Now that I know the route better and am more familiar with where it is relatively flat and where it is steep, I think I can definitely improve my time. But, with the big mass of other cyclists moving up the mountain at the same time, I’m sure I will lose some time going around slower riders and trying to stay out of the way of faster riders.

My heart rate monitor captured the stats below. I forgot to stop it until after I slowly rode across the small parking lot at the top, stopped riding, stopped hallucinating, and got off my bike. As to why I ended up with 11 miles, either I didn’t calibrate it very well, I started my ride before where the official start line will be, or I rode a little farther because I didn’t always take the straightest line through a lot of the corners (though I’m proud to say I powered up the last 100 meters in a straight line).

• 1:13:20 riding time
• avg 168 bpm
• max 179 bpm
• 1148 kcal
• 11.0 miles
• avg speed 9 mph
• max 21.2 mph
• avg cadence 73
• max cadence 110

I definitely hit the max heart rate during the brutal climb at the end. I looked down at one point and saw 178.

I’ve been completely Microsoft Windows free at home once again for quite a while since the death of yet another hard drive in a Dell computer with a pre-installed copy of Windows XP Home. This time it was a Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop. There have been a couple of times over the last few months where it would have been convenient to have a Windows install at home so I could test some code to make sure it ran fine on Windows or to run some odd program that is available only on Windows. After upgrading my laptop to 1.5 GB of RAM, I decided to set up a Windows XP virtual machine using the Windows XP reinstallation CD that came with my Dell. For no particularly compelling reason, I decided to use KVM instead of Xen or VMWare. The Fedora project website has a great overview of virtualization options built into Fedora 7, though most of the focus is on Xen.

Setting up the Windows XP VM using KVM and a management tool called virt-manager was amazingly easy. I also benefited from a KVM and Fedora 7 tutorial at Phoronix, which is also home to great info for Linux users like me who have laptops with ATI video cards, but it would have been easy enough to figure out just by running virt-manager.

First, you may need to install a couple of packages:

$ sudo yum -y install kvm qemu virt-manager

If you had to install kvm, you should reboot to load the kvm modules. Once you restart, launch Virtual Machine Manager from the System Tools section of the Applications menu.

One problem I ran into with virt-manager was that it wouldn’t let me browse to the reinstallation CD. I ended up having to copy it to the hard drive into an iso disk image file, but that was easy enough.

$ cat /dev/cdrom > /tmp/winxphome.iso

Also, because the 2004-era Intel CPU in my laptop doesn’t have the Intel VT enhancements that support hardware acceleration of VMs, I had to configure my VM for full virtualization. It’s definitely slower than running native, but it’s still quite usable. I wouldn’t try running Halo in the VM, though.

I was worried when a popup window appeared about thirty minutes into the Windows XP install asking me to insert a CD that contained Service Pack 2. That was baffling, because the XP reinstallation CD claimed to include Service Pack 2. After canceling out of that dialog and stopping and restarting the VM a couple of times, the install continued. After a couple of hours of the installer grinding away with 98% CPU usage, I had a functioning Windows XP VM.

The biggest problem I’ve run into is with the mouse cursor. Frequently, it behaves like it has hit the bottom or the top of the screen, even when it is far from the edge. Perhaps Windows is getting confused about the size of its display window, which appears to be 800×600. The easiest way to work around it is to move the mouse all the way to the edge of the window in the opposite direction. This seems to temporarily help Windows calibrate the screen size. I ran into a similar problem years ago with VMWare, but was able to get past it by installing VMWare Tools. I’m not sure/doubtful there is an equivalent for KVM for Windows guest operating systems.

I haven’t set up a new Windows install for a couple of years, so I forgot how painfully slow it is to install all the anti-virus and anti-malware software, disable the naive user settings that Explorer and other Microsoft apps set up by default, enable the power user settings, and install all the apps and utilities like Firefox that make Windows usable. Setting up a new Linux install is so much easier for me and takes a small fraction of the time. When comparing the time to set up Windows versus Linux (especially for a software developer), you have to keep in mind that Windows comes with only a very basic set of useful tools and applications when compared to a good Linux distribution. The Yum (RedHat/Fedora) and apt (Debian/Ubuntu) packaging tools also make it far easier to install additional applications on a Linux system than on a Windows system. Keeping software up to date on Windows is generally a nightmare compared to Linux.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

My copy of the book is the first edition, but I highly recommend getting the second edition. The authors added a lot of critical comments and corrections in the second edition. Or, if you already have the first edition, you can do what I did and browse through the updates in the second edition while at a book store.

One of the comments in the second edition directly addresses one of my biggest issues, i.e., the incredibly fawning intros to each chapter. Levitt is clearly a smart guy and doesn’t really require any further build up. However, each chapter begins with a couple of glowing paragraphs from the NY Times that describe how Levitt walks on water, cures the infirm, turns crappy CW sitcoms into The IT Crowd, and turns an incompetent US President into … Okay, not even Steven Levitt can save George Bush from ignominy.

So, who is the unmentioned author of those excerpts from the Times? Why it’s his co-author, Stephen Dubner. But don’t let this stop you from reading this great book. Just don’t waste your time on the chapter intros.

The introduction to the of the book sums up the theme of the book quite nicely - “Why the conventional wisdom is so often wrong”. Over six chapters the Steves present very convincing arguments, backed up with lots of data that has been carefully statistically analyzed and vetted, why some familiar claims that have been made in the media are not only not accurate, but often completely wrong. They received quite a bit of backlash for this book, primarily, it seems, from people who read articles about it rather than reading it for themselves. Obviously this puts a lot of pressure on you to not just read my review, but to also read the book. Sorry. I believe that Levitt honestly is not trying to push any moral beliefs on anyone. He’s just looking at the data as impartially as he can and describing what his analysis tells him.

One chapter I found fascinating was titled “Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?”. An earlier chapter was titled “How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real Estate Agents?” (very popular with the National Association of Realtors), and this chapter could have similarly been titled “How Are Drug Gangs Like Multi Level Marketing Companies?”. A grad student named Sudhir Venkatesh collected a significant amount of data, at a not insignificant risk to his life, on the Black Gangster Disciple Nation (not connected in any way with WombatNation) in Chicago. The conventional wisdom is that the risk of a gang member dying early is offset by the all the money they can make. Otherwise, why would they do it, right?

Well, Levitt’s retelling of Venkatesh’s research reveals that the marketing done by the drug gang recruiters isn’t that much less misleading than that done by recruiters for multi level marketing companies. Why the MLM marketers don’t die, of course, they generally make far less money than the recruiters say they will, and sometimes they even end up owing the companies money. Although I see a lot of corollaries with the org structure of MLM companies, Levitt compares them with McDonald’s. But back to the drug gangs.

The people at the top levels of the drug gangs do make a lot of money. But, it really is just the people at the very top. The top 2.2% of the gang that was studied took home over half the money. The guys at the bottom made less than the minimum wage and the people above them were making $7 per hour. It’s important to note that if a gang member were active in the gang for the entire four years for which Venkatesh was able to collect data, that gang member’s chances of ending up dead during that time were 1 in 4. Hmmm, the risk seems to outrun the reward just by a little bit.

But just like how many people get sucked up into some MLM companies that border on being Ponzi schemes, the foot soldiers who are signing up have no idea how badly the odds are stacked against them. Of course, many of them are in situations where they feel they might not have any other options.

And if the book isn’t enough for you, there’s plenty more freaky stuff on the Freakonomics blog at the NY Times.

If you’ve been subject to identity theft like me (twice so far), you should strongly consider having access to your credit report frozen. This will greatly decrease the chance of someone else establishing a new line of credit using your identity. Consumers Union has a great summary of the details for all the states that currently allow you to freeze access to your credit report. The credit industry doesn’t want you to do this, of course, so they have fought it for a long time and tried to make it hard to accomplish.

One downside is that it can make it hard to for you to get quick access to credit. But, maybe not being able to walk into a Lamborghini dealership and walk out with $100,000 of debt isn’t such a bad thing. However, if you really are trying to line up new credit for a well thought out reason, such as when buying a house, you do have to remember to unfreeze access in advance. You definitely don’t want to lose a house because you couldn’t get the funding together quickly enough.

Thanks to Dan Wallach (Go Rice Owls!) for his informative post on Fredom to Tinker.

AVIOS is having their second speech app building contest for student teams. “Cash and/or equipment prizes valued at over $1000 will be awarded to teams of student programmers who design and create applications judged by industry experts to be the most robust, useful, creative, innovative, and user friendly.” The finished application must be submitted by January 31, 2008.

Although the application must at least support speech input or output, students are encouraged to develop multi-modal apps. Many development environments are approved for use in building and running your application. If you are looking to get some long term useful experience out of this exercise, I strongly recommend that you build a VoiceXML app and host it one of the platforms like BeVocal, TellMe, etc. While working with a downloadable environment like Voxeo’s Prophecy would be highly educational, you’ll end up spending a lot of time dealing with stuff that the hosted platforms take care of for you. Even better would be to use a tool that dynamically generates VoiceXML, but there aren’t a lot of free tools available that do that.

Waiting for Fidel by Christoper Hunt

My wife bought this book for me a few years ago when we were doing a lot of international traveling. It never made it to the top of my reading stack, but this summer I was looking for a relatively small paperback book to read while taking BART and MUNI to California Victory matches in San Francisco. I’m really glad I decided to choose Waiting for Fidel.

Christopher Hunt spends a lot of time blending in with locals and comes away with a perspective that would be extremely difficult to obtain by most visitors to Cuba. While he is clearly enamored with Cuba, he doesn’t hesitate to point out the flaws in their economic system and the suffering that is ever present. While some of the suffering is due to the American embargo, Cuba definitely lost out big by betting big on a losing horse (the Soviet Union) and Castro appears (even back in the late 90’s when the book was written) to be far out of touch with the realities of day-to-day life and the high levels of corruption throughout much of Cuba. Still, it sounds like the majority of Cubans are incredibly kind and warm-hearted and they make for wonderful hosts.

After a couple of failed attempts to meet Castro in Havana, Hunt decides to follow Fidel Castro and his fellow rebels’ 30+ day march across most of the length of Cuba (I don’t know why I thought Cuba wasn’t that long of an island, but it is) en route to overthrowing Fulgencio Bautista in Havana. His adventures while following in the rebels’ footsteps make for fascinating reading. Although most of the Cubans he meets are relatively poor, they offer to share whatever they have with him.

Along the way, Hunt learns many terms that help to Cubanize him. A regular part of Cuban life is queuing up in lines, so the phrase everyone says as they approach a queue is “¿El último?”, in order to find out who is currently at the end of the queue. This is, of course, not to be confused with “El Máximo”, which is a nickname for Castro. When commenting on the regular challenges Cubans face each day, they often sigh and simply say “La Lucha”, or “The Struggle”. Other useful slang terms include wanikiki - money, fula - dollars, jinetero - grifter, jinitera - prostitute, and el fuego - the act of grifting.

One interesting bit of trivia is that the Communist daily political newspaper Granma is named after the boat the rebels used to land at the Eastern tip of Cuba, or as Che Guevara described their arrival, “This wasn’t a landing, it was a shipwreck”. But why was the boat called “Granma”? Well, they had purchased it from an American who had given it the affectionate name for his grandmother. Imagine if they had bought the “Luna Sea”, “Obsession”, “Wet Dream”, or “Miss Behavin’”.

I plowed through a bunch of books this summer and swore to myself with each one that I would post a book review. It’s not like I spent all summer just watching episodes of Robot Chicken, The Simpsons, The Venture Brothers, and Ghost in the Shell. Sure, that took up 80% of my free time, but I engaged with literature at times, too.

So here’s a partial list of reviews to potentially look forward to, or not, in no particular order:

• Waiting for Fidel by Christopher Hunt
• Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
• The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
• Cycling’s Greatest Misadventures edited by Erich Schweikher
• Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach
• Too Much Coffee Man’s Parade of Tirade by Shannon Wheeler
• Murder Mysteries by Neil Gaiman and P. Craig Russell

I also read reasonable sized chunks of several technical books, but I’ll probably spare you those. I mean, do you really want to read about how I used Fedora Linux by Chris Tyler to better configure my desktop and laptop? Yeah, I didn’t think so, even though it is a useful book.

Question: When is a bike not transportation?

Answer: When your inside the confused brain of US Transportation Secretary Mary Peters. There is a great article on Salon exposing Peters’ pandering to the automobile and truck industries.

In a recent appearance on PBS’s “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer”, Peters claimed that bridge and highway repairs were being held up because too much money was being diverted to create safe paths and trails for pedestrians and bicyclists. Never mind the fact that the Federal Highway Administration reported that in 2006 over $1 billion in unspent bridge repair funding was returned by state departments of transportation.