I’m on my way with training for the Aids Life Cycle (ALC9) but I have a lot of work to do.  Mostly I need to increase the distance I can ride in a day, I haven’t really ridden more than 40mi in a single period, but that’s about to change.  The route requires between 66 to 108 miles per day, and a lot of the weekend group training rides are up to 70mi.

I’ve purchased an indoor trainer so I won’t loose any chances to train when I can’t get outside or for other schedule reasons.  But I’ve hit a few snags along the way, and learned a couple things too.  My first ride up to Tiburon ended with a broken spoke, not really the ideal end to a trip.  I’ve since gotten this fixed along with my shifter from a previous incident involving a pick-up truck (I’m sensing a trend).

Most recently (this morning actually) I thought I should really push my training and ride regardless of the rain and wind outside, probably not the best decision in the world.  Turns out the fancy pebble concrete on the way back on the Golden Gate Bridge is actually pretty slick when wet.  I totally took a fall in front of all the gawking tourists and children.  Looks like my new shifter lasted less than 24-hours without getting all scratched up once again, it’s just like old again!  So, time to make use of the indoor trainer and spin classes while it’s still all doom and gloomy outside.

I’ve been a “beta” tester of the new Translink card payment system for San Francisco public transport for a while now, but am amazed at the credit card payment process for these cards. As you can tell from the video below it appears to still use a dial-up process to authenticate and process credit card payments. So while you’re on your way to somewhere important, and realize you need to add value to your card you have to wait for a modem to dial up a credit card auth. I sure hope they speed up this process before it gets popular! Given, there are better ways to refill your card such as online or via the automatic enrollment. But this system is really supposed to be better than the old, and using a card to add value is now apparently two steps backwards.

I just registered for the AIDS LifeCycle, a 7-day 545-mile bike ride from SF to LA.   This begins June 6th and ends June 12th, and to participate I need to raise a minimum of $3,000.  I’ve kick-started this by donating $2,000 and setting a goal of $5,000.  I’m also going to match all donations up to $3,000 so if I make my goal it will mean a total of $8,000 in total donations!   I would love to be able to participate in this and reach my fundraising goals for this great cause, so I would love it if everyone could consider making a donation, no matter how small it might be.  I’ll do my best to document the ride with pictures and videos and post them here for everyone to see, even if this means me crawling the last few miles!

You can make donations online here, donations will benefit the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.

I decided that a video camera would be the perfect addition to my ski and cycling adventures.  After a very brief survey of the available options the CountourHD 1080p seemed to be the best choice for it’s simplicity of use, size, and quality.  Here’s how the pro’s and con’s break down.

Pro:

• Extremely small profile for recording activities such as skiing, cycling, etc.
• Simple design with large start/stop recording button.
• High quality video
• A camera specifically designed for this purpose.
• It’s got lasers! (used for initially aligning the camera when it’s on your head).
• Simple USB disk access and charging.

Con:

• Simple design and use means little control over configuration when away from computer.
• No way to preview videos without computer connection.
• MicroSD card means limited to 16G and an extremely tiny card that’s difficult to switch out while in an outdoor/harsh environment.
• Poor mount designs.

The mounting options are pretty poorly constructed in my opinion, and don’t offer a stable/secure base for the types of activities it’s intended to record.  For example, one of the mounting options is to the strap of a ski goggle.  While this option offers flexibility and ease of use the camera still tends to wiggle back and forth on difficult terrain as seen in the sample video below.  The vented helmet strap is also not ideal as I don’t trust the latches that hold it in place, and it’s problematic to get it in the correct position to record, however it does seem to be much more steady once it’s in place, time will tell if my concerns about it coming loose are justified.  For skiing, I think a solid mount to a helmet is the way to go, it’ll offer a much more stable platform to record from… oh and i should be wearing one anyways I’ve been told.

(click for full size video)

MicroSD cards, while are an ideal size for small form factors such as this, I find the limited capacity and switching them out to be a major concern.  The maximum size supported is 16GB and even if you have spares switching these out on a hill or outside isn’t an ideal option unless you’re fine with dropping a days worth of video into a snow bank or a storm drain.  However, you’re likely to run out of battery before you use up a 16GB card (the unit only comes with 2GB, but I’ve replaced it with a 4GB card I had laying around).  A spare battery is one of the first things I purchased, and I’ll likely upgrade the MicroSD card to 16GB as well.  2GB will probably give you about 30 minutes of total video time.  This being said, you can get a good set of videos recorded on the included battery and SD, but if you’re going to be out all day I think a spare battery and a storage upgrade are in order.  It’ll mean less worrying about what to record when.

While the audio isn’t always the best (it’s difficult to hear others far away, and the sound of air rushing past consumes the majority of the audio tracks), the video is fantastic.  The viewing angle is perfect for sports and quality is just what I was hoping for.  I’ll need to adjust some of the various contrast/brightness settings to get a better night filming, as well as bringing out more contrast and texture in the snow.  This is tedious as you can only configure this from a computer, but the configuration software does allow you to save pre-configured setups for easy switching between pre-determined settings.

So I dropped my iphone today, and cracked it’s screen all up, tragic I know.  <moment of silence please>….

But it’s still working for the time being, so that’s both good, and a sign of ok quality hardware despite the entire screen looking like a minor traffic accident.  So it’s time to shop for a phone again in order to prepare for this phones ultimate demise.  I heard AT&T has refurbed iphones for a steep discount, but the pricing is a little interesting for existing customers (who don’t get the really steep discount till their contract expires of course… don’t even get me started on that rant):

Note that for $150 in addition to the normal iphone 3GS 16GB Black price, you can get a refurbished iphone 3GS 16GB Black…. Such a deal, those refurbished phones must be in such high demand they are driving the price up above a brand new iphone.

I’m removing the FatMM patches I made available a while back from my blog until I can re-visit this optimization.  I recently noticed that I wasn’t getting the original performance gains I measured with this optimization patch.  (For those not familiar, the FatMM patch is a patch against PHP that performs a simplified memory management model where we allocate a larger memory structure at start and don’t both with freeing memory until the request is completed.)

With the help a user, Ricardo Bartolomé Méndez, we recently verified that this is in most cases fixing regressions in other memory performance such as debug builds or Suhosin patches.  (An embarrassing mistake on my part to be sure, but I didn’t want to remove this until I could get confirmation refuting what reports I had received previously.  The lesson here is to make sure you make your measurments carefully, it’s easy to mis-configure when you have multiple builds lying around).  So I until I can revisit this technique, I don’t want anyone else spending time on something that may be misleading in the end.  If I can come up with a better improvement, be sure I’ll post it again, and if you’re currently using this patch please verify that it’s not just correcting a previous regression from other patches or configurations.

Shortly after my post about Go Girl! at Facebook, I noticed another group getting their Go Girl! on.  As you can see in the following screen shot, Go Girl! made a cameo appearance in the last episode of Glee.   And who better to lead the way of Go Girl! than Sue Sylvester.  Now we know the secret to the Chereos stamina, while maintaining their pristine appearance!

Playing chess with Lucas at all hands meetings, while Karel looks on... (maybe I should bring back my stripe)

Go Girl! (what really powers Facebook)

November 2nd, 2009 will be my last official day as an employee at Facebook, and the 23rd will be my last day in the office.  It has, without a doubt, been one of the most amazing work experiences I’ve ever had.   My first hours of work was attending our 5 million user party in 2005, what a great introduction to Facebook work ethic.    The first year or two was masochistic, 24×7 constant cycles of wake-up, write code, push code, fix code till 4am, fall asleep spooning laptop, repeat…  <advertisement>But Go Girl!, the Sugar Free Energy Drink, kept me going through it all!</advertisement>   I started working on APC out of necessity, mostly to keep the panicked “If we don’t do *something* in the next hour, the site will be down!” from happening on a daily basis.  It grew into a full-time job managing the PHP/Apache stack, something that’s been a real challenge and I’ve really enjoyed. Throughout my time here our growth rate has always been astounding, even today I’m amazed at our trajectory and I think a huge portion of it corresponds to the creative energy embodied in it’s employees.  But alas, I feel my time here has come to a close, it’s time for me to relax a bit, re-focus, and figure out what I want to do next. I’m looking forward to seeing Facebook continue it’s upward trajectory and accomplish great things, and eager to discover whatever might be next, but only after a little R&R…

xlog version 1.0.2 is now available.  This fixes some compatability issues with PHP-5.3.

I’ve gone through several iterations with my to-do list.  I usually have a pretty large list of things that need to be done either as long term goals or short term by the hour or day tasks.  I’ve found that a lot of people use plain text files to track their lists or notes,  I did this for a while but found that I really wanted hierarchical formatting to better organize my thoughts and text files don’t necessarily offer the best feature set or visual display of this type of information.  For a long time I was using OmniOutliner for this purprose but this was a bit heavy handed (feature and price wise) and not really it’s intended purpose.  Edgies is another great application for this sort of thing, and my good friend uses these, but I didn’t find that they suited me for really long lists of tasks that I may not actually get to until a year from now.

I’ve finally landed on TaskPaper, it’s my ideal tool for tracking tasks, goals, notes, and most other things.  It works like a plain text editor, but understands special formatting like a ‘-’ character to start a bullet point or a ‘:’ following a word to signify a project, as well as proper indenting to show a hierachy.  It also supports marking tasks as done, arhiving, searching, and tagging.  All very necessary features.   I do have a few complaints such as the ability to drop photos or other files.  I also find it’s not really feasible to paste a large block of code or text like an email.  Despite this however, I’ve been very satisfied and definitely recommend it.  Now I just need to actually complete some items…<sigh>