The commuter bike, a Giant “Tran Send”, has received some accoutrements over the course of the year: storage, improved lights, and winter rubber.

The panniers I had purchased in April ended up being returned since they were too small to fit my laptop and gi. In their stead was a plastic crate lashed to the rack with zip-ties. The crate wobbled a bit when piled high, but sufficed for most of the summer until I had the chance to augment it with some old panniers that had been stored in my parents garage since a Boyscout bike-hike many years ago. The old panniers didn’t fit the laptop either, so to fit both them and the crate I fashioned a wooden riser-platform to allow the crate to sit a few inches off the rack. While difficult to attach, this arrangement has the benefit of enhancing that stability of the crate as well as providing as much storage as I care to fill.

The second upgrade was the addition of several more blinking tail lights and the CygoLight Mity-Cross headlight that I had purchased for the 24 Hours of Great Glen mountain bike race. A reflective vest also joins the lights for what I’m hoping will provoke a reaction along the lines of, “Is that a Christmas tree ahead?”.

Last week brought the latest update, studded snow tires. I purchased the Schwalbe “Marathon Winter” tires from Peter White Cycles in New Hampshire (mail order), with 240 tungsten-carbide studs in each tire. At this point they’ve only seen a bit of snow and ice, but they remove the hesitation I built up after a tense, snowy commute with my slick summer tires.

Now that winter seems to have started for real, my plan is to bike as much as I feel comfortable with and car-pool with Sarah or take the bus if the weather is bad. I’d like to push myself a bit to continue through the winter, but would rather not take any risks of being hit by drivers who might be sliding around the highway in a storm.

The blue line is our GPS track, the purple are the trails (provided by LocalMotion.com).

View Larger Map

It was a bit damp and cloudy, but the trails weren’t too muddy the woods were beautiful. A fine time was had by all (especially Hudson, the pooch).

I mostly rode with the light on my helmet and battery in my CamelBack which worked great on all of the trails from super-twisty handle-bar-wide singletrack to wider double-track. I certainly had plenty of light to see and I was pleasently reminded of mogul-skiing advise: Stop looking at your feet, observe strategically. Lifting my head a bit and looking 15-20 feet down the trail (on single-track) rather than at my feet helped my speed pick up measurably. There were a couple of time while I was exploring some new single-track that I came around a large tree in a hairpin-turn to be surprised by a drop or climb that I wasn’t expecting, but I don’t think more light would have helped shine through an obstacle.

I tried one short stretch of double-track with the light on my bars and found that while the the depth-perceptions is much better (as everyone says), it was really distracting to have the light twitching back and forth as I dodged rocks. With the light on the bars I was able to cleanly bunny-hop a series of 3, 6, and 8-inch logs, whereas with the light on my head I miss-judged the big one and clipped it in the air with my tires — praise-be to 6″ of suspension travel.

Overall the MityCross 350 is plenty of light to get out into the woods and ride after dark. More light would always be nice, but I had a great hour and a half ride with just this light. My plan is to get a high-powered LED flashlight to complement this light and provide depth-perception on the handlebars, but the MityCross was more than enough to get started.

On my ride home after leaving the woods I tested the “throw” of the light by riding down my dark road as fast as I could. I found that the beam of the MittyCross allowed me to resolve details about 100ft (30yards/meters) ahead which made me comfortable riding up to ~20-25mph. Beyond that, the road seemed kind of dim and fuzzy and I had to really strain to see further. While adequate for a leisurely road ride (or as fast as I can get the mountain bike), I wouldn’t want to bomb down a hill at 50mph with only this light.

(Note: cross-posed at MTBR.com)

Tran Send DX photo from the Giant website

I’ve been regularly bicycle commuting since 2002 — though only since 2007 has my commute increased to 3 miles each way up from less than one. I commute pretty exclusively on my Cannondale road bike, as the full-suspension mountain bike with downhill tires is way too slow and the unicycle is even slower.

The road bike is wonderfully fast and a blast to cruise through traffic with. What is less fun is carrying my laptop bag and a duffel-bag for my gi (heavy cotton Aikido training clothes). A backpack is a little better at handling the weight than the two smaller bags, but hotter due to more contact with my back.

After a few wet rides last week and increasing frustration with the weight of the laptop and sweat-soaked gi I decided it was time to get a dedicated commuter bike with fenders (for the wet) and a rack with panniers (to get the crap off my back). I test-rode a Trek at the Middlebury Bike Center and a Kona and the Giant “Tran Send DX” at the Middlebury Alpine Shop.

While the Trek and Kona felt like perfectly good bikes and were reasonably priced, the Giant felt wonderfully peppy and nimble for a pretty beefy bike. I really like how its geometry manages to maintain an efficient peddling position while still being quite upright. The other bikes didn’t feel quite so efficient. What fully sealed the deal was that the Tran Send came with a custom rack and fenders that felt really solid and fit well on the bike, all for the lowest total cost.

After riding the new bike home I mounted a set of head and tail lights for the bi-weekly rides home in the dark. The tail light will be much more visible on this bike than my road bike as I was able to bolt it to the back of the rack where it won’t get covered up by my coat or bags like the under-seat mounting position does. I also picked up some rain pants and ordered a set of panniers to complete my foul and fair weather setup and plan to ride rain or shine through at least November.

Fairpoint’s online account services (just now available after many months of paper billing) do not work with FireFox or Safari, just Opera. While Opera is a fine browser, it seems like an odd sole-choice.

Anyway, the slowdowns seemed really sporadic with sites very slow to start loading, but then loading content quickly. My hunch was DNS problems, which I verified by setting my router to point at the OpenDNS.com name servers at 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 rather then the default Fairpoint DNS servers. Instant speed up of all web access. So if any one with Fairpoint DSL has noticed a slowdown recently, try changing your DNS server settings in your router or computer and see if that helps.

After getting several inches of snow on Monday, the weather has now warmed up and I was able to get out for my first bike ride of the season. It was a pretty blustery evening with west winds gusting up to 35mph, but was quite warm at about 50°F. I ended up going out for an hour and covering about 15 miles.

View Larger Map

After having the wind at my back for the first 20 minutes to East Middlebury I got it into my head that I wanted to ride up Route 125 to Ripton. Halfway up the first pitch my legs disabused me of that notion and I decided to ride down to the Shard Villa instead. I enjoyed the rest of my hills, but that first pitch was more than I was prepared for.

All in all it was great to be back in the saddle and I am looking forward to a lot of riding this summer. Last year I only covered 527 miles, we’ll see what this year brings.

After about 5 evenings of documentation and tutorial reading intermixed with a bit of programming I’m about 1/3 of the way through my first real Rails application and am beginning to have a few thoughts on Ruby, Rails, and the process of learning new languages and frameworks:

Languages are Easy…
This might have something to do with how my brain works, but I find learning new programming languages quite easy and extremely interesting. Some of the things I find really neat about the Ruby language:

• Full-on object-oriented — I really like the consistency
• Blocks and Iterators — I fell in love with blocks in SmallTalk, they are a great concept and so much easier to use than named callback functions
• Method names can end in equals such as name=(newName), parentheses are optional, and spaces seem to be allowed in method names that include ‘=’, so attribute-setting methods can look syntactically identical to variable assignment operators. Example: adam.name=('Adam') is equivalent to adam.name = ('Adam') and is equivalent to adam.name = 'Adam'. Sweet syntactical sugar.
• All instance variables are private. Always. The snazzy setter/getter syntax can spoof the idea of public attributes while still retaining actual methods to do the work. (I never got the point of public attributes other than as a way to avoid other languages’ painful getter/setter syntactical requirements.)
• Classes are never closed — can always add a method
• Single-inheritance prevents ambiguity in the class-hierarchy, but there is this concept of ‘Mix-ins’ where the un-closed nature of classes (I think) allows for a class to obtain method implementations from another class without inheriting from it. It sounds interesting, but I haven’t played with it yet

The Ruby language may have some blemishes (and apparently a slow interpreter), but it seems like a pretty nice language in general and pretty devoid of major syntactical or conceptual warts.

…Frameworks are hard
While I feel like I can [mostly] get my head around Ruby in a few days, Rails is another matter. Rails follows a few architectural concepts very strictly: convention over configuration, DRY, MVC, etc. One of the problems (at least with the tutorials and documentation on the Rails website) is that few of the convention have descriptions on how they should be applied and the documentation is scattered and can be hard to follow. A lot of magic happens behind the scenes when things are named a certain way and it can be hard to sort out what’s up when something goes wrong.

One problem I ran into that took me forever to debug was that by naming one of my classes Connection and using it in a has_many relationship I collided with something internal to ActiveRecord which caused an indecipherable error when trying to save my object. Connection is not one of the reserved words listed for Rails.

It may just be that I need to find a good book for Rails, but the official online documentation seems to be rather sparse, disorganized, and/or scattered. I don’t mean to complain too much and I believe that Rails will become much easier to use after I have a bit more time in the saddle, but it is a complex system that is not easy to learn a bit at a time.

I don’t want to dwell on on comparisons, but I must note that I have been very spoiled by PHP’s excellent official documentation at PHP.net and for the Zend Framework. PHP has more warts than, well, something with a lot of warts, (it has many, many warts), and doesn’t begin to compare to Ruby in syntactical elegance, but good documentation is also a valuable thing.

With all this said, I now have only 5 evenings in Ruby on Rails and I plan to give it at least twice that more. I hope by the end of this first project I’ll be comfortable enough with it to use it on other small to medium-sized applications with relative speed and ease.

One thing that often happens to me though, is that I work for about a half hour to an hour trying to get a new piece of code working and in the process make several sets of changes to one file that are only loosely related.

Let’s say that I am fixing a bug in my ‘MediaLibrary’ class and while doing so notice some some spelling mistakes in some comments that I fix. Now my one file has two changes my bug fix, and the spelling fix. Rather than committing both changes together with one comment describing both changes, I can highlight one of the changes in git-gui and select the “Stage Hunk for Commit” option.

With that one hunk staged I can now commit with a message applicable to that change. Other changes can then be staged and committed with their own messages resulting in a very understandable history of changes.

“Stage Hunk for Commit” can also be used to commit important changes while not including debugging lines inserted in your code.

Lightning, by Adam Franco.

This has been a crazy summer with only about 5 days between June and mid-August that didn’t have rain. The thunderstorms usually start in the afternoon and sometimes last over night. A few drop several inches of rain at a time causing the flash-floods that have taken out Route 125 several times as well as other bridges and roads.

Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike ()

Aside: The reason I use different licenses is that for software I have a reasonable expectation that commercial use of my software would result in feedback, bug-reports, translations, or patches that would further improve said software, whereas I do not feel that commercial use of photographs without compensation would improve my photography.

While I encourage others to make use of my work, I do expect them to respect the (liberal) license that I have applied to them and properly give credit where it is due. What particularly bugs me is Flickr’s so-so support of Creative Commons licenses. They encourage usage of CC licenses (decent) and display license information on the photo page (good):

But in the HTML snippets that they provide users for showing an image in one’s blog, they do not include any attribution or CC license information as required by the CC licenses (bad).

One of the knocks against the Creative Commons effort as a whole is the lack of clarity as to how attribution should be done in different media. For web publishing however, how to attribute is quite clear – though buried as the 11th item in their FAQ. Major services like Flickr failing to provide good example of attribution and how to properly credit work just makes the whole Creative Commons thing that much less clear for the general public who now find Creative Commons work readily available and with copy-paste code that violates the license by default.

In an effort to push Flickr to provide a good example for users of Creative Commons-licensed works I’ve started the following thread (reposted below) on the Flickr Ideas forum. I encourage others to weigh in if proper attribution is important to you. Such a fix should only take a Flickr developer about 15 minutes to do, but first such a feature needs to hit their radar.

Flickr Ideas: Update embed code to properly attribute for Creative Commons Licenses

As discussed in this Help thread from a year ago, the “Share This” and “All Sizes” embed code does not meet the Creative Commons license requirements for proper attribution. To quote the CreativeCommons.org FAQ:

How do I properly attribute a Creative Commons licensed work?

If you are using a work licensed under one of our core licenses, then the proper way of accrediting your use of a work when you’re making a verbatim use is: (1) to keep intact any copyright notices for the Work; (2) credit the author, licensor and/or other parties (such as a wiki or journal) in the manner they specify; (3) the title of the Work; and (4) the URL for the work if applicable.

You also need to provide the URL for the Creative Commons license selected with each copy of the work that you make available.

If you are making a derivative use of a work licensed under one of our core licenses, in addition to the above, you need to identify that your work is a derivative work, ie. “This is a Finnish translation of the [original work] by [author]” or “Screenplay based on [original work] by [author].”

Further recommendations and guidelines for marking works can be found at the CC Marking project.

The creator’s name (2) and license logo/link (1) are required for proper attibution, but missing from the Flickr-provided embed code. This means that when a user copy/pastes the embed code provided by Flickr, they violate the license by default if they do not take other steps (not mentioned anywhere on Flickr) to give proper attribution.

After no response on the previous thread for a year, TeX HeX has utilized the Flickr API to create an embed code generator at www.ImageCodr.org that can take the URL of any CC licensed Flickr photo and generate the proper HTML code on the fly. This ImageCoder example page provides embed code with the results below:

  by  Adam Franco 

Note the proper link to the license and attribution of the photographer. Also, note the very understandable description of how the Creative Commons license terms affect usage of the image:

I applaud TeX HeX for his wonderful work, but this embed code really should be generated by Flickr itself as only a small percentage of users are going to find their way to ImageCoder.

Please Flickr staff, update the embed code with proper attribution lines so that users of our images can properly attribute by default.

Comment on this thread in the Flickr Ideas forum »