Saw this last night on one of the local TV stations: “Happy Holiday’s!”
I’m sorry, I meant, on one of the local TV station’s. Because noun’s should have apostrophe’s.
A new low in spelling
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Fall activities
A quick update on my non-work related activities.
A lot of orienteering lately:
- Quick white course at Lake Bond with my daughter a few weeks ago.
- A very eventful Birkhead Wilderness run. You can read the report in the comments – I don’t think there was one single participant to get all the controls right. I messed up the first two and had a relatively clean run after that, especially after I started to pace count.
- A quick Bond Park sprint. I kind of had the home field advantage, and I was still slower than the fast runners.
I ran for the first time with the Raleigh Trail Runners. I knew I signed up for pain, and pain it was. 2.5 miles at a slow speed, 6 uphill sprints on the Graveyard Hill at Umstead (off of Old Reedy Creek), and back 2.5 miles; last 2 miles were 7:50 and 6:50 minutes respectively. Maybe we were trying to make it back before it got too dark. As I said to the other (3) runners, it’s no surprise so few people sign up for hill sprints.
My daughter started to take piano lessons, so a piano had to be acquired. We got a digital piano which seemed like a good compromise of quality vs. price.
Between fixing stuff up around the house I’d like to get back to some recreational programming (picking up Flex would be nice).
Prize for trash
One of the novel ideas (at least for me) for the Gleneagles Challenge Adventure Racing was a prize for the most unusual piece of trash one can collect from the course. I think it was a great way to encourage us to clean up the courses, but even more so to become painfully aware of the price of littering.
It is not fun running with a wheelbarrow 
I kept seeing it in a ditch at Lake Bond for the past couple of weeks, and was wondering who’s going to pick up; my teammates decided to break it in two pieces (the cup and the handles – there was no wheel), and we took turns carrying the parts. That was enough to earn us the prize
My First Adventure Race
Today I participated in the Gleneagles Challenge. I must say it was a lot more fun than I expected from an event that takes 4.5 hours and requires you to be constantly on the move.
About 20 minutes of running, 30 minutes in the kayak, an orienteering course and a lot of bike riding. The bike’s odometer showed 19.33 miles when I got back home (that included about 3 miles to get to Lake Bond and back).
Thanks to Bryan, Rob and Justin for letting me join them. Overall I think we did pretty well, second place when we only aimed to finish the race in one piece.
keyutils, python and you
Over the weekend I wrote Python bindings for keyutils. So this blog announces python-keyutils.
If you are not familiar with keyutils, it is a library that allows you to securely store sensitive information, directly inside the Linux kernel. You have a reasonable guarantee that the information cannot be retrieved from the memory or swap.
keyutils comes with a binary, keyctl(1), that gives you access to the kernel’s key management facilities. The man page describes the types of available keyrings. The ones the most interesting to the use case I had in mind were the per-thread, per-process and per-session keyrings.
The need for python bindings came when we realized that our release process requires typing the passphrase for signing packages way too many times, so there was a real need for a key agent of some sort. Searching for gpg-agent protocol specifications (or seahorse) returned some information, but nothing I could readily use (I may not have found the proper examples for speaking assuan; the end result was that I could not get anywhere in this direction).
Future versions of Conary will have the ability to read passphrases from the session keyring, if python-keyutils is installed. You can get python-keyutils from either contrib.rpath.org@rpl:2 or foresight.rpath.org@fl:2-devel (depending on whether you need the python 2.4 or python 2.6 version).
Keep in mind that I only implemented the bare minimum I needed for being able to set and get key information. There are other functions the library provides, that could be useful to have. If you find the need for one, let me know; as usual, patches will be cheerfully accepted.
The code is hosted on bitbucket and can be checked out with Mercurial.
Vote for Cary as the best place to play tennis
The winner of the 2009 Best Tennis Town award will take home $100,000 to be used for community wide programming or facility enhancements that the winning entrant endorses, and the community will be recognized during the 2009 U.S. Open.
According to the town of Cary:
To support tennis, the Town of Cary constructed the Cary Tennis Park with 30 championship lighted courts, later converting one court to four permanent 36-foot QuickStart courts, making the Tennis Park the largest in North Carolina and one of the largest in the Southeast. The Town also boasts 25 other tennis courts at four parks — Annie L. Jones Park, Harold S. Dunham Park, Robert V. Godbold Park, and Middle Creek School Park. Furthermore, the Town has assembled top notch staff charged with operating the tennis program with a team based philosophy.
In addition to the Town’s tennis facilities, there are more than 200 tennis courts in Cary including public courts, private clubs, schools, businesses, and HOA facilities. There are more than 20,317 people participating in organized tennis activities in Cary including Town programs, Western Wake Tennis Association tournaments and leagues, private club programs, corporate leagues and adult social leagues. Many of these organizations work together to provide adult league play, junior league play, charitable organization fundraiser events, QuickStart tennis programs with local elementary school PE classes, Bridge II Sport’s wheelchair tennis program and local public and private high school teams.
python: the dangers of assert
I ran into a piece of code that looked like this:
import threading
class A(threading.Thread):
def run(self):
self.foo()
def foo(self):
assert(threading.currentThread() != self, "Blah?")
print threading.currentThread() == self
a = A()
a.start()
a.foo()
a.join()
In the original code, there was no a.foo() invocation, because that would have triggered the assertion. Or so it was thought. I added it for my own edification.
The intention was for the foo() method to be callable only from within the running thread. In my quick test above, a.foo() should have failed.
There were two problems with that piece of code. First, it was not failing. Second, in python 2.6 you get a warning whenever you use assert with paranthesis. This is very deliberate, since assert is not a function. Using paranthesis will simply pass a tuple to the assert construct, and the tuple will always evaluate to True.
Very dutifully, I removed the paranthesis, and moved on to do some other things (and I even forgot I did it). A few days later, a coworker reported problems with the code.
As it turned out, the assert was hiding a very old bug – the condition should have checked for equality, not inequality. But since the condition _and_ the error message were paranthesized, the code passed no matter what you did. Removing the warning uncovered the problem, probably 3 years later.
Probable causes for errors
If you needed an excuse-of-the-day look no further than the DMTF specs for CIM.
The CIM_Error class has a ProbableCause property which can have a long list of values:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc150671(VS.85).aspx
“Toxic Leak Detected”, “Ice Buildup”, “High Winds”.
In a way, I feel refreshed to see the potential causes for the world’s problems are no more than 129.
27-mile week
Yes, I ran more than a marathon.
Unfortunately, spread over 6 different days.
Last week I ran 24 miles (4 days 4.5 miles each, a longer weekend 6-mile run), and this week I wanted to increase the distance by 10%. That was 6 days with 4.5 miles each – tomorrow is rest day.
I am not training for anything at the moment, so I am pretty happy, especially after coming from a 3-week vacation where the only running I did was a 15-minute downhill Tâmpa in Bra?ov. I will probably try to keep it at this level, I have no interest in increasing the weekly distance at this point.
Sprained ankles
Thankfully, the title is not about me.
I was running my usual trail course today and found a lady who sprained her ankle so bad, the pain almost made her pass out. I helped her hop on one leg to a house less than 100 yards away, where a very nice gentleman drove her home.
She mentioned that she doesn’t want to go to urgent care because she recently got laid off and has no medical insurance. This is so sad on so many levels. Silly economy. Stupid medical system.