1) The cat bit in the film Inside Out, which could have been an entry itself, but the cat bit was the bestest bit.
2) Some relaxing reading time, were I finished Raising Steam by T Prachett.
3) An impromptu date evening dinner out with H, which was followed by a film..
[Happy] 2 out of 3 ain’t bad..
I can only think of 2 today..
1) I watched an interesting TED talk about addiction
2) I enjoyed my cycle ride home as it was a nice sunny evening.
[Happy] Reasons to be cheerful..
In an attempt to be happier, and generally see the positive.*
I am going to be recording 3 things each day that has made me happy. Doing it here, as that should be convenient.
So here is today’s list:
1) That I am finally getting around to doing this.
2) My oldest niece, has just done well in her GCSE’s
3) I successfully completed a fast day.
* I’m told that there are also other benefits, one of which is that I might post more…
[push] 30 minutes in the red zone
So last night was the Smithfield Nocture, and I was out racing the penny. I was well down on prep an was down with a cold a few weeks back, so hadn’t even been doing many commute miles recently.
This year we where riding in the opposite direction this year, which made for an interesting downhill hairpin into Snow Hill. The race started with a processional lap and then a rolling start, so I had the chance to get a few lower speed attempts to get the idea of the line. But I knew that I was going to waste a lot of effort slowing down as I approached the corner. Then it was into the wind and back up the hill to the start / finish line.
So how was it, once we got started the pace was high, I was hanging on to the back of the second group on the road about 11 places back, but with in 4 laps they had split off into 2 groups and I was getting dropped. But that still left 16 riders behind me..
All I could do is dig deep and just keep pushing myself and hope that I could hold off everyone who was behind me.
The race was 20 minutes and then 3 laps, which is a very long time to push yourself at maximum effort.
I know that I was over taken by 2 more people during the race, but I was doing everything that I could to keep them in sight but they were sitting about 200 yards ahead of me. When I had the chance I would glance back but couldn’t see anyone following me, so I was out in the no man’s land between groups. Which is one of the hardest places to maintain your pace, as you have no one to slipstream.
With two laps to go, I was lapped by the leading group of 4, which is when I really started to lose count as to my placing. I know that I overtook 9 other riders, but it was very hard to tell if they were back markers or people dropping back from the leading group.
In the final lap I was aware that someone was behind me, and in the last 100 yards he pushed past, and even at maximum sprint I couldn’t keep up.
The crowd seemed a bit down this year on previous, but they still produced a huge wall of noise, which made for a great atmosphere, and a great race.
I think I was about 12th, the official placings say 17th. Which strikes me as a little low, but I didn’t crash and had fun, so I was a good night out.
If I am going to do better I will have to do more training and get a bigger wheel. To that end I had a ride on one of the new racing machines made by Unicycles.com and I was amazed at how much more power it felt like I had on the bigger wheel.
While I was getting the feel of the machine I recognised a chap walking up towards the race circuit. He shouted a hello and asked a question about the bike. He was Michael Hutchinson ex pro rider and time trial rider.
After expressing an interest in the penny I was riding, I naturally offered him a go. So I can now claim that I have given someone truly famous from the world of cycling an holder of multiple time national champion his first lesson in how to ride a penny farthing.
He is currently writing a book about the history of cycling and bicycles so wonder if I will get a mention.
Achievement unlocked.
Race stats:
Distance: 6.5 Miles
Average speed: 14.5 MPH
Top speed: 19.5 MPH (which is down on my best ever top speed of about 22 MPH).
[bike] The language of crashing
Last week I was involved in a bicycle crash.* I was hit by a metallic painted smoked glass windowed BMW at at about half ten at night as I cycled home from climbing.
I was riding through Camberwell in the bus lane, having just passed a bus, and was now on the inside of a line of traffic waiting at traffic lights.
The car in question decided that he didn’t want to wait in line and could use the bus lane to slip up the line of traffic and he was going to turn left anyway so that made it all right. I haven’t checked the hours of operation on that bus lane, I don’t remember it being a 24 hour one.
So he pulled into the left lane, which was a problem, as that is where I was.
Now I my spider senses had tingled so I had a very small window of realisation of what was going to happen, so was already slowing down and swerving towards the left hand curb as he drove into me. This vastly reduced the seriousness of the crash, (I’m not going to say accident, as it was clearly his fault) so I wasn’t knocked off my bike.. I had time to yell out a short warning before we made contact.
Not that it prevented the inevitable crash, that just meant that a lot more people got to see it..
Not that there was much to see, it is not like I fell off or anything. I just bumped my shoulder against the side of a car, wobbled a bit and stopped. The car drove on for another 20 feet before the driver realised that he was going to have to stop before he could lean out of the passenger window to ask if I was ok..
Given that I hadn’t fallen off, there was no bleeding and apart from my shoulder being a little tender I was fine, so I told him to be careful and carried on home.
I wasn’t badly hurt there didn’t seem to be any mileage in doing anything else.
So I have spent a week with a sore shoulder, there are still some actions that are achy, so I will have to take it easy for a little while yet.
Anyway the point of this post was to try and talk about the language and the conversations that have happened in the following week. I have dealt with several..
“Cycling is so dangerous”
“Were you wearing a helmet”
“you’ve got to be so careful”
“you just hear so many bad stories”
“you have to watch out out for lorries”
I’ve been trying to explain that basically I am fine, just a bit stiff, and it is not that bad. You ride carefully, but if the people in the cars are not paying attention, they are going to catch up with you from time to time.
But that doesn’t mean that cycling is a bad idea.
And I just have no idea how to articulate that.
* Spoiler, I am ok, there is no need to worry, nothing broken with either me or the bike, but I am a bit achy.
[www] Microsoft IIS HTTPS ping of death
So I have been intrigued by the news coverage or lack of it from a bug reported in Microsoft’s IIS webserver last week. What makes this slightly unusual is that Microsoft released a patch on Tuesday, and by Thursday some bight spark had worked out what exactly the patch fixed and worked out that if you gave a very interesting poke at an unpatched IIS webserver then it would blue screen.
The interesting magic to test if a server is vulnerable being:
curl -v [ipaddress]/static.png -H "Host: test" -H "Range: bytes=0-18446744073709551615"
Simply change the 0- to 20- and the server instantly hits the blue screen of death. Manual intervention is required some poor operator has to reboot the computer for it to be usable again.
So how much press did this bug get, practically zero. It was reported in the Register, but from the main stream news outlets nothing. Which is interesting, as the recent must patch now bugs for Linux, heartbleed for example got quite a bit of press. Admittedly that bug was in the openSSL package, that is used for encryption, but it also didn’t have the power to crash the server. Maybe it was the fact it had a way cooler name that helped it get attention.
What is very interesting is that both bugs were caused by the same very simple mistake. Accepting input and not checking that input is valid before you act on it. A very clear explanation of the heartbleed issue in cartoon form is given by XKCD. In one it can be used to reveal information, and in the other crash the server.
Hang on a minute, an instruction sent to an open port on a server had the opportunity to crash the whole server! Not just the webserver, or the currently active thread that is returning a single web page, but the whole server. Really.
This is because of an arms race between IIS and Apache that happened a few years back, both were trying to demonstrate that they were the fastest webserver at a range of tasks, one of which was returning HTTPS webpages.
In order to try and gain an advantage in that race, Microsoft broke a security model. They moved the HTTPS handling of the IIS webserver into the kernel, the main core part of the operating system. This made the processing of HTTPS pages faster, but it means that a simple bug will crash the whole server.
Which is why people don’t host critical systems on Microsoft webservers, they know that bugs like this one will be out there, the code base isn’t being independently checked, and that security standards are ignored to try and satisfy performance problems.
[Life] Why did no one tell me!
Over the weekend I have learned that the Post Office Tower was a national secret, and didn’t appear on any OS maps from it’s completion in 1966 till it was finally declassified under parliamentary privilege in 1993.
Despite being the tallest building in London and open to the public as a restaurant for most of that time.
I find this to be completely brilliant, and part of me wonders why no one told me.*
* I asked my brother about this, to be told “That he couldn’t tell me as it was a secret”!
[potd] Orbital rock get in the way of fusion reactor
Given that I am in the south of France we only had a partial eclipse, and it was very cloudy..
So this is a heavily cropped phone camera picture that I took while sat at the side of the ski run.
[push] It’s more falling with style..
Achievement unlocked: Just completed my first black run!
Think that makes me qualified to deliver Milk Tray..
[life] Take time to enjoy the small stuff..
Today has been brilliant..
The bulk of the day has been spent skiing*, the skiing has gone really well with me mostly skiing on dark red routes.. so I pushed myself and did well, ok there were a few spectacular wipe outs.. but if you don’t fall over your clearly not trying..
Then there was vast amounts of beer at a pub with a live band.. (who rocked), then there was Calsone, followed by chocolate ice cream..
Not really sure how I could have a better day.. **
* But that can be replaced with other physical activities.. like cycling.
** Ok maybe if it had included a strawberry milkshake or a very good hot chocolate..