Monthly Archives: September 2008

skydiving

200 skydives in ’08 so far

September 28, 2008 – 11:06 pm

In response to my last post, I just hit another milestone today..that is 200 jumps in a calendar year. I now have 200 skydives in ’08. :)

Let me look at my log books and break it down for comparison:

  • 2008: (so far) 200 skydives
  • 2007: 199 skydives
  • 2006: 85 skydives
  • 2004: 19 skydives (not including static-line, training jumps)

It is interesting to note that I was close to 200 last year, but I have had a much better year this year while being around home more often and spending more time with my girlfriend. I think I have struck a very good balance this year and I am very happy about that (not to say that it can’t be improved somehow?).

200 is an arbitrary number and has no real meaning, just a round number that is nice to see.

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skydiving

500 skydives!!!

September 22, 2008 – 9:56 pm

Woa woa. I just did my 500th skydive on Saturday the 20th. 9/20/08. All I have to say is “w00t”!

This particular skydive was very fun. Lynn, Jamie & Marty were on my 500th. It also happened to be Jamie’s 800th. Very good timing =) Basically a screw off dive, built a round then we all dropped a knee and spun until we couldn’t hold on to eachother. We were then flung around the sky and we sorta rebuilt before breakoff. Me and Marty did some proximity flying under canopy and were about 4 feet away from a 2stack dock. God I love this shit…

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gentoo

Gentoo: Improve boot time…

September 22, 2008 – 9:36 pm

Switch to baselayout-2 and openrc..the speed up is noticeable. Especially if you enable rc_parallel="YES" in /etc/rc.conf. Anyway, others have wrote about it already, including a bootchartd of before and after here.

Anyway, this should be hitting stable soonish and when it does be sure to read the migration guide because some things have indeed changed.

For me, I count to 10 slowly and my laptop is at the xdm prompt…very cool and good job Roy!

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linux

Firefox 3 awesome bar…

September 17, 2008 – 6:34 pm

Awesome? No, definitely not. I use the “oldbar” addon now which brings back the firefox-2 like address bar.

You can get it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227

Note that it is still the ff-3 algorithm but the display is modified. YMMV, but I like it.

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linux

Free mercurial hosting – bitbucket vs freehg

September 11, 2008 – 8:12 pm

Update: (04/14/11) I see that freehg now links to an adult site. Hence, I have removed all the links.

Just a small post to document the options with regards to “free” mercurial repo hosting. Many options are located on mercurial’s homepage here. I choose to compare offerings from bitbucket and freehg. I was rooting for freehg in my comparisons because they sound more “free”

Anyway, the numbers don’t lie.

%% time hg push http://freehg.org/u/jolexa/personal/
pushing to http://freehg.org/u/jolexa/personal/
searching for changes
no changes found

real 0m4.221s
user 0m0.103s
sys 0m0.011s

vs

%% time hg push http://bitbucket.org/jolexa/personal/
pushing to http://bitbucket.org/jolexa/personal/
searching for changes
no changes found

real 0m0.665s
user 0m0.109s
sys 0m0.011s

and..

%% time hg pull http://freehg.org/u/jolexa/personal/
pulling from http://freehg.org/u/jolexa/personal/
searching for changes
no changes found

real 0m2.099s
user 0m0.105s
sys 0m0.011s

vs

%% time hg pull http://bitbucket.org/jolexa/personal/
pulling from http://bitbucket.org/jolexa/personal/
searching for changes
no changes found

real 0m0.479s
user 0m0.107s
sys 0m0.009s

So, even though bitbucket has limitations on their free account, I don’t anticipate ever having more than 150 MB of data and more than one repo. 4 seconds is a long time to wait for a change in state. I guess that I will use bitbucket after all. Works for me, hope this helps someone in the future.

Update: (9/17/08) As I gain more experience with mercurial, I didn’t like having to enter my username and password every time I push/pulled. So I inquired about this with a friend and the solution was to edit the repo path with <user>:<pass>@blah, the only problem was that this was a world readable file..not the end of the world but it still didn’t sit well with me. I digged into this and found another benefit of bitbucket, they allow you to upload your ssh public key! Now I don’t have my password in any files and I don’t have to enter it in every time. It is a win-win, right? Wrong…using ssh, naturally, kills any speed improvements that it has over freehg. This is another “oh well” scenario – I would rather have the ssh access.

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skydiving

Remembering Sept 11.

September 11, 2008 – 11:18 am

I know, cliche as this post may be…I remember all too well where I was on Sept 11th. US History class in 9th grade. Sitting in the desks watching CNN.

I think this is real touching and a very good job by Team Fastrax, a skydiving team of really experienced canopy pilots. Original post can be seen here on the PD blog. They are jumping at ground zero with 7 US flags of various sizes trailing thier canopies. The plan was to drop all the flags at the same time at approximately 10:30am ET, the time when Twin Tower two fell.

The team views this jump as a very special honor and a way to say thank you to the members of all the fire fighters, law enforcement, and military personnel, who have served to protect the freedom that we all enjoy.
Below is the list of jumpers and sized flags they will be jumping during this special event.

Travis Donley – 7800sqft
Stuart Schoenfeld – 3700sqft
Niklas Hemlin – 2000sqft
David Hart – 1100sqft
Dan Pangeti – 500sqft
David French – 500sqft
Robin Heider – 275sqft

Good job guys, times like this that make me proud to be associated with skydiving.

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skydiving

Learning to be a video flyer

September 8, 2008 – 9:13 am

I spent the majority of last weekend skydiving with a video camera strapped to my head. This is not the first time but it was the first time trying to film a tandem skydive. It actually went really well. I kept the pair in frame the entire time, I got the entire exit including the plane leaving, and I also was able to flip on my back and film the deployment. Some things that I need to work on include conserving altitude, staying closer to the tandem pair (there was quite abit horizontal separation at first), and being able to fall slower. I need a baggier suit, which I am working on this week.

The guy that I videoed didn’t want to pay for a video, so I utilized it as practice time. My skills are no where near paying customer quality. Afterwards, we were watching that video and I was getting tips from the local experienced skydivers and the tandem passenger was watching as well. He liked it and wanted to “support my cause” and offered to buy it. I didn’t charge him full price but he even threw in a tip above what I asked him. Very cool.

Overall, it was a good learning experience. I think I will like flying video and hopefully I can get even better at it soon.

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gentoo

Gentoo: Bugday and maintainer-needed packages

September 5, 2008 – 5:27 pm

In response to Bugday and my willingness to help, I want to help users that contribute. I won’t be around for Bugday and I am normally not available on the weekends. So, here is what I am willing to do.. On any maintainer-needed bug, if you fix the issue, feel free to CC me (darkside (at) gentoo.org) on it. You should say something like “darkside: I fixed this and tested it, please commit” and I will review it and commit it.

Do not:

  • CC me on a bug that doesn’t have a fix.
  • CC me on a bug asking for help with something
  • CC me on a bug with a fix that you personally have not tested.
  • CC me on a maintainer-wanted package. Sorry, but there is Sunrise for you.
  • Abuse my willingness to help you.
  • Expect an immediate commit. Work, school, and my significant other come first ;)

I am offering to do this because a) I like when users get involved and help make Gentoo better, b) the whole maintainership concept slightly bothers me, c) I can’t look at all 250+ maintainer-needed bugs to see if there is a fix for it by myself.

Here is a search for bugzilla that you could use to find maintainer-needed bugs (in assignee or CC). At the time of this writing there is 270. I (plus others I’m sure) have worked that queue before, the lowest I have seen it recently is 250. Consider this an open offer and we will see what happens. Thanks for helping!

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