A bright but very cold morning greeted the five intrepid (or possibly foolhardy) riders who turned out for the 2010 edition of the North Bucks Road Club's annual New Year 10 mile time trial.  As last year, the event was run on the F5d/10.  I suspect it was actually colder this year than it was last year, but bathed in sunshine instead of the clammy atmosphere of last year, it almost seemed balmy. 

This was the first competitive outing for my new time trial bike, so I was bound to be a bit cautious as I made my way over to the club room.  I'll probably write some more detailed notes on the bike later, but two points for now - the steering seemed alarmingly twitchy as slow speed, but once down on the tribars and at racing speed, everything seemed very good; this was my first proper ride on Speedplay pedals, and I'm most impressed.  I had decided to try out the GPS receiver for the Polar bike computer, but I couldn't get it to work, so rode the event solely on heart rate.

The Conservatives, fired by the controversial arrest of their immigration spokeman within the House of Commons earlier this year appear to be somewhat exercised by the issue DNA sample retention by the police (Police policy on deletion of DNA records is shambles, say Conservatives | Politics | The Guardian).  The dear old UK Government appears to be fighting a rearguard action to evade the judgment from Europe that the retention of DNA samples and associated data on individuals who end up either not being charged or not being found guilty infringes human rights.

Freedom of information requests to police forces in England and Wales by the shadow immigration spokesman, Damian Green, reveal a huge disparity in the way records are treated. "The force most likely to remove your DNA profile is South Yorkshire, with 83% of requests granted," said Green. "However, of the total requests to 26
different forces, less than half were granted. Some forces, including Cambridgeshire, Gloucestershire and Nottingham, refused to remove any profiles."

What's even more astonishing is the Government's belief that an individual arrested but not found guilty of a minor offence is in some way more innocent than an individual arrested but not found guilty of a serious offence.  As the Guardian reports:

One would have to be a spectacularly unaware competitive cyclist to remain ignorant of the spread of power meters in the ranks of bike racers.  In the past I've not moved in this direction, for a number of reasons, some practical (e.g. typical power meters would be a faff to move from bike to bike, unlike the typical HRM), some more theoretical ( e.g. isn't it best to assess the physiological demands of a training session).

At the end of the 2009 season I bought a Polar CS600X bike computer with power metering capability.  I've written the first part of a review on the usage of power meter data (framed by a book review) over at the Team Grumpy website.

So, the latest investigatin of an organised doping ring (Virú Investigation Turns Up Kelme Documents - Cyclingnews.com) appears to be turning up evidence that accusations of systematic doping were suppressed.

Wind back the clock a few years to 2004, and we find Kelme rider Jesús Manzano (who I recall collapsed from side effects of doping practices) made accusations of systematic doping in the Kelme team.  I don't however remember any significant action being taken.  Cyclingnews reports that

According to Tuesday’s edition of Spanish sports daily AS, among the papers found during a search of a Valencia clinic run by ex-Kelme doctor Walter Virú were records of doping plans and treatments. AS indicates that some of the plans could have been drawn up for riders who are still competing.
AS claims that these plans are exactly the same as those that former Kelme rider Jesús Manzano showed to the Spanish cycling federation and police investigators back in 2004 when Manzano alleged systematic doping had taken place within that team.

Even better is the secretive system of using code words to denote different doping substances.  My goodness these doping clinics do seem to fancy themselves as being in some kind of James Bond business.  I just worry that someone, somewhere will give them a licence to kill.

Each year, I try to have a project for the christmas break - it's usually a bit more interesting than sitting around in an overfed state watching poor quality TV.  A few years ago I decided to do internet genealogy, which became something of an obsession for a few months (and which I occasionally revisit) and indirectly resulted in this website's first incarnation.  This year, I decided to re-evaluate our domestic computer provision.

While I have almost completely moved to using GNU/Linux on my computers (for the last few years I've been using Ubuntu), Mrs Grumpy remains a Windows user (principally XP), so whatever changes I make need to take that into account.  At the moment, we have a number of portable devices which hook up wirelessly to our router, and two Ubuntu desktop PCs and a printer which connect via ethernet cables.  One of those desktop PCs is rarely booted, while the other is used to make backups from laptops and stream music to a Squeezebox 3 (now renamed Squeezebox Classic and no longer marketed).  Backups are handled using BackupPC, which is fairly fiddly to set up, but which is really rather robust and easy to manage via a web interface.

The BBC reports the latest planned device from OLPC BBC News - OLPC unveils slimline tablet PC. Turns out that the last proposal, for a sort of hinged design (XO-2) has been scrapped in favour of a tablet design (XO-3).  They are aiming for launch in 2012.  But in two years' time, what will the tech landscape be like?

And, despite my admiration for the aims of OLPC, might this not just turn into vapourware?  I do note that the BBC report says

OLPC recently said that the organisation would just focus on promoting its concepts and educational aims, rather than manufacturing laptops.

The Register reports that Mobile networks line up to bash net snooping plan. El Reg has used FoI requests to obtain information related to the public consultation on the UK Government's euphemistically named "Internet Modernisation Programme", under which all ISPs were expected to eavesdrop and record information about their clients' communications.  Criticism has been severe enough to stall development of this vile and intrusive plan until after the next election.  The Register reports that

The mobile operators variously attack IMP's technical feasibility, its legality, its impact on customer privacy and its opaque £2bn cost estimate. They also question the consultation's assertion that the ability to access records of all communications is essential for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to do their jobs.

In an interesting approach to judgement, it appears that CONI, the Italian Olympic committee, has proposed that Danilo Di Luca's doping ban should be 3 years rather than 2 because he's aggravated the situation by not admitting his guilt (Di Luca Facing Three-year Ban For Doping | Cyclingnews.com).  Meanwhile Di Luca reportedly claims the whole situation is a result of a conspiracy and that his lawyers will prove the two samples taken during this year's Giro d'Italia are false positives.

Well, what's new.  But the EPO tests are, I believe set up quite conservatively, and tend to yield false negatives rather than false positives.  In an added attempt to punish the errant doper, CONI are imposing financial penalties:

The agency also intends to hold Di Luca to the International Cycling
Union (UCI) rule which fines riders one year's salary for a positive
doping control, as well as the costs of the results management and
B-sample analysis allowed under UCI anti-doping article 275.

Well, I'm no friend of dope cheats (but I do find their defensive bleating quite amusing), but this does seem to pile penalty upon penalty.  On the subject of conspiracy, Di Luca's lawyer said:

I ditched BT as an ISP over a year ago, in protest over their plans to implement the vile Phorm DPI system.  This proved easy to do (apart from the 4 hour New Delhi runaround trying to get them to stop charging my credit card), and resulted in a threefold increase in my download speed through the new ISP.

However, our landline has remained with BT.  But I'm getting fed up with what amounts to an added 10% surcharge for not going with Direct Debit (it's a fixed fee of £4.50).  The search is now on for a land line service that isn't run by such an avaricious bunch of money grabbing crooks.  Or I just cave in and pay by Direct Debit.

I've been thinking about doing a fresh installation of Ubuntu Gnu/Linux on my now venerable Sony notebook for some time.  I had a number of reasons for this - firstly I wanted to eliminate the two partitions associated with Vista (spit, spit), which really wasn't able to run effectively on the limited resources the notebook had to offer.  Secondly, over the last couple of years of 6-monthy updates, I've installed a variety of now unnecessary software (including much installed outside of the excellent packaging system) - much of this seemed to lead to fairly lengthy boot-up time, and I wanted to see how Karmic performs in this regard.  Finally, I was interested to see how the Ubuntu installer works nowadays.

One of the stumbling blocks to wider acceptance of Linux (as far as I can see) is the installation of an OS - most PC users never do this: they buy a computer with a stock install of some version of Windows. I recently received the January 2010 issue of Linux Format (it's always struck me as quite bizarre that the cover dates of computer magazines )are set so far in the future!) with a DVD containing Mandriva, OpenSuse 11.2 and an LXF remaster of Ubuntu 9.10.

The installation process (if defaults are selected) seems to be about 8 steps, including easy setting up of language, time zone etc.  The partitioning step is something that I always get nervous about (I am often reinstalling and I worry about losing data.  There are a few options: to install alongside the existing OS, using the whole disk, or the advanced partioner.  I chose the advances option and removed the Vista and Vista backup ntfs partitions, the existing Ubuntu root partition, and set up the partition table afresh, maintaining the partition mounting as /home.  It's never seemed sensible to me that the default install doesn't set up a separate /home partition.  The partitioner is really very straightforward, if you have a bit of experience, and for the beginner, the default partition is easy to select.

Installation, from accepting the partition arrangement to a bootable system was very quick - unfortunately I didn't time it, but it did seem rather quicker than I'd found in the past, well under an hour to reach a functional state.  Once into the system, I installed a shed-load of software I routinely use, mostly through Synaptic, and did a system update.  It was really easy to restore all my desktop settings to the way I like them.

• There are the usual irritations related to US patent law affecting sound and video codecs, but the Ubuntu forums and wikis steer one very clearly through stages required to enable (for example) DVD playing.  This page - Restricted Formats - in particular was very helpful.
• The installation of Crossover Office (now named Crossover Linux - a user friendly implementation of Wine) went west, but I wasn't too depressed about that as I'm not overwhelmingly convinced I need Windows software at the moment.  In any event, I checked my account over at Codeweavers and was able to download a deb installer.
• The GRAMPS genealogy database installed straight off from the deb file (the repos always lag), and there were no problems with the existing dataset.
• Firefox was a bit of a pest until I persuaded it to look at the correct config folder in my home directory
• I installed the Bibus bibliography app from the Karmic repositories - I still have to configure it, though I'll probably install the latest deb from the Bibus site first.
• Various bits and bobs from Google:  Chrome browser; Picasa;

Still remaining: I need to set up ssh connections to the backup computer (notebooks are backed up daily using backuppc).    I dare say there will be one or two issues...