I've been having all sorts of problems with the North Bucks Road Club website.  These manifest themselves at intermittent connection problems earlier this week, followed by complete loss of function yesterday morning.  A bit of probing revealed that the issue lay with the hosting company (it's not the company that hosts this site) - as far as I could tell, database connections were timing out.

Yesterday lunchtime, this became more severe, with no access whatsoever.  I have had a series of recent backups using Joomlapack, an excellent Joomla! extension that backs up entire websites.  After a number of false starts (consuming several hours yesterday evening), I was able to restore a functional site on a local PC, thereby reassuring myself that at least the backup was functional.

This just, in the "What were they thinking of?" department.  Poor old Microsoft.  They get splattered by the EU for forcing Internet Exploiter down the throats of Windows users, they get told by a Texan court to stop selling their biggest money-spinner, Word, and now they are embroiled in accusations of racism.

An advert featuring happy executives (one asian bloke, a black bloke and a white woman) was clumsily Photoshopped to replace the back bloke's head with that of a white bloke for the Polish marker.  The Photoshopping was pretty clumsily done, and they didn't edit the hand of the chap who lost his head. You can see the before and after pictures of this particular PR disaster at the BBC website.

So, we're in the midst of a major recession, the Government has spent huge amounts bailing out the fat cats of international banking, and Joe Public is tightening his or her belt.  The Higher Education Sector, in which I work, is certainly feeling the chill wind of cut-backs, and in my Institution's case this comes on top of the Goverment's ELQ policy.

So, one might have thought that costly and pointless exercises such as the dreadful ID card plan, and the even more despicable Interception Modernisation Programme might have been curtailed or dropped.  Not a bit of it.  Computer Weekly reports (Home Office trebles consultancy spend):

From the excellent xkcd...the Tech Support Cheat Sheet...

The Astana professional cycling team has certainly been an interesting team this year.  From the reappearance of Armstrong (for me, an unexpected force at the Tour de France), and the subsequent soap opera that ensued as Armstrong and Contador jockeyed for preeminence through the duration of the Tour, to the reassertion of Kazakh control and the departure of Bruyneel, Armstrong et al to form the new Radio Shack team, it's been pretty exciting.

Now, Cyclingnews.com reports (Vinokourov to head to the Tour of Spain with Astana) that Vinokourov is back in the Astana fold after serving his ban for blood doping, and will lead the team at the Vuelta.

This was my last open event before the Duo Normand (20th September) and, given the hopeless character of my season thus far, I was hoping for some indication of returning form.  I decided to ride over to Tempsford, a ride made slightly dodgy by the huge roadbuilding exercise going an along the A421 - but of course at about 6am, there's not too much traffic.  The ride was an excellent warm-up, and I felt pretty enthusiastic as I lined up at the start - and this despite the stiff breeze that had sprung up, and which would make the going a bit tough on the south-bound legs.

Fortunately the F1/25 starts with a short southbound leg to the Sandy roundabout, then a 12-13 mile leg north across the Black Cat roundabout to turn at the Buckden roundabout, then there's a final leg of about 8 miles that today was into the teeth of the breeze.

The Guardian reports (Office of Fair Trading to investigate targeted ads and pricing online) that the Office of Fair Trading is to investigate aspects of behavioural advert targeting. 

"We are also considering including the use of personal information in advertising and pricing," said the OFT. "In particular, we may look at behavioural advertising where information on a consumer's online activity is used to target the internet advertising they see.

Not only was this event the final evening event of the North Bucks time trial series (the remaining events are weekend morning), but it was the seventh counting round in the League. A cloudy morning gave way to brilliant blue skies and high temperatures.  Oh, and strong wind!

I rode over from work to the meeting point at Stony Stratford, dodging the usual strange driver-roundabout situations.  The good weather resulted in a good turnout of riders.  At the appointed minute, off I went, and pretty soon found the outward leg was to be blighted by the strong wind.  Still, I persevered through Beachampton (fortunately avoiding the tractors that were going to and fro along the course), and on up to the climb up to Nash.

Cyclingnews.com reports (UCI confirms USA, Great Briton's top allocations for worlds) that while France and the Netherlands will only be able to field 6-man teams in the 2009 World Championships, the UK will field a full team of 9 riders.

Team sizes are determined by the UCI using some arcane method that Cyclingnews.com don't share with the reader.  However, it's undoubtedly linked to ranking performances.  France and Netherlands gain their places via the Europe Tour, as indicated by the table below:

This story popped across my screen this morning:Microsoft patents phylogenetic comparative methods. . . say what? - Dechronization blog  (hat tip, PJ over at Groklaw).  Bizarrely, Microsoft appear to be patenting a method for Clustering Phylogenetic Variation Patterns.” The authors of the blog article are understandably a bit agitated about this (see this neat graphic).  The author of the Dechronization blog article, Liam Revell, writes:

The patent filing, by Stuart Ozer, claims invention of a variety of techniques already in wide use by systematists and evolutionary biologists – and (so far as I could tell) none of these inventions are original in quality. The whole patent filing can be read (at one’s own risk) in its entirety here

It's been a while since I mentioned Phorm on this blog.  Mostly that's because it's become less of a threat to the UK ISPs (but other murky operators lurk in the wings, judging from the nodpi.org forum), since BT confirmed they had no plans to implement Phorm.  BT's announcement was closely followed by Carphone Warehouse and a rather lukewarm statement from Virgin Media.

The market responded to the rug being pulled from under Phorm by a mammoth drop in share price, a decline which has continued since.  Interactive Investor now has the price at 130 pence, possibly its lowest event point.

Well, I know this is tempting fate, but I've got 48:03 on the uptime monitor, so perhaps the recent Karmic xserver updates I've recently installed have sorted out the X freezes (see here, here and here).  If so, I am mighty relieved, as this was a bit of a show-stopper for me.

Update: now 61h14m, but sometimes it logs me out when I resume from suspend.  Guess that's a risk one takes when one is using the alpha version of Ubuntu GNU/Linux 9.10?

When we (Richard and I) left for the race, it was a glorious sunny morning, albeit with a rising wind.  Perhaps, I thought, this would be a morning when I'd have a confidence-boosting performance.  I arrived at Tempsford in good time, got set up and rolled off to warm up prior to starting.  No problems there.  The event was on the F1B/25, which heads south to the start of the A1(M), where we turn and return, finishing just north of Tempsford.  I had chosen to ride with tubs this morning - a Hed Stinger 90 front wheel and a Corima disc rear wheel, both with Tufo tubulars.  This makes for a satisfying rumbling noise!

The starting section up to joining the A1 was quite sheltered by trees - unfortunately once out on the A1, the headwind (which was quite a side wind) was quite apparent.  I felt pretty good, though I found some sections quite a struggle.  This didn't worry me too much, as I knew that the return leg is (overall) a descent, and with a tail wind should be quicker.

A warm and sultry day, with several quite heavy showers suggested that this evening's event might be a little damp.  By the evening, however, the weather had moderated to cloud and sunny spells.  Even the wind strength was rather modest.

After the weekend's '25' over on the F1, when I suffered on my hard carbon saddle (probably as a consequence of an altered riding position in turn due to new handlebars), I had replaced the saddle with a (still quite minimal) SLR saddle.  At least the replacement has a modicum of padding!

Since my last posting (Weird X freeze on Ubuntu 9.04, part umpteen), the problem with X freezing still seems to be present, despite the bug report saying it was fixed in development versions of Ubuntu 9.10.  I upgraded to 9.10 on Friday, and have had a couple of freezes since then.  Just now, I have just over 40h on the uptime meter.  I think this is because I'm logging out before suspending the computer.  Anyway, logging in is better than having freezes which require a reboot!

I guess a week at residential school with its heady mix of cafeteria diet, excessive drinking and late nights isn't really the recommended preparation for a time trial, and so it proved.  I'd also not trained for a fortnight.

The event was held on the F1/25, on a very calm but slightly oppressive morning - indeed as I left Tempsford after I'd finished it began to rain, and this would presumably affect the later starters.  One other factor was that I was riding my newly installed USE Tula handebars.  I was a little concerned about the location of the brake levers, and whether I'd be able to reach them quickly enough in an emergency.  Well, I found them pretty good, and the slightly altered position seemed very comfortable.  For the first five miles or so anyway.  Throughout the race I was keeping my HR up at well above 180bpm - I presume I am well-rested!

Over the last week (while I've been working away, and needing the use of my Ubuntu notebook) I've continued to have issues regarding the weird X freezes I've been having sporadically for the last few weeks (X freeze on Notebook - solved?).  Unfortunately, all the fiddling around with the system were to no avail, and the problem continued.

Seeing the claim that the bug was resolved in the upcoming Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" release, I decided to update the system to the current alpha version of Karmic.  I did this with some trepidation, as I would usually wait until the official release before updating Ubuntu.  Interestingly, I've yet to find any irritating alpha bugs (but it's early days) - it's also a bit early to say whether the X freeze bug has really been resolved.  If not, I'll do a fresh reinstall.  As I type this, I've had a cumulative uptime of 10h42m...so let's hope this is sorted, as it's a bit of a showstopper bug.

Despite being a bit of a fan of Watchmen, I never made it to the cinema to see the film. I finally watched it after the DVD I'd pre-ordered arrived this week. So, what's my take on Zack Snyder's opus? I guess my first comment would be that it's got a kind of fanboy feel - with the exceptions of the omission of at least one scene (the death of Nite Owl I, though I understand it's restored in the new Director's Cut) and the changes to Veidt's gran plot to end the threat of nuclear war, both of which I can understand in the context of a feature film, there's obviously been a definite attempt to stay as close to the book in visuals and script. This extends even to such minutiae as Rorschach's broken trenchcoat epaulette. As an exercise in filming a comic book, I guess it succeeded, but there's the difficulty that a filmed comic book often struggles to convince, and can often come across as rather risible.

Presumably that's why films like the original (Christopher Reeves) Superman series and the Flash Gordon film were in part or whole played for laughs. It's interesting to note the variety of styles applied to the various Batman films over the years, from the really camp 60s versions to the dark and characteristic Tim Burton vision, which gradually slipped in the succeeding films into more jokey style.

This bug report at the Ubuntu Launchpad ([i965] X freezes starting on April 3rd) seems to describe the problem I've been having over the last few weeks with my notebook running Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04.  In essence, at some point, usually 2-24 hours after the last boot, the system will freeze up - the display is immobile (though the mouse pointer moves) and there appears to be no input from keyboard or trackpad buttons.  Other than that, the system is running happily, as far as I can tell from logging in remotely.

In a previous blog post (Firefox, Opera and Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty), I'd thought that the problem lay with Firefos, but that turned out not to be the case.  From the bug report, it would seem to be related to the Intel graphics card the current theory being:

I entered this race with some trepidation - it would be my first outing on the F1 since the Icknield RC '25' back in May, during which there was a fatal accident.  I hadn't originally planned on riding out to Tempsford, but after doing so on the road bike last weekend to help with the finish timekeeping, I thought I'd give it a bash for this event.

After a false start occasioned by forgetting my pump, off I went at around 5.30am, and across the M1 at junction 13.  Once over Brogborough Hill, the view was one of roadworks - there's a major effort to dual the A421 from J13 to the Bedford bypass.  This meant the ride over had me a bit anxious, particularly in the coned-off sections.  In fact I didn't have much trouble.  I left the A421 at the Moggerhanger exit, and rode through Willington and Blunham on the way to Tempsford, where the race HQ was (I was 10th man off, with number 50 at 6.50am).  After signing on, I nipped over to the start and rode gently around, and had a few sips of energy drink. I was certainly well warmed up!