MotoGP at Laguna Seca was a blast once again this year; I have some early photos up at Flickr. Wonder if I’ll get a chance to edit them and expand the set. Who knows? Enjoy.
2009 USGP – MotoGP at Laguna Seca Photos
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Who Writes This Stuff?
Sometimes you just have to wonder what the web developers were smoking. A large trading company recently told me the following after I failed to remember my password in three attempts:
Beacuse I might not be using a web browser to do anything else.
So there goes any hope that I’ll get that task done. They are forcing me to ignore them until I can restart my browser. Who really things this is OK? Why to consumers settle for this kind of quality? We should all know better than this.
PoTW: The Ocean with the Girls
More to come, but we had fun today walking down to the beach and hanging out. Flickr set. We walked down, Virginia in the stroller and Magdelen in the carrier so we could get there in time to play before nap time.
Cisco VPN Software Replacement under OS X
Just as I had finished complaining about Cisco’s VPN drivers causing crashes, I stumbled across a macosxhints.com hint about vpnc.
Looks like this is well worth the effort to install and try it out. This will let me get that Cisco code out of my kernel and perhaps make the lock-ups go away.
Further instructions are available at the original poster’s site.
I’ll update this post with my experiences.
Theme Problems
Something isn’t working properly with my normal theme, so I have installed the WordPress ugly default until I can debug the combination of Themes and plugins I was using previously.
VM and VPN woes
I’ve been using a Mac since 2003, and I love it. It is far and away my favorite machine of all time, I’ve had several and I will continue to buy and use them. For software development and general messing around, having a BSD-like OS under a pretty hood has been VERY excellent.
One things that really frustrates me though are the large number of software vendors that truly do not ‘get’ the Mac world and insist on shipping installers (instead of just dragging / copying to install) and one level worse : installers that ask for a reboot or shutdown other applications. This just isn’t in keeping with the spirit of things on the Apple platform. Wait, there is a level even worse than all this: Kernel extensions.
My Mac crashes about once a week. It never used to crash, ever. Of all the programs I run, the two right at the very top of the “crash my Mac” list are two that I really cannot do without: Cisco’s VPN Software and VMware Fusion.
Sadly these two applications are very useful, however, they are the worst offenders when it comes to doing things against the grain. The Cisco software creates a proprietary VPN connection (based loosely on IPsec, but not really) and eschews the fact that the Mac has perfectly good IETF-IPsec built right in. Secondly, the driver code is terrible. 9/10ths of my crashes have a stack trace in the kernel that points directly at the Cisco VPN drivers. It isn’t very useful if I have to take my VPN down all the time to avoid crashing my machine.
And VMware fusion, well, they just simply don’t play well with others either. Check out this known issue from their latest release:
Do not install VMware Fusion 2 and CheckPoint SecureClient on the same Mac
When both VMware Fusion 2 and SecureClient VPN applications are installed on one Mac, the Mac OS X stops responding while booting or shutting down.
If you encounter this issue, use the following workaround to boot your Mac in Safe Mode and remove one of the applications:
- Make sure the Mac is powered off.
- Press the power button.
- Press and hold the Shift key immediately after you hear the startup tone (but not before).
- Release the Shift key when you see the gray Apple and a progress indicator.
- Uninstall SecureClient or VMware Fusion.
- Reboot the Mac.
Sorry, you just cannot use us if you use SecureClient. Nice.
Sigh. I think I’ll take my VPN down and reboot prior to launching VMware. Yeah. That’s fun.
Spotted in the Wild: XOF1 Solar Car
As we were driving North on CA-1 on our way back from the elephant seal rookery, KC and I saw an odd vehicle off in the distance. At first it looked like a wide-load with some sort of farm equipment in the front. As the ‘farm equipment’ got closer (it was closing fast) it started to look like a squat vehicle. At first I figured it was a Shell Solar Challenge vehicle, but once we got home we noticed that the news had a story.
It is a fellow Canadian who has made this vechicle (and driving it around North America) quite a project.
More here.
Photo by Jack Snell — I didn’t get a chance to take one as it zoomed by on a twisty section of CA-1.
PS: Damn – it was cool looking and booking along, fast.
PoTW : Elephant Seals
KC and I took a trip down near San Simeon to see the elephant seals. Managed to get a few shots and put a set up on Flickr.
These animals were really amazing. More information at Friends of the Elephant Seal .
WordPress Upgrade
Wow. With much gnashing of teeth, I’ve upgraded to 2.7.1. I have not managed to upgrade my themes, but one step at a time. I had my shared hosting vendor upgrade the platform a while back and oddly enough this disabled my administrative access and I’ve been largely unable to write new content for almost 3 months. It looks like that problem is fixed and I can post a few entries again.
Update: Apparently I still have some problems, I’m working on it.
PoTW: Local flying.
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I finally managed to get out flying in the Santa Cruz area. It wasn’t how I expected — I didn’t go as pilot-in-command, but instead was invited to fly in the right seat with another local pilot. He owns a few local coffee shops, frankly one of the area’s best where I can frequently be found tasting his many fine espresso offerings.
We took a quick(ish) flight from Watsonville CA north along the coast, past Alcatraz, over the Golden Gate Bridge, then over the Bay Bridge, into SFO’s class B with radar flight following, over the west end of SFO’s runways and followed US-101 more-or-less until west of SJC. A slight right turn with a pop over Loma Prieta took us back into the Watsonville area where we joined the down wind leg of the pattern and landed just as the sun was setting. I was able to fly all but a few minutes around take-off and landing and it was really, really nice to be at the controls again.
Given that I used to fly in class-D and class-C airspace almost exclusively, it was interesting to see what it is like to fly from an non-towered field and then run into class-B airspace fairly quickly. Radio work is key if you want to fit in and leverage the system. The local pilot tells me that most folks based in Watsonville really like the fact that the airspace isn’t under positive control.
That’s all fine and well, I even understand, but it is no excuse for poor airmanship. While we were joining downwind to land, we were very confused to see someone cross in front, and slightly above us, only 100′ above pattern altitude. They did a 360 in the pattern and then ended up about 50′ above and 100′ left of us headed in the same direction. I got the sense that they didn’t see us and really didn’t appreciate that the Bonanza was trucking along at 120 KIAS vs their 80 or so. It made for very tight quarters and we managed to get a hold of them on the CTAF and sequence ourselves ahead of them, but it was a close call that didn’t need to be. They really should NOT have joined the pattern the way they did. Good thing we were both always watching for traffic and saw this coming.
More photos in my flickr stream.