Escape from boredom

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Red Bull Sparkstøtting Supercross

Leisure

Yesterday Petter, Sverre and I went to see the Red Bull Sparkstøtting Supercross competition held at Grefsenkollen ski center. Crazy and a huge amount of pure fun, no doubt about that.

Around 50 teams, two on each kicksledge (sparkstøtting), one had to be the passenger and the other one the driver. The last 50 meters they both had to stand up and kick, not run, towards the finishing line.

Here a picture from the first turn.

Further downhill

And uphill

Afterwards Espen joined us for two hours of cross country skiing. My first time on skis this season, pretty bad, but that’s how it is now these days.

Controlling the fan speed of my T60

Work/Geek

Had some trouble with my Lenovo T60 becoming way to hot in the past. Not sure, but I guess it might have something to do with me having installed Ubuntu (Linux) on it. Here the other day it did in fact switch itself off because it was to hot, and when it today started getting as hot as before. So, a quick search on the Internet I found the description of what to do. Created the file “/etc/modprobe.d/options” with the following line “options thinkpad_acpi fan_control=1”. Then, after a reboot I was able to control the fan speed, setting it to automatic using “echo level auto > /proc/acpi/ibm/fan”.

Thinkwiki to the rescue, the article found there

Firefox 3.5.x – Pages goes blank when loading

Work/Geek

A lot of cursing, but as always Google to the rescue, Shockwave Flash Plugin was the devil causing the problem. Just disable it and voila, back to normal. Solution found here www.computing.net/…/firefox-page-blanks-out-after-loading/..

@Update: Did just help for a while, so I enabled it and it all worked just fine. So now waiting until the next time when I have to disable it. And by the way, I do have the same problem on my laptop running Ubuntu as I have on the laptop I use at work running Windows XP.

Testing the Maven JMeter Plugin

Work/Geek

Currently testing the Maven JMeter Plugin developed by Ron Alleva. Did some testing, but quite soon got an error like the one mentioned in the comments of his post

2010/01/19 16:42:45 ERROR – jmeter.JMeter: java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.apache.jmeter.gui.tree.JMeterTreeModel.
addSubTree(JMeterTreeModel.java:91)

A bit of struggle to actually find it, since I’m new both to Maven and diving into Open Source-code, but after I had a quick look into the code of both the actual plugin and JMeter itself it came clear that the problem was ClassNotFoundException related to Apache Commons LogFactory. With great help from Kaja I just added the following code to the POM-file


<dependency>
<groupId>commons-logging</groupId>
<artifactId>commons-logging</artifactId>
<version>1.1.1</version>
</dependency>

Updated my repository and voila, test running…

From Lindesnes to Nordkapp with bicycle

Sport

Ok, the title being a bit misleading, I will not actually ride my bike from Lindesnes to Nordkapp, but to keep track of how much distance I have covered riding my bike back and forth from work I use that distance to compare with.

For now I have done ten days, about 360 kilometers, so now I’m passing by Drammen. What is there to say about Drammen? Anders and Eivind are from Drammen. Herodes Falsk, one of the members of Prima Vera is from Drammen, they also made a song about Drammen (…for jeg ble født i en jævla by, ja jeg snakker om Drammen…).

Another ambition is to write something about the things I see when cycling to work. So, the first thing worth mentioning which I pass by would be Tveitablokkene. Three big tower blocks housing no less than 819 apartments. Not the biggest cooperative in Norway, but I’m quite sure no other have so many apartments with only three buildings.

@Update: And as my best man Espen pointed out…he is born in Drammen…

Commuting is hard for the equipment

Sport

Commuting with my bike has created the first system malfunction today. One of my barends broke when I applied to much pressure on it. Might have been caused by the accident I had last week in the parking house at Lysaker.

A bit funny, when using Google to search for barends one of the hits was this

Takket være sin konsekvente tro på ny teknologi, holdbarhet og attraktiv design fortsetter Nakamura, det anerkjente canadiske MTB merket, å gjøre suksess …

(Google translate)
Did not feel that today I must admit, durability when the barends are made of rubber and plastic…but, ok, the bike is Nakamura, but the barends are made by Specialized…

Cleaning up my backpack

Leisure

Using an old backpack when using my bike to work. Opened one of the pockets and had a thorough look yesterday and found this document from the vacation me, Loy and Espen had in 2004. Remember the sleeping directly on the floor as the most extreme thing, or maybe the elephant ride was most extreme…extremely boring…