Nyack ATTACK

After posting an overnight low of -1F on Tuesday, Saturday topped out at 63F. Peter and I had been planning a ride out to Nyack, New York for a few weeks now but because of tight deadlines at work I had blown him off. But with my code delivered, and an unseasonably warm Saturday approaching we decided that this was the weekend. We met on the west side bike path around 72nd st where I realized that although I had printed out the cue sheet from the New York Cycle Club, I left it at work…

Having left with no cue sheet, I anticipated a few wrong turns but I didn’t expect to get lost less than 2 miles from where we left. Somehow we took a wrong turn on the west side bike path and ended up on the wrong side of the Henry Hudson Parkway. After a couple failed attempts to find a way back to it (and one security guard yelling at us), we just decided to brave the quasi highway conditions on Riverside Drive. Eventually we got ourselves mixed in with a few kitted out roadies who we followed all the way through Harlem to the George Washington Bridge.

Once into New Jersey we mistakenly made our way to a park just on the other side of the Hudson where I saw what I would never expect to see less than 2 miles from Manhattan… deer. We corrected our course and made our way up (and down) Henry Hudson Dr which surprised us as an arboreal oasis wedged between New York and New Jersey. As we continued on we encountered only a few hikers, and fewer cars so on the descents I was able to tuck and take my bike to full spin. And then we found out why there were no cars…

A rock slide is surprisingly difficult to navigate in fiberglass soled shoes with cleats, and even more difficult when you have to carry your bike across it. Once across it, we had the road to ourselves until we left Henry Hudson and began the ascent of Alpine Approach Rd. I don’t know what kind of imagery a name like “Alpine Approach Rd.” invokes in the reader but for me it was an endless out of the saddle battle with a 23% gradient. Once at the top we regrouped for the relaxed approach into Nyack along 9W, and Piermont/River Rd. River Rd. offered us some beautiful views of the Hudson while we pedaled between impressive mansions and the docks where the owners tied up their yachts. Nyack turned out to be a quaint Main St. town with all of the retail activity of the town focused on a quarter mile, comfortably walkable street. We took a pit stop at Olive’s Bar (I highly recommend their black bean and avocado burger), I then made Peter wait while I pounded back a triple latte and we were on our way back to Manhattan.

The ride back was less scenic, but had a smaller sigma with respect to elevation and after three and a half hours of riding some boring flats were welcome (with the exception of Churchill Rd.). Even after a grand total of seven hours of riding, I was somehow able to meet Kate and her friends for a few drinks in the west village before collapsing. With more comfortable weather imminent, I plan a repeat Nyack attack as well as rides out to perhaps Philly, and Montauk…

Yer basic Nyack Ride
Flickr, why not?
The Route

Fun with Generators

Pointless post, just an example of a python generator (and list comprehension)

#! /bin/env python
from operator import add

originalPrincipal = 5300
ccAPR = 0.099

def ccBalance(principal, apr):
    while(principal > 1.0):
        minimum_payment = principal * 0.02
        interest = ((principal * apr) / 12)
        principal -= (minimum_payment - interest)
        yield (principal, minimum_payment, interest)

leCardDeRipoff = ccBalance(originalPrincipal, ccAPR)

payments = [(x,y,z) for x,y,z in leCardDeRipoff]

print "paying the minimum balance on a credit card with"
print "a current balance of $"+ str(originalPrincipal) +" and"
print "an APR of " + str(100 * ccAPR) + "% will",
print "take " + str(len(payments) / 12.0) + " years"
print "and result in paying $",
print str(reduce(add, [z for x,y,z in payments])) + " in interest"

This is by no means a fast solution, take it with a grain of salt…. and wordpress flattens everything in code tags…

Its that time of year again.

Its that time of year again where I have to decide whether or not I should renew my subscription for ericrose.net, a decision made slightly easier by the generous hosting fee that I get by hosting through QuickPacket.com (CamelCase, one word). Ericrose.net was initially created as a travelogue for my adventures in Germany, and it served that purpose quite well. I have since returned to the US and ericrose.net has, by virtue of that fact, lost a bit of it’s raison d’être. That is not to say that once I set foot back on American soil I returned to my life as it was, because I certainly haven’t, but rather that my time in Germany was dedicated to experiencing The New which was something that I didn’t feel like I was doing at Clemson. My life since Germany has been spent in Boston, a city that upon setting foot in for the first time I had to find a place to live, and New York, to where I moved before I had any promise of employment, so even after returning from Europe I have still maintained my affinity for seeking things fresh and exciting. Even though I continue living my life with the same wide eyed curiosity and adventuring geist that served me so well in the past I have, for some reason, declined to engage in the introspection required to synthesize my experiences, thoughts, feelings, and accomplishments into blog posts. That is not to say that such introspection does not occur, it means simply that the result of my introspection is not a blog post. There are many reasons for this: I like to annotate my posts with relevant links and this tends to take a lot of time, I am reluctant to blog about things that do not have pictures associated with them and I often forget to bring my camera with me, I am employed/was pursuing a graduate degree in computer science which necessarily reduced the discretionary free time that I could dedicate to maintaining a website versus my other hobbies (running, cycling, reading, etc.), I maintain other web presences that represent information that I would otherwise sculpt into a blog posting (flickr, facebook, google reader, and too a lesser extent: myspace, yelp, and about a dozen more).

In 2009 I hope to both do and think things worth writing about and write about them because as websites like twitter gain popularity, I, like David Brooks, retain an appreciation for long form thought.

Minuteman ramblings

This weekend I thought I would finally explore the Minuteman bikeway. It was nice to not have cars whizzing by but there were still a dozen traffic crossings. Overall it was a pleasant ride but on a Sunday afternoon it was a bit clogged with family rollerbladers and weekend warriors.

I’ve been car free for the past 3 years and in that time I’ve learned a few things that weren’t immediately obvious when I started using the bike as my primary means of conveyance.

• Lightweight windbreakers work wonders keeping you warm – one good gust of cold wind can cut right through several layers of cotton and chill you right to the core.
• Sunglasses protect your eyes from more than just sun – there seems to be constant construction around my apartment throwing up all kinds of dust and other particulates, sunglasses keep it out of my eyes. Cold and windy days can also cause my eyes to tear up making it difficult to see. Sunglasses can help prevent this.
• Toe clips help increase power transfer but limit the shoes that you can wear while biking – When I added toe clips to my plain flat pedals I noticed a reduction in the effort required to maintain a particular speed. I do find it difficult, however, to easily slip in and out of the clips when I’m wearing my running shoes because they are wider from the toe box to the arch and can sometimes get stuck. My sambas and vans do slide in and out quite easily.
• Helmet hair looks ridiculous – Your standard expanded polystyrene bicycle helmet has several vents to help keep your head cool, vents that can also create areas of low pressure coaxing your hair up into them and upon removal of the helmet your hair will be flattened where it was in contact with the helmet and have a windblown, straight up in the air look everywhere else. A look that not even the sex pistols could pull off. My solution is to wear a cycling cap underneath my helmet and depending on the helmet a regular baseball cap will work as well.

As I think of more I’ll post them, below is the route I took on the Minuteman bikeway.

Noteworthy

Don’t search for “python dict sort by value” since you’ll get outdated answers. As of python 2.4, the “right” way to do this is:

from operator import itemgetter
sorted(d.iteritems(), key=itemgetter(1))

from http://blog.modp.com/2008/09/sorting-python-dictionary-by-value-take.html

Installing octave on Leopard

Installing octave on Leopard is difficult because emacs is broken – wait what? If you’re using darwinports to try and install octave which requires gnuplot which uses emacs in the build process, you’re going to have a hard time. The error that I eventually got to after hours and hours of downloading an compiling was:

$ sudo port install octave
...
(seriously it took forever)
...
Making all in lisp
emacs -batch -q -no-site-file -l ./dot.el -f batch-byte-compile gnuplot.el
Fatal malloc_jumpstart() error
make[2]: *** [gnuplot.elc] Error 1
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make: *** [all] Error 2


This is because one of the dependencies of octave was failing – gnuplot. Trying to install gnuplot by compiling from source confirmed this. I found a few postings to message boards and mailing lists but nothing useful until someone mentioned that this error indicated an error with emacs. Sure enough trying to invoke emacs from the command line produced:

$ emacs
Fatal malloc_jumpstart() error

Further digging produced a rather lengthy exchange on the Apple support forums, but more importantly a solution! Before trying the solution below, I also tried compiling emacs from source but to no avail so to get a functioning emacs on Leopard simply type:

$ sudo mv /usr/bin/emacs-i386 /usr/bin/emacs-i386.backup
$ sudo /usr/libexec/dumpemacs -d
$ emacs --version
$ emacs

And, viola! Now if you run $sudo port install octave again darwinports will pick up where it left off and eventually you’ll come to the NEXT error: octave won’t compile. >.< The reason it gave me was due to the lack of a suitable fortran compiler. Never fear, ATT labs has a binary for OS X.

Now I just need to get readline working…

EDIT: Well after much MORE wrangling I was still unable to get octave to install using darwinports… or compile the source from the website, so I resorted to fink. I tried my best to avoid it, but now I have two command line software management packages on my laptop… to go with gem… and easy_install… In order to install octave using fink you need to enable the ‘unstable’ repositories and then it’s just a matter of $sudo fink install octave

T-T-T-Triple Boot

I recently got my MacBook Pro to triple boot Leopard, Vista, and Fedora 8 x86_64 (since yes – the Intel Core 2 Duo is a 64-bit processor.)

The most comprehensive How-To that I came across was from onmac.net which worked for me except for a couple caveats. First you want to make sure that whatever version of linux you choose that you get the 64-bit version. Second, when creating your disk partitions using diskutil the how-to suggested:

sudo diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 60G "Linux" "Linux" 17G "MS-DOS FAT32" "Windows" 15G

The diskutil that ships with Leopard doesn’t know what format “Linux” is (and neither do I, maybe that means ext3?) but since you will be formatting that partition and further partitioning it when you get to the install step for linux you simply need to set it to something, it doesn’t matter what. So instead try:

sudo diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 60G "MS-DOS FAT32" "Linux" 17G "MS-DOS FAT32" "Windows" 15G

Third, I used rEFIt as my main boot loader and I didn’t want to wait forever to boot into linux I set the timeout in my grub.conf to 0

Final note: Compiz-Fusion was fairly easy to get running this guy has a pretty good tutorial on how to do it.

The Departed Alleycat

The Departed Alleycat race was awesome. The shortest route to all the checkponts was this.

Pictures:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/javiergarcia-albea/sets/72157601087723228/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dxcasner/sets/72157601089801574/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/36781701@N00/sets/72157601199669432/

We are traffic

I recently participated in my first Critical Mass here in Boston, and while it was not as eventful as the Critical Mass in New York or San Fransisco, it was not without it’s moments.

Critical Mass has a name and a meeting time, and that’s about it. The meeting time is usually the last Friday of the month and the name refers to the amount of fissile material needed for a sustained nuclear chain reaction. The basic idea is that all the bike riders of a particular city congregate at a certain point and, together as a single mass, bike around the city with no predetermined route simply going where the group wants to go. The ride has no set length and riders simply flake off when they get tired of biking or, in my case, when the mass goes by their apartment. Critical Mass is not an official organization or protest, and there are no leaders or goal to the monthly ride and it is simply what the participants make of it. Critical Mass has the effect of increasing motorist awareness of cyclists, as it is pretty hard not to notice a swarm of 200 or so cyclists on the roads, as well as pissing off a few already irate motorists (the Critical Mass in Boston takes place at 5:30, rush hour, on Friday). For the most part participants abide by the traffic laws, with the exception of corking. Corking the drivers is an attempt to maintain formation and prevents cars from trying to squeeze their way into the group, and causes a few drivers to honk and shout. Some to try to use their cars as weapons, threatening the corks, even though for the entire procession to pass it takes around 2 minutes.

The cycling snobs quite frequently looks down their noses at the CMers referring to participants with pejoratives such as anarchist and hippie. While it is true that Critical Mass has no leader and lacks any organizational structure (and therefore accountability), Critical Mass is apolitical and fiercely so. Case in point: Organizers for an group called a28.org wanted to co-opt the April ride to make a political statement, however on the email list participants were quick to cry foul. It was a bit surreal to bike around Boston with such a large group of cyclists and quite a bit of fun. Below are pictures from the ride.

• http://picasaweb.google.com/gobikey/BostonCriticalMassMarch07
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_Mass
• http://critical-mass.info/

2006

“True glory consists of doing what deserves to be written, and writing what deserves to be read”. –Pliny the Elder

My life is anything but glorious, but I’ll write about it anyway.

2006 for me began in Berlin, Germany and ended in New York City, New York, USA.  All in all I think it was a pretty good year.  I feel like I accomplished quite a bit, I learned how to ski (in the Alps no less). I finished work on my bachelor of science in Computer Science, completed my Bierdiplom and have begun working on my master of science in computer science.  I went to a German soccer game (no one does it quite like the europeans) as well as seeing a few of the World Cup games in their host cities (including the final in Berlin) and even caught the prologue to the Tour de France.  I saw some some great bands live: Death Cab for Cutie, Thrice, Metric, and was minutes away from seeing Amon Tobin.  I saw Paris, Rome, Berlin, Dublin, Belfast, New York, Munich, and Boston.  I became a better biker and runner, completing my first marathon.

My move to Boston was probably one of the most hectic periods of my life.  I flew to Logan international with three suitcases containing everything I could possibly cram into them (including an inflatable mattress) with the hopes of finding a permanent residence in Beantown.  I schlepped my luggage on two different subway lines and on one bus.  After missing my stop, I rode the route around again and finally got off and found my hostel in Everett, MA.  I had a four bed dorm which, over the course of a week, I shared with an Uzbekistanian, a Korean, a Japanese person, a Turk, an American returning from a year in Ireland, a Brit, and a couple other people who stumbled into the room at 3am and left the next morning without saying a word.  My days were spent going from appointment to appointment with various realtors where, although I didn’t find any apartment that suited my budget, I learned that I never want to rent an apartment through a realtor.  In the evenings I would scour craigslist for postings in and around Boston, and set up appointments with as many people as possible (a few of whom turned out to be really shady).  I eventually settled on my current residence in Allson, MA and have been content with my decision since.

My first semester of classes at Northeastern proceeded without incident.  I took courses in Networking and Computer Systems, and I’m now ready to face my second semester as a graduate student.

I rang in the new year at a party in Brooklyn with an old roommate and good friend, Peter, and his girlfriend Anna.  The party was in Loft apartments just across the Manhattan bridge giving us a clear view of the island and at midnight everyone at the party clustered around the windows to catch a glimpse of the city lit up from fireworks.