ZenLinux Blog

My century bike ride yesterday was a success. I completed the ride in about seven hours, including breaks, with my riding time just over 6.5 hours. That’s 100.3 miles at an average speed of 15.2 MPH. The weather turned out excellent, with cloudy skies in the morning keeping the temperature down in the upper 60s.

It’s really motivating to do long rides in groups. When you’re riding solo, all the aches, pains, and uncertainty are hard to ignore. I don’t think I could have done this ride alone.

Now my goal is to keep riding as much as I can this fall and winter, and maintain my fitness until spring arrives.

The title of this post also happens to be the title of my college admissions essay, which was about a mountain bike ride. This time, though, I’m talking about a road ride. Specifically, the Tri-State Seacoast Century, which I will be riding in this coming weekend, rain or shine. I’m planning to attempt the 100-mile ride, which will be my first century ride if I’m successful.

So far this year I’ve put 1200 miles on my bike and done a couple of solo 70-mile rides. I think once you can ride 50-60 miles, it’s all mental after that. You just keep turning the pedals over until you’ve reached your goal. Since there will be hundreds of other cyclists doing this ride, it should be easier to stay motivated.

I expect the ride will take me somewhere around 7 hours to complete. I’m really looking forward to it, as it’s a personal goal I set for myself late in the Spring.

I just noticed a major usability improvement regarding the use of CAPTCHA images for login verification. Namely, don’t show one until you’ve received a failed login attempt. NewEgg does this, and a colleague tells me Google has been doing it, too. It makes perfect sense – give your user the benefit of the doubt the first time around, and then enforce use of the CAPTCHA if you suspect you might be the target of a brute-force attack.

Tonight’s NHRuby.org meeting in Portsmouth should be a blast. Nick Plante and I will be coding up a web application from scratch, as decided upon by members of our email list. As we develop the app, we will explain how and why we’re doing what we’re doing. We want this to be a collaborative group discussion, not just a presentation. So head on down to RMC Research tonight at 7pm and take part in the development of this web app! For more details, see our wiki site.

There’s a reason why I haven’t been blogging much lately. And this is the reason:

After more than 12 years, I’m back into cycling. When I was in high school I was obsessed with mountain bikes, worked at a bike shop as a mechanic (also did some sales), and did some cross-country races. For various reasons I didn’t ride regularly for a long time, and now my interest has been rekindled, this time in road riding.

I can’t express how wonderful it is to return to a physical activity that I feel so passionate about. I’ve hiked and hit the gym off and on for many years, but this is something I work into my life nearly every day. I’ve had this bike for about six weeks now and have been rebuilding my fitness base as a cyclist. Today I did my longest ride so far, a 37 mile tour of some surrounding towns. My goal is to do my first century (riding 100 miles in a day) by the end of this season. I’m even commuting by bike back and forth to work on occasion.

It’s great to be back in the saddle, both literally and figuratively.

I have returned from the Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York City, and am feeling particularly excited from the energy and enthusiasm that was prevalent throughout the event. I met some very interesting people and all of them “got” the concept of CampaignLever immediately. Of course, these are people doing work in this field already, and don’t necessarily represent my target audience of grassroots activist groups on a tiny budget.

Larry Lessig gave one of the first morning talks, titled “Free Culture, Free Politics.” His presentation was nearly as engaging as his famous Free Culture one (you have to watch this if you haven’t already). Lessig is thinking forward and addressing a lot of issues which need to be taken action on now in order to preserve an open culture in the future, as opposed to a controlled and proprietary one that we are currently heading toward.

Lessig made it very clear (and I applaud him for doing so) that supporting copyright is not an either/or issue; he is not against the concept of copyright. Rather, he argues that we need a more nuanced view on copyright where limitations in certain kinds of media or contexts is upheld. The most compelling example he gave were televised political debates, which some major networks are trying to control the distribution and third-party use of. He also pointed out that nearly all of the major democrat presidential candidates have come out in support of placing the presidential political debates in the public domain or otherwise not restricting the use of them. The main exception to this was Sen. Hillary Clinton, who has been disconcertingly silent on this issue. Lessig also pointed out that “fair use” rights only guarantee one the right to hire an attorney and slog through years of litigation when a copyright holder wishes to interpret fair use in light of their own interests.

Seth Godin gave a top-notch and entertaining presentation as well. Godin discussed how the old methods of marketing and advertising (i.e, buying eyeballs for large sums of money by interrupting people) is offering diminishing returns by the day, and that this also applies to political marketing. He gave a wonderful metaphor to demonstrate what’s wrong with the current process (I’m paraphrasing below):

How NOT to Get Married:

Go into a singles bar, walk up to the first potential mate you see and propose to them. If this fails, try another person, and so on.

Godin noted that political campaigns are doing effectively the same thing thing to voters, yelling their message to everyone they can interrupt, when rather what they need to do is to take things slower and start going on “dates” with people to build a relationship where permission is given to go on future dates and finally to get married (i.e, buy the product or vote for the candidate, volunteer with the campaign, etc).

The conference also included a series of demonstrations of political and activism-related web applications by meetup.com, change.org, mcommons.com, and eventful.com, among others.

So what could have been better? At the very end of the conference there was a panel discussion by the technology leaders of several presidential campaigns. This was boring as hell – all each person on the panel did was make inside references to the their work and processes and talk primarily to each other, not the audience. Nothing insightful came out of the panel as far as I could tell, and after a half hour or so I simply left to attend the post-conference cocktail party a bit early.

There was a good amount of professional networking going on during the breaks and afterwards, but I would have liked there to be more breaks to allow more of this kind of thing. The cocktail party afterwards was overcrowded and extremely loud. In my estimation, there were upwards of 300+ people in attendance (Update: the official conference count was over 800!).

Overall, though, this conference was definitely a worthwhile event, and reasonably convenient to me, being on the East Coast. I’m certainly planning to attend the next one, and hope to have a compelling, working product to demo and share with the attendees.

Tomorrow night at the Portsmouth Public Library I’ll be giving a presentation on how to deploy a ruby on rails application.

I’ll be discussing setup of a deployment environment based on Apache 2.2, mod_proxy_balancer, Mongrel, and MySQL. Then I’ll be giving an introduction to Capistrano, a wonderful ruby tool for automating the deployment of your rails application from source code repository to production server(s). Plus, there will be free book giveaways!

For more details and directions, check out the NHRuby wiki.

I am very pleased to hear that Dell is going to be offering select desktop and laptop systems with Ubutnu Linux pre-installed. I just purchased a Dell Latitude D620 (without Linux preinstalled – it was right before the announcement), and I have to say I’ve never had a smoother laptop Linux installation before than with this laptop and Ubuntu 7.04 “Feisty Fawn.”

This move on Dell’s part will do a lot to differentiate them from other companies, and it’s definitely going to impact my recommendations when it comes to suggesting computers for friends and family. Thank you, Dell, for taking this leadership role and selecting one of the finest desktop Linux distributions available today, Ubuntu.