More uninteresting crap… Now from England!

I've hated the new tire rules (one set of tires for the whole race weekend) in F1 since their announcement last year. The excuse for this stupid rule was safety (the F1 rule makers can short circuit the rule approval process in the name of safety.) The idea being, that the new super durable tires would be slower, and thus safer.

What it did was kill any excitement in the practice or qualifying sections because teams were afraid of ruining their tires for the race day. That was bad enough, but perversely the new tire rules also greatly reduced safety in the sport.

You can change a tire if it is clearly unsafe, but who determines that it is unsafe? Obviously a flat is unsafe, but what about a flat-spotted tire? A few weeks ago Kimi Raikkonen was put in this sticky position… he had a flat spotted tire, but could not stop for a replacement because he could be disqualified if the stewards did not agreee that it was clearly unsafe. With one lap to go his front suspension failed from the tire vibrations causing a spectacular crash. In any previous year this would have been avoided with a tire change.

Now we get this weekend. All I can say is that I'm glad I didn't make a trip to Indy to see the race. During practice it was found (the hard way by Ralf Schumaker, hitting the wall again) that the Michelin tires were not up to taking the banking in turn 13. The vertical loads induced by the banking were high enough to cause tire ruptures. The cars are doing in excess of 200mph, so this is a huge safety problem. For legal reasons Michelin informed their teams that they would not sanction their use in the race. That meant the Michelin teams had no real choice but to park their cars… if there was an accident they could be sued into oblivion. There was the option of changing the course layout (adding a chicane to slow down the cars in turn 13) but the FIA would not accept this idea. So only the 6 Bridgestone cars took the track, 2 Ferraris, 2 Jordans and 2 Minardis… The Jordans and Minardis are so slow they are effectively rolling speed bumps, so it's not even a 6 car race.

The only good that can come out of this is that FIA and FOM heads will roll. The rules need to change and the heads of the sport have proven that they don't have the brains between them to make it happen. Good job, assholes. Better leave the race track early… there are 140,000 disgruntled fans in the stands.

PS: Hey, Michael (Schumaker), I'm a big fan, but can you try not to be a complete asshole… it's not even a race! Did you have to force your own fucking teammate off the road?

Tedious computer speak to follow. You've been warned.

Moving our mail and blogging infrastructure over was relatively easy. Textdrive had support for just about everything I needed.

The hard part was what to do with our photo galleries. Storage at Textdrive is RAID-5 SCSI with daily snapshot backups, but that comes at a price. The base account option only provides 300MB of storage. That's not even close to enough to host our photos. So I started looking into another hosting service. Flickr looked the mostpromising… $25/yr for practically unlimited storage and bandwidth, and a reasonably nifty API. While it initally looked great, it wasn't going to be easy transition from our old gallery to Flickr. A fair amount of programming was going to have to happen to make that work. I'd have to rework all my old blog entries which reference that gallery too.

Other photo hosting sites weren't looking any easier, and I wasn't that keen on having all our stuff on someone elses server. Then I thought What about hosting the photos on my machine at home? Although not 100% kosher according to my broadband connection's Terms Of Service, word on the street said they turned a blind eye to it. There were a number of hurdles though: firewalls to traverse, dynamic IP addresses to deal with, moving the gallery software and data from unix to a WinXP box, and finally reintegrating everything on the new server.

I spent the better part of the day figuring it out, and I'm pretty pleased with the end result. I used DynDNS to associate a name with my Dynamic IP. I setup my wireless router for port forwarding, and to update DynDNS when the IP changes. I used the Apache2Triad package to get Apache, MySQL, PHP5, perl, Python, and some other goodies installed on my Windows box. I then reinstalled Gallery, and tar'd up all the old photos copied them into the new install. The final bit of work was remarkably easy considering it used mod_rewrite. With a few lines added to a .htaccess file, I'm now proxying all my photos so they look like they are being served via denovich.com. It's a little slow thanks to my upstream being capped at 128Kbps, but it made reintegrating my blog a snap. The last thing was setting up a permanent redirect on AlfaWiki…

Let's see if the setup is fully operational.

Here's a link to my old blog

I haven't paid a dime for denovich.org's hosting over the last, wow, 10 years I've had the domain. Hell, I didn't even pay for the first server that drove the site the first 7 years… I inhiereted a friend's 486 66Mhz with VESA Localbus SCSI & EISA 10Mbit ethernet (old sk00l!). A few years ago, I sunk a paltry $250 into a replacement system. The hosting was free thanks to having friends willing to let it whir away in their offices, and willing to occassionally deal with me when it stopped. However after many thankless years, my last host is moving on to greener pastures, and so shall denovich.org

It will be weird not having full control of the server… but that will be more than made up for by not having to worry about the damn thing. Backups, power, security upgrades, I'm happy to make that someone else's problem. I'm planning on using TextDrive for my hosting. They seem to have their shit together, they support all the stuff I want to use, and just as importantly the price is right. Cheap enough I probably should have thought of this sooner.

Now, the trick will be pulling this off without fucking too much up in the process.

Ha!

I paid off the last of my student loans today. Good riddens.