Life Pattern

Category: Misc

Ръзни

  • Where the real fun is

    This year I got a road bycicle. It’s Specialized Alez Sport:

    specialized-allez

    The nice thing about road cycling is that you can go really far. The not so nice thing is that you have to mix with the automobile traffic. To me MTB is still the king. This is where the fun is!

    Today I did my first real ride for the season and it was fabulous. Well, actually it was second – the first was in Galatas, but this one was on home trails that I like very much (the first 1/4 of #vitosha100. The weather was really nice too. This was my first real ride with the new 1×11 drivetrain (Shimano XT M8000). I know I can’t be completely objective here, because the parts are brand new without any wear or play, but 1×11 feels really really nice and smooth. It made me shift more often and I felt like this gave me additional edge on the mostly level single trail where the speed varies quite a bit with every turn, bridge or puddle… In a way it had me thinking about CVT transmissions and electric motors 🙂

  • 2015 cycling in re(ar)view

    2015 cycling in re(ar)view

    Moving with my bicycle through 2015 I’ve produced more than 126000 kJ of mechanical energy, which translates to approximately 35 kW/h. I didn’t have my power meter with me on several occasions and few rides data got corrupted or missing for various reasons, so 126 MJ is a conservative figure. “Обиколката на Витоша” 2015 cost me 2468 kJ, so overall it’s like doing 51 rounds of it or in other words doing it every week.

    Due to many other commitments (it was crazy year for sure!) I didn’t have the opportunity to ride outside as much as I liked, so many of the rides were on the indoors trainer. Also my primary discipline is MTB, and that’s another reason for my unimpressive accumulated distance of 4853 km (compared to road cycling). Still, I climbed 44570 meters. That’s roughly the elevation gain equivalent of doing “Велорали Черни Връх” 28 times.

    Ultimately, despite all obstacles this is my fastest year ever! 🙂 Using “Обиколката на Витоша” as benchmark, because it’s both the first bike race I’ve participated back in 2007 as well the most popular mountain bike race in Bulgaria (xcm), here’s how I did through the years:

    Year Time
    2007 10:30
    2010 7:57
    2012 6:22
    2013 6:10
    2014 7:16
    2015 5:23

    To be fair I didn’t think of 5h23m as a possibility. I just hoped I can go slightly bellow 6 hours. This was also the year where I participated in the biggest number of races – I think I stood at the start line of at least 13 races.

    I’ve also learned that if you smile more you’ll enjoy things more.

    So, cycling-wise 2015 was a good year 🙂

    Looking forward to 2016 with high hopes!

    And now some pictures, each worth more than thousand words of course:

    velo-viewer-2015

    2015 Ride locations

  • Remote ssh command escaping

    I often have to run non-interactive commands on remote machines (thanks ndenev and famzah). Dealing with quoting and escaping could become quite cumbersome at times. Here’s a very simple example:

    for n in "$(cat some\ file.txt |cut -d: -f2)";do echo "$n" |awk '{print $2}' ;done

    The thing is, you often debug something on a single server constructing the on-liner iteratively and interactively with no intention to run in on many servers. But then at some point you realize you’d better check on other servers for this problem you’ve been debugging. And you usually find out that your already quite lengthy one-liner must be properly quoted and escaped. One easy way out is to just let CPAN String::ShellQuote do the work for you:

    perl -MString::ShellQuote -ne 'chomp; print shell_quote($_),"\n";'

    for n in "$(cat some\ file.txt |cut -d: -f2)";do echo "$n" |awk '{print $2}' ;done

    'for n in "$(cat some\ file.txt |cut -d: -f2)";do echo "$n" |awk '\''{print $2}'\'' ;done'