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A Saturday morning folding bike breakfast
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Kent, Mark and I met at the top of the I90 bridge this morning for some socializing and bike geeking. The toys of the day were my Bike Friday Tikit and Kent's Dahon Curve. Mark brought along Jan Heine's Alex Singer -- normally one of the most interesting bikes of the bunch, but today it didn't get much attention.
Kent's Dahon is really nice. For $400 you get a bike which folds up to a tiny package (not as small as a Brompton, but smaller than the Tikit) and which rides nicely. Contrasting the Dahon and Tikit was fun. The Dahon is very simple in comparison. The fold isn't as slick, but it is fast enough (Kent says it takes about a minute). The Dahon folds into a small package partially because it is a small bike to begin with -- both Mark and I felt that it was undersized than us. Kent said that if you think about it as the fast alternative to walking then you'll have the right mindset. I was impressed with the parts spec on the Dahon. For $400 it includes some nice features like Schwable Big Apple tires and a simple and effective Sturmey 3sp drivetrain.
Kent and Mark were impressed with the fast folding of the Tikit and Mark liked the riding position (which is pretty similar to my other bikes). The Tikit has some handlebar flex that I'm still working out, but once you get used to it the ride is pretty nice. The Tikit is closer to a normal bicycle in ride and fit, but it also has a much more complicated design and is much more expensive.
The ride also gave me a chance to try out my newest rack. I built a second rack for the Tikit that fits into the folded bike more nicely than my original design. There is clearance for the saddle to fit into the rack and it doesn't get in the way of the rear tire when the bike is folded. I think that I came up with a solution that is asthetically pleasing and functional.
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Virtualizing the servers
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Currently phred.org/bikelist.org are run off of two servers, one running FreeBSD and one running Windows 2003 and Exchange 2003. We also have a file server for our house, so that is 3 computers powered on 24x7. The total power consumption for all three machines is around 400 watts, which costs us about $25/mo in electricity ("clean" hydro-powered electricity, but that is still a lot of energy).
This month I'm replacing all of those physical servers with a single PC. Using VMWare Server I can run the operating systems from those three machines at the same time on a single computer. They'll share a single set of disks, memory, and CPU. This one box will use about the same amount of power as any one of the previous machines.
It's going okay so far. Last night I spent a lot of time trying to move the FreeBSD machine (phred.org) over to VMWare. This process is called P2V (physical to virtual). There are very good tools for doing this with Windows-based computers, but not much for FreeBSD. Here is what worked for me:
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Make a backup of the FreeBSD box.
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Use vmware-vdiskmanager to create a virtual disk that is at least as large as the disk in the FreeBSD machine.
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Move the FreeBSD machine's drives to a Windows box with those tools. In my case this couldn't be the machine that I run VMWare on because that machine runs 64-bit Windows and my FreeBSD drives use an old 3ware RAID controller which isn't supported in 64-bit Windows. I used an old PC that is being retired.
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Mount the disk image created with vmware-vdiskmanager using vdk.
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Use dd to copy from the physical volume that contains the FreeBSD bits to the VMWare disk.
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Dismount the disk using vdk.
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Copy the .vmdk file to your VMWare box and mount it in a new VMWare image.
Hopefully someone finds this via a search engine and it is helpful to them.
If you see that phred.org or bikelist.org lists are down for periods of time in the next week or two this is why. I still have one more machine to move over.
I'm excited for the end results. The machines take up a good amount of space in the basement and a single machine is much easier to hide in a corner. Power consumption will be lower. It'll be easier for me to build out test servers to experiment with. It makes backup and upgrades easier.
The old computers (some of which are only a couple of years old...all will run Windows XP and Office) are going to Global Technology Academy, a non-profit based out of Garfield High School. GTA sends local high school students around the world to setup computer labs in schools in developing countries. I'm excited about this non-profit because it gives Seattle students exposure to developing countries and gets the technology installed in useful ways instead of just dumping it.
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bike lanes kill
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On September 7th a cyclist named Bryce Lewis was killed in Seattle at the intersection of Eastlake and Furhman (heading north on Eastlake just before the University Bridge). The cyclist was going straight and a dump truck turned right across his path, dragging the cyclist for 25 feet.
Here is what the intersection looks like (thanks to the aerial photography of local.live.com):
The cyclist's path is the orange line, the dump truck's path is the blue line.
The city is not holding the dump truck driver responsible. Most cyclists are upset and think that the driver wasn't looking and thus is clearly at fault. I personally hold the city responsible -- the bike lanes should never have been stripped this way.
Almost all bike lanes (including the ones above) put cyclists at the right side of the road all the way up to the intersection. This puts the cyclist to the right of right turning cars. When I'm riding I avoid this by pulling into the lane before the intersection, but that is not an obvious or typical thing for a cyclist to do. The bike lane needs to merge with the traffic lane before the intersection, cross the traffic lane, or otherwise indicate that bicycles going straight should not be on the right side of cars which are turning right. I don't want to see more bike lanes in Seattle if they are designed like the ones on Eastlake Ave.
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I was also disappointed to see that The Stranger (one of Seattle's weekly's) put Cascade Bicycle Club on the genius shortlist. They specifically gave credit to David Hiller for the Stone Way Bike Protests, an event which was actually planned and organized by a point83 spinoff called "Seattle Likes Bikes". Cascade often does good stuff, but there is a lot more going on than what they organize. The point83 guys got together last weekend and built a memorial at the accident location. I've ridden past the accident location two or three times since then and there are always people looking at it. This does build awareness.
As an aside, I was hit by a car on April 17th about 300' from the accident shown above. I'm okay. I was also in the bike lane when a southbound car turned left across my path. Someday I'll write a full blog entry about my learnings on dealing with insurance after a bicycle accident.