Gnubbs Blog

This week I had to rent a car in St. Louis while there on business. It happened to be a brand new Chevy Blazer. I also got to spend some time in one of my coworkers Corvettes. This is my take on each.First the Blazer. So, at home I drive my fiances Jeep Cherokee a lot. I am pretty used to it, and it is not terrible to drive. The flat six has a good amount of power, there is not too much body roll when turning (safe SUV turning, not real turning). It generally drives in as well behaved a manor as can be expected from an SUV.So, when I hop into the blazer I expect more or less the same thing. Pulling out of my parking spot I almost clip the car next to me. What the fsck — doesn’t the steering wheel on this thing work. That was my first experience with how amazing unresponsive the steering is. Huge turning radius, and you have spin the wheel like a sea captain even get it started turning. Start compensating for that. Approaching the checkout booth, I start appling light brake pressure. The vehicle slams to a stop. Brake modulation — why would you want brake modulation? Through the booth and turn onto the road. Whoa, this thing is going to flip. Add extreme body roll at even the slightest hint of a turn to my list of compaints. So, I am on the road now, hit the gas. No response. Give it some more and the spedometers slowly starts to increase. Hit 2k rpm and the engine emits this horrifying moan. Whoa, this thing is just going to die. Anytime I go over 2k rpm while accelerating it does this. Why would anyone want to go over 1/3 of redline? This car fscking sucks.The other end of the spectrum. 2003 Chevy Corvette. I am picked up, hop in and immediatly notice the low grumble of an engine that would rather be running hot than idling. You can feel everything on the road. Hard cornering doesn’t appear to phase it in any way. That thing can move. I am throughly impressed by the just raw power that car exudes in it’s every feature. Talking to the owner there is one downside. The car has different sized wheels front and back, and assymetrical tires. So, it is carry four spares or none. The car doesn’t come with a spare, and has run flat tires instead. The owner says the stock tires suck — extremely low profile tires plus thick sidewalls for runflat apparently equals poor high performance tires. So, he kept them for roadtrips, and has another set of wheels and tires for day to day driving.It amazes me that these two cars can be made by the same company. Sure, different price brackets, different audiences, etc. None the less. That blazer was quite possibily the most unejoyable car I have ever driven. That corvette was probably the highest performance car I have ever ridden in.

So, this week I spent Weds and Thursday in St. Louis to do an install of some equipment. This is a bit of a rant about the city, the TSA, brain surgeons and manifest destiny.

First, I was there to install new surgical systems for the guy that came up with concepts on which the company I work for was founded. This guy is a best of class neurosurgeon, not some quack in Montana. So, I get there install the systems, and observe a case on Weds. All goes extremely well.

That evening I go out drinking with the engineer who was sent with me, who also just happens to be one of the founders of the company. We end up in some pseudo hooters for a couple of beers and I realize this guy has toys. A new toy hero of mine even. First, he picked me up in his 2003 Corvette. Then at the bar he shares that he also has an airplane and four bikes (Goldwing, Harley, Triumph, and Ducati). I need to start myself a company.

After a drunken night of stumbling around my hotel, I crash. Wake up the next morning early for some more surgeries. Get to the hospital and the OR manager tells us that the surgeon decided to go to london last night, and will not be there for the rest of the week. Fsck. Call the airlines and rebook for Thursday night.

Spend the afternoon putzing around StL. There is nothing to see in this city. I went to the arch which is kind of neat, but not as cool as your childhood mind had made it. Not to mention, this is the Jefferson National Expansion Monument. Hey, don’t get me wrong, that Louisianna Purchase was a good gimmick. Manifest Desiny — I hear you brother. I was just pretty stunned that in this whole museum of the white mans move west, there was not a mention of the destruction we reigned down on the savages. No “Well, we kind of did screw them on the treaties” or “White mans disease killed alot of them, that wasn’t so good.” Nothing but metal detectors and searches to get in, and proclamations of the greatness of the pioneers inside. Fscking midwest. Even comes through in thier National Monuments. Back to the airport. Run in with airport security and thier pretty little TSA badges.

The TSA guy in front of me is smiling through dimwitted eyes. I don’t know what Lenny has going through his mind, but I am starting to worry that he may have mistakken me for a rabbit. He has a look about him that lets you know that he may not be “mentally challenged”, but it sure as hell scares you that he owns guns.

Look around, maybe there is another line I can go through. That’s when it hit me. It looks like all of these guys were dropped off by the TSA shortbus. Fsck. No wonder the lines are long.

This weekend was a big one for me. After a bonus from work, a tax return for Stephanie from Japan, and a lucky trip to an audio store going out of business, I have myself a new turntable.

The table is a Linn Axis with a Linn Akito Arm. Linn has been long known for making excellent turntables at reasonable prices. (This is a very loose, audiophile definition of reasonable prices.) This is a very nice upgrade from my old, dying Thorens TD166. The Thorens had got to a point where it was just not enjoyable to listen to records on.

The problem with the Thorens is that the motor was dying, and the belt needed to be replaced. After many years of faithful service, the TD166s are known to develop a rumble in their motors. Not good considering how extremely sensitive cartridges are (they produce sound based on movements measued in 1/10000 of an inch if not less….) You can get a little extra life once they start rumbling by adding sewing machine oil to the motor. This, however, only does so much.

So, Stephanie and I are walking down Pearl street on Friday, laden with disposible income for the first time in a very long time, and we see the going out of business sings on the local used audio store. Stephanie has actaully been wanting me to replace the turntable because it is much more reasonable to buy $4 used records than $18 shitty new cds. So we go in, not expecting to find anything nice in our price range. I see the Linn, but just keep walking because I assume it will be drastically out of price range.

Well considering it’s aestetic condition (it needs some love, plastic polish, alluminum polish, and a sharpie marker and it should look like new), and the 30% discount on everything in the store, I walked out with it under my arm. On the way home, we stop and get some record cleaner. Get home, take my Grace F9 cartridge off the old table and mount it on the new one. Re-level my equipment stand, and align the cartridge to the best of my novice abilities.

Look through my records for a well recorded, big budget album. Best I can come up with is Eminem “The Marshall Mathers LP”. Plop it down and drop the needle. Start of play has zero surface noise. Man this is clear. First baseline drops with my jaw. This sounds spectactular. The bass is deep and controlled, the music is rich and full, cymbols have an extremely sharp attack and then endless resonance. Sound glorious.

So, to take advantage of our new audio capabilities, Stephanie and I head to the local used record store Saturday afternoon. She finds old Madonna and the Cure, I strike upon a new copy of CCR “Green River” on RTI 180 gram virgin vinyl. At $30 it defeats the point of trying to find used vinyl, but screw it. Get home, drop down side A, and am stunned by the sound. Fantastic. Sweet, sweet analogue only recording (not a digital conversion from John Fogerty’s vocal cords in 1969 to my ears in 2003) is hard to beat.

gnubbs

This one is just for j$, but it will be short. It is kind of funny how the hive mind continues, despite geographic borders…. I have been working on the EE again lately. I am actually, at this point making a little bit of progress.

I will post more on the specifics soon, but just an overview of where everything stands at the moment. I spent a while recently laying out the details of each page in the site, drawing up a much fuller DB design, and writing out the entire class structure. All done using Dia.

Once I had these printed out and hanging in front of me for reference, I started looking at how I was writing my code. That led me to trying Eclipse. This is working well for me, but I feel that I still have a lot to do to streamline my coding process.

Next thing to add to the fray was unit testing. I had been doing some classic code testing up until now — add some print lines, maybe look at the database by hand now and then, hit reload in the browser… Not exactly through, scientific, or good practice. (It would be funny to see how many projects have been written this way…) So, I downloaded PHPUnit and set up my first test cases. After poking around for a while trying to figure out the correct way to build the test cases, test suites, etc.

Now for the fun part. Coding. I am going to try this whole TDD thing that I have heard so much about. (J$, is that still working for you? Have you fallen back into your lethargic programming ways?) Ok, I know I should have linked a bunch of blog entries in here, I know I should have been a bit more through in my descriptions, I know, I know. But, I would rather be coding right now…

gnubbs

J$ mentioned a peice of software the other day that I had never heard of. It is called Eclipse, and once you add in a couple of plugins, it becomes a very nice IDE. So, off to my Linux box at work to see if I can come up with a better text editor than Emacs for coding.

A couple of downloads and a little while of messing with Java later, I was anxiosly watching the splash screen to see how much of a waste of time this was. I usually assume that free development enviroments are not going to be that great.

So, a couple of days of use later, I am impressed. I have only scratched the surface of it’s functionality, but it has a lot to offer. The text editor performs well. Autocompletion, syntax highlighting and everything else you would expect to be fully configurable are fully configurable. It does some really nice outlining as well, giving you a broswer of objects, variables and functions in your file. Click on an entry and it takes you to that object in the code. I use that feature extensively.

The software also claims to seemlessly integrate with CVS. I have not played with this feature at all yet. It also provides a very nice file browser and tabbed editing. The nice thing about Eclipse is that it is simply a framework for an IDE to which people have added plugins for design tools, database management, cvs integration, you name it.

After a couple of days of use I will post a more through review, but my initial impressions are very positive.

(Yes, this does mean I am back working on the EE. I had a quiet afternoon and was able to refactor my design a bit and get a renewed drive to work on it. More on that in another post.)

I have long been convinced that advertising does not work. I am 100% sure that I am wrong, but I chose to believe this none the less. I think that advertising is an elaborate pratical joke once played on a business that has since spiralled so far out of control that most businesses that advertise don’t believe they can exist without it.

This in turn, pays the bills for the places that provide me with entertainment. That is why a magazine that plays the advertisement game and is 50% adds (like GRM) costs $4.95 an issue, and one that doesn’t (like Alpinist) costs $12.95 an issue. This is especially true for television and internet sites that get the majority of thier revenue through advertising. (Lets ignore the fact that the only television channels that have any original content worth watching you have to pay for.)

For a while, Salon.com was totally free and delivered on the backs of advertisers. Then, for a while it was subscription only and delivered on the backs of the readers. I have never been able to subscribe to salon because I just don’t read it enough. At the same time, they frequently have well written, well researched, interesting articles that I really want to read.

So, for a long time I was out of luck. Then, they came up with this Salon Premium Day Pass. Basically, you watch a fancy 30 commercial, and then are able to browse the site all day without any more hassle. No pop-ups and a pretty standard amount of inline advertising. If you don’t like this, you can still subscribe for a pretty reasonable fare, but if you are a cheap ass like me you can get all the content for free.

Okay. I am more or less a complete neophyte when it comes to car. I do my best but still baulk at making any repairs more complicated than replacing brakes. If forced, I would probably get through more complex operations, but luckily I have not yet been forced. So, back to brakes.

First, my car. A red 99 mercury cougar, 2.5L Duratec DOHC V6, more or less entirely stock. Something to note is that she is heavy. Not your little Lotus Elise chiming in at 1300 pounds, Ann Marie weighs in at about 2800 pounds. If you follow my blog at all, you will have noticed that she recently recieved new tires (BFG CompTA VR4s) and some other, well, hacks. In both of these threads I was complaining about my brakes though.

My driving condition are a little different from Ohio. First, as I become more competant in corning and shifting, my street driving has started to become a bit more aggressive. Additionally, I live in the mountains. So, coming over independence pass (12,000′) at 85 - 90 mph, I am faced with 12 miles of 4-8% grades, and the opportunity for hard breaking because of grandpas in the left lane doing 55. Best case scenario for this stretch is extremely hot breaks when you get to the bottom (makes your car smell great).

My current brake pads actually have tons of wear left on them. The rotors however, do not appear to be in the best condition. Running my fingers accross their surface there are all sorts of stryations. The breaks sound terrible, and judder when coming to a stop. Not exactly confidence inspiring. My theory is that the last owner replaced break pads without turning the rotors or replacing them. I plan on replacing my front rotors and pads at the moment as I feel this is the most likely culprit.

Here are my rotor options:
Raybestos (Autozone) $100 a pair
Cheap. That is thier only redeeming value

KVR (SP Motorsports) (Slotted and drilled) $185 a pair
Very popular on cougars. Slotted to clean pad faces and also to allow the brakes to more quickly come up to operating temperature. Drilled to help dissipate heat at higher temps.

EBC TGD (Tirerack) (Slotted and “dimpled”) $185 a pair
EBC makes other high quality brake components. They “dimple” thier rotors for that drilled look without the risk of the rotors cracking at the holes.

All of that is from the manufacturers marketing materials. Both the KVR and EBC are marketed for high performance street, or light duty track use.

Pads:
Raybestos (Autozone) $55
Cheap. Well as cheap as it gets for my car. Fscking wierd SVT compontents.

KVR Carbon Fiber (SP Motorsports) $55
Well I guess those Raybestos are not that cheap after all. High quality performance street or light track use.

EBC Greenstuff (Tirerack) $75
What do I need to say about these staples of performance street pads.

So, Scott, J$, whomever else reads this and knows something about cars, I would appreciate some input. Who hear is a fan of generic smooth faced rotors? Who is okay with those cute ricer style ones that are more holes than surface material. Your guidance is needed.

What happened to the good old days? Thirty foot long cadillacs, Shelby GT 500s, GTO Judges, engines that fscking worked with only a bit of black carborator magic. I think in those days you had a chance…

Ann Marie is not the happiest of cars these days. I just bought her new tires but she still isn’t satisfied. I am about to replace her brakes, maybe that will soothe her a bit. In the mean time, she is showing one of the most terrribly annoying aspects of being a Duratech 2.5L car.

Since Ralph Nader came of age destroying the american dream cars, the rest of mankind has been trying to pick up the peices and get thier cars on the road despite emmisions standards. One of the many ways this is manifested on my car is through the IACV. This allows a small amount of air to bypass the throttle body straight into the intake maifold. This theoretically allows just enough air into the block to allow it to efficiently burn at idle.

A side effect of this design on the Duratech 2.5 is that if you have your engine at 4000 rpm, hit the clutch and let off the gas, the engine continues to charge along at 4 grand before starting to very slowly rev down to idle. So, off to the duratech boards to figure out what to do to fix this damn problem.

First thing that I tried was taking a copper 1/2 pipe cap, drilling a small hole in it and placing it in the air hose that runs from the air intake (bypassing the TB) directly into the intake manifold. After several itterations of increasing hole size and repolishing the cap I still couldn’t get it quite right. I just couldn’t get the hole perfect, so I would get a rough idle and check engine light (not enough air getting in for her to idle). However, with this in place as soon as I let off the gas RPMs plummeted to idle. Halfway there.

Back to the message boards. Find another solution for a related problem, but not exactly what I was experiencing. (The other problem is the IACV moosing — rapidly opening/closing and causing a terribly sound like a pissed off moose.) So, back to the hardware store for 2 ft of 3/4″ ID flexible hose. Out comes the fancy six inch long OEM air hose, and in goes the new hose formed in a nice loop. The theory is that the extra resistance of the 1.5 ft of hosing will have more or less the same effect of restricting air flow.

Start her up — idle sounds good, no CEL. Out to the streets for some testing. Rev to 3k and let off, engine immediately starts revving down but as slowly as normal. Rev to 4k and let off, engine immediatly starts to quickly drop through RPMs. Nice. Under about 3k, the engine is still getting enough air for this not to make a difference, but once I hit about 4k before shifting it works like a charm.

The speed at which it drops RPMs still leaves something to desire, (might have something to do with a flywheel that wieghs 26 pounds) but at least it does not continue to chug along at 4k. Not only does this prevent the engine from howling away while I slow for stop signs, but also makes for much smoother shifting. On to brakes….