November 16, 2008, 6:58 pm
After a slight hiatus, progress has been made on the TR6. Last Saturday, I managed to head out to the garage and get the fuel pump changed, along with the pipework to the carburettors. Instead of solid pipework snaking around the rocker cover and being held in place by a bracket attached to the thermostat, it’s now shiny braided hose (originally bought for the AC), secured in place with P-Clips.
 
My dad had taken the time to remove the old rocker cover, clean the head, and fit the new gasket and rocker cover. It looks the part, and I just need to clean up the block now 
Also on the completed list are the seat rails. Bill had come out for a catchup, so he devised a cunning method of replacing the rivnut in the floor with a welded in replacement. This allowed the seat rail to be bolted down correctly and finished off. I just need to fabricate a plate for the control rod latch on the seat rail, and all will be good.
This Saturday afternoon was spent fitting the new ignition coil, distributor cap and HT leads. Last week I’d cleaned and adjusted all the spark plugs but it still ran rough today. Somehow… all the plugs were still set wrongly. Readjusted them, and all 6 cylinders fire nicely
The smooth(er) running highlights one other issue. The rockers need adjusted.
November 13, 2008, 12:54 pm
Whilst waiting for xmodem one day… I got very bored and had a shot at something involving depth of field. It’s a little digital pocket camera, so nothing fantastic.
November 11, 2008, 11:31 pm
Since KDE have ruined Kubuntu with KDE4, it’s time to use Gnome. However Compiz and glitzy pointless effects irritate me no end. A few quick commands will disable them for the current user…
gconftool-2 –set /desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager/current /usr/bin/metacity –type=string
gconftool-2 –set /desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager/default /usr/bin/metacity –type=string
The next time you log in, it will use the default Metacity window manager instead of Compiz. Happiness all round.
*** UPDATE *** See Calum’s response below for the correct method.
November 11, 2008, 11:20 pm
A few weeks ago I thought I would take the plunge, and installed KDE 4.1 on my Kubuntu 8.4 laptop. With the recent announcement of Intrepid being launched, I upgraded to Kubuntu 8.10 with KDE4 as the default environment. I figured that I should get an early look at the direction KDE is going. Sadly it would appear to be the wrong direction.
The first daft thing I noticed is the logout method. Click on the K Menu, then Leave, then Logout. It takes you to same menu that you get for shutting down. Complete with all the same options available. What’s the point in the extra menu options and complexity for new users? I use KDE4 at work on OpenSUSE 11, and it doesn’t suffer from this multiplicity.
Maybe the above can be attributed to a bug in Kubuntu, so let’s just carry on using it. Hopefully…
Before the system had even finished logging on, it was as slow as treacle. My poorly laptop had a loadavg of 7,5,5 just to log in. It’s not exactly spritely, but as a 2.33GHz Core2 with 2GB RAM and a GeForce Go 7400, I expected more. A minute or so passed as the system wound itself down, and Plasma graces the screen. Slowly.
Everything is just so slow. It’s unbearable. I worked at it for about a week, and everything KDE related was sloooooow. Kontact crashed with predictable regularity. Amarok hung randomly, Konqueror bailed out whenever the wind blew the wrong way, and kwin would have a fit when you looked away from the monitor. The bugs were supposed to be ironed out during 4.0. This is 4.1, and supposed to be stable enough to ship as a default WM in a release of Kubuntu. I tried everything, from disabling all effects in kwin, to purging ~/.kde/ and ~/.kde4/. All to no avail. I even formatted and reinstalled a new instance of Kubuntu ‘just in case’. Sadly that didn’t resolve it either.
The situation would appear to be the same on my reasonably powerful desktop PC at home. Kubuntu 8.10 is unbearably slow and prone to crashing. Admittedly I’ve not tried the absolute most recent version on the desktop, as I managed to embed a hard drive in the LCD panel. Long story, but it involves KDE4…
Kubuntu 8.10 ships with KDE4 and no option to use KDE3.5. It’s with a heavy heart I move to Ubuntu and Gnome. Initial impressions would indicate that it’s far swifter and less prone to random crashing. Maybe I’ll move to KDE 4.5 when Gnome releases 3.0…
November 5, 2008, 12:57 pm
Normally you’re supposed to tag the next people to carry on the meme, but in Flash’s instance, she didn’t. So here goes anyway…
If the connection between devices A and B breaks, then the devices know about it immediately because there is two-way communication between them, and they have now lost contact with one another
It’s not exactly nitty, gritty fiction, or classical prose. More along the lines of simple ring topology in O’Reilly’s “Designing Large Scale LANs”
The rules for this meme thing are :
* Grab the nearest book.
* Open it to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
* Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
Other followers of this meme suggest several sentences from the book, and 5 nominees to go next. I’ll do the latter.
Ben Thorp
Mike Quin
Joel Rowbottom
Calum Morrell
Alex Holden
 
