That’s another magazine off to the printers. And Sim and I are very much looking forward to riding bikes. And I’ve just chanced upon six rotor bolts, the final piece in the jigsaw that’ll let me get the Singular together. It’ll be shakedown time on the Thursday night ride then. Yay! I’ve missed night riding… well, all riding actually. That makes a change…
Right, home/bed/sleep… Cheers all!
It seems I’ve not had time to put a blog post up for a week. I’ve also not had time to ride my bike, or have the weekend off. Yes, it’s deadline time. Sim and I have been slaving here for the last week solid (as any webcam stalkers will have seen) but it’s all coming together. The magazine ships to the printers first thing tomorrow… Or else! (Or else we might go mad… that’s what…)
Remember kids, it’s all glamour in magazine land 
Yes, after not adding to my bike cellar for 18 months (I think the last one was my pink Bianchi singlespeed, oh, and we’ll come to the Klein ‘cross bike later, OK?) I suddenly have a couple of new additions to lug up and down the narrow stone staircase to my subterranean bike lair…
You know all about the Ibis, which is my long term test bike. But I’ve also secured the loan for a month or two of a Singular Swift 29er frame and forks. I first saw Sam from Singular riding his, with Brooks saddle, drop bars and leather bar tape, at the UK Singlespeed Champs and then again at the SSWC where I spent half a lap trying to keep up with him. I initially thought it was some high-zoot boutique frame he was riding, rather than an early version of a £360 frame/fork/EBB production job.
After dithering between the candy apple red, geared model and the ‘mainly singlespeed’ EBB frame in blue, I pitched for the EBB model. It still has a derailleur hanger and disc mounts and I intend on running it ‘anti-cliché’, which is to say, with gears. Not everyone who runs big wheels has to have it as a singlespeed, but you wouldn’t believe that from the few you see over here…
Anyway, it’ll go together right after we get this issue to bed. Talking of which, I have work to do…
Aren’t standards great? They help make everything easier for everyone. Take disc brakes for example, any 6 bolt rotor will fit with any 6 bolt hub, any IS brake will fit with any IS mount fork. Two years or so ago this was the way it was and everyone was happy.
Well, I say everyone, but anyone who has spent an hour shimming out their brakes to stop disc rub or trying to get a sheared off disc bolt out of a hub was less than over-joyed.
When people started to step away from standards there was a split of opinion. Postmount disc mounts solved the shim issue and meant you could upgrade to bigger or smaller discs with a simple adapter. Center Lock has solved the sheared bolt problem with a cassette lock ring answer. The problem was these weren’t part of a standard and there could be compatability problems for users.
But now it seems like the industry is adopting these un-official standards, Postmount disc mounts and brakes are everywhere and Center Lock is one of the little innovations that remind you of just how clever those guys at Shimano are, and with DT now incorporating it into their hubs it shouldn’t be long, I hope, before others follow suit.
So, what standards are going to fall by the wayside next? Hub spacing and headset diameters are undergoing changes, how long before we’re all running 150mm hubs and 1.5″ headsets?
Sometimes standards make everyones life easier, but at the expense of innovation.
Is it a price worth paying?
Sometimes riding bikes does feel like work.
Today me and Matt headed up to Coniston in the Lake District to explore the fells there for this issue’s route guide. And what an adventure we had!
We: got sand blasted by hailstones; got slightly lost down a dead end sheeptrack; broke our GPS (thank God for gool ol’ fashioned maps); had our bikes levitate horizontally at our sides during a brief portage session due to insane winds; forced to push down the first few hundred feet of the descent that we’d climbed all day to reach due to insane winds, rode the rest of the descent on egg shells for fear of puncturing in the fading twilight.
Thankfully spirits stayed high (for the most part anyway ;)) and we dug in and got on with the job in hand as the elements conspired against us. The sense of relief/joy/exhilaration/thingy as we finally made it back to the car was brilliant. Managed to get some pretty good pics of the ordeal too.
‘Proper Mountain Biking’ rules OK
It’s always a time of distraction, the week before print deadline. There’s tons of work to do, but it has yet to coalesce into the full-on structured panic of deadline week itself. There’s still a vagueness of what goes where, just how many words are needed for which article and just what was supposed to go into that four page gap that’s just appeared in the flatplan. It’s also the time when stuff appears late for last-minute inclusion in this issue, or early for inclusion into next issue. Add to that the regular distracting dribble of review kit and personal purchases and boxes (like the one that just arrived from www.daveyatescycles.co.uk with a disc-mount Kona conversion for Sim and two (ahem) removed siezed seatpost frames for me… It’s a wonder we get anything done at all…
Just gone through totting up the first batch of voting forms for the 2006 Singletrack Reader Awards. As it stands most of the categories have a clear winner already - but most of these leaders aren’t what I expected/predicted.
The three categories which are currently too close to call are ‘Best UK Trail Centre’, ‘Best Singletrack Feature’ and ‘MTB Personality of the Year’. It was strangely exciting in a Eurovision stylee going through the last few voting forms and watching 1st place change hands over and over again
Closing date for voting is Monday January 15th.
Well, we’re into our second week of the new year and it’s already filling up with stuff. I appear to only have two spare weekends between now and the end of March. And of course I’ll book something in for those weekends because they’re free. A bit like climbers climb mountains because they’re there, I seem to fill weekends because otherwise they’d be empty.
What I forget, though, is the joy of getting to Friday night and then working out what to do with the weekend. Will the evenings be spent in the pub and the days spent trying to perfect the ultimate crusty cheese roll? Or will there be spontaneous decisions to drive to north Wales, or the Yorkshire Moors, find a B&B and get out and get lost? Or will I just decide to read a book, have an early night and a full day of riding in the great hills around my Yorkshire home?
The Penny Steps, a couple of miles from my house.
I promised I’d post regular progress updates so here you go. What follows is probably pretty tedious if you’re not interested in the technical details. The summary is: I’ve had a couple of frustrating days but I’m back on track now. Read on for the details.
As I mentioned previously I’m developing the new site using Joomla 1.5 - which is itself in development. That means that every day I check out the latest version from the Joomla subversion repository and merge their changes with the code I’m working on. I’m trying to keep changes to the Joomla core to an absolute minimum - it’ll be far easier to maintain the site later if it’s based on just-about-standard release of Joomla. There are, however, a few changes that I’ve made to their source code that haven’t yet been merged into the main source tree by the Joomla developers.
That means I can’t just copy the latest Joomla source; I have to merge their changes with my changes so that I end up with the latest version of Joomla with our patches applied. I’ve written a couple of scripts that use diff3 to extract a delta consisting of the changes the Joomla team have made and applies it to our version of the source tree.
Until a couple of days ago that was working pretty well but I knew there was a potential problem brewing. The mechanism I have works well for the PHP source but quite a lot of Joomla’s functionality is defined by the contents of a database. Basically the whole look and feel of the site, which components appear where and how they interact with each other is data driven.
I manage the contents of the database using the same mechanism that I use to manage source updates but because of the way changes to the database that are due to updates by the Joomla team intermingle with changes we make in order to configure the site there’s far more potential for conflicts. Typically a row in a table that we’ve updated will also be updated in a different way to correspond with some difference in the way the Joomla core works.
So that’s what happened earlier in the week. Wednesday’s snapshot of the Joomla core wasn’t working anyway - they’d committed a set of changes that resulted in an installation that just didn’t work. It also became apparent that they were making changes to the database that were going to clash with changes we’d made. Anyway, it wasn’t working so I shelved merging the main version with ours until today and carried on working on the forum.
Today the developer snapshot of Joomla is working just fine - so I had to address the issue of the incompatible database changes. That’s meant rewriting chunks of the code I use to merge changes to the database - and a fair bit of manual fiddling. So today feels like a bit of a wasted day: in a sense I’m back where I was before Wednesday’s update. I’ll console myself that I have a better set of tools now so next time the same thing happens it won’t be anything like as painful.
I’m off to find a beer now. Have a great weekend.
In preperation for a forthcoming article we’ve just taken delivery of a Dialled Bikes Holeshot frame.
A few late nights and some spanner wrenching later and it is now in a fully built bike form.
It looks a whole heap of fun and is exactly the right shade of red. Yes, these things do matter.
Look out for a review in a future issue of the mag.
Sim