exo

Having got back into commuting on a moderately regular basis I’m again facing one of the dilemmas of the cycle commuter: is it polite to draft?

Drafting is sitting behind someone else getting sucked along in their slipstream and thus requiring roughly a third less energy. I recall reading that it also helps the drafter but the details, which I was hazy on at the time, now elude me. Needless to say any benefit to the drafter is considerably less than to the draftee. In most groups of road cyclists drafting is the norm for anything other than a gentle ride and is usually well practiced; each person in the group will take their turn at the front and then pull off to join the line at the end.

For the cycling commuter though it seems to be something of a grey area. I’ve read long rants on cycling forums decrying the practice of latching on to a stranger; others seem not to care if they drag someone along for miles. I personally am in the latter camp and am also not averse to sitting in someone’s wake for a bit. I’ve no idea how you tell the persuasion of another cyclist.

At this point I should say that with the great majority of my fellow commuters the issue never arises because I’m going faster than them. This makes sense as purely from a perspective of maths I’m much less likely to see those travelling at a similar speed.

However, what this does mean is that those who are worthwhile to draft are likely to moderately serious cyclists and hence familiar with the concept of drafting. The problem then arises of how to, and indeed if you should even try to, set up the shared drafting mentioned above. In the echelons of professional, and for all I know about it amateur, cycling the accepted signal is a flick of the elbow on the side you wish the draftee to come past you on. I am not inclined to make such a commanding gesture at a total stranger. I am left with the hope that if I pass and then move in front of a fellow commuter they will return the favour after a while.

I have not yet put this to the test.

In fact thus far, depending on the speed of the other person, I either maintain a polite distance behind or increase my speed sufficiently that I pass at a reasonable rate. The latter makes me feel less like a stalker.

A third option would be to pull alongside and explain all this. It seems a lot to burden a stranger with at either end of the working day.

Avocado and green tomato chutney is something I shall not be repeating.

February is not the time of year to buy bouncy balls. They are, apparently, more of a summer thing.

Given that there exists a name for pretty much every common category of interaction on the interweb there really should be one for suggestions that the way to solve a problem using one particular piece of software is to use a different piece of software as it is better. It is usually the case that both bits of software are capable of solving the problem however the person making the suggestions just prefers the software they suggested and so should you.

In pathological cases an entirely different operating system, usually Linux, will be proposed as the solution.

This donations fuss really is beginning to get old very quickly indeed. I am fairly convinced that we have better and more important things to be devoting so much of our public discourse to.

Yes, we should expect a high level of probity from our public officials. We should expect that they follow the both the letter and the spirit of the law. However, I’d like to think that we could also expect better than name calling and the somewhat disingenuous accusations of incompetence. And more to the point we should expect that our politicians rise above cheap points scoring and either agree to sort out the problem with a set of clear, concise and workable laws or get in someone else to do it for them so that we can get back to talking about anything that might actually impact on people outwith politics.

Version 0.21 of WebService::HTML::Validator::W3C should be hitting a CPAN mirror near you soonish.

Lets just say that if you’re going to use skip and a variable number of tests you have to be careful.

Version 0.20 of WebService::HTML::Validator::W3C should be hitting a CPAN mirror near you soonish.

This release is just a refactoring of the tests to run less of them by default and also to not contact the validator by default. This was partly to stop tests failing if the error messages change and also as it makes the tests run quicker. The old tests that contact the validator can be run by setting an environment variable of TEST_AUTHOR to 1. I’m not sure if this is the best way to do this but it works for me.

There was also a slight internals refactoring to enable the test reorganisation.

Anyone that reads the news can’t fail to have noticed that there’s something of an image problem for pro cycling at the moment. Anyone who’s a cyclist must by now be familiar with the “you’re all on drugs” gags from your friends and workmates. It’s a fairly depressing time to be a cyclist and a follower of pro cycling.

You’d have to be mad to deny that doping happens in cycling. It seems to be deeply ingrained in the ranks of the peleton despite the signs this is changing among the younger riders. So, part of the problem for cycling is cultural. But it’s a two sided cultural problem. The second side of that is that cycling want to be clean in a way that other sports seem less bothered about — c.f. Barry Bonds — and at the moment these two side of the culture are clashing.

Money is partly the root. There is enough money in cycling that there is an incentive to cheat to win but there isn’t enough money to be made from cycling by the surrounding circus that a blind eye is turned.

And yes, I am sad and annoyed that this is happening to my sport. I’m not altogether surprised as I recall the bad days of Festina. What I still don’t understand is not so much why cycling, but why no other sport? Is it really that there is something about cyclists and cycling that makes then so much more prone to this sort of cheating? I like to think it’s partly that cycling has more and better testing than other sports but it’s a thin cloth to hide behind.

apt-get install bum

Not really anything much new in this other than some updated docs and a few bugfixes.

Under the hood the code’s been reorganised quite a bit though which allows me to do better testing and so on. And should hopefully make it a bit easier to add new features.

It’s available for download in the usual place.