Author: rolfje

Soybean racer

2006-03-12 rolfje No Comments

The big car manufacturers could have done this, but they didn’t, because they are sponsored by the big oil companies. And your local governement is swimming in taxmoney that’s added to your oil price. And no, they don’t want to get rid of the cars, despite of what they say. The nicest thing for governements would be the complete population sitting in single-seated, gas guzzling cars in a traffic jam accross the country!

Now that a few school kids have proven that you don’t need oil to race, and several American race series run on methanol (no that’s not an oil product), can we please stop making cars that run on gasoline? And by the way, also stop pumping money into the super-dangerous liquid nitrogen cars? All that is purely to keep the oil companies in the same place: monopoly. Do you really think they do it for the environment? What if I told you that your current petrol car can run on bio-degradable methanol, with almost no changes? If you have a very modern car, the fuel system will even auto-adapt! But noooo, they won’t tell you that, because the oil companies and governements want to keep the monopoly intact!

Not that you can really do anything about it though. Except maybe not buying liquid-nitrogen or hybrid cars. There are better technical alternatives, although not on the market yet. Boycot the “environmentally friendly” car, force them into making a *real* environmentally friendly car.

Yes, I’m driving a diesel, and a motorbike. And no, I’m not worried about oil-shortage. It’s all bullshit from the oil companies, who could have come up with alternatives a long while ago, but chose not to. If there really was an oil shortage, we all would have been driving on methanol for quite some time now. And co2 emmisions would have been reduced to absolutely 0.

Hardware, Racing

How to replace the headlights on a Citroen Xsara

2006-03-11 rolfje 23 Comments

Recently my left headlight broke. I thought I’d change it quickly, but after half an hour of fiddling I decided to ask my dealer to do it for me, while I was looking. That was not a bad idea. It turned out to be not so straightforward after all, and you actually need tools (which you don’t get when buying the car) to do this! This lead me to write a “small” article on how to replace the headlights of a Citroen Xsara. Enjoy.

Hardware, Workshop

Inventive minds

2006-02-28 rolfje No Comments

Of all inventive minds, the religious mind must be the most inventive.

It can justify a massacre by refering to a book that essentially says “Thou shall not kill”.

Uncategorized

You Can’t Fix What You Don’t Measure

2006-02-25 rolfje 5 Comments

… maybe the title should be “Two Stupidities A Week”, but since both stupid actions had to do with measurement, or rather the lack thereof, let’s stick with the proverb.

Hardware, Workshop

Killing oracle sessions, the easy (JDBC) way.

2006-02-23 rolfje 2 Comments

Does Oracle complain about not being able to drop a table for a currently connected user, but you are sure you disconnected? Do the sessions “hang” in “inactive” state? Just log on as system, and execute the following query:

SELECT
'ALTER SYSTEM KILL SESSION ''' || sid || ',' || serial# || '''; --',
       s.sid,
       s.serial#,
       s.osuser,
       s.username,
       s.program,
	status
FROM   v$session s
WHERE status = 'INACTIVE';

You will get a list of statements you need to execute (just copy-pase) to kill the inactive sessions. Don’t listen to the guys telling you to do intricate System Administrator stuff on a command prompt, just use any JDBC tool.

EDIT: Single query which also lists the kill command if the “alter system kill session” trick did not work:

SELECT
'ALTER SYSTEM KILL SESSION ''' || s.sid || ',' || s.serial# ||
       '''; -- kill -9 ' || p.spid,
       s.sid,
       s.serial#,
       p.spid,
       s.username,
       s.program,
       s.status
FROM   v$session s, v$process p
WHERE s.paddr = p.addr
  and (s.state='INACTIVE' or s.state='KILLED');

Thanks Bas en Jeroen!

Software

Rotten Rotor

2006-02-14 rolfje No Comments

Last week I tried to pull the rotor by using a rotor puller, and a socket (from a socket wrench set) to block it. The socket burried it’s way into the first thread of the crankshaft. After realising this, I tried to fit the rotor bolt, and it wouldn’t go in. Since only the first thread was damaged, I carefully drilled it out (only needed to go 2 mm deep), and now the rotor bolt fits nicely again.

Google Talk with your browser!

2006-02-08 rolfje No Comments

For some reason I’ve been selected my the google company to have the new interface of gmail, where you can use google talk without even installing it! Yes you’ve read that right. When I log in to Google, I immediately see a quick contacts list of people who are online (on googletalk), and I can chat with them as if I was using the actual application! Only voice is missing, but I don’t use that anyway (Skype fan), so I am really happy.Now I can google-talk with my friends on *any* computer without having to install plugins, upgrading MSN otherwise contaminating the host’s computer. I am really impressed and amazed (for the past 3 hours or so). Go Google! I feel like buying a t-shirt now 🙂

Oh yeah, and it works in both FireFox and Microsoft Internet Explorer. And I am not kidding.

Auch, and I just missed the scoop on Slashdot… I could have been a succesful submitter. so close, so close.

Fun, Software

Tapestry/OGNL: Could not find an adaptor for class XYZ

2006-02-07 rolfje No Comments

Getting the “Could not find an adaptor for class Foo” Mesage in Tapestry? You probably forgot to make your class Serializable. A simple description of a possible problematic situation follows:

Software

195Nm Victory!

2006-02-07 rolfje No Comments

For some strange reason, my brother’s Kawasaki KLR Tengai dead-stopped. After starting it again, it made some strange noises. It also had lost a lot of oil somewhere along the way, so we decided to not run it again before we found the cause of the trouble. A few weeks ago we encountered a funny problem, we couldn’t loosen the rotor-bolt. In the Kawasaki KLR workshop manual is a picture of a strange wrench to hold the rotor. Ofcourse we’re cheap, so we wouldn’t spring for a nifty and probably expensive Kawasaki specialty tool for a very old bike which not worth more than the petrol that’s in the tank (okay, okay, but you get the point).

The rotor bolt is tightened to 195Nm. That’s a lot of force there, so it’s not surprising we couldn’t loosen it by holding the flywheeel with our hands. So we set out to create a tool of our own. We even ended up trying to bend an old 32mm Chrome-Vanadium wrench, which resulted in an empty gas can, a very hot workbench and nice colors on the wrench, without it bending even the slightest. We we barely able to heat it to the point it got red-hot, because the metal just conducts the heat away from the point you want to heat.

So I started mailing with Vincent, a good friend of mine which happens to be “quite handy” with motorbikes . He pointed out that you could also stop the rotor from turning by holding the piston. Because we wanted to measure the play in the bigend bearing we needed to remove the sleeve anyway, so I immediately went back to the workshop to do this. After removing the sleeve, I could easily make some wood pegs to block the piston. The wood would have to have a big surface and be strong enough to hould the piston, without damaging the piston or the engine casing.

It turned out to work great! I needed to attach a long bar to the socket wrench to be able to apply enough force to the bolt, but in the end I got it! In the picture on the left you can see a detail of how the wood blocks are resting on the engine casing. After loosening the bolt, there was absolutely no visible damage to the piston or the engine. Even greater news is that there is also virtually no play on the bigend bearing, so we don’t have to disasemble the crank.

When looking at the bolt, the results of applying so much force to the faces of the socket wrench become visible. We know for a fact that this bolt has been removed once before, so these wearmarks are from tightening and loosening the bolt just two times. I think we can tighten it one more time, but after that it needs to be replaced.

Hardware, Workshop

Foxit PDF Reader

2006-02-05 rolfje No Comments

In the early days, Adobe Acrbat Reader was a great tool for reading PDF files. But in the past months, it has transformed into a slow-starting, update hungry irritating tool which pops up questions about upgrading parts of the program you didn’t even request to be installed. If you have the older version of Acrobat Reader without the update manager, hang on to it.

If you are looking for a nice alternative for Acrobat Reader, I can recommend Foxit PDF Reader. It is a very small program, free, and starts up in about 1/10th of the time Acrobat Reader takes to display just the splash screen (and subsequently, the annoying update manager). It can do anything I usually need when reading and printing PDF files, and the fullscreen mode is even richer than Adobe’s.

Adobe seems to have gone overboard with their userinterface. People just want to read the PDF, and not be bothered with complicated questions which very often result in downloading and installing megabytes of unwanted software on their machines. I will recommend alternatives to Acrobat Reader from now on, and I think the world will become a slightly better place 😉

Software