Thundersprint 2010
Another excellent year of the Thundersprint, second time I have been, seemed a little larger than last year even. Steve Parish was there for the first time this year, and was quick around the circuit.
Not as quick as Chris Walker on the Norton Commando though, how cool is it to see Norton's out and about again and performing this well.
The pic i have included here is Sammy Miller's Honda RC181 Mike Hailwood replica, I think this is the best sounding vehicle i've ever heard.
Sammy Millers RC181
The NC30 performed brilliantly today too, I should have entered into the cavalcade, I think I will do next year. The new battery has made so much difference to the old girl.
NC30 Repairs
Ah the old girl's up to her tricks again, this time a new battery seems to be on the cards. Luckily they are not too expensive, just 28 quid plus postage from David Silvers. A lot better than the 50 quid they wanted to charge at Halfords.
Unfortunately when I was taking the rear fairings off to get to the battery I noticed that the little plastic loop bit that holds the seat in place on one side had snapped. I decided to fix it myself with a fibre glass repair kit, to re-enforce it. It looks a bit messy at the moment, but I will trim and sand it soon, it is also under the seat so I am not overly worried about it.
Broken seat fairing
This is the kit I got from Halfords, hopefully it was the right thing to do, certainly better than trying to get a local motorbike shop to do anything with it, they really don't seem to have a clue these days except to recommend buying a new fairing or whole new bike..
Repair Kit
Finally the result, not pretty but hopefully it will be strong, and once it has been trimmed and sanded not look too bad.
Fibre Glass Repair
Well let you know if it goes ok 
I really just put this on here in-case other NC30 owners had the same problem and were thinking of ways to go about fixing it.
I am really hoping the new battery will arrive in time for the Thundersprint, then I can pop this fairing back in and the newly charged battery, get the MOT sorted and take her down there.
Brilliant Birthday 2010
29 years old now ! Had a brilliant birthday though, thanks to all that came 
Went over to Lantong Thai in Nottingham, really good place incase anyone hasn't been, well worth a visit.
Also got a rather splendid selection of presents always good, particularly enjoying Guitar Hero hehe.
I also went over to the car show in Weston park so I thought I would include some of the pics too in my gallery.
Screen burn-in / Image retention removal LCD TV
I made the silly mistake of leaving my DVD player on the menu of Easy Rider the other day, and ended up with Peter Fonda's face burnt in on my LCD TV, which was as you can imagine more than a bit of a panic.
After reading around rapidly, and coming across jscreenfix I started to follow the instructions leaving it over night attached to a laptop hoping it would clear itself, I can tell you it does nothing.
All you need to do to resolve image retention / screen burn in on your LCD TV is to turn it off at the wall, allow the liquid crystals to return to their dormant state, say within a few hours then turn it back on and you will find it is back to normal!
Jscreenfix and other such tools, DVDs etc I am sure must just be for plasma TVs or stuck pixels, even though it says it removes light burn-in from LCD TVs.
Memcached PHP
Installing memcached for php on CentOS is as easy as: -
yum install memcached yum install php-pecl-memcache service httpd graceful
Once installed you can start the memcached service as either a standalone service or as a daemon.
Run as any user other than root, starts as a normal process using up to 1 gig of RAM.
memcached -m1024
Or as a daemon
memcached -d -m1024
You can always get more info about memcached's options with
man memcached
PHP memcache documentation http://php.net/manual/en/book.memcache.php
Memcached's site http://memcached.org/
Easter Egg Run 2010 Nottingham
Had a great day today on the Easter Egg run taking Easter eggs for disadvantaged kids. So many bikes of all kinds there, cruising along throughout Nottingham and out to Mansfield.
Bikes all gathering before departing on the Easter Egg run
Must have been thousands of bikes there, I suspect cars got a bit peeved hehe. The weather was perfect for it though and got me in the mood for riding for the rest of the day, went off for a cruise throughout the country lanes.
Ouchh!
Finally had my wisdom tooth out, not had any dental work done before so was quite a shock hehe. Ah well it's done now and I am chilling at home watching some classics starting with the original Italian job, probably then good ole great escape
Apache ReWrite proxy and spaces
Passing the spaces in a URL through to another URL using a proxy style re-write in Apache can be a slight pain because as standard it basically cuts off the URL at the first space.
The answer is rather easy once you know how: -
RewriteEngine ON
RewriteMap escape int:escape
RewriteRule ^/search/([^/]+)/?$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/index.php?action=search&search_txt=${escape:$1} [P]
In this example index.php should then receive whatever is after /search/ on the url until the next optional /
Gzip Compress Apache’s Output
This has been described many times and in many ways by so many sites, but usually the descriptions are long and tedious. If you simply want to know how to get your website's pages to be compressed if the browser supports it, or not if the browser doesn't add the following lines to your Apache configuration file: -
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
Basically compress anything that can be compressed using the gzip algorithm ignore images because they are already compressed.
I put these directives within my Virtualhost but they could be just used in an .htaccess file I believe.
To test it is working, install the firefox web developers plugin, open your page, click the information drop down and select the option to view the page headers you should see something like: -
Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:42:56 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.x (SGI) X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.xx Expires: Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT Last-Modified: Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:42:57 GMT Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0 Pragma: no-cache Vary: Accept-Encoding Content-Encoding: gzip ----- This being the item of interest Content-Length: 12115 Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 X-Cache: MISS from conway Connection: keep-alive 200 OK
Blogger to wordpress re-write
This may not be the best way to achieve this, but if you have set up some nice permalinks on your wordpress blog and have previously imported your blog from Blogger and want to maintain your links.
I set my permalinks to match my old blogger links i.e year month and blog title first, then I set my apache directory re-write rules as I have described before. Finally I added the following to the re-write
RewriteRule (.*)\.html[\/]?$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/ [P]
Just above the Rewrite conditions and re-write rule generated by word press. It just means that requests to the old flat HTML postings are properly re-directed to the new permalink postings.
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