A bright but very cold and frosty morning greeted us as we loaded up the car to drive over to Resolven to ride in the 2010 Port Talbot Wheelers 2-up '25'. In fact we were both apprehensive - about the weather, yes, but also the uncertainty of what form our winter training had led to. In my case, I was reasonably confident, but I was aware of being rather overweight and lacking in mileage - most of my winter training had been in the form of relatively brief turbo sessions in the garage. On the other hand, my team mate Gerry had left resumption of training until late December, and had then been afflicted with a lengthy cold (possibly the same thing that got me during most of December). So he was pretty sure he was going to be riding sub-par.

The Floyd Landis doping saga has reached new and bizarre levels. Soon after winning the 2006 Tour de France, Landis was stripped of his title after it emerged that he'd tested positive for testosterone.  Of course, and as is the case with just about every case of sports doping, Landis has never admitted guilt, and mounted a spirited defence with a high-powered legal team.  This defence used copies of material obtained from the testing lab, and wa sultimately unsuccessful.

Now, however, it would appear that the case has reached quite unusual levels - Cyclingnews.com reports that a French arrest warrant has been issued - for computer hacking (Arrest Warrant Issued For Landis In France | Cyclingnews.com).  The article claims:

In November 2006, the [Chatanay Malabry] lab reported that its computer systems had been infected with a "Trojan Horse" virus, which was used by someone to access the lab's confidential documents. The lab said that data had been removed or changed, allegedly in an attempt to discredit the work of the organisation.

An email carrying the virus was alleged to have been sent from a computer with the same IP address as that of Landis' coach Arnie Baker. Both Landis and Baker denied any involvement in the hacking, but authorities maintain that the pair made use of pilfered documents in Landis' defense argument.

I posted the other day about the new BTCare customer support forums ( BT and the heavy hand of censorship).  In the intervening few days, the leaden effects of BT censorship have become ever more evident, not least because of the actions of moderators, which has caused a number of the long-standing and helpful/knowledgable members.  Check these threads out:

Cyclingnews. com reports that Riccardo Riccò, whose partner and fellow cyclist Vania Rossi recently tested positive for the CERA derivative of EPO, has now separated from her (Riccò Splits With Girlfriend Rossi Over CERA Positive | Cyclingnews.com).  Nice timing, Riccardo.

I'm fairly sceptical that the two were ignorant of each other's apparent doping practices.  And Riccò has always come across (to me at least) in magazine interviews as rather unrepentant over his doping past.  Cyclingnews quotes Riccò as saying

"I am disappointed with my girlfriend and there can be no reconciliation until Vania is shown to be innocent of the allegations that were raised," said Riccò, according to Italian website Tuttobiciweb.com.

Riccò is of course still banned (until March 18th) for his positive test at the 2008 Tour de France.  I note that Rossi doesn't appear to have dumped him over that transgression.

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I have a Google Mail account, principally because it was the easiest way to set up an account with Google (for things like Google Maps APIs and a few webmaster tools).  I noticed a bit of a buzz on the interweb, but hadn't really looked into it (I normally use Evolution to access my gmail account via IMAP).

I was more than a little surprised to find that I'd been signed up for Buzz by default.  Fortunately I only had two contacts, because I rarely use gmail except as a mail drop for subscriptions, and I hadn't set up a public profile, so there was rather little impact.  I've now turned it off (via the little letters at the bottom of the gmail screen).  For others however, their contacts have been spread around as followers, and their mailboxes receive additional and frequently unwanted input.

The xkcd web comic has been particularly good lately (a standout was the Mars rover comic), but I found the quirkiness of this one just tickled my funny bone:

British Telecom's customer help forums appear to have moved from beta to a final version.  During the great Phorm Phiasco, when BT were planning to use the vile Phorm DPI system to illegally pry into their customers' internet usage, there was great censorship in the beta forums (BT Total Censorship).  I bailed out when I got my final warning from the mods for using the word "it" - to refer to matters that were forbidden, in this case Phorm/Webwise.  All very amusing.  So how do the new forums shape up?  Not well.

We have threads being locked, and repressive conditions.  The whole edifice seems to be a kind of BT newthink where dissent is curtailed, and where moderators' responses differ as a discussion proceeds.  It's notable from the conditions, which explicitly state (and these are drawn from a banning email sent to one of the nodpi.org forum members who had posted there):

Last week, I took delivery of the first new desktop PC I've bought in several years. One of the driving motivations was the form factor of the computer: I wanted a bigger screen than commonly available with a laptop, but also to keep the main box's footprint as small as possible. A decent keyboard & mouse also appreciated.  Just before Xmas, a flier from Dell plopped out of a magazine, and the Inspiron Zino caught my eye. This has a wireless keyboard and mouse, with a pretty small case. The monitor was extra. With Windows 7 upgraded from Home to Professional, the whole package was well under £500.

This is my first exposure to Windows 7 (other than looking at other peoples' laptops). I did have Vista on the Sony notebook that currently runs Ubuntu 9.10, but the notebook's specification was woefully underpowered for Vista, which made for a pretty vile experience. Plus 95% of my computer usage is with Linux these days (mostly Ubuntu). Windows was selected because the household uses both Windows and Linux.

Since receiving the PC, I've installed Ubuntu 9.10 on a partition, and have been setting up various bits of hardware and software (an on-going process). I think the comparison between the two systems is interesting from several perspectives.

For users moving from WinXP to Win7, I reckon there'll be a bit of a learning curve (there certainly has been for me). Everything's there, but arranged in slightly different ways. Icons are rather over-elaborate, making their function a little hard to discern at times. The start menu is vile (as it was in Vista), and makes it a bit of a pain to find programmes. It's possible this can be addressed in some setting tweak however (hints and tips most welcome via the commenting!). There's a nice Mac-style floating tool bar thing that's easily configurable to auto-hide off the edge of the screen. Not sure if that's a default feature of Win7 or if it's just themed by Dell.

The PC is blessed by an almost complete lack of crapware (Thank you Dell, thank you!). On the other hand, the default install doesn't really come with much in the way of serious software. There is a 60 day trial of Office 2007, and a default installation of Works. It came with McAfee antivirus/security software, which rather annoyingly set itself up without giving me the opportunity to say no - as my work network requires that we use Sophos, this was irritating. I set up VPN very easily. The PC sees the home network reasonably effectively, though I find the default layout of the Windows 7 file manager rather confused.
Overall, I find Windows 7 to be pretty good as far as it goes - rather a snappy boot time, but not much to do with it once it's booted. I downloaded GIMP. I downloaded Firefox 3.6 and a bunch of my favourite add-ons. The default browser with 7 is of course Internet Explorer, complete with a single search engine. Bing. With the IE shortcuts consigned to oblivion and replaced with the curly fox, I set about exploring. First up, to get the backup system working (this had been trivial with the Ubuntu partition). I had to identify and download a cygwin installation with rsync and ssh. After a few false starts, I got that done. I set up folders to share and got the rsnapshot.config syntax set up OK. Did a test run, no dice, appeared to be a firewall issue (confirmed by turning the firewall off for a brief period). No problemmo, just open a port. OK, how? I have to identify a programme, then point the firewall interface to the exe file to open a port (no indication what the port number is). Yep, works.

I installed iTunes (not my most favourite programme in the world, but I use it for the iPod Touch) - looks as though migrating my iTunes library may be a bit complex. Decide to postpone this. I go to install a driver for my printer (HP 2575). No joy, it's not listed. I wander off to the HP website, where a 378Mb download is available. Blimey! 378Mb! I decline. I notice an search for drivers option on the original Win 7 dialogue box. Click it. After a significant wait, lo and behold! a driver is available, which I download and install. I've no idea what it is, how big it is, or where it's from, but it can't be the monstrous HP file, since it sets itself up pretty quickly. And it works.

In contrast, the Ubuntu installation came with just about anything needed, with everything else (just about) available on demand via Synaptic. And it wasn't until jumping in and out of both OSs for a couple of evenings that I realised just what it was that I was finding difficult with Win7 (which to be honest, I don't actually dislike particularly).  This was a sense of constraint. I felt constrained by having only one desktop, by not really being able to change the desktop theme beyond basic colour and image options. Constrained by not knowing exactly what was in the various updates the system has been downloading. Constrained by software availability. And constrained by all the tweaks I'm able to implement on Linux but not on Win 7 (top must be a showdown between the guake terminal and being able to set double-clicking the window titlebar to roll up the window).

Postscript: Amid the myriad of small booklets that arrived in the box was a brief guide to the Ubuntu desktop! From the look of it, aimed at first time users of the Netbook version of Ubuntu...

I picked the news that Better Advertising Acquires Ghostery via the No DPI forum.  Ghostery is a very popular plugin that identifies tracking scripts on webpages, and offers the option of blocking said scripts.   I'm not sure how significant this will prove to be, but I note from the Better Advertising web page that

According to a report at the Cyclingnews website today (Valverde Offers To Submit DNA Sample | Cyclingnews.com), Alejandro Valverde has offered to provide a sample for DNA testing to establish for once and for all whether the blood in the blood bags (i.e. the bag or bags labelled Valv.(Piti)) is indeed taken from him. It astonishes me that such a test has no been conducted thus far, as it would provide indisputable proof as to whether or not the blood was his.  Now, of course, that is only important if the transfusions service was aimed at supplementing an athlete with his own blood (autologous transfusion).  If the practice was using another athlete's blood (homologous transfusion - use of blood from a donor that has been checked for compatibility*), the bag might contain blood from someone else. While the UCI and WADA are happy to take him up on this, CONI isn't - Cyclingnews reports: