There's a news flash that Iban Mayo has tested positive for EPO during this year's Tour de France; specifically on July 24, 2007.

Not much else available right now, but here's my theory: Iban Mayo, Haimar Zubeldia and Roberto Laiseka are all dopers.

Why? At one point, they were nowhere on the pro scene, then a few years back they were suddenly up there with the strongest riders. Also, all three were on the same team (Euskaltel-Euskadi) and thus subject to the same treatment by team doctors, and then *poof* they switched teams and now they can't deliver.

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For the 5 or 6 people out there who have ever wanted a Corvette Station Wagon, your dreams have come true... More pics here

I just got a new Mac and wanted to do two things: update Ruby, and install Rails. This post deliberately does not include any information about FastCGI, or Lighttpd, or any other customizations. This gets your Mac from "no rails" to "rails" quickly, and that's all. ;)

If you get stuck anywhere, check the following pages, as both of them are far more detailed than mine (and therefore take longer to dig through):

http://hivelogic.com/narrative/articles/ruby_rails_lighttpd_mysql_tiger?status=301

http://developer.apple.com/tools/rubyonrails.html

1. Update Ruby
Your Mac already has Ruby installed, but it's probably an older version (likely 1.8.2; run "/usr/bin/ruby -v" to check). To install the latest version of Ruby (which is currently 1.8.6), paste the following into a Terminal window:

cd /tmp; curl ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz -O; tar xzvf ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz; cd ruby-1.8.6; ./configure; make; sudo make install

You should now have Ruby 1.8.6 installed at /usr/local/bin/ruby, and you can verify with a quick test:

# ruby -v
ruby 1.8.6 (2007-03-13 patchlevel 0) [i686-darwin8.10.1]

2. Install "readline"
The most recent version is 5.2. To install it, paste the following into a Terminal window:

cd /tmp; curl ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/readline/readline-5.2.tar.gz; tar xzvf readline-5.2.tar.gz -O; cd readline-5.2; ./configure --prefix=/usr/local; make; sudo make install

3. Install RubyGems
Get the latest version from here: http://rubygems.org
For example, I downloaded rubygems-0.9.4.tgz, moved it to /tmp, then did the following:

cd /tmp; tar xzvf rubygems-0.9.4.tgz; cd rubygems-0.9.4; sudo /usr/local/bin/ruby setup.rb

4. Install Ruby on Rails
Run this:

sudo gem install rails --include-dependencies

Verify that it worked:

/usr/local/bin/rails -v
Rails 1.2.3

It was just announced that Alexander Vinokourov has tested positive for blood transfusion on the day of the individual time trial (which he won). As a result, he and his entire team have been kicked out of the Tour. What a disappointment...

Here's a nice follow-up about the iPhone/Duke network issues from Tracy Futhey, Duke’s chief information officer:

By now many of you have read news accounts around iPhones and Duke's wireless network. Some of the reports incorrectly made it sound as if our entire wireless network had collapsed. Others made it sound as if the iPhone could not work correctly on our wireless network. Still others seem to imply that Duke's network was deficient in some way because the problem had not been encountered more broadly. The reality is that a particular set of conditions made the Duke wireless network experience some minor and temporary disruptions in service. Those conditions involve our deployment of a very large Cisco-based wireless network that supports multiple network protocols.

Cisco worked closely with Duke and Apple to identify the source of this problem, which was caused by a Cisco-based network issue. Cisco has provided a fix that has been applied to Duke's network and there have been no recurrences of the problem since. We are working diligently to fully characterize the issue and will have additional information as soon as possible.  Earlier reports that this was a problem with the iPhone in particular have proved to be inaccurate.

Originally posted here: Update on Duke's wireless network and Apple's iPhones

I've tried to get iChat working with a Windows AIM user, and after some trial and error we found this page which pointed out that AIM 6.0 doesn't work with video, but 5.9 does, and you can get the 5.9 installer from here:
http://ftp.newaol.com/aimgen/73010/Install_AIM_5.9.3861.exe

On the drive home tonight, I turned on the radio and heard Don't Phunk With My Heart (Black Eyed Peas, audio soundbyte here). But the version they played was edited to use "mess" instead of "funk", so the line became, "no no no no, don't mess with my heart".

W
T
F

This is exactly why I can't stand mainstream radio. Most of the time it's a bunch of overplayed, lifeless, corporate bullshit, but the few songs that are any good get edited so they suck.

The word is FUNK (with an "N" not a "C").

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I finally started using Flickr to host / share my photos, and I've christened my photo stream with some photos of my Stratocaster.

I recently replaced my manual-focus 50mm prime lens with a much nicer auto-focus 50mm. A fixed lens is not versatile by any means, but can produce striking results for the right shot. I'm pretty happy with this shot.

Interesting excerpt about Nintendo's inability to meet consumer demand for the Wii console, full article here: Can The Wii Save Your Life?. The article also states that Nintendo has sold more than 10 million consoles in 8 months.

Q. Is the limited supply of Wiis at retail a sign that Nintendo is artificially restricting the number of units, or is this all that Nintendo's manufacturing process can bear? Is this a strategy?

A. This is the limit of our production right now. Since our business of selling hardware is not flat over the year--it goes way up around the holidays--we try to strike a balance with our parts suppliers. They'd rather have to make the same number of parts each month. Our total inventory is only 2 1/2 weeks worth of supply. A normal supply would be six weeks. Right now we're living hand to mouth, and it's not clear that we're going to get on top of that in time for the holidays.

Just read Kenny Larkin's recent blog post about his new iPhone, cool stuff from someone who's really using it (and coming from the Blackberry world, too). He's got some good criticisms of it, but also great praise.

In particular, I've heard lots of grumbling about the virtual keyboard... is it as fast as the Blackberry keyboard? Kenny says just keep typing on the iPhone, even if you're making mistakes, because the iPhone will figure out the right words and correct you on the fly. Once you get the hang of it, it's apparently faster than the Blackberry keyboard.

Anyway, the big juicy bit is that you can activate an iPhone without doing the usual 2-year contract through AT&T. When you enter your social security number, use all 1's (so 111-11-1111). This is a special case number that means "my credit sucks", and AT&T will offer 3 options for activation, one of which is prepaid plan.

My friend Justin sent me an alternative to my post about making a Nokia 6133 work with iSync. It's a little bit more involved, but the results are better.

I just saw your blog post, wanted to let you know of another way to enable it that actually worked much better that the plugin you linked. The 6133 is the US version of the 6131, which already has a bundled plugin, so just transform that into a 6133 plugin! I found this method, while more cumbersome to implement, supported the phone better than any of the plugins I found for download.

In a Terminal, go into:

/Applications/iSync.app/Contents/PlugIns
/ApplePhoneConduit.syncdevice/Contents/PlugIns

and copy the 6131 folder but name it with 6133 instead. Go into the new Nokia-6133.phoneplugin/Contents folder and run:

perl -pi -e 's/6131/6133/g' Info.plist

Then cd into Resources and run the same perl command on MetaClasses.plist and rename the .tiff file to have 6133.

That's it, now you can add the phone and sync all the address book fields including physical address (all the other plugins crammed the address into a note, which then at the next sync screwed up my contacts on the mac by moving the address to a note).

I was talking about headphones today with a co-worker, and I got all fired up about the Grado SR 60. I bought a pair about 6 years ago and absolutely love them. The only thing that's a negative is that they use an open earcup, so exterior noise is not blocked out, and people nearby can hear your tunes - so they're a bit distracting in an office environment. Other than that, they sound great, look cool, they're comfortable and lightweight, they pack easily, and they're much cheaper than just about eveything else out there.

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Here's a graph that proves both Fabian Cancellara and Andreas Kloden are taking drugs.

The data here shows the time gaps in the 2007 Tour de France prologue time trial. The first bar is 0, that's the winner (Fabian Cancellara), so the time gap to himself is 0 on the chart. The 2nd place rider is Andreas Kloden, he was 13 seconds back so his bar on the chart is at 13. The 3rd, 4th, etc. places are all quite close each other, only off by a few seconds at most. It's only 1st and 2nd places that are so much faster than everyone else.

I built this chart using the Prologue Time Trial time data from cyclingnews.com.

This chart clearly shows that Fabian Cancellara is doping. Why? Because he's way, way ahead of everyone else. Sure, this isn't "proof", but proof is unnecessary - if you're much faster than everyone, it follows that you're on drugs. Many people use this as their only justification that Lance Armstrong was doping, so after we've established that shaky logic, it follows that every rider who performs substantially better than the rest of the field is in fact cheating.

This spreadsheet illustrates the point beautifully, and from it we can conclude with absolute certainty that both Cancellara and Andreas Kloden are both cheating.

Ok, I think I've figured out the "secret" to finding out who is and isn't doping in professional cycling.

Here goes:

1. Any cyclist who wins a race (or comes close) is clearly doping. If a rider is racing clean, then basically he should lose against the rest of the field, because as we all know everyone in the pro field is doping, so whoever beats the field must clearly be doping, too. For example, Fabian Cancellara not only won the World TT Championship last fall but also just beat the entire field in the prologue TT. Clearly, he's cheating.

2. If a rider is implicated in any way, or involved (either directly or indirectly) with anything or anyone who ever has (or has not) been involved with anything that may (or may not) have been related to doping, then clearly that rider is guilty of doping. If you need examples on this point, just wait a few days and read the latest news. It seems we can't make it more than a few days without hearing of another "guilty" rider. Perhaps we should just ban the entire pro field on the grounds that at least some of them cheated, and the rest are surely friends with those guys, so they must all be guilty by association.

3. If the rider is French, he is excused from both of the above points (anyone remember Richard Virenque?).

Think Secret posted photos of an iPhone disassembly (page one, page two).

It's kinda cool to see the inside, but then I saw the busted glass and broken parts (for example, here). Poor little iPhone. They sacrificed it for our collective viewing pleasure... :(