http://flamencohead.com/flamencohead/index.php/site/index/ en robert@flamencohead.com Copyright 2010 2010-10-18T13:32:21+00:00 http://flamencohead.com/flamencohead/index.php?/site/pasero-patterson_at_enzo/ http://flamencohead.com/flamencohead/index.php?/site/pasero-patterson_at_enzo/#When:13:32:21Z The music series at Enzo might be the best kept secret on the San Mateo coast. Saturday’s concert by Stevan Pasero and Richard Patterson showed why. Pasero and Patterson are both very accomplished musicians in their own right. Richard Patterson also is the director of the Omni Concert Series which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. Richard’s maininfluences are classical Spanish guitar, where Stevan seems to have a wide variety of influences including Bosa Nova, Tango and Jazz. Together it is a wonderful hybrid. Their performance at Enzo was mostly Latin American music and even the maluguena was the classic Maleguena by Lecuomo, a Cuban. The set included a Bosa Nova sequence, pieces from Venezuela, Cuba and Argentine Tangos. The Tangos ware possibly in honor of Mauro, our host and the driving force behind Enzo. Mauro is Argentine. I loved every piece. What really makes this special though is the venue and the whole experience. Picture 40 of your close and new found friends, getting together for wine and a delicious meal at a house on the beach followed by a private concert by two of the best Spanish guitarists you have ever heard. It doesn’t get any better in my book. Music 2010-10-18T13:32:21+00:00 http://flamencohead.com/flamencohead/index.php?/site/new_legs_for_the_990/ http://flamencohead.com/flamencohead/index.php?/site/new_legs_for_the_990/#When:19:52:43Z Swapping out the original forks on my Trek 990 really gives new life to the bike. Last night I took the Trek 990 for a spin after swapping out the original front suspension, headset and stem. Wow! I love this bike. The original Trek DS2 fork was an early air fork with limited travel and almost no adjust-ability. It was good at the time, but times have changed and the seals were starting to go. I wanted to upgrade it with a modern fork with more travel, but didn’t want to drift to far from the original design center and look. I also wanted to keep the existing vBrakes. I ended up finding a good deal on a Manitou R7 with VBrake bosses and 100mm travel. The DS2 is a threaded fork, swapping it out with the R7 also meant upgrading to a threadless headset and stem. I went with   Manitou R7 Absolute Fork   Cane Creek S8 Headset   Ritchey WCS Stem The whole job cost about $400 and 2 hours of work. It was time and money well spent. I had never replaced a headset or cut a fork before but with advise from friends and The Big Blue Book it went smoothly. After the conversion, the bike climbs like a bunny on mate. The fork is very light and with the fork locked out is super stiff. On descents, the bike gives me more confidence than my SuperLight with its old Manitou Skareb fork. That fork will be the next one to go. Bicycle 2010-10-15T19:52:43+00:00 http://flamencohead.com/flamencohead/index.php?/site/the_middleburn_xtr_kit_has_arrived/ http://flamencohead.com/flamencohead/index.php?/site/the_middleburn_xtr_kit_has_arrived/#When:23:32:33Z Just in from the UK - a full set of Middleburn rings with the XTR spider. I’ll post photos and details of the installation soon. I picked them up at Chain Reaction Cycles. The shipping cost to the US was surprisingly low and very prompt. I’ll definately do business with them again. Bicycle 2010-01-13T23:32:33+00:00 http://flamencohead.com/flamencohead/index.php?/site/replacing_the_weird_2002_xtr_fc-m952_chainrings/ http://flamencohead.com/flamencohead/index.php?/site/replacing_the_weird_2002_xtr_fc-m952_chainrings/#When:15:07:50Z What do you do when your old M972 XTR chainrings wear out… In giving the new old superlight a tune up I noticed that the chainrings are showing signs of wear so I put “replace chainrings” on the to do list. No problem, put it on the To DO list. But it is a problem. The 2002 Shimano FC-M952 has a very functional but totally non standard design. It is spiderless and has an unusual 68/110 four bolt pattern. The replacement rings for this kit are almost impossible to find and when you do they are expensive. I could replace the whole crankset but now we are talking hundreds of dollars for something equivalent to the XTR. After a lot of googling I found that Middleburn in the UK makes an XTR M952 replacement spider. This spider replaces the original spider from XTR M952 cranks, allowing you to run your choice of 4 bolt 104/64 BCD chainrings. MTB Tandems sells these and other Middleburn components (scroll to the very bottom of the page). I may just keep the old XTR BB abd crank arms and convert to Middleburn chainrings using this adapter. Or any other 64/104 BCD chainrings for that matter. Bicycle 2009-12-19T15:07:50+00:00 http://flamencohead.com/flamencohead/index.php?/site/woo-hoo_a_new_old_bike/ http://flamencohead.com/flamencohead/index.php?/site/woo-hoo_a_new_old_bike/#When:16:57:07Z Lately I’ve picked up Mountain Biking again. It has been about 15 years since I did anything other than the occasional fire road. I still have my 1992 Trek 990 Singletrack, but it is a hard tail and I’m 15 years older than I was when I last rode it on single track. Ebay to the rescue! Last week I picked up an used Santa Cruz Superlight on eBay and I’m tracking the shipping progress hourly. The photo is the new old Superlight. Bicycle 2009-12-16T16:57:07+00:00 http://flamencohead.com/flamencohead/index.php?/site/where_is_my_jdk/ http://flamencohead.com/flamencohead/index.php?/site/where_is_my_jdk/#When:21:17:19Z I’ve been setting up a new Ubuntu 9.0.4 box at work. Intuit standard issue is Windows and a few brave soles here are setting up Linux dev boxes for working on projects that don’t require it. Out of the box, Ubuntu has the Gnu JVM and JDK installed. You can install the Sun JDK 1.6 using the Synaptic Package Manage. Great! But after I did that, I was surprised to see that the default JVM and JDK were still pointing to the Gnu versions. A little googling turned up this howto install and configure the Sun Java Development Kit. Tech Stuff 2009-10-26T21:17:19+00:00 http://flamencohead.com/flamencohead/index.php?/site/code.intuit.com_goes_live/ http://flamencohead.com/flamencohead/index.php?/site/code.intuit.com_goes_live/#When:13:18:42Z Yesterday was a big day on code.intuit.com. We went live with a press announcement that was picked up by infoworld and many others. There is even a welcome video from yours truly. We are seeing a noticeable uptick in traffic and registrations. But this is really just a beginning. We need to translate the interest and good will into engagement.     Tech Stuff 2009-07-28T13:18:42+00:00 http://flamencohead.com/flamencohead/index.php?/site/Geek_Dream_Office/ http://flamencohead.com/flamencohead/index.php?/site/Geek_Dream_Office/#When:17:48:46Z A friend a work forwarded me a link to a geek’s dream home office. The author, Mitch Haile, lives in Boston and works for a Bay Area company. He essentially built his own deluxe data center in his attic. It is a bit over the top but like he says: "I’m in here 60-80 hours a week right now. It’s way less depressing than long hours in a cube farm with an uncomfortable desk and phone books to boost the monitor height." Tech Stuff 2009-02-27T17:48:46+00:00 http://flamencohead.com/flamencohead/index.php?/site/Build_Tools_set_up_with_Maven_and_Hudson/ http://flamencohead.com/flamencohead/index.php?/site/Build_Tools_set_up_with_Maven_and_Hudson/#When:06:13:10Z We are almost finished setting up the code.intuit.com Build Tools project. This is an internal support project for the code.intuit.com community that provides build tools and support for projects that are hosted here. This includes:   Continuous integration and automated release builds using Hudson   Maven repository management using Nexus   Scripts, poms, etc to support consistent builds We have a couple of projects that are building now and we’ll be having a code jam Thursday to get a couple more up and running. For our pilot, we are using a CollabNet hosted Cubit environment. We are not sure if we will stick with cubit or not. We are also trying to figure out what level of build support that we will offer to projects, if we will charge projects back, etc. Tech Stuff 2009-02-04T06:13:10+00:00 http://flamencohead.com/flamencohead/index.php?/site/Going_open_phase_2/ http://flamencohead.com/flamencohead/index.php?/site/Going_open_phase_2/#When:04:07:37Z Things are coming together on code.intuit.com. That is the domain for the Open Source Community we are building at Intuit. The goal is to build an active community around Intuit’s Partner Platform services and APIs. We have our initial pilot projects in place and are in the process of making the code open source ready. Mostly that means improving the documentation, adding more unit tests and changing the copyright information in the source. As of today, we have 90 registered users who are all Intuit developers. Only a handful of these are active contributors but we expect both numbers to increase when we start showing the site to external developers. We have been spending time recently working on the contributor and licensing models. We’ll be rolling that out when we get legal and executive agreement. We will be going with a business and developer friendly contributor agreement. For outbound licensing, we are looking at a liberal license such as Common Public License. Once we decide, we’ll be updating code.intuit.com with the details. This is one fun project. Tech Stuff 2009-01-27T04:07:37+00:00