metaruss

Swapped back to the original tires and put the Blizzaks in storage.  They were excellent tires in the sloppy weather, though we had a fairly mild winter this year.  Dry traction and handling is horrible, but I was expecting that given the very soft compound and tall treads.  Gonna start on the CSX so I can start tearing into this thing.

bup is a backup and restore tool that uses tar to create archives.  The archives are
automatically named and split into 1GB chunks to accomodate any file system.  The archives
are optionally compressed using bzip2.  It is essentially another wrapper for tar,
which can be a pain when the backups are large.  I haven’t found one that is as easy to use
as this one (at least for me).  I do all my backups to a remote machine with a removeable
hard drive bay via NFS.

Packages

• bup_0.9.1-1_i386.deb
• bup_0.9.1-1.tar.gz
• bup_0.9.1-1.dsc

Sorune is a tool written in Perl by Darren Smith.  It is used to manage the database on the Neuros Audio player.  Features include:

• A simple GUI that makes management easy (requires Perl Tk).
• All music formats are supported (mp3, ogg, wav, wma(non-drm)). All native file tags are supported.
• Full m3u playlist support.
• Database rebuild support.
• Tagging by directory layout.
• Sort by title on artists, genres, songs and recordings. Sort by track number on albums.
• Maintains directory/file names as well as file access/modification times during sync.
• Moving of recordings to user specified directory.
• Foreign language accents in tags are handled (converted to the nearest English equivalent).
• Handling of duplicate title names. Appends a number in parenthesis “(2)” or “(3)” to the title.
• Sub-menu support.
• Various artist support.Separate binary from libraries.

See the man page for more information.

Packages

The latest beta release:

• sorune_0.5-1_all.deb
• sorune_0.5-1.diff.gz
• sorune_0.5-1.dsc
• sorune man page

Latest stable release:

• sorune_0.4-1_all.deb
• sorune_0.4-1.diff.gz
• sorune_0.4-1.dsc

Changes from Original Source

• Separate binary from libraries.
• Fix native library include path.
• Created man page.

Version 0.5-2 of subversion-helper-scripts has been released. This is a bug fix update to the initial public release, which includes an example global config file.

Strange thing happened.  I tried to go to work one snowy morning, but I couldn’t get the beast started.  It popped a few times, but then nothing.  It was snowing out, which made it a pain to diagnose, but I had fuel and spark.  Finally I checked the timing and found that the cam was fine but the ignition had jumped about 50 degrees.  I cranked the distributer around to get the rotor pointing at #1 again and it fired right up.  The timing belt was done anyway, so I went ahead and replaced it.  Also fixed a bunch of little vacuum leaks.  Runs better than ever.  Will have the Blizzaks shortly….

The stupid radiator core support broke and the engine mount smashed the crap out of the radiator.  Whatever moron at whatever body shop fixed this thing did a really crappy job.  They replaced some of the metal, but didn’t bother to actually weld any of it together.  Instead they put a couple of pop rivits in, used the wrong bolts on the ends, and let the rest of it float around (which is why the hood looks a little unsteady at speed).  The core support itself was not even straightened out.  Instead they welded some angle iron and a piece of a bed frame to it and hoped for the best.  The remaining sheet metal fatigued, cracked, and ripped apart.  I pushed everything back where it is supposed to be, more or less, and welded it together.  It should hold for a while.  Ideally I should cut that whole mess out and weld in a new one, but I can probably do some creative sheet metal bending and make it work too.

My intent was to build-up this motor over the summer, but I simply didn’t have time.  I also wanted to fix the fender and paint the hood, but again no time (house stuff).  I spent most of my free time trying to get the CSX ready for the convention.  So, the Daytona basically sat in the garage all summer while I drove the CSX.

Before putting the CSX away and getting the Daytona back on the road, I did manage to fix a few things.  I went to a local fabric store and purchased new headliner material and finally fixed that stupid thing.  While I had it out, I installed the ’87 overhead console and associated wiring.  While doing that, I also prepared the wiring to accept the early 12-button navigator in the ’91 slot.  This required splicing in about 12″ of wire into the harness so it would reach.  Also fixed a few other electrical gremlins.  The compass in the overhead console has a problem retaining it’s calibration and the thermometer was way out of whack.  I managed to calibrate the thermometer, but I was not able to get the little microcontroller in there to keep its memory.  I’m not sure what causes it to lose its brains, but it is fairly intermittent.  My primary motivation to install it was the compass (I don’t have the best sense of direction), but it will have to wait.

Put the car to rest for the winter.  The inner tripod on the passenger side axle is pretty loose and the car needs tires, but other than that it ran good all summer/fall.  I do need to drop the oil pan and install the crank scraper, oil temp bung, and possibly some baffling.  The one thing that got me at the driving school at SDAC was oil supply problems.  By the end of the session the car was running pretty bad because of collapsed lifters.

cats2procmailrc is a tool written in Perl by Cameron Simpson.  It reads a human friendly mail category description file and emits a matching procmail recipe to implement it. The intent is to have an extremely succinct file of easily editable one line rules, generally of the form:

folder tag pattern

See the man page for more information.

Packages

• cats2procmailrc_1.5-1_all.deb
• cats2procmailrc_1.5-1.diff.gz
• cats2procmailrc_1.5-1.dsc
• man page

Changes from Original Source

• Add missing -T option implementation.
• Disable double quote stripping for maildirs.

09/28/04: Version 1.4 – had some mechanical issues that had me chasing my tail. Ended up undoing a lot of changes and putting them back.  The accumilated changes include an unscaled AISBaroCompensation table, some changes to the AIS off idle position, changed all the boost tables to 21psi, took some fuel out of the fuel baseline, added some fuel to cold start table C, grabbed the non-MP no throttle fuel table and fine-tuned it to reduce exhaust popping and funny behavior in high vacuum, slight tweaks to starting fuel, and kicked the whole PEFTBL up by 10%.