Every now and then it happens – you flat.  More frequently on a road bike then a mountain bike, but it happens to both at some point.  After a flat, should you patch the tube or throw it away?

As for preparation for the inevitable, well you should always carry two New tubes as spares. You should also have a ‘patch kit’ or more appropriately some ready to use preglued patches.  These are in case you flat more than twice – yes I personally have flatted 3 times on more than one occasion on my road bike (although in one case I borrowed a tube from someone else rather than patch).

When you do flat you should always take your punctured tube with your or dispose properly of it.

Thus my first rule is after clearing my tire from any debris which is poking through the tire causing the flat is to use a new tube.  Note that I specified “New” tubes earlier.  Your spare tubes should never have been previously patched. If you are using a patched tube and you flat 300yds down the road you don’t know if your patch failed or if you left debris in the tire – with a new tube you can be confident that you didn’t clear the tire correctly (and apply the appropriate expletives while changing your tire AGAIN).

Once you get back to base/home you have a damaged tube in your pocket (or are you just happy to see me Which brings me back to the question of should you trash or patch it? 

Well my preference is to patch once.  Only once, because each patch introduces another potential point of failure and so I limit myself to one patch on a given tube.

Having said that for what to do when riding where does patching fit in and why?  Well the fact is that a patch introduces a new point of failure in your tire.  No not the ability of the patch itself to withstand pressure, but the glue holding the patch down.   Applying the patch on the road is risky because depending on your skill a large number of patches aren’t applied correctly to start with not to mention on the road it’s harder to tell if you’ve gotten the hole(s).  That's why you carry two spares since

Thus for me the rule of patching is: to patch a tube and place it back on the bike at home.  It doesn’t matter whether I’m swapping that good tube back out to be a spare again or if I’m replacing a worn tire with a new one.  Along with this the goal is to patch in the evening allow the patch to hold overnight (showing it was a good patch) and then do a short ride and finally leave the patch in the sun/heat.  I bring this up because I’ve repeatedly had new patches which seemed to hold, even to support me during a short ride to suddenly fail when my bike was parked in the sun.  In some cases with more traditional patches I was able to re-inflate the tire and in the process the patch had gotten a better seal – in other cases especially with a self adhering patch, the patch was dead. 

Thus I am willing to patch a tube for reuse locally and allow it to prove itself.  However, I wouldn’t patch or install a patched tube if I was preparing a new tire for use as part of a long ride or an important ride where I didn’t want to risk a failed patch flat.

It's been a while since I posted.... I have several items to comment on but I've been on vacation and more focused on setting up some updates related to the blog vs. adding content.  So I wanted to quickly comment on the Tour de France (http://www.letour.fr/2007/TDF/LIVE/us/200/index.html).  It started Saturday and one of (in my opinion) the advantages of living on the West Coast is that the live broadcast runs from ~5:30 AM till ~8:30 AM daily (http://www.versus.com/tdf/article/view/758/?ss=tv&tf=Body.tpl).  The result is I can wake up around 6 tune in the tour and see the results of that days stage before starting my day.

The tour itself is great motivation to get out and ride.  Watching these guys do 100+ miles a day for 3 weeks is inspiring.  I had a great Mountain Bike ride last week I'll talk about in a later post but there is nothing like a morning or afternoon out on the roadie.  This morning's race (stage 2) also brought home how the Tour is like a more environmentally friendly version of Nascar.  (note I'm not claiming the tour IS environmentally friendly - as you watch riders toss plastic bottles to the side of the road and consider the chase vehicles etc... )

• both involve a "man" piloting a machine (Nascar has women drivers)
• both races are on a paved (or other road) surface
• both involve corporate sponsors with their name on every available surface
• both are more exciting (to the average TV viewer) when there is a pile-up/wreck (http://community.active.com/blogs/MartinDugard/2007/07/09/a-lot-of-tension)
• both seemingly individual sports have a team aspect that changes the underlying dynamics
• both have issues with particpants 'juicing' there 'engine' - the body (steriods) in cycling, the car and it's combustion engine in Nascar
• both have fans that line the course drinking copius amounts of adult beverages

Now obviously there are differences for example the Tour's course takes you through most of France over the course of a month with beautiful scenary and Nascar uses loops and only races on weekends; but in general aside from the fact that the Tour doesn't burn copius amounts of fuel to power it's vehicles the dynamics of the event are somewhat the same.  There are of course many more intracacies to the Tour (and bicycle racing in general) than (in my opinion) to Nascar but that's beyond the scope of this musing.  Oh and just like in Taledega Nights - if you aren't first, you're last.

Last Friday Microsoft announced a new product family under the heading Popfly.  Popfly leverages the recently announced Silverlight technology.  Silverlight allows you to create interactive media style applications for the web.  Popfly is focused on taking items such as Silverlight applications or other existing web contact and pulling these individual resources together to form larger applications.

The basic idea is to create "Mashups", what's a Mashup, well in short in terms of Web applications, a mashup is a web page which combines content from multiple sources.  The terms been around long enough for publishers like WROX to actually create books on the practice (such as this one on using Flickr: Mashups for Flickr).  Currently however, to create these technologies you are essentially working from scratch.

Popfly is a set of extensions for Visual Studio as well as a Live Spaces area to allow you to really start creating Mashups in a more drag and drop fashion.  The basics of the tool are available at http://www.popfly.com and for additional resources I suggest going to this blog entry from Adam Nathan and checking out the demonstration video he links to: http://blogs.msdn.com/adam_nathan/archive/2007/05/18/yes-i-m-on-the-microsoft-popfly-team.aspx

It's going to allow many more people to create sites with a great deal more interactivity.  It's still in Alpha and you have to apply to participate on the Popfly site but it definitely looks cool.

It's quite common to hear that anyone can be a developer.  Microsoft and other technology companies are infamous for telling us how everyone from a 9 year old through a 99 year old can be a developer.  However, it's a little like saying that everyone from a 9 year old through a 99 year old can play baseball.  (I'm using baseball and softball for this discussion in a gender neutral fashion.  I understand that most women play softball, but the gist of the discussion is not gender specific.)

Yes everyone from a 9 yr old child to a 99 year old "can" play but when you start talking about professional players - what's the real range of 'who can play?'  Don't get me wrong even when I was say eighteen through twenty-five I wasn't a baseball star (or any other sport for that matter).  Sure I knew how to play, and would even participate in a softball game at say a company or church picnic.  But was I professional?  Not a chance, and there's a reason - I wasn't nearly as good as those people being picked to play for organized teams.  In this case I'll even extend 'professional' to the college ranks to make it clear it's gender neutral.  Let's face it those teams pick the best available players, and while anyone may have the basic skills to hit and catch the ball - only the best stick with it and are worth investing in that skill.

It is much the same in software development.  Sure anyone 'can' write some code.  Anyone can write a 'Hello World' program or type up a basic HTML page.  But does that mean anyone can act as a professional software engineer?  The answer as with baseball, is not really.  Sure you can hire people who will take your money and accept the title of Software Engineer, but in the long run neither you nor they will be happy.  Similar to other skilled professions (everything from Doctors to Electricians to Truck Drivers) certain people just do better in the software industry.  So how do you spot them?

Well there have been several essays but finally there is a new book coming from an author I trust on this subject.  Joel Spolsky author of Joel on Software is releasing a new book on hiring software and related technical people.  I've just ordered a copy and depending upon your role you might want to do the same. 

Given Joel's history while you may not agree with everything he has to say, you should at least consider this book if you are in the business of helping to interview new engineers.  I'm sure I'll have more to say once I've read this book but for now, given how much I liked his last two books (with Joel on Software being the better of the two) I'm confident in recommending this before I've read it.

The ride was yesterday.  Thankfully it was a beautiful day in the low 70's.  The ride left from Cuyamaca College.  It took me till a little after 12, with 3 rest stops, 1 stop to aid another cyclist and later a flat tire of my own.  Overall my average speed was 13.1 mph which was passable.  I was once again able to show the value of riding a triple (haven't tried one of the new compact doubles).  To put it in comparison my 13.1 average speed was .8 mph slower then I did in 2005, when it was in the 90's and there were issues with heat.  But that takes care of next year and next year (unless they move the location) I'll just have to do better.

BTW, the best part of the ride actually came after I finished.  I ran into someone who I had suggested try out the ride.  He had done the 30 mile route and had a great time.

I'm planning to teach the Spring quarter's edition of Visual Basic II.  The class is designed to pick up for students who have been through an introductory .NET Framework class and an initial Programming with Visual Basic I class.  Previously the class has focused on .NET 2.0 but with the recently released .NET 3.0 now available we'll be spending some of the additional class time looking at things like XAML, WPF, WF and LINQ (part of the .NET 3.5 feature set).  Additionally for those interested in handling existing VB6 code we'll be talking about the Visual Basic Power Packs which allow you to interoperate between Visual Basic 6 and Visual Basic .NET code within your existing application.  My goal is to ensure that students completing this class have an  understanding not only where .NET is today and how to work with Visual Basic - but where Visual Basic and .NET are going and how to be positioned so that what happened with Visual Basic 6 doesn't again happen to those working in Visual Basic.

The class can be registered for through UCSD at:

http://extension.ucsd.edu/studyarea/index.cfm?vAction=singleCourse&vCourse=CSE-40616&vStudyAreaId=14

One of the items which came up at the MVP Summit involved the availability of VB Samples online.  It's funny how sometimes you'll see the difference between those in Redmond and internal to Microsoft and those of us on the outside.  In this case the response of the VB Team was effectively: "What are you talking about we ship samples along with each CTP, the C# team has their posted because they aren't all in the product."  (Note I'm paraphrasing what I recall hearing here.)

Anyway the MVP's made it quite clear that from a perceptions standpoint the fact that the C# samples were easily available via the web while the VB samples were MIA was a problem.  So the VB Team committed to making their samples available online.  The result is that if you head over to the LINQ Samples page you’ll find both C# and VB Samples.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/bb330936.aspx

Which reminds me of a second link to LINQ - For those of you who are still getting up to speed you'll find alot of great introductory information related to LINQ at: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vbasic/aa904594.aspx

For those of you working with WPF, WF, WCF and other cutting edge .NET technology Microsoft made Beta 1 of Visual Studio Orcas available today you can download it here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=36B6609E-6F3D-40F4-8C7D-AD111679D8DC&displaylang=en

Update:

The link above is for the VPC version.  MSDN Subscribers should have access to an MSI to install the tools (in ISO format) but it isn't publicly available.  For those of you more familiar with or looking for a smaller download that can be installed there are also Express Editions of Orcas available here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/future/default.aspx

One last entry as I'm preparing to wrap for the day.  Found this new site which indicates that as of today, what was previously called WPF/E is now known as "Silverlight" - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/asp.net/bb187358.aspx

Lots of good information and links for Silverlight at that location.

A new story on how they've discovered the gene responsible for a genetic pre-disposition to diabetes (and all you ever hear is it's because people eat too many carbs... wrong - even before the gene was found it was known to be a genetic problem.)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18122308/site/newsweek/wid/11915773?GT1=9303

Apparently according to this article the the gene in question is #10.... you might have one copy that's bad or two but having even one increases your risk of Type 2 diabetes significantly.  As for me - well I already have Type 2 Diabetes so no reason for me to get tested - and as for my son - why would I possibly want to have him tested?  I don't plan on telling him I have Diabetes once he's old enough to really understand because I don't want him to be black-listed for insurance and other activities - thus what possible benefit would there be to getting him tested?  The fact is leading a healthy lifestyle with exercise and diet is the only defense until and after you get diagnosed so unlike say a breast cancer risk where you might choose surgery to remove the risk, the test really doesn't provide any value.