NEOhio Event 5

Today was the fifth event this season for NEOhio SCCA region. With rain and possible thunderstorms forecasted for the day, I was expecting a slippery day on wet street tires. To my surprise, there was wide open blue skies with a scattering of clouds on the way to the event, and I was happy with my decision to bring the racing "slicks" along. I turned out to be a hot and humid, but dry, day. In the midst of my first run, however, things turned amiss. My car has a slight issue with wet roads, and thanks to rain all day yesterday, things seem to have gotten upset. I was about half the way through the run when suddenly my fuel cutoff started engaging at 3,500rpm, much earlier than the typical 7,200rpm, leaving me no choice but to cripple my car the rest of the way through the course. Knowing the problem was nothing but an electrical mishap with a sensor somewhere under the hood, I chose to ignore the car's heed of warning and cleared the ECU between each run. This technique only bought me the full RPM for about 1/2 - 3/4 the course, however. My fastest time was around 39.5 seconds, still faster than an S2000 and Integra at the event, so I wasn't overly upset about my situation. The course was fairly simple and didn't pose much of a threat throughout the day. I hit my peak pretty early and couldn't quite get any faster, perhaps mostly because of the rev limit, at least that's the story I'll stick to.

Be sure to check out the pictures in the gallery, and my three run videos from the day.

Videos

• Run 1 (caution: some foul language once I discovered the issue)
• Run 2
• Run 3

NEOhio Event 4

Today was the fourth NEOhio autocross of the 2008 season. With a surprisingly small number of entries (22), it turned out to be a pretty quick day. We got six runs in the morning and got fun runs afterward to help cover the costs of renting the parking lot since the entry fees didn't quite add up. I got in nine runs total and consistently held times between 39.500 and 40.500 seconds. My first event this year I took it easy on the new car, so this time I decided to push things a little more. As a result, I very easily hit more cones than anyone else at the event (maybe 7-8 in my first 6 runs). Since there weren't many people to help work fun runs, I decided to slow down and drive smoothly to save the workers a bit of running to fix cones I might hit. This decision ended up reminding me of the oft saying from veteran autocrossers, "if you want to go faster, slow down". After taking my time and giving myself a chance to line the car up properly to carry more speed through the course, I didn't hit a single cone in my last three runs and got my fastest time of the day at around 39.500 seconds (the official results won't be posted for a while).

Today I also got the opportunity to grab a lot of media to share online. I built a camera mount for my car that secured my digital camera to the headrest of my passenger seat. Overall the setup cost only a few bucks and works fairly well. A friend of mine, Steve Vondruska, who I hadn't seen since high school came out to the event with his very nice Nikon D40 DSLR camera and snapped shots of the event (including the one above). Check out the photo gallery for all of my driving shots throughout the day. I also posted both videos online, so be sure to check out my first and second run videos!

Map SSHFS Linux share as network drive in Windows

I've found a lot of use from running OpenSSH on my Linux desktop at home, then mounting my desktop's partitions onto my laptop via SSHFS. Every now and then, I end up somewhere on a Windows computer and wishing I were able to somehow mount my desktop's remote shares. I stumbled upon a somewhat clunky, yet functional, solution that I couldn't find online so I thought I'd document it here. All that's needed is to mount the remote share on a Linux system (ie: my laptop), then set that mounted partition as a Samba share. You can now access the remote directory from Windows by having the local Linux machine act as a "proxie". Again, not the prettiest solution, but it gets the job done. I hope this comes in handy for someone else.

MySQL int(M) Field Type

I was working on a database recently and needed to check the value range of an int field. For the longest time, I've been under the assumption (shame on me for not looking) when declaring a field such as int(11), that the number 11 specified the bit/byte-size of the field in some way. It turns out, however, that int(11) has the same value range as int(2). The "M" integer value in the field definition is only used for the display length. For my typical web development stuff, this value rarely (read: never) even comes into play. The display length is typically used to left-pad numbers in your database when displaying them (to keep everything aligned properly, for example). So if you're looking to slim down your database size a smidge, or maybe restrict the available values of a number value, making the M value smaller isn't going to do you any good. This is a perfect time to employ the TINYINT, SMALLINT, or MEDIUMINT field types. Now's a good time to consult the manual...