Consolidating (Your Links May Change)

From the beginning, events on NPA have been posted as individual peices of content, with one copy of each race in the database per year.  I’ve scaled back from everything that was originally planned, though, and this no longer makes sense.  Taking a cue from Northland Runner, I’m in the process of consolidating events into one page per event, and then updating the dates and locations as needed.  So if you end up here from a link that doesn’t work, you can probably still find the event.

For the historians in the group, you’ll also be able to see revisions of each event to see what has changed (in this database at least) from year to year.

If you need to update an event and you don’t have access, post a new one and I can consolidate them manually.  I’m in the process of making this easier to do so bad links don’t end up on Twitter.

Questions and comments: As always, please email me at matt@northernplainsathletics.com or tweet at @nplainsathletes.

Find PDFs that are not OCRed (Windows grep)

 
Works reasonably well, although some files may have font properties without the word “Font” (capitalization matters).
 
Open CMD prompt
dir Desktop (or whatever target directory)
grep -L Font *.pdf > list_of_files.txt
 
-L = only return file names that do not match
-r = Recursive

Apple Mail Rules Broken in Yosemite (OS X 10.10)

This has been bothering me since I upgraded to Yosemite earlier this summer.  I finally found an answer: turn on iCloud syncing for email.  I did not need do any if the file copying mentioned in the linked solution.

In case you’re wondering: No, I am not a rules fanatic, but one IMAP email account through my hosting company has an issue with spam.  I turned on Spam Assassin, which tags the junk, and then I use a rule to put those messages in the junk folder, just in case there was a false positive.

 

Add Factors to a Momocs Coo Object

This wasn’t documented anywhere (maybe it’s obvious?), but here is a short example using the included ‘bot’ dataset.

data(bot);
# Look at the existing factors, stored in bot@fac
a<-bot@fac;
# Add another arbitrary factor
a[2]<-a;
a[2]<-c(1:40);
names(a)[2]<-“number”;
# Put your new factors back into the object
a->bot@fac;
# Look at your data based on the new factor
panel(bot,cols=col.india(40)[bot@fac[,”number”]]);
 

 

PetroMod Simulation Log Location

Simulation logs (one per processor used during simulation) are located in the out folder of your model, with the name(s) log.pma, log1.pma, log2.pma, etc.

Possible use for this information: Write a script that automatically copies log files to another location for later review if needed (watch folder in Python?).  Bonus points if you are timestamping your notes so you can identify the right file to look at.

Race Report: Maah Daah Hey 100

I was 20 miles in before I crashed. I didn’t hurt myself much–a nasty scrape across my chest from the end of my handlebar, figure that one out–but I took it down a notch after that. No need to ride absolutely everything if Joe was choosing not to, and walking some sections was a nice break.

We rolled into the first aid station (checkpoint, really, since the time cutoff applied there, but labeled as an aid station) with 45 minutes or so to spare. We were getting tired and it was warming up, only 25 miles into the race. The first few miles were spent in a grand parade of herky-jerky singletrack, among people who had chosen the back of the pack at the start and realized that it would be some time before they wouldn’t be held back by those ahead.

After a flat tire (torn sidewall on my part), we were pretty much the last two people on the second 25 miles of the course.  Keep drinking, keep moving.  Stop in the shade when you get too hot.  Get up and move again.  Lack of training took its toll.  I think we were an hour past the cutoff at aid station two and the end of our race.

I can’t capture all the beauty of the trail and the dedication of Nick Ybarra and his crew of workers.  The Maah Daah Hey lives up to its reputation, and so does this race.  I’ll be back again someday to finish.