Ed "Over" Ip

FINALLY have the Quarq CinQo in hand after 2+ months of wait.  Here are my first impression of the Garmin Edge 704/Cinqo combo:

1. There is a 1 sec +/- lag between pushing on the crank and power registering on the Garmin
2. The power readout do not fluctuate a whole lot perhaps due to the lag stated in #1.   It’s actually worked out pretty well for me;  The Ergomo was a bit quick readout on the Ergomo was quicker and thus I had hard time pacing my effort during intervals.
3. I really like how the workout (advanced interval) mode on the Garmin tells me which power zone I’m in so I wouldn’t have to think.
4. During my first workout, the power and cadence blanked out for a first seconds.  I had to stop for a second for it to pick back up.  It’s most likely a software issue.
5. FTP intervals with the combo  is, dare I say , borderline easy.  Either I’m stronger  (which I would love to think) or the combo is reading a higher number.  I will be doing some VO2AT workouts shortly which should help decide if I need to “calibrate” the readout against a CompuTrainer.

Many of us who fancy ourselves competitive cyclist/athletics would set goals at the beginning of every season to have something to shoot for.  Most goals are obtainable while some are simply beyond stretch limits.   For example, for my first race season a few years ago, I wrote down “Top 10 in the BAR” as a goal.  In reality I should have aimed for 10 points instead – for your information, I got 3 points that season.  Another goal I set every year but yet to achieve is to loss 10 pounds to increase that good old power to weight ratio.  Another trait of most competitive (aka geeky) cyclist is we are always on the lookout to “buy” advantages such as carbon aero wheels, aero bikes, recovery nutrition, compression sucks, etc.  So why should weight lost be any different?

Since I am a big fan of Hammer Nutrition, I decided to give Appestat a try.  According to Hammer, Appestat has the following benefits:

• Appestat can suppress appetite without stimulants.
• Appestat helps increase fat metabolism.
• Appestat can reduce potential for carbohydrate-to-fat conversion.
• Gluten Free

The first bullet point was easy to prove while the rest might just have to take their words for it. 

I am not going to lie to you, the first few days on the stuff was a bit rough.  I didn’t feel like eating much despite the fact my stomach hurt constantly presumably from hunger.  It was quite strange.  At first I thought it was a placebo effect – I spent $30 on a bottle so it must work right?  (Read on for the answer)

The first week (out of the three weeks cycle) I just felt weak on and off the bike.  It made sense because through logging my caloric intake using thedailyplate.com, on average, I was only consuming < 1600 calories per day when I normally would take in 2100 – 2600 calories. 

By the second week, I was mentally and physically prepared to eat less.  It was around that time I started seeing weight lost.   Very exiting!  I wanted to experiment a bit with taking 1 vs. 2 capsules per meal to see what it might do. To me (your mileage might vary) the effect with 1 capsule was very subtle while 2 capsules along with a small meal kept me full for hours.  With that knowledge in hand along with a recommendation by Hammer, I started taking 1 cap at lunch to get a bit more calories for the day and 2 caps for dinner.  With that protocol, I had absolutely no desire to snack a night which has always been a weakness of mine.

By the end of the third week, I had lost a total of 6lbs.  A little faster than I prefer but I will take it.   However, towards the end of the 3 weeks cycle, I felt like my body was becoming “immune” to the pills.  I wanted to eat more and more.  In addition, the first few days I was off the pills (sounded like something a woman would say) all I wanted to do was stuff my face no matter with sweets.  So I surmised the pills were indeed able to suppress my appetite. 

Having said all of the above, your results might vary but I think it’s definitely worth a try.  I will begin a 2^nd round shortly to hopefully reach my “fighting” weight in time for my first race of the season. 

Please feel free to drop me a comment if you have any questions or would like to share your own experiences with Hammer Appestat.

I kept getting this error in my Vista Enterprise install.  I tried a bunch of stuff including turning off the firewall, going to a different network, and at the end of it all, the error had nothing to do with “Timeout” — The product key I’ve entered was bad.  Arrgh!

–

A while back I wrote about a problem I encountered where my client’s system is experiencing “Object not set to a reference of an object” errors in the receive pipeline for one of their client.  After yet another round of experimentation, I FINALLY figured out what caused it!

This particular client appear to programmatically connect to the BizTalk server via Telnet as a way to keep the socket open.  In return, BizTalk would treat the connection as having a missing body (not to be confused with an empty body). To solve the problem, although it’s not ideal, is to put a try/catch around the GetOriginalDataStream() and return null if it encounters an error.   Unfortunately, the side affect of this is an active blank message instance in the BizTalk Administration Console.  But at least there are no more error event logs and suspended message instances.  

public IBaseMessage Execute(IPipelineContext pContext, IBaseMessage pInMsg)
{
    IBaseMessagePart msgBody = pInMsg.BodyPart;

if (msgBody != null)
{

string oldStr = string.Empty;

try
{
    using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(msgBody.GetOriginalDataStream()))
    {
         oldStr = sr.ReadToEnd();
    }
}
catch
{
    return null;
}

<< INSERT STUFF YOU NEED TO DO HERE>>

}

}

GoDaddy and many ASP.NET hosting company operate IIS under medium trust.  As such,  you will need to make a number of modifications to your app.config/web.config to make WCF work.  Assuming your WCF service is compiled against the 3.5 framework, the following is a list of errors I encountered along the way and the respective solution.

Error:
There is no build provider registered for the extension ‘.svc’. You can register one in the <compilation><buildProviders> section in machine.config or web.config. Make sure is has a BuildProviderAppliesToAttribute attribute which includes the value ‘Web’ or ‘All’.

Solution:

<compilation>
     <buildProviders>
          <add extension=".svc" type="System.ServiceModel.Activation.ServiceBuildProvider, System.ServiceModel, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089"/>
     </buildProviders>
</compilation> 

Error:
This collection already contains an address with scheme http.  There can be at most one address per scheme in this collection.

Solution:

<system.serviceModel>
  ...
      <serviceHostingEnvironment>
      <baseAddressPrefixFilters>
           <add prefix="http://services.edoverip.com/" />
      </baseAddressPrefixFilters>
   </serviceHostingEnvironment>
  ...
</system.serviceModel> 

Error:
The WSHttpBinding with name WSHttpBinding failed validation because it contains a BindingElement with type System.ServiceModel.Channels.SymmetricSecurityBindingElement which is not supported in partial trust. Consider disabling the message security and reliable session options, using BasicHttpBinding, or hosting your application in a full-trust environment.

Solution:
This one is a bit tricky.  If you prefer to use wsHttpBinding, you will have to set the Security Mode to either None or Transport.  For example,  to set it to None, it looks something like this…

<bindings>
   <wsHttpBinding>
        <binding name="wsHttp">
            <security mode="None" />
        </binding>
   </wsHttpBinding>
</bindings>

<services>
     <service behaviorConfiguration="DistanceWS.ServiceBehavior" name="DistanceWS.Service">
          <endpoint binding="wsHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="wsHttp" contract="DistanceWS.IService" />
          <host>
               <baseAddresses>
                    <add baseAddress="http://localhost:8731/Design_Time_Addresses/DistanceWS/Service/" />
               </baseAddresses>
          </host>
     </service>
</services>

That’s all I can think of for now. I will update this post if I come across anything else. Meanwhile, enjoy and good luck!