tyler's take

~ $ du -k -c -L|grep -E "^[0-9]{5,}"

For those interested in creating Nokia series 40 themes on a platform other than Windose, here follows a quick few lines of code that will facilitate packaging your effort of labor into something useful:

~ $ cd themeFolder~/themeFolder $ zip -j -l -X ../wondertheme.nth theme_descriptor.xml~/themeFolder $ zip -j -X ../wondertheme.nth *.{png,mid,jpg,gif}

Leave a comment to request more about this.

Why do I need to do this so often in order to hear the interface sounds in Mail and iChat? This bug has been in Mac OS X for years, and it surely must have been reported 1000 dupes by now in RADAR. What gives? It’s annoying. Fix it. Please.

Early this morning as I was horizontally contemplating going vertical for a 06:30 swim, I had a sort of epiphany. Really.

For a long time I have thought that the breaststroker has an advantage in individual medley (IM) because the breaststroke leg comes near the end of the race, when fatigue begins to set in (well, it does for me at least). The advantage arises from it being easier to swim a length or two (or four) of an off stroke (like butterfly for a breastroker) when fresh as opposed to fatigued, especially if you throw in a dive from the blocks to start it off.

The traditional order for IM is butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, and freestyle. Although I’ve never tested it in a race, I’ve often thought that I would personally swim the IM faster if the butterfly and breaststroke legs were reversed, changing the order to breast, back, fly, free. Of course, a change like this would never fly … (sorry ; -) … I mean, what would be the point of it? It would enrage the traditionalists, screw up the record books, and generally make a lot of people really grumpy about having to swim fly so near to the end of the race. But most significantly, it would be exactly as inequitable as the current stroke order.

My simple hypothetical solution to this problem has been to just have more IM races, one for each possible stroke order. But that’s a non starter. Most swim meets are long enough as it is, and figuring out a decent order of events that doesn’t put someone swimming back-to-back seems hard enough, and simply impossible in the case of Michael Phelps, whose best event seems to be every event.

Then this morning my epiphany. And like almost all epiphanies it seems so obvious in retrospect. And so equitable. And for the spectators, so much more exciting. The solution? Have only one IM race for each distance, and have a race in every stroke order, pleasing everyone at the same time! Sounds crazy? That’s why it’s so appealing. How to do it? Easy.

Let the swimmer decide the stroke order.

Think about it for a second. There’s no downside. No one can complain that any one stroke has it better than another based solely on stroke order, because everyone is free to swim the strokes in any order. Naturally, if one particular order is demonstrated to be consistently faster than the others, then most people will likely swim that order. But it might not be the traditional order. And the judging should not be much more complicated. The swimmer must still perform legal turns and finishes for each stroke segment, which is no different from the current situation. The only real difference would be that judges would need to ensure that no one tried to cheat by skipping a slow stroke and swimming a fast one twice. But the timer could just note the order swum on the backup record. And sure, the FINA record books might need a few more asterisks. But how is that any different from people today swimming in full-body fastskins and rolling over on their stomachs to do backstroke flip turns?

The real plus would be the excitement multiplier. Watching a great IM race would be a lot more like eating from a box of chocolates. Right Forrest?

This morning I swam a long-course 400 free. My splits are posted below. For those of you who are quick with the maths, the first thing you might notice is that there are 7 x 100 splits, and 5 x 200 splits listed, even though the race was only 400 total. What’s up with that?

Well, the extra entries are “flying splits” that show my progression through the race. In other words, the first 100 split shows my first two 50s combined, while the next 100 split (the first flying split) shows my 2nd and 3rd 50s combined. Get the pattern?

50 100 200 400
----------------------------------
29.94
32.37 1:02.31
33.34 1:05.71
33.93 1:07.27 2:09.58
34.27 1:08.20 2:13.91
34.38 1:08.65 2:15.92
34.33 1:08.71 2:16.91
33.73 1:08.06 2:16.71 4:26.29

The flying splits show rather clearly that for the second half of the race I settled in to a solid 1:08 pace for my 100s. Not quite what I had hoped for, but apparently I’ll have to live with it.