Adam Young’s Web Log

There are two main forms of rock climbing. The most popular is face climbing. The climber makes upward progress for the most by pulling downward on small ledges in the rock with their hands, and stepping on top of these same ledges with their feet. This is the predominant style of climb in climbing gyms as well as sport climbing. The other form of climbing involves cracks in the face of the rock. The techniques involved in navigating a vertical crack in a rock are somewhat different from the more popular face climbing.

I love crack climbing. A crack in the rock about two inches wide, just wide enough to get my hand inside, is thus called a hand crack. If a crack is in the face of a rock, with both sides of the crack flush, it is called a splitter crack. My ideal climb involves serious portions of perfect splitter hand crack.

A lot has been written about the placement of hands in hand crack. Less has been written about foot placement. Many people avoid crack climbing due to the painful nature of foot placement in cracks. I suspect I know the reason, and have a technique that will help both minimize the discomfort and maximize the effectiveness of foot placements.

The advice most people get when learning how to place feet is to cam the knee out perpendicular to the crack, so that the sole of the foot is vertical. You place the foot into the crack, and then turn the knee vertical, camming the foot inside the crack. The discomfort most people feet comes from the focus of pressure on the high point behind the big toe.

The diagram above is a simplified contour map of the foot. The curved paths represent spots on the top of the foot that are all the same height. The line segment AB represent the edge of the crack when the foot is placed parallel to the ground and perpendicular to the crack. Note how this line goes right over the arch behind the big toe. This is the pain point.

Proper foot placement in crack climbing is based around lining up the contour of the foot with the edge of the crack. The line Segment CD represents the edge of the crack in the preferred approach. Note how it aligns more closely with the major contour that runs along the outside edge of the foot, behind where the toes join. A typical climbing shoe, especially one designed for crack climbing, will have sticky rubber well up to this point. This sticky rubber is much more evenly in contact with the sides of the crack.

Here’s the technique. Rotate the knee out to the side so your foot is vertical. Place your vertical sole in the crack. You should just feel the edge of the crack on the pain point. You are going to use the pain point as the pivot point as you rotate the heel of the foot downward while you straighten your leg. Your foot will cam naturally into the crack, and the pressure will be distributed along the contour line of the top of the foot. As you rotate your foot, straighten your leg as well, and you should be able to place body weight on the newly placed foot.

Dave Patterson’s photo shows Joe Dawson with his left leg in the described position. (Yes, that is Indian Creek, home of some of the greatest splitter cracks you can imagine.) Note that he has his fully body weight on the lower leg, minus the small bit that is loaded on his arms. Note: Dave is a friend.  I got explicit permission to use his photo.  Please do not take it and use elsewhere.

Photo Copyright Dave Patterson, Used With Permission

At my current company I have to use perforce.  I’ve used cvs and subversion recently, and I tend to think about revision control in terms of thsose.  So here is my start of a cvs to perforce dictionary.  This post will be edited as I learn more:

The format is

cvs command : perforce command  — comment

• cvs diff : p4 diff  — hey some things are easy
• cvs commit : p4 submit  — note that the p4 version tends to be done with a change log
• cvs commit : p4 resolve —when you submit a file, the server compares the version you checked out to what is in the repo.  If changes have come in since you checked out, perforce will prompt you to merge them by hand.  cvs commit does this automatically, and will report any failures in automatically merging.
• cvs status : p4 opened  — this shows only the files that are opened but that were already added to the repo. cvs status has a lot more info than this.
• cvs update : p4 sync
• cvs blame:  p4 filelog  — not really a direct translation, but a starting point.  filelog is really more like cvs history.

Key perforce commands that have no cvs analogues:

p4 change –creates a change set, a subset of the files in the current directory that will be commited together.   Thus a p4 submit -c <changlist#> could only be reproduced in cvs by somehow generating a list of a files you wanted to revision control together.  CVS does not tend to be used that way.

p4 client — perforce controls everything on a centralized server.  It also requires you to explicitly check out a file before editing.  You must create a client to get any work done.  the p4 client command both creates a client, and allows you to name it.

Rock Climbing is my major leisure time activity. Given a free weekend, that is what I want to spend my time doing. One thing that excited me about moving back east was the quantity of good, climbable rock in the vicinity of my parents home in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The house is about halfway between Rumney and Franconia Notch, two of the big three climbing areas in NH. The Third area, North Conway, is at the other end of the Kancamagus Highway. In addition to the numerous established climbing areas, there are vast numbers of smaller, local crags just begging to be climbed. One of these is on Russell Mountain, Just west of Russell Pond Campground, and just North of Exit 31.

Many years ago, after college I was suffering through from EMail. Before internet access was everywhere, most people had to resort to dial-up. I went with AOL. THis was before AL had developed its hard earned reputation for spam, script kiddies, and painful connections. When I was trying to get a screen name, just about every variation on my name had been taken. I setteld on RusselCrag (yes, I missed a letter). Even then I was thinking of home.

I did a little bit of a web search about Russell Crag. Aside from finding a guide service where a guide had claimed to have done first ascents there, there was nothing about climbing. Good. But there was some references to Peregrine falcons. Numerous cliffs in the Sierra’s have part time climbing bans to protect the Raptors that nest on them. The mother birds will often abandon a nest if she feels threatened. If this happens after the eggs are laid, they will not hatch, and another year with no replacement population threatens their already dwindling numbers.

In mid July, a few days after arriving on the East Coast, I took a pair of binoculars and scanned Russell Crag from my folks property. I got lucky. I saw a beautiful brown and white bird of prey launch from the vicinity of the crag, and start riding the rising wind currents west of Russell Mountain. The white band at the neck identified it as a Peregrine. I watched the falcon rise higher, pass after pass, and then disappear behind the mountain.

A few weeks later, I contacted Chris Martin the author of a New Hampshire Audubon study on Peregrin Falcons nesting in New Hampshire. He confirmed that Russell Crag was an active nesting site that year. They had bandded three chicks in June. By July, there was no risk of climbing to threaten the nest. He suspects that the nest will be in use for several years to come. In fact, he invited me along to help with the banding next may if I was interested. I most certainly am.

So if you are in the vicinity of Russell Mountain, search the skies for circling Falcons. If you want to climb Russell Crag, give me a shout and we’ll go up, so long as it isn’t nesting season.

If you have an ssh session to a machine and it gets frozen, the key combination to release it is

<enter> ~ .

This basically resets your terminal

At work we have a slew of directories automounted.  Te problem is that unless you know the name of a subdir under the mount point, you can’t navigate to it.  Since we use nis to list the mount points, you can’t even find a local list to see what is automounted.  However, the init script for autofs shows the way to get the listing.  It is a two step process.  First, use ypcat -k auto.master to see the list of top level mount points.  For each entry there that has a yp: in it, run another ypcat -k to see the actual top level directories:

Here it is in bash:

#!/bin/sh

for MOUNT in `ypcat -k auto.master \
| grep yp | awk ‘{gsub(“yp:”,”",$2) ; print $1 “:” $2  }’`
do
MDIR=`echo $MOUNT | cut -d ‘:’ -f 1`
YPNAME=`echo $MOUNT | cut -d ‘:’ -f 2`
ypcat -k $YPNAME | cut -d ‘ ‘ -f1 | sed “s!^!$MDIR/!”
done

One reason we moved to Boston was to be closer to the things we like to do. Yes, the Sierras are great, but at a minimum of 3 hours driving time from the SF Bay Area multiplied by the screaming infant factor, they were just too far away for regular visits.

This weekend was our only our second where we all stayed in the Boston area since we moved here in July. I made plans with some I met via meetup.com’s Boston Rock climbing meetup to climb at quincy quarries on Saturday morning. I had heard about the quarries back before I left the area (I left in 1989) but was not in to climbing then, so I had never made the effort to go. The stories back then were of car break-ins, falling rocks, and kids drownding in the water left in the old quarry holes. I had been assured that the current scene was much more positive. I was pleased to find out that it was so. After some debate, my wife and I decided that it would be a decent attempt for a family outing, so we packed up the car and drove the 15 minutes south to Quncy.  We met up with Roger, my partner for the day, out on the street.  We both were running a little late, which made for a perfect connection.  The climbing was a one minute walk in on a paved trail.
While there is climbing that close to SF (Glen Park comes to mind) the quarries are a great site. The main area is a large grassy field with cliffs surrounding it.  One portion is quite overhung and makes a decent place to, say, put a stroller containing a sleeping toddler.  The cliffs are short, the tallest in this area was 50 feet.  But then again, that is still taller than even the highest point at most climbing gyms.  Add to that the fact that it is real rock and it makes for an enjoyable climbing experience.

We spent the day at  K wall.  I opened by leading outside corner, a 5.8 with great gear placements all the way up (Although I did clip a fixed piton). Once the rope was up, we pretty much shared ropes with the parties next to us on this climb and the 5.9 next to it.  At the end of the day, we move the rope over one more anchor and beat on what we thougt was a 5.9.  It was, except for the final move which was probably low 11s.  More than I was ready for at that point, even on TR.

The climbers were a great bunch.  Lots of people just getting into the sport that were experienceing “outside” for the first time, mixed with a few old school climbers that showed up solo and just got a ride on the existing topropes. One such old-school climber (Paul) showed a level of gracfulness in his layback approach to the crux move on outside corner, that we had all dyno-ed our way through.   I followed his example on my next attempt.

I managed to abrade the back of my hand on  a hand jam, so I call it a successful day.

A couple people here at work just came up against a bug in memory usage on an embedded platform. (This may be straining the definition of embedded in the size of the application, as it is large, but we’ll go with it.) The problem manifested as a failure in malloc. The debugging tool that allowed them to find it was simply to set the environment variable:

MALLOC_CHECK_=1

This tells glib to use a debug heap as opposed to the standard heap allocation routines. No recompile required.

Short one this time:

I needed to integrate doxygen with my current code source. Turns out it is pretty easy.

Use doxygen to generate a config file (OK I copied one from another project)

doxygen -g project-dox.conf.in

Note the .in at the end. autoconf/automake will generate the correct code to convert something ending in .in to the correct file.

Add this config file to configure.ac

AC_CONFIG_FILES([Makefile project-dox.conf]

along with whatever other files get listed there for your project.

Our build system builds in the $project/build directory, but leave the source back in the original directory. To get this in sync, I modified my project-dox.conf.in

INPUT = @srcdir@

Assuming doxygen is installed, of course.