A weekend, a snowstorm, and a bike ride

For the 6th weekend in a row, we had snowfall. This is highly unusual for the Denver area, but at this point, we should just go for 10 in a row!! The good news in all of this is that I refused to stay inside.

I planned a Saturday morning ride and invited the LBS guys along. All of them bailed except for one maybe, who ended up bailing in the morning because of the snow. I brought out the CUSS and had some singlespeeding planned.

All bundled up and ready for a quick trip to the grocery store before the “main” ride. Out the door and down the road, when I hit a patch of ice 0.1 miles into the ride. I went down hard on the right side but popped back up and headed to the grocery store.

After the 30 minutes of riding to and from the store, I began the main ride. Down the hill into the cold and slush, but still having fun because I was on the bike. I ended up with 2:01 in ride time and 26.00 miles. Not bad for a cold snowy morning and a 3 week old at home.

Total mileage for the month is now at 75.

How to escape XML characters

When first trying to use the “code” and “pre” tags to escape XML, I had no luck. Then I stumbled upon this site which will convert your XML to escaped characters.

http://www.destraynor.com/c2h.html

Problems with Cobertura Maven plugin

The cobertura-maven-plugin was updated in early January to version 2.2. This version has caused problems with the coverage testing because 2 .ser files are created – one during instrumentation and one during testing. This causes a 0% coverage rate because cobertura isn’t putting all information into the same .ser file.

There are several posts on the issue and a possible workaround:
http://www.mail-archive.com/users@maven.apache.org/msg58559.html

https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1543280&group_id=130558&atid=720017

My fix was to backlevel the plugin to the working 2.1 version. When defining the plugin in the build and reporting sections add a version tag to manually set the version to 2.1.

This obviously isn’t a long term solution, but it will work until the 2.2 plugin and Cobertura 1.8 work correctly with Maven.

Another snow?

This is the 5th week in a row we are expecting snow. The good news is the storms are getting smaller. 30″ to start, then 12″, 8″, 4″, and finally today 1-2″.

The CUSS has been the primary bike of choice lately. One gear and knobby tires are very appealing when you’re constantly riding on snow and ice.