The longest day in the tour. The daily briefing said that there will be 5 support stations, and mentioned the time of sweep at each station. I had some initial break problems again even before we started from the hotel which I asked the mechanic Sarvanand to have a look and fix it.
After I started, i was pushing hard as the sweep times were very close between the stations. Almost around 2 hours for each 40kms.
I managed to cover the ground leaving some people behind and catch up with my sweep friend Murali Iyer. After that we almost covered 100kms in around 4+hrs. We also stopped for a couple of narial pani’s on the way.

Again bike problem stuck me and I was loosing air in my front tyre. Somehow I managed to reach the support station 2 and changed my tube again. This costed us some time. Had my lunch and pushed off again for the remaining 90kms which was a rolling terrain.

Thats me

We were going at a slow pace in this section as we might have lost some energy by pushing hard in the first half. When we reached support station 3, we had another 35kms before the start of the competitive section, I wanted to move to station 4 automatically somehow and then do the 10k climb.

Thats murali

But murali motivated me to do another 35k and then rest. We were racing against time from the station 2 and then station 3 & I was damn sure that we would be reaching station 4 again just in time before we get sweeped.
We had 2 hrs to complete the 35kms and we thought that we can make in time for some rest, but we were not sure what was the plan Mr Rajesh Nair had for us.

We started off and were passing the Madikeri jungle. The road began a slow ascent and a long one too. I was getting damn tired and doing the climb on 2-1 gear combo.

Initial part of the Madikeri Climb

The climb was killing us and then the sweep truck came saying that we have 10 more minutes. “Pedal fast man, another 6 kms to go and you will be safe” – This was my thinking.

I was also shooting some shots and then the inevitable happened. Adarsh stopped murali first and then me and loaded our bikes on the top of the Scorpio. We got sweeeped

Bikes loaded on top , got sweeped

We arrived at the Support station 4, which was just freaking 2 kms from where we got picked up.
Mark and Richard were sitting in the front of the sweep truck. They had stopped to get some beer on the way and were looking happy.
Richard decided to continue his ride in a little drunk state and managed to get till the top of the Madikeri climb, which also happened to be the race section of 10kms.

At the top of the hill, there was a small accident involving Vandit Kalia. His tyre got a flat and he skidded on the road hurting his knee, which was bleeding pretty badly.
At the top after the arrival of the last person, we were taken by the bus to the hotel. It was a truly bumpy ride as mentioned in the morning briefing. Unfortunately the hotel was too far and it was late in the evening and we could not buy any coffee & roam around in Coorg.

Chatting

The ride started at 7.30 with the usual morning briefing by Francis. This was supposed to be a shorter ride than the previous day and it was almost a rolling surface. I was riding fast in the morning, so that I can reach the hotel early and take some rest. But then I started taking some pictures, as it was a Tour , not a Race
The roads were superb,all smooth and beautiful. The scenery was awesome too. we passed through the fields where people were cutting/finishing their cutting corps.

Beautiful roads

Paddy fields and a cow

The only problem was that there were speedbreakers as we entered/left a village, and there were lesser trees on the way.

Reached the SS2 for the competitive section. Somehow I felt that I was slowing and screwing up my timings. Vikram was cruising past me and Murali, finally we(murali & me) stopped for some narial pani & suddenly got a burst of energy n pushed for the remaining 5k.

Ranjith at the start of the race

The last leg was 32k long where me & murali were pushing hard this time to finsih early, but where Murali is there are bound to be punctures & this time my roomie Amit had a flat, so we decided to help him. In the meantime Manoj n Mallik also joined us,when amit’s puncture was fixed manoj realized that he too had a flat, so we waited till he fixed his flat n then pushed for the remaining 20k. arrived at the hotel at 4.30pm.

At Kauvery river

Arun having a good time at support station

The total ride time was around 8 hrs again.

The Tour of Nilgiris was flaged off with a full army support. We gathered at 5.45am at the General Manekshaw Ground.
The event’s chief guest was the law and Urban minister of karnataka, who promised a full support for cycling in b’lore and mysore. Maybe they are planning something good for promoting cycling there.

We had our breakfast and then after a brief intro ceremony the tour was flagged off at around 7.30am. We took the hosur road and then the Nice road to exit out of b’lore.
As soon as we left the Nice road for mysore, I had a flat at 30k mark.
Managed to fix it alone, with some late help arriving from Prashant(blogging team). I believe i managed to do something to the break settings at that time.

I was probably quite behind and then I started to cycle at my own pace and saw Murali, Manoj and Deepak crossing me. I began to cycling at their pace to catch up with them, but somehow it was too much of an effort.

Just 5km before the support station 1, there was another problem in my front tyre and thankfully it wasn’t a puncture. Went to a local cycle shop and got the air filled in.

The race section was around 23kms and it was to start at SS 1 till SS 2.
I started the race at 67k mark, but around 76k mark I was almost dead tired, there was too much effort going in to push the bike.
I stopped for a pee break and then took a break of 10-15 minutes. I was even thinking of quitting and getting sweeped on the first day, but no, no quitting. As I pushed my cycle on the road, I noticed that the rear tyre was getting locked – ahhhh here is the problem.
I quickly fixed the break issue and then ensured that the wheel rotates freely. Fixing this problem, I zoomed to reach the timestation 2 to complete the race. I think I rode pretty fast in the later part of the tour to complete the remaining 60kms till mysore. Even though we reached mysore at 5.30pm (a ride of 9 hrs 48 mins). In the end I managed to catch up again with Murali, Manoj and Deepak.

Manoj had 2 flats initially & Murali was there to help him fix the flat, hence they were late.

We had our dinner in the hotel itself and went off to sleep. The next day was easier , a total of 120kms ride.

The winner of the Competitive section was Mark Anderson who beat Rajesh Nair by a huge margin of 2 mins. Mark is 48 btw

Riding through some village

Cooling effect

To enable right-click perform the following operations:

1. Install dconf-editor using YUM like

<code> sudo yum install dconf-editor </code>

2. run dconf-editor after it is installed

3. Goto org-> gnome -> desktop -> background  & check the show-desktop-icons as shown in the image below.

Y

If using standard traceview : Click Here

If using TPTP in eclipse instead of Traceview : Click Here

Debugging for Memory leak : Click Here

Restart before installing a newer version of Xcode

Here is a nice blog that explains how to test your Push notifications

Also you can find a sample code written in python to test if your server can send notifications:

In the sample code you need a certificate file in PEM format.
Here is how to export the Apple Development Push Certificate into PEM format

# These files now need to be converted to the PEM format by executing this command from the terminal:

openssl pkcs12 -clcerts -nokeys -out apns-dev-cert.pem -in apns-dev-cert.p12
openssl pkcs12 -nocerts -out apns-dev-key.pem -in apns-dev-key.p12


# If you wish to remove the passphrase, either do not set one when exporting/converting or execute:

openssl rsa -in apns-dev-key.pem -out apns-dev-key-noenc.pem


# Finally, you need to combine the key and cert files into a apns-dev.pem file we will use when connecting to APNS:

cat apns-dev-cert.pem apns-dev-key-noenc.pem > apns-dev.pem


The sample code also mentions the DeviceToken that you will need to send notifications to your device.

In your sample app goto the method


-(void) application : (UIApplication*)application didRegisterForRemoteNotificationWithDeviceToken NSData *)deviceToken
{
NSLog(@"Device token generated : %@", deviceToken);
}


Finally to test if I get notifications on my device, I am still figuring that out…

Bada version is 1.0.2

1. Longer battery life… earlier my battery used to drain within 1-1.5 days… nows its complete 2 days & i still have some life left.

2. Screen unlock : earlier it was black screen when unlock button is pressed, now i see that i can see the background image.

3. Different tunes for Email & message alert

4. Additional Software update menu.

5. Can see the alarm icon on the top bar.

Will post more changes once i get and see some

but this is definitely a great improvment over the previous firmware i had flashed.

Cannot find Harddisk

Crash #1
Try to reply to a message and at the same time a new message arrives.
Firmware : S8500XXJF1
CSC Ver : S8500XAJEG