Eric D. Schabell: January 2006

Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Mini Mayfair 87' makes the APK in one go!

The Mini made it thru the APK check in one go!

That is a first in the three years I have had it. Nice feeling to pick it up and know that all is well under the hood. Actually, I still have bent contact points so will have to take care of these soon. My contact person who can get a bit of reduced pricing is picking up some new components for me and will help to tune the valves, points and timing once they arrive.
More as it it happens!

Monday, January 30, 2006

Found the problem: Contact points are bent

After my wife was having problems with the Mini stopping, jerking and basically running real bad I took some time this weekend to take a look at the cause.

I traced it from the contact points and immediately found the problem. Instead of having two contact heads resting flat on each other, one is slightly off center and twisted so that it is at the right spacing on one side (0.35mm) and too far apart on the other side (over 0.40mm). This will cause problems.

With some help from a neighbor, we decided to set the spacing based on the outer side (widest point) and the Mini is now running great! This week it goes for the APK checks so it was necessary to sort this out.

Fingers crossed for the APK, will I make it thru in one go?????

IRIS PMS release v0.6.1

Today I release a minor updaet v0.6.1 with some much needed fixes.

Since my last posting I have pretty much finished the 1.0 functionality. I have farmed out the last bit of work to a collegue who needs to implement a publication edit function. Now there only remains the bugs as listed on the roadmap.

I will be moving on to our next big project so have to spend less than 1 day a week on continuing development and bug fixing. Most IRIS department employees have used the system and with their input I am sure many more enhancements will be implemented.

The project has been moved into the CodeYard project. Feel free to jump in and help out!

Thursday, January 26, 2006

Mayfair died on my wife

Yesterday my wife was driving the Mini on the way home from work and it started to sputter and cut off on her. She was able to get it off the road and parked in a neighborhood, but when I got home from work I had to go and get it.

I just enriched the mixture a bit to keep the idle running at 2000 rpm and drove it home on full choke. The timing is outta wack so have arranged to borrow a timing light and will take a look at it this weekend.

The last bit of tuning to get it through the apk!

Monday, January 16, 2006

APK preperations continue

Since the Mini has not been running good, even after new sparkplug cables, new sparkplugs and some extra TLC I decided yesterday (Sunday) to go ahead and brave the cold (it was +1 degree C) to replace the contact points and rotor arm in the distributer.

97803 km
  • contact points
  • rotor arm
Low and behold, all is well in the Mini. Running like a race car! Will take it to work some time soon to see how it holds up, but think I am ready for the APK!

Saturday, January 7, 2006

APK preperations for 2006

As my APK is coming up soon in Feb 2006 I thought it would be time to get the Mini in order. After a brief inspection (my wife has been driving most of the time into town with it, I have not had much time behind the wheel) I have replaced the following:

97675 km
  • sparkplug cables
  • distribution cap
  • outside rubber strips
  • replaced missing clips in the front and back window stripping
  • air filter
  • sparkplugs
I have had trouble with the motor seeming to be missing on the firing, might have to replace the contact points but want to check the spacing on the sparkplugs first as I did not do that before inserting them (I did not have a spacer tool, now I have picked one up).

I have a few weeks to sort this all out as I would like to get thru an APK check in one go!

Wednesday, January 4, 2006

eGroupWare week 01 progress report

Worked on the English manual pages for the Calendar application, continuing where I left off last year. The following pages updated:
  • ManualCalendar:en: Calendar
  • ManualAcl:en: ACL
  • ManualCalendarChange:en: Switch between the different available views
  • ManualCalendarDay:en: Day View
  • ManualCategory:en: ManualCategory
  • ManualCalendarView:en: View an Appointment
  • ManualCalendarSearching:en: ManualCalendarSearching
  • ManualCalendarList:en: ManualCalendarList
This is enough work for one day if you ask me! At the end of the day I started getting database errors when trying to save my changes so stopped. Helped a few users on the mailinglist and one on irc.

Monday, January 2, 2006

Contact with several Sync enthusiasts!

I have made contact with the current developer of the eGWOSync software that is used to sync eGroupWare with Microsoft Outlook! Glad we can get the ball rolling on that front. I hope to team a bit with him for the php side of the connection as he irons out the problems syncing with the newer 1.2 release that is due out.

Furthermore, I have been contacted by another eGroupWare wiki page creator, the author of the Syncronization overview page.

I have both on ICQ now so hope we can collaborate as needed to get the word out and about regarding the progress I hope we can make on this part of eGroupWare.