thumperthoughts

Positive ground depends upon proper circuit functioning, the transmission of negative ions by retention of the visible spectral manifestation known as “smoke”. Smoke is the thing that makes electrical circuits work; we know this to be true because every time one lets the smoke out of the electrical system, it stops working.  This can be verified repeatedly through empirical testing.  When, for example, the smoke escapes from an electrical component (i.e., say, a Lucas voltage regulator), it will be observed that the component stops working. The function of the wire harness is to carry the smoke from one device to another; when the wire harness “springs a leak”, and lets all the smoke out of the system, nothing works afterwards. Starter motors were frowned upon in British Automobiles for some time, largely because they consume large quantities of smoke, requiring very large wires.

It has been noted that Lucas components are possibly more prone to electrical leakage than Bosch or generic Japanese electrics. Experts point out that this is because Lucas is British and all things British leak. British engines leak oil, shock absorbers, hydraulic forks and disk brakes leak fluid, British tyres leak air and the British defense establishment leaks secrets…so, naturally, British electrics leak smoke.

(anonymous)

Engine numbers, frame numbers, model designations and engine configuration for Ariel motorcycles from 1926 – 1965.

Two strokes are at the bottom.

Note- 1941-5, 350 W/NG. Some of the machines made for the Royal Navy had engine prefix letters NBH, and some of the machines made for the Royal Air force had engine prefix letters RBH. There was no record of this in the Despatch Books. In both cases the numbers were in the main BH sequence.

Ariel Two Stroke engine and frame prefix and suffix letters.

Note:- the two strokes all left the factory with the engine number the same as the frame number. One series of numbers was used for all the two strokes, prefixed T-,the model being indicated by the suffix letter.

/A = Early Leader
/B = Late Leader
/S = Early Arrow
/T = Late Arrow
/G = Arrow SS
/H = 200cc Arrow

Early Leaders and Arrows ( /A and /S ) are those up to and including 17440.
Late Leaders and Arrows ( /B and /T ) are those17441 and higher.
The earliest Arrow T- 8701/S
The earliest Arrow SS T- 20384/G
The earliest Arrow 200cc T-33701/H

This list originaly compiled by Roger Gwynn and Ralph Hawkins in September 1989, corrections to February 1993.

Merged in model letters and bore/stroke info from Accessory Mart.

All reproduced with permission.

Ariel tended to mix things around a bit so the line from one year to the next is not clean. For definitive dating of your machine contact the AOMCC or Draganfly. For a small fee they can look up their microfiche copy of the factory despatch books. Each bike received a handwritten entry with other info included such as special options and date of despatch and where to. That’s how I know my bike’s birthday is May 31st!

A business site I provide some spport to runs on a GoDaddy virtual Linux server. We were having some performance issues so I dug into the available data and found we were hitting our memory limits. It seems the Virtuozzo system used by GoDaddy has hard and soft resource limits – you can go over the soft limits for short periods but after a while bad things start to happen. Like Virtuozzo shooting your processes in the head. As the applications and OS think they have the hard limit available, staying below the soft limit is problematic.

Virtuozzo makes status information in /proc/user_beancounters. The different fields are pretty cryptic – their meanings are described in detail here.

The attached zip file contains two cacti template exported from Cacti version Version 0.8.7b, a snippet to add to the snmpd.conf on the server and a one line shell script called readbeans which is called by the snmpd agent. Deploy these latter items on your GoDaddy VM and suck the templates into Cacti. This will give you a “Virtuozzo Beancounters” data query which you can add to your device which should give you access to 20 graphs (don’t check resource, that one is bogus).

I found that building a compound graph like this brought together the most interesting values:

This long term graph shows where I implemented the crude but effective solution of restarting various system processes nightly (snmpd, httpd, mysqld, named and Plesk), some of which were gradual memory hogs.

Download this template