My Honda Civic

I got myself a red '91 Honda Civic (4th generation) at the end of April. Why would I go and buy a 16 year old car? Well, my brother got a black one in winter. I figured it's a hell of a car for 2000 Lt (around 750 USD). A neat, high tech, lean burning, economical 1.5 L engine that cranks out 66 kW (90 hp). Double wishbone suspension on all four wheels. Great overview in all directions. Low center of gravity and driving position. A peculiar, even a bit awkward, design. And it just about fits a 250 cm windsurfing board along the passenger seat!

Another intriguing thing about Honda Civic -- there's a whole subculture of modding enthusiasts. Honda's D series engines are all pretty similar in many ways, allowing relatively easy "swaps" of the whole engine or its parts in order to achieve more power or better fuel economy. So, once I get a garage with power, I'll swap my dual point injection for a real full injection system. About $100 worth of parts, a bit of wrench work, some wiring changes, and -- tada! -- 10 hp more.

I bought mine without having tested it on the highway, so there was some work needed to get it accelerate better than a trolleybus. :-/ Now it's still far from the official manufacturer figures, but better than it was.

Debugging page templates in doctests

Sometimes you get a page template error in doctests. The traceback does not point to the place in the page template that caused the error. Here's a quick, dirty and effective three liner to figure it out:

>>> import traceback
>>> from zope.exceptions.exceptionformatter import print_exception
>>> traceback.print_exception = print_exception

Hello world

So, here is my new blog. Welcome, readers!

What will this blog be about? I have no intention of centering on any particular topic, so expect an eclectic mix of posts on my interests: Zope 3, software development in general, windsurfing, photograpy.

A couple of words on naming. alga and albertas blog names on blogspot.com are taken by selfish irresponsible people who have posted one entry three years ago. LTU-42 is my sail number, so at least my windsurfing companions will recognize this as my id.