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Olympia Nova High-viz Vest [Review] June 30, 2008

There are a few contenders when it comes to High-Viz motorcycle vests, Olympia, Icon, and FieldSheer are the main ones, and all meet military specs for on-base riding. Of those only the Olympia Nova and the Icon Mil Spec are available in bright yellow. If you haven’t seen the yellow in person I have to tell you that photos don’t do it justice. This stuff is so bright it makes you wonder if you’d still be able to see if you turned out the lights. The orange is, well… orange.

Regardless of what brand you choose, get the yellow. Personally I was a bit torn between the Olympia and the Icon. The Icon has more area covered by high-viz material. Unfortunately none of that is mesh so it will stop a lot of that precious cool air from getting to your core. The Olympia has large areas of black on the front (which will be obscured by your windshield and headlight anyway), but they’re all mesh so that a fair amount of that air is still going to get to you. Additionally it has more retroreflective tape, which is going to do far more good in the night than the color of the fabric.

I find that the storage pockets are all useful, and it has a large pouch on the back where you could probably stick a Camelbak. Construction is great, nothing feels cheap or flimsy and it doesn’t even think about flapping around when you ride it. I’ve seen other people with the Icon and it seems well made and also doesn’t flap around. I prefer the Olympia’s cinches on the sides to slim it down to your size over Icon’s lace up sides. Much easier to adjust and no worry about knots coming undone. Also, IMNSHO, while that black pocket on the Icon OK in photos, it looks really stupid in person.

The Olympia Nova is a great vest and I wouldn’t hesitate to buy it again.

An aside:
Why pay almost $60 for a vest when you could pick up something a construction worker might wear for $15? Because construction workers don’t work in 70+ mph winds. The straps on those cheap things aren’t designed to withstand that kind of constant pulling and tugging, and neither is the material. Do you really want one of those coming loose and flapping around you wile you ride? All of the vests mentioned above are going to hold up, and they are made out of some seriously heavy duty material that will provide you with additional abrasion resistance if you take a spill.

Popularity: 92% [?]

Using E-Z Pass / FastLane transponders on your motorcycle or scooter June 29, 2008

You’d think it’d be a non-issue, but it is. In fact, it can be a real pain in the ass. Sometimes they simply don’t register. You’d think they’d just wave you through since it’s not your fault, but frequently they’ll make you pay, and digging your money out of a riding suit can be a major hassle, especially if you thought you weren’t going to need it. So, if you’re riding a motorcycle and have an E-Z Pass / FastLane transponder. Here’s how to use it without headaches.

Step 1: Make sure your motorcyle’s plate is associated with your transponder. This is critical as you’ll see in a second.

Step 2: Whenever it is an option, avoid lanes that let you pay cash. If you’re riding with a group just go through the pass-only lane and pull over to wait for everyone else.

Step 3: Never, ever, stick it in the breast pocket of your jacket. I realize this is the obvious place for it, but for some reason this almost guarantees it won’t register. My recommendation is to either put it in the map pocket of your tank bag (so that there’s only the thin piece of plastic between it and the receiver), or attach it to the inside of your windshield. I emphasize “attach” because I had mine wedged in tightly between the windshield and the plastic behind the gauge console, and after a while the vibrations, combined with the pressure it was wedged between the plastics, and a small bump made it shoot out, flip in the air, and, thank the gods, get caught on a small shelf inside my fairing. Thankfully I was approaching a red light where I could reach in and grab it before it fell to the road. You can get spare / replacement fasteners from the state you purchased it from.

Now, the reason Step 1 is so critical, is that sooner or later the little piece of crap isn’t going to work. By that I mean you’ll go through a booth and it won’t register at all (I’ve had a booth attendant stand there waving it about in there air with no response, or maybe it’ll register red even though at the last toll booth it was green). If your plate is already on your account then when you go through, and it doesn’t register, the cameras will take a pic of your plate, they’ll look it up, see that you have an account and just bill it normally. Combine this with Step 2 and you can go through without worry of a ticket, or of ever being asked to take off your gloves to dig through pockets (especially evil when your money’s in your pants and you’re wearing a one piece).

On a related note: I have heard many people say “make sure it’s right side up”. It makes no difference if it is right side up or not. First off, they’re back-side up when properly attached to a windshield. Second is the physics of how they work. Transponders work by creating a magnetic field at the reader. There is a coil of metal wires inside of the transponder. When you move a coil of wire through a magnetic field you get electricity, which powers the rfid tag. The little bugger is going to get powered up regardless of what direction it’s facing in. What’s important is that there is nothing between it and the reader, because while it does have power, it still generates a pretty weak signal. *

*If anyone knows more details, or has evidence that I’ve made a mistake about these transponders please comment below.

Popularity: 97% [?]

Why you should use a distributed version control system June 27, 2008

If you’ve ever:

• made a commit and then realized you forgot “one little change”.
• made a commit and regretted it.
• wished you could combine some the past couple days worth of commits into one nice combined commit in the main branch.
• wished you could commit just part of a file.
• needed to drop work on one task and switch tracks to another one without having to make commits with unfinished changes, or commits with changes for one issue and a little of another.
• wanted to make a test spike with version control and without polluting the public repo.
• managed an open source project.
• wanted the security of knowing that there was a valid backup of your revisions on many other peoples boxes, or even just your own.
• been frustrated with branch namespacing issues
• been frustrated with how difficult branching and merging is in most centralized version control systems.
• wished you could just create branches to work on a feature or a bug without worrying about the consequences to the main repo.
• wondered which branch a bug applied to.
• wanted to use version control when you were offline.
• wished you could quickly compare versions of entire trees.
• wished you could easily release everything in the current branch “except that”.
• been concerned about how to scale a system to support hundreds, or thousands, of users.
• been concerned about what would happen if your main repo box died.

then distributed version control is worth your consideration.

Now, there are a variety of DVCS to choose from, Git and Mercurial (Hg) are main contenders, and both are really good. My experience is primarily with Git so I’ll be speaking as a Git user, but Mercurial can do most everything Git can, and a lot of this is general to all Distributed Version Control systems.

Quite possibly the most powerful, world altering thing about DVCSs is how they handle branches. Because of their distributed nature branching and merging absolutely must be simple effective, and avoid conflicts whenever possible. As a result people who’ve gotten the DVCS religion tend to make a branch for practically every bug or feature. We call these “topic branches“. If you’ve been working on one task for a while and a bug comes in that has to be address NOW it’s not an issue. Commit your changes in the current branch (or “stash” them away) and make a new branch for the bug that just came in. I doesn’t matter if you commit unfinished work in one of these branches, or if the work totally breaks the build, because it’s your branch. When you’ve finished working on a feature or bug you can “rebase” all your interim commits on that task into one nice clean one, or maybe generate a patch to apply to the main branch.

The fact that you can as many of your branches as you want solves a huge number of problems. Combine that with the ability to “rebase” you changes, by bringing up a list of past commits to merge, reorder, or exclude, as you see fit, and …well it’s like heaven. The only caveat is that you can’t rebase commits that others have already pulled. But that’s not a big deal if you simply do your work in personal branches that others aren’t going to be pulling from.

Because most DVCSs allow you to cherry-pick exactly which commits you want to be in a branch you can easily build a release branch with just the parts that you want. There’s one caveat to cherry-picking in most distributed and centralized systems : to do it well you must have commits that are a self contained and atomic as possible. If you make a commit with multiple features/fixes in it and later on you decide not to include one of them there’s no simple way to exclude just the bit you don’t want, because it’s mixed in with all the others. And this, brings us back to the idea of “topic branches.” If you’re already working with topic branches then you can easily merge the changes in one topic branch into the main branch as one atomic commit that can be excluded or included individually. However, as Aristotle pointed out in the comments

“the power of [Git’s] rebasing allows you to go back, split the commit sensibly into several, and then transplant the rest of your history on top of that. I guess whether this is simple depends on your definition of simplicity, but git has enough tooling to support this procedure directly. In other DVCSs you have to painstakingly monkey around with far less powerful tools, and in centralised VCSs it is for all intents and purposes impossible to do it at all.”

Yes, there will always be some changes that are dependent upon some prior commit, but by having nice little atomic commits you can limit the tree of dependencies to a bare minimum.

One of the best features of DVCSs is speed, but unfortunately it’s a lot like the Matrix. No-one can be told how much of a difference it makes. You have to experience it for yourself. I never complained about the speed of the centralized systems I worked with until I switched to Distributed Version Control. I found it hard to believe that “instant” commits would make a difference. Or that the time it took to diff against past versions was an issue. But I swear to you that the effect on how you work is almost as radical as the improved branching, and it flows over into the branching too. Now branching and merging is not only painless, it’s instant. I create, merge, and destroy branches throughout the day without hesitation because no matter what operation I do it comes back so fast that I frequently am incapable of telling that any time passed. That’s means that many (most?) of my operations are happening in the sub 100ms range. Imagine being able to diff versions of entire trees in tenths of seconds.

Scaling to thousands of users is not an issue with Distributed Version Control Systems because one box doesn’t have to support all the simultaneous operations that would normally be going on. Commits, checkouts, reverts, branches, diffs…. all of it happens on peoples local machines. They rarely need interact with the canonical / central repo. This means that large companies like Google wouldn’t need to invest in massive boxes with huge processors and piles of ram just to keep their version control system usable.

Speaking of the canonical repo… workflow doesn’t have to change at all. If you’ve got an established workflow with a centralized system there’s absolutely no reason it can’t continue on after a switch to Distributed Version Control. But, it does open up some other ways of working that you may want to explore.

In a centralized system if the box your main repo lives on goes down you’re pretty much screwed. If your IT people are really on the ball you’ve got it syncing to another box every few minutes (or more) and everything will fail over… bringing the primary box back up and resycing it may cause them to pull out their hair but at least no-one would be affected. Unfortunately it is a very rare company that’s that well prepared. And if you’re hosting an open source project you just have to hope that the people you’re hosting with have good backups and don’t go down.

Most software companies, and open source projects, simply grind to a halt when the version control system goes down. Changes can’t be shared, branches can’t be made, bugs can’t be patched, releases can’t be made, developers start building up a backlog of changes that will end up mooshed together into one commit when things do come back up, etc., etc., etc. But teams using DVCSs simply don’t care. It’s a non issue. “The heads crashed on the drives of the main repo, and a fuel truck plowed into our offsite backups”. It simply doesn’t matter. Sure your IT guys are going to have to deal with fixing that, but the impact to development is essentially zero. Someone stands up, or sends out an e-mail, and says “the main repo is down, just use my box instead”, and people do, and that’s the end of it. When the main box is repaired IT simply pulls from the box everyone’s been using in the interim and once again stands up, or sends out an email saying “the main box is back up”. Automatically syncing a remote box for fail-over becomes trivially simple with DVCS. Just set up a cron job to pull from the main box every minute and you’re done.

When it comes to open source projects there is one factor that absolutely sucks and that’s giving out write permissions. You don’t want to give them out to just anyone, but if you don’t then people who you don’t trust yet either have to work on your code without any revision control, or as is frequently the case, they just fork it into a version control repo they do have control over and loose the ability to easily merge their changes back into the main repo. You could just give them out to anyone but that’s not a choice that many project managers are comfortable with. With DVCSs it simply isn’t an issue. Everyone’s got their own repo(s) everyone can commit, branch, etc.. And when they’ve got something worthwhile they can ask you to pull from them, or send you a patch that they know will work with your repo because that’s where their repo originated and they’ve been pulling down your changes and merging it in to their work.

One problem that’s been an annoyance for me for years is that most bug trackers have no concept of branches. When you go into your bug tracker it shows you all your bugs but there’s no way to tell what branches they exist in, and what happens when you fix a bug, and get QA to sign off on it, in one branch but it hasn’t been patched in another one? Is the bug fixed or isn’t it? And what about the people who don’t have an intimate knowledge of that bug? How are they supposed to know where it does and doesn’t exist?

Distributed Issue Trackers solve this problem. You file a ticket in the branch the bug exists in. Then that ticket follows along with and branches of that branch until someone closes the ticket. As they merge the fixes back into parent branches the closed ticket merges in too. As a result you can always tell if a bug is or isn’t fixed in the current branch. If you commit your closed ticket with your patch then even more possibilities open up. If, for example, it was decided that your cure was worse than the cause and excluded that commit from a release then the ticket would re-open itself in the release too (because you got rid of the fix).

To date the best Distributed Issue Tracker, without question is Ditz, but the field is still very young. I’ve personally been working on a fork of Ditz that makes some dramatic changes and tightly integrates itself with Git, and I’ll update this page and make an announcement as soon as it’s released (a week or two). Personally I wouldn’t recommend anything other that Ditz right now. The projects are either too immature or abandoned and buggy. Ditz doesn’t have a lot of features yet but it’s reliable and gets the job done.

Another cool thing about Distributed Version Control Systems is that you don’t need anyone’s permission, or cooperation, to start using them. I work at a company that uses Perforce, and I think that Perforce is the devil, but it doesn’t matter, because I have Git. I do all my work in Git; constantly branching and merging and mooshing commits, and when I’m ready I just submit the completed changes back to Perforce. And this is actually better for everyone. Sysadmins don’t have to deal with the consequences of me making topic branches all over the place, the commits I make for coworkers are generally cleaner, and I can commit as often as I want, even break the build, without having to worry about the impact on others.

Now, it happens that Git has a number of tools for working with the major centralized version control systems (it’s even got a CVS proxy so that CVS people too resistant to change can keep working the way they’re used to). But, if your DVCS of choice doesn’t have a tool to bridge the gap to whatever centralized system you’re forced to deal with, you can always use Tailor.

It sounds too good…

Some of you are probably thinking this sounds too good to be true, or maybe that I’m DVCS zealot. But really, it isn’t, and I’m not. I’m a huge fan of DVCS, it’s true, but I’m not about to claim that they will solve all your problems. To really get the full benefits of them you’ve got to start making atomic commits. This is actually true of centralized systems too, but since centralized systems tend to be such a pain to use, and frequently can’t do cool things like cherry-picking, people don’t even bother to do anything advanced with them. With a distributed system the advanced stuff becomes trivial every-day stuff, and it becomes more annoying to have to deal with those developers who won’t stop making ginormous commits with changes to multiple bugs as well as a new feature or twelve. Fortunately, you don’t have to accept their patches of you don’t want to. ;)

Then there’s the UI issues. Graphical interfaces only seem to exist for Git and Mercurial (as far as I’ve noticed) and while they’ve got some pretty cool features they’re still, for the most part, catching up to the GUIs for centralized systems that have been around for ten years or more. But, I’ve yet to see a Gui for a centralized system that will let you visually follow a function as developers move it from one file to through multiple commits, with Git, this is possible.

On the command line some DVCSs like Darcs shine with totally intuitive commands, others have a bit more of a learning curve. Git definitely does because of how it stages things before commits. It appears similar enough to the way centralized systems work that many newbs expect it to work the same, and get frustrated when their expectations collide with its significantly different paradigm. Not only does Git stage things before commits but it doesn’t even think in terms of files, although, unless you’re paying attention, it may seem that it does.

Scaling to handle extremely large repos with years of history is something that Git handles very well (Mercurial probably does too), but some systems, like Darcs, have serious problems with.

In short, Distributed Version Control systems are totally bad-ass, and can really help with a lot of common development problems, but they’re still fairly new, and while the big ones are good, and reliable, they may not have all the polish and GUI widgets that you’re used to with your centralized system.

My advice is to go get Git, unless the majority of your developers are on Windows, in which case Mercurial may be a better choice… for the moment.

Popularity: 95% [?]

Boston Night Rides I June 15, 2008

I love this city and I thought it would be interesting to see what I could see when the roads weren’t clogged with cars…

Overall rating:
2 1/2 stars (out of 5). It’s interesting but not very relaxing. Don’t get any ideas about attempting this during the day either. The traffic would be evil.

The Route
Note: I’d actually recommend going to the end of Storrow Drive and following the curve around as it becomes the start of Memorial Drive but I couldn’t convince Google Maps to do that. All said, it’s about 20 miles, and a little over an hour of driving.

What you’ll encounter:

• Boston Garden
• U.S. Coast Guard First District
• Glowing pillars (they were green this time)
• James Hook+Co Lobster
  This eyesore of a building has been here so long it has ingrained itself into Boston’s subconscious.
• Boston’s World Trade Center
• The Bank of America Pavilion
• A working sea-port (they never close)
• The sweet view from Fort Independence,
  but not Fort Independence itself, because the trees hide it in the dark.
• The Big Dig (you’ll ride above, and within the tunnel)
• Boston Museum Of Science
• Two State Police stations
  Not that State Police stations are particularly notable. I just found it interesting because of the low probability of directly past two of them on such a short ride.

What you’ll need:

• The ability to memorize the route.
  This shouldn’t be hard. A lot of the roads you just follow until they force you to turn, or it’s simple to know you should turn. Consulting a map en-route is simply not safe without pulling over.
• To consult Google’s Street View images so that you know what the turns look like in advance.
• A good sense of direction in case you miss a turn, or they’ve blocked one off.
• No fear of rotaries (roundabouts).
  I think there are 3 and one is busy and not slow.
• To make sure there isn’t a big event at the Garden when you go by it. It’ll slow you down to a crawl for about 4 blocks if there is.
• To pray they’re not randomly blocking off three lanes of the tunnel for no apparent reason… again.

When to go:
Late. No, later than that. Midweek nights are probably best because there’ll be less people out partying. The route goes directly in front of approximately four bars, so keep your eyes open around them (not hard to spot) and remember that the MBTA stops running at midnight and the bars close at two. I’d say this encouraged drunk driving except for the fact that no-one can park anywhere in Boston…

Highlights:

• Driving Storrow Drive at night with no traffic ( although I prefer it in the other direction).
• Getting off your bike and listening to the sound of the sea lapping against the rocks at Fort Independence.
• Finally getting to open your throttle when you get onto I 93 north.
• Entering Boston from the south on I 93. I’ve always loved that, but I love this city so maybe it’s just me. I actually liked it better before the Big Dig.

Would I do it again?
Meh, probably not. But it was interesting once, and now I’m curious to see what Fort Independence is like during the day.

Popularity: 89% [?]

typelation [Definition] June 12, 2008

typelation: n. The act of converting speech, or thoughts, into text for a text-based conversation (e-mail, instant messages, etc.).

Example: The joke lost something in the typelation.

Popularity: 88% [?]

Undelicious - a Delicious Library 2.0 review

So, Delicious Library 2.0 was finally released. I was seriously wondering if it was just going to be vaporware for years. The people behind it would pop up their heads every two to four months and say “real soon now”. Back in November / December of 07 they were encouraging people to buy 1.x so that they would get the free upgrade, hopefully in time for xmas but if not very soon thereafter. It’s now June. They had a forum to discuss it where people basically said “yo wtf?” and the devs said “…” and occasionally “real soon now” with no indication as to wtf the hold-up was or why it’d been in private beta for months, and months, and months.

The 2.0 version has taken about four years to happen (1.0 came out in 2004). All the 1.x versions were just bug fixes not feature upgrades. If I sound a little bitter, it’s because I am. I can’t begin to tell you how excited I’ve been, and how long I’ve been waiting for, DL 2.0 without sounding like an idiot. This is, of course, due to the fact that it’s a library app, and anyone sounds like an idiot when they start talking excitedly about one. But they actually made it fun and really useful with 1.x and I couldn’t wait for new hotness.

Being a registered user I figured I might get an e-mail about the release, but no. I just stumbled across it when doing my monthly check of their blog (to see if there’d be any progress). So, I downloaded the demo, to try out it’s new hotness.

Adding new items: I was so jazzed to try this out as it was always one of the best parts. When I tried to add one of my recently purchased books it told me I could only add 25 items in the demo. It’s a reasonable limitation for a demo, but I hadn’t added a single item. It had imported my library from the 1.x install. Maybe they’ve radically improved the adding of items. Maybe they didn’t change it. Maybe it’s as broken as FTP upload…. I couldn’t tell ya.

They spent “four or so months to rewrite iSight scanning for internal iSights”, because apparently working perfectly in 1.x under Tiger and Leopard simply wasn’t good enough. And you deserve 4 months worth of work users will never see the benefits of. I can’t confirm that they didn’t break it because it won’t let me try to add anything.

Ability to borrow a book from friends? Hah! Silly user. People don’t borrow books. They only lend books. I can browse the libraries of anyone else on the network who has it and is sharing (just like iTunes). I can only mark things as being lent to others, but I can’t borrow anything.

Speed: meh. It’s no speed demon. It’s usable, but some things seem… laggy. Icon’s taking half a second to swap states when you check in something a friend borrowed. It’s not that it’s annoyingly slow. It’s that we’ve become accustomed to things being far snappier.

FTP Uploading: I get an “Operation not permitted” error, or it appears to silently fail, based on my settings. I’m not sure if it “Operation not permitted” means the FTP server won’t permit some operation, or DL won’t permit some operation (probably the former), and I have zero idea what operation wasn’t permitted. After fiddling more I discovered that it wasn’t really silently failing. The was a subtle solid circle next to the Publish button. This circle doesn’t move, blink, fade, or do anything other than sit there.

When you choose Window > Activity you see an empty black window that’s titled “lookup activity”, and the only way I discovered that it actually was publishing was that when I moused over the circle it says “Publishing in background”. It’s been “Publishing in background” for up to 20 minutes on multiple occasions now and each time it creates one folder, and twenty html files (out of the 160 the progress bars (1-75 and then another one for 1-85??) claimed it had created, but no images. It has put these files in a “deliciouslibrary” folder inside the folder i told it i wanted the files in, because apparently just sticking them directly in the folder I told it to use it too complicated.

This is because it has stalled (silently failed for real this time). It turns out if you try and restart it from the File menu it says “Publishing to FTP Site (0%)” where it used to have a “Publish to FTP” menu item. This is even more frustrating due to the fact that it has published something so it can’t possibly be zero percent. When you go to quit it (because it’s not working) it doesn’t bother to warn you that it’s in the middle of publishing. It just quits.

Exporting HTML to a local folder: works just fine (except for the 22Mb DeliciousLibrary2Dump.deliciousShare file it shoved in there for no apparent reason), and then you can upload that manually to your web server, although my export is just under 50Mb.

HTML Export (any method): Items seem to be sorted by meth-addled crack-whores reaching for the “rock” they just dropped, whilst fellating a John with electrodes attached to his willie. It’s not sorted by author. It’s not sorted by title. It’s not sorted by rating. It’s not sorted by genre. It’s not even sorted by the order I added them to Delicious Library. In fact, as far as I can tell, it’s totally fucking randomized. What DL has given me is a very nice looking collection of 378 books (and other media) in which you can’t find a damn thing you’re looking for, and can’t browse in any useful way.

Oh, and those star ratings next to each item? Those aren’t mine. I assume they’re from Amazon, but I have no idea if they’re the average rating or what Amazon thinks I’ll think of them. I can’t turn them off, and honestly, I don’t feel like contemplating the relative quality, on a one to five scale, of each of four hundred freaking books, and then all my movies and video games. So, I’m not going to set them.

There are 27 pages of books in my export, of which you can see links to 5 at a time. there’s no good way to jump ahead so you end up clicking and clicking and clicking … or you would, if there was some order, and thus hope of getting to something you’re looking for.

I won’t link you to the html it made because it’s a) useless b) annoying c) a fucking insult to our intelligence.

Sharing: sharing is pretty useless. the only way to interactively share is with other people running delicious library on your local LAN, which is to say, no-one. While I know that 1.x has sold gang-busters I have yet to meet a user of it in person. I suspect the same will remain true for 2.x. The odds of meeting them AND them being in the same building at my company…. even closer to zero. The usefulness of sharing from someone in the lan on my house is absolutely zero.

I’m betting that printing works. I could “share” the list that way. But seriously, who wants to read through pages and pages of hundreds of my book, game, and movie listings. No-one, that’s who. I have friends who would like to know if I have a particular book, but like they say “you can’t grep dead trees.”

Misc: After all this freaking time delicious-library.com (which they do own) still doesn’t work. No, you have to go to delicious-monster.com which I simply don’t have enough energy left to bitch about the stupidity of.

Conclusion: HTML export is beyond useless. UI isn’t different enough that I care. “Sharing” is a feature I’ll never get a chance to use, and you probably won’t either. On the other hand, it now supports many languages I don’t speak. And lets me loan (but not borrow) tools, because apparently the lead dev. couldn’t remember who he loaned a $200 drill to… Sounds like a must-buy app to me. Er, wait… no it doesn’t.

[NOTE: this is actually a cross-post from my comic blog, which usually doesn’t include these types of things (more a personal blog with drawings) but I did an annoyed drawing of the delicious monster and out came a review. *shrug*]

Popularity: 90% [?]

Angle-bracket Operator [Definition] June 9, 2008

Angle-bracket Operator: n. A person who manipulates HTML professionally.
Also see Web-designer.

Popularity: 89% [?]

Knox Gilet Air Review June 8, 2008

Most motorcycle gear has little-to-no spine protection. Even suits with decent spine armor rarely have anything that comes close to what Knox offers, and essentially no-one else offers CE rated chest protection for street-riders. Being a safety conscious chick who values her spine and internal organs I ponied up the money for this. The results are mixed.

Looks:
If you check out Knox’s home page you’ll see that they’ve updated the styling of this for 2008, but the one pictured here is essentially the same, and what I happen to own, so that’s what I’m showing. The only positive thing I can think to say about the looks of this is that it’s not bad from the back. The front however…

Fit:
First off, this is really designed for men. The chest plate simply doesn’t accommodate anyone with a bust. Fortunately (or unfortunately) for me I’ve got small boobs so it’s not really an issue. Also, if you’re pudgy, like so many Harley riders, I suspect this just won’t fit well no matter what size you order. However, if you’re in shape, and relatively flat chested, or male, you’ll have no problem. Their sizing chart worked for me and I’m very glad I consulted it, because I would have never chosen an extra-small otherwise as I normally wear medium or large tops.

You can easily remove the chest piece, but there’s not a lot of point in buying the Gilet if you do that. If you just wanted the back protection they have a variety of back-only options.

Comfort:
The back plate is actually quite comfortable and gives me a reassuring feeling while riding down the road. The chest piece is so-so on comfort. It’s not uncomfortable, but it’s not comfortable either. The real problem though, is the closure at the top. I find that when I wear this under my Highland II (after removing the Highland’s back armor) the neck closure on the Highland (and probably any other jacket) presses against the neck closure on the Knox and pushes it against my breast-bone. After about half an hour it really starts to hurt and leaves a sore red mark. The only solution I’ve found is to not do up the top closure of the Knox.

Similarly the zipper that holds the mesh snugly around the chest armor is by the top and points directly back at your chest. I haven’t actually had an issue with this but I suspect it might be a problem for some, and I thought that it was what was hurting me for a while before I moved things around and still had the pain. I really think this zipper should be moved to the front or replaced with velcro.

The wide velcro belly band that supports the back-piece and holds everything in place has a tendency to ride up, and doesn’t breathe at all, which brings me to…

Temperature:
Let’s be honest here. We’re talking about strapping large form-fitting pieces of foam to your torso. There’s no way this won’t increase the temperature. As I mentioned above the back piece is comfortable and gives me a reassuring feeling, but I do sweat somewhat under it, always. Surprisingly though, it doesn’t end up bothering me at all.

The chest piece though… I tried so hard to like this chest piece. I want some chest protection, and that’s the main reason I got this (the Highland II already has CE rated back armor, although not as good), but I’ve pretty much given up on using it in the summer. I overheat to the point that I worry about heat stroke on long warm rides when I have the chest piece in. Not only do you overheat with it, but the sweat just kind-of stays there, feels uncomfortable, and can’t help cool you. It blocks air from getting to your chest, which is exactly what you don’t want to have happen on a hot day.

And then there’s the belly band. Not only does it ride up but you can’t help but sweat under it.

Ugh. Knox really needs to rethink the design of this chest piece. Dirt-bike riders have had chest protection for years and it always has air vents in it. I’m tempted to go to Home-depot, buy a half-inch drill bit, and go all Psycho on this thing, but it’s so small to begin with that I’m not convinced that what would be left would be worth wearing. There’s no reason the belly-band can’t be redesigned to be more breathable.

Misc:
I find that the back piece is large enough that it prevents the Gilet from fitting into most bags. As a result you’re stuck wearing it, and looking like a dork, or carrying it around, and looking like a dork, if you go into a store or restaurant. I’m hesitant to leave it in a bike bag (not that I have one it would fit in) because the thing costs $300.

Conclusion:
I would love to wave a flag and say “Buy This!”, because I think most people wear way to little armor, and this is a nice simple way to add some to your current gear, but I simply can’t. I think racer’s would do better with the Knox Contour and chest piece, and I just don’t see anyone who isn’t fanatical about wearing armor using this all the time. In the summer the chest piece is too hot, probably for anyone, and I’m sure there will be some people out there who are bothered by the extra sweating under the back-piece. Most women simply won’t be able to wear this comfortably at all.

Knox needs to find a way to seriously improve the ventilation of this before I can recommend it. If you’re concerned about your spine, look into one of their other stand-alone spine protectors, but I’d pass on this unless you happen to find a really good deal on it. I’ll keep mine for winter use and when I have a ride-along who wants to feel safer, but for the summer I think I’ll switch to the Knox Kompakt (revamped version of the Stowaway) or just use the back armor that came with the Highland II.

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