Duncan was once again playing with the 14th Spitfires Scout and Guide Band as part of today’s Remembrance Day parade in Eastleigh. It did rain at one point, but luckily for the musicians, they were in the bandstand at the time! I was following along, taking more pictures than were really need (now on Flickr). No video this year, I’m afraid, but they were sounding good.
Duncan and I went to the SN Saturday Series event at Horsell Common today where, as has now become the norm, he beat me. This was followed by some junior training which mostly involved me soaking up uncharacteristic November sunshine.
I had to have the significance of the sandpit adjacent to the start pointed out to me. Despite having reread it in the past year, I’d failed to remember that Horsell Common is the setting for the start of H G Wells’ War of the Worlds. The sandpit is the landing site for the first Martian…
The recent spat between Garmin and Strava reminded me that there was a time when I used to post GPX files on this blog for orienteering events and my more interesting runs. I then used the XML Google Maps plugin to render those GPX files. That plugin failed to survive a PHP upgrade many years ago, and the maps were gone. I sensed another opportunity for Copilot…
Read the rest of this entry »I decided to test out Copilot on another MapRun-related challenge: planning the optimal route for a score event. Our Summer League events are, more often than not, planned using OpenOrienteeringMap. This uses OpenStreetMap data for the base map. The format is usually a 45-minute urban score event, using MapRun’s ScoreNxx scoring system. The aim was to take the KML file that describes an event, and determine the best route to take to maximise the score. As a constraint, I would specify the maximum distance that the route should cover (i.e., how fast the competitor was expected to run).
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We decided to spurn the Scottish 6-Days for our orienteering holiday this year, and instead went south to the OOcup. The event moves around, but this year was taking place on the Slovenia/Italy border. We flew Easyjet to Venice and then hired a car to drive the 200km to Kranjska Gora where we had rented an apartment. (I now know much more about cross-border hire charges than I ever wanted to. For the record, Enterprise was around £25 for the week.)
Read the rest of this entry »Southampton Orienteering Club has what is now an annual MapRun league. A few years ago, I wrote a tool to scrape the results for each event, allocate points (only your first attempt counts, and it must be in a specific time window), and publish some HTML results. For example, those from this year (which I might just happen to have won!). For some reason lost in the mists of time, it was written in Node, but I decided that I would rewrite it in Golang before sharing it with the world on GitHub.
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Duncan’s Silver Duke of Edinburgh expedition was on Dartmoor, and I was on the hook for driving half the group down early on Saturday morning, and back on Monday. It seemed to make sense to stay down there and make a long weekend of it.
The journey there was remarkably painless, and once they’d been briefed by the leaders, they set off north from Bennett’s Cross. I was due to meet my uncle in Bovey Tracey for lunch, but had time for a quick circular walk past Grimspound. In addition to the obligatory Dartmoor ponies, I also spotted a fox and some llamas (the latter captive!).
Read the rest of this entry »I’ve written before about our use of Drupal for the Southampton Orienteering Club website. We’re now on Drupal 11, and my opinions haven’t really changed. Upgrades are still painful, particularly the community modules that we have to leave behind each time. The user experience for creating content also lags behind newer alternatives. We have a significant amount of historical content on the site (not all of it publicly visible), making a move a daunting proposition. In the meantime, as this post demonstrates, we continue to utilise the powerful features that Drupal and its ecosystem offer.
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