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!).
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 We have a significant amount of historical content on the site (not all of it publicly visible), making a move a daunting proposition.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.
Recently, I was plagued by the “CredentialHelperSelector” dialogue popping up multiple times when attempting to pull from a remote Git repository. This was despite repeatedly selecting the option to remember my selection to use manager and various attempts to explicitly set the config helper via the command line.
I spend a couple of hours a week hanging around the leisure centre at Fleming Park while Emma swims. For the past month or so, I’ve been using that time to update the orienteering map of the area, ready for the SOC Summer Series event there in August. The fairways of the old golf course are becoming increasingly overgrown, aided by the planting of lots of new trees. I therefore wanted to update the map to the latest sprint specification, ISSprOM 2019-2, so that I could make use of the ‘rough open with scattered bushes’ symbol. Although it hasn’t shifted much since 2016, I thought it was also time to update magnetic north.
The following directions for OpenOrienteering Mapper (OOM) are based on those I received from the club’s mapping officer, Mark Light.
A few weeks ago, one of my colleagues at JUXT gave a presentation on Helm, and this started me thinking back over my own experiences with the tool. It appears I already had a lot to say on the subject back in 2018! Since then, I’ve made extensive use of Helm at CloudBees where we had an umbrella chart to deploy the entire SaaS platform, and at R3. It’s that latter experience that I’m going to talk about in this post.
Last weekend, the children were away on a music tour and Christine was examining a viva in Lancaster on Monday, which was the ideal excuse for a long weekend in the Lake District.
Friday – Loughrigg Fell
I took Friday off work and we took the train to Windermere via London, and then the bus to Rydal where we were staying in the Badger Bar. (Badger feeding was supposedly on offer each evening but I think we went to bed before the badgers got up!) It took about seven and a half hours door to door which, while a couple more than driving, was certainly more relaxing. We had time for a walk on Loughrigg Fell before dinner in the pub (and watching a very damp Olympic opening ceremony on TV).
Saturday – High Raise and the Langdale Pikes
The forecast was for rain most of Saturday morning. We eventually set out about 11, staying low and skirting the lakes to Grasmere. After tea and cake, things had started to dry out and we set off up to High Raise. Our younger selves might have continued on to Bowfell but we decided to drop down to Dungeon Ghyll via the Langdale Pikes.
We had a drink at the pub while waiting for the bus and chatted to a couple of guys who had been watching the Blisco Dash fell race (this year, the British Short Champs). They also mentioned it was the Lakeland 50/100 and we cheered the runners in Ambleside as we sat and ate our fish and chips.
Sunday – Fairfield Horseshoe
The weather was set fair for Sunday and we headed up Nab Scar to do the Fairfield horseshoe clockwise. I was dripping in sweat when we reached the ridge but sadly we then headed into the clouds as we approached Fairfield. The clouds did clear as we headed back towards Ambleside.
Monday – Lancaster
We relocated to Lancaster University that evening and had a wander around a mostly deserted campus. On Monday I had a couple of hours to kill while Christine worked. I decided to take the guided tour of Lancaster Castle. You started in the wings that were still in use until the prison closed in 2011 and then headed back a few hundred years to the waiting cells where, if you timed your arrest badly, you might have had to wait up to 9 months for the court of assizes. The tour then moved on to the impressive courtrooms, concluding in the “drop room” (which I’ll leave you to fathom for yourselves).
There was just time for a quick bite to eat before it was time to meet Christine at the station for the return train home.
Posted in Family, Running, Travel | Comments Off on Lancaster and Lake District Getaway
This blog has been a bit neglected for the last few years. I miss the opportunity to reflect on something I’ve done and write up those thoughts. We’ll see whether this is a one-off or the start of something new!
The first task was to make sure everything on the site was up-to-date. WordPress does a pretty good job of automatically applying security fixes but the Ubuntu VPS needed an upgrade. The update to Jammy went smoothly enough but attempting to access the site showed the WordPress PHP source. The enabled modules for Apache showed a couple of broken symlinks to PHP 7. After enabling those for PHP 8.1, I saw a WordPress error page: There has been a critical error on this website.
With the site rendering again, I thought I was done but on posting this entry the dreaded critical error reappeared. Looking again at the Apache error logs, /var/log/apache2/error.log revealed errors in lightbox-plus and crayon-syntax-highlighter of the form Compilation failed: invalid range in character class. From PHP 7.3, hyphens need to be escaped in regular expressions. I could have rolled the PHP version back further but decided to patch the offending files. (I probably need to review the plugins in use on the site and remove those that are no longer supported.)
And, finally, we’re back in business!
Posted in Hosting | Comments Off on WordPress is broken by PHP in Jammy update
October started with Duncan’s birthday. It was a pretty quiet affair at home with Christine’s parents visiting and a film in the evening. Friday night has become film night more generally now (after a trial of Sky Cinema we signed up for a discounted subscription). Trying to select a film is always a bit of a trial, particularly balancing Emma’s desire for action against age-appropriate content for Duncan! I’m usually the one who ends up making a final decision to try and satisfy everyone’s needs.
Swimming lessons continued, as did long walks and cycle rides at the weekend. In addition to Tuesday Night Runs (now with beer inside but with face masks and table service), I managed a couple of runs with the IBM gang. We went to another SCJS training with Duncan, this time in the New Forest. We were back in the Forest a couple of weeks later for an event I planned at Anderwood. I managed to put one control in the wrong place – the perils of doing all of my planning in one visit to the area the week before the event – but otherwise everything went well!
Still with vacation to burn, I had half term off. Much of it was taken up redecorating Emma’s room: out with the little girl pink, in with the teenage grey (there was much debate about quite how dark a grey she could have!). Duncan and I amused ourselves soldering and assembling the MERG DCC command station and handset kits for his railway. Two pairs of hands definitely made the job easier, not to mention Duncan’s eyesight when it came to the surface-mounted components in the handset. Remarkably, it all worked once assembled but the train and track now need a bit of an upgrade to get a reliable signal.
Duncan bought himself a small drone which we then promptly had to retrieve from the garden two doors down the road! He also bought himself a penknife which has, so far, only caused the loss of blood on one occasion! The month ended with Christine’s birthday. Come December, Christine was also allowed to tell the world that she had succeeded in her promotion to Professor. At least she now needn’t worry about being called upon to help in an emergency!
Emma’s inflatable boot had not helped her ankle but we were then left waiting for the hospital to start operating on children again. We were eventually given a date at the start of December (still over a month before the NHS would have even started to look at her ankle). Christine would go with her so both had to traipse up to Basingstoke for a Covid test three days beforehand, and then the whole family had to isolate until the day itself. Having been on the front of the list, Emma was awake again by mid-morning and home early afternoon. All seemed to go well and, rather than a plaster cast, she got to use the inflatable boot again. By Christmas, she was walking around normally again although is still a bit wary of cycling.
Things opened up again for the next few weeks. Orienteering resumed with events at Bramshaw and Farley Mount. We even managed the annual Run the Pubs, albeit that the meal afterwards had to be in the pub garden as we were not all from the same household. I managed to give blood (having been turned away with a sore throat on the previous occasion). We also had a big online launch event for the Software Delivery Management product I’m working on, for which everyone in the company received a set of glassware in the post so we could drink a toast. (You had to provide your own drink though!)
The dreaded R-number was on the rise again in the run-up to Christmas and there was much debate about what we might be able to do. At best, it was possible that we might be able to meet family for a few hours outside but, by the 19th, Hertfordshire (where my family is based) was put in the topmost tier, ruling even that out. By Boxing Day, we joined them in Tier 4 and we were to enter another national lockdown in the New Year. The Christmas period was therefore spent at home, enjoying the frosty conditions outside, and doing yet more decorating!
New Year’s Eve was made a bit special as we cashed in the money that CloudBees was contributing to a festive meal and had a nice takeaway. Emma was then determined to stay up until midnight and we thought we should probably keep her company! As the year came to an end, I’m sure everyone had the same wish: that 2021 should be a better one.
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