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.
(more…)Author Archive
MapRun League Results Generator
Saturday, August 2nd, 2025Dartmoor DofE
Saturday, July 26th, 2025
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!).
(more…)Creating a Membership List in Drupal 11 with Aggregating Views
Wednesday, July 9th, 2025I’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 We have a significant amount of historical content on the site (not all of it publicly visible), making a move a daunting proposition.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.
(more…)Stopping the Git CredentialHelperSelector from popping up
Tuesday, June 24th, 2025Recently, 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.
Updating the symbol set and magentic north with OpenOrienteering Mapper
Sunday, June 15th, 2025
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.
(more…)Helm: for better or worse?
Monday, June 9th, 2025A 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.
(more…)Lancaster and Lake District Getaway
Monday, August 5th, 2024Last 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.
WordPress is broken by PHP in Jammy update
Saturday, August 3rd, 2024This 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.
The WordPress PHP compatibility matrix indicates that there are still exceptions with PHP 8 versions. Time to get PHP 7 back…
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php
sudo apt update
sudo apt install php7.4
sudo apt install php7.4-common php7.4-mysql php7.4-xml \
php7.4-json php7.4-mbstring php7.4-gd php7.4-curl
sudo update-alternatives --config phpThen re-enable the PHP 7 Apache modules:
sudo a2dismod php8.3
sudo a2enmod php7.4
sudo apachectl restartWith 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!
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