Archive for the ‘Orienteering’ Category

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In Control at Alice Holt

Friday, January 2nd, 2026

I qualified as a Level C orienteering controller in mid-2024, but with club Chair duties taking up much of my spare capacity, it never seemed like the right time to say yes to controlling an event. That said, Southern Navigators approached me in mid-November seeking a controller for their event at Alice Holt at the end of December. With the maps having to go to the printers before Christmas, the limited runway meant there was only so much of my time it could consume, and I eventually agreed to take it on.

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Run the Pubs (20th Anniversary Edition)

Tuesday, December 23rd, 2025

It’s 20 years since the first Run the Pubs took place. Looking at the photo from that first run, I could have worn the same outfit if I’d realised it was a significant anniversary, as both the shorts and top are still in my running wardrobe. Congratulations to Andy H for being the only other one of those original five runners to make it out again (though as a teenager, Martin was on drinks duty for that first run).

It was a pretty murky start as we set off from Nomansland, but thankfully, the forecast rain never arrived. There was plenty of opportunity for getting wet and muddy from underfoot, though. While visiting only two pubs, we managed nearly 20km this year and, most importantly, didn’t get lost! Thanks to Andy A for all of the cat herding!

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Orienteering with the Martians

Saturday, November 8th, 2025

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…

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XML Google Maps to OSM Plugin Migration

Sunday, November 2nd, 2025

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…

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MapRun Score Optimal Route Planning

Sunday, October 5th, 2025

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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Summer Orienteering in Slovenia and Italy

Saturday, August 16th, 2025

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.)

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MapRun League Results Generator

Saturday, August 2nd, 2025

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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Creating a Membership List in Drupal 11 with Aggregating Views

Wednesday, July 9th, 2025

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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