10K Time

September 20th, 2015

Hursley 10KIt’s been a busy weekend with Duncan off at a party yesterday and then setting out our stall at the school car boot sale (a profitable couple of hours but we still came back with far more stuff than I’d hope to have!). Today it was the Hursley 10K and it was my turn to run this year. As an added incentive, this year I was running with #8 which, I was told, was based on the estimated time that I had submitted. What I also knew was that #1 had beaten me by some 4 minutes two years ago so I wasn’t trying to keep up from the start!

Things went well for the first half when I was in a pack of five behind the leading two runners. Unfortunately I started to fade after that (blood doning last Wednesday?) and also started to wretch around the 7km marker (something that’s affected me before in 10k races so there’s probably something wrong with my pre-race prep). I was therefore glad to hit the open at the end with no-one on my tail and could coast to finish in 7th place. Depending on how you look at things, either I was either 4 seconds slower that two years ago (gun time of 38:49) or one second faster (chip time of 38:45).

Duncan - Hursley Fun RunEmma - Hursley Fun RunBoth Emma and Duncan were entered in the children’s races. Duncan was off first in the KS1 race and declared that he wanted to run on his own. This was probably a mistake as he got his first stitch on the way round which was obviously paining him as he came in to the finish. Emma had a longer loop in the KS2 race and, although she claimed not to have enjoyed herself very much, put on a respectable show. She seems to have become very materialistic of late and was very put out at ‘just’ getting a buff, bag, banana and water bottle!

Emma and PonyWe then had to race off as Emma was meant to be singing with the Brownies at the local fun day (she’d already missed singing with the school). We arrived just in time for her to enter the arena having no idea what she was meant to be singing! She needn’t have worried though as it was virtually impossible to hear them over the band playing at the other end of the rec. Thankfully there were long queues at most of the attractions to disuade Emma but she eventually decided that she would like to have a go on the pony rides. By this time I needed to get home to have a cup of tea and a sit down!

 

Hincheslea O

September 13th, 2015

Wilverley PlainOur Autumn orienteering season kicked off yesterday with a SOC event at Hincheslea on the western side of the forest. It was raining as we left home but the showers soon passed over leaving some lovely sunshine. This meant we had a very pleasant task in manning the start. When I left for my run the children had settled in to their usual task of getting maps out the boxes for competitors.

I enjoyed my course as the area offers high speed running when you’re not fighting your way through the head high bracken and gorse! I messed up two controls. I ran round in circles at #5 as I wasn’t confident that I was at the right gully so didn’t go looking in the undergrowth. I also wasted time at #11 where I was way off to the right which threw me completely.

Duncan orienteeringWhen I got back, Christine went round the yellow with Emma. Once we’d packed up the start, Duncan and I set off as well. Despite saying he didn’t want to do it, Duncan set off at a fair lick and kept it up most of the way round what was quite a long course. His motivation was quite clear when he came back from download with a big grin having beaten his sister by a couple of minutes.

Container Camp LDN 2015

September 13th, 2015

On Friday I made my way up to the Barbican Centre for this year’s edition of Container Camp London. After a slow start (no-one seemed to know that we were supposed to descend five floors to the cinema in the bowls of the building) things finally got under way. Here’s a quick summary of the day’s sessions:

  • Bryan Cantrill, CTO at Joyent kicked off the day with a animated romp through the history of containers ending with the view that containers deserve better than to be run in virtual machines and, perhaps not surprisingly, Joyent’s Triton project gives you the ability to turn the bare metal in your datacenter in to one large virtualized container host.
  • Next up (after another hiatus to sort out projector woes) was Shannon Williams, co-founder of Rancher Labs. He talked about what you should be looking for in a private container service which again, not surprisingly, read much like a feature list for Rancher.
  • Lack of network connectivity was the next issue which saw Bryan Boreham from Weaveworks take to the stage. Byran gave a technical presentation describing why consensus (as used by Consul or etcd) may be overkill and why Weave uses conflict-free replicated data types (CRDT) for service discovery and IP address management.
  • Mandy Waite from Google gave an introduction to Kubernetes – nothing new there.
  • Stephane Graber, who is the project lead for LXD at Canonical, gave a nice demo of some of the capabilities of LXD. He stressed that LXD is aimed aimed at system (i.e. whole OS) containers rather than application containers, suggesting, for example, that you might run Kubernetes under LXD. He failed, however, to explain what features differentiated it in this respect.
  • There was selection of lightning talks over lunchtime, most of which now escape me. Ben Corrie from VMware spoke about Project Bonneville, demonstrating vSphere as a container host. Liz Rice would have demonstrated the real-time scaling of force12.io if she’d been able to connect to the screen.
  • After lunch, Arjan Schaaf from Luminis illustrated that, as always, you should performance test. In this case, to understand the inter-container networking characteristics of your IaaS and SDN.
  • Alissa Bonas from Redhat demonstrated the OpenShift/Kubernetes integration in ManageIQ that allows you to drill down from a container view of the world in to the underlying infrastructure (virtual or physical).
  • Miek Gieben spoke about the dynamic, container-based infrastructure that powers Improbable.io based on Core OS, fleet, etcd and DNS.
  • After yet another coffee break (queue trek back up five flights of stairs), Ben Hall gave an entertaining pitch on attempting to keep nefarious users at bay whilst giving them free reign over a Docker setup in his Scrapbook learning environment.
  • This was followed by Diogo Monica of Docker cover the Notary and the Trusted Update Framework as integrated with Docker 1.8. I was just glad that I had saved watching Docker Online Meetup #24 for the journey home as it was the same slidedeck.
  • Perhaps the most impressive session of the day was by Loris Degioanni, CEO at Sysdig. He started by talking about monitoring through tools such as Google’s cadvisor and Docker logs before giving a really powerful demonstration of the sort of information you could collate and navigate by inserting the sysdig kernel module on the Docker host.
  • Last up was Juan Batiz-Benet who, although his presentation was entitled ‘Containers at Hyperspeed’ was, I suspect, going a little too fast for most people to keep up! The net was though that we should all be using IPFS to shift images around so that deduplication doesn’t stop at container layers but goes down to the individual file level.

As you can probably tell from my comments, the conference could have been slicker but it was still well worth the trip up to London. I’d say I learnt less than last year but that’s more because my own level of understanding has moved on. I’d also suggest that this year there was more of a focus on ‘doing with Docker’ than simply on the technology itself which indicates an increase in the maturity of the ecosystem.

BBQ Washout

July 24th, 2015

SOC Bake-offSOC was meant to have a BBQ tonight and, to be fair, we did have a BBQ. Truth be told though only one person attempted to cook their food on the BBQ with everyone else seeking the warmth, shelter and food of the IBM clubhouse. Sadly the rain also meant there weren’t many takers for H’s Hidden in Plain Sight photo-O. Luckily my local knowledge meant that, with a bit of a cerebral workout, we could work out most of the controls with a beer in hand! Christine had also organised a bake-off, with Rob’s chocolate coated 3D-map taking first prize.

T20 Blast

July 24th, 2015

Hampshire battingAt the suggestion of some friends we joined them at the Hampshire vs Somerset T20 Blast match at the Ageas Bowl on Thursday night. The traffic was a nightmare getting there. It took over an hour and a half to cover the 10 or so miles from home and even then we abandoned the car and walked the last half a mile. As a consequence with missed about a third of Hampshire’s innings.

I’ll confess that it was my first time watching a professional cricket match and the Twenty20 format certainly helped keep my interest. I can’t say that the same was necessarily true of the children! It didn’t look to good for Hampshire when they had to settle for 143 for seven but the bowlers did an excellent job in the second half with Hampshire the winners by six runs.

Ageas Bowl

End of a Series

July 18th, 2015

wpid-duncan-rvcp.jpgWe went to the last of the SOC summer series events today at Royal Victoria Country Park. I went round the yellow with the children with the expression instruction of just making it fun as orienteering is still out of favour with Emma. Duncan therefore spent most of the course waving a large stick around and we took a detour on the way from 3 to 4 to take in the boardwalk!

I went round the Light Green after Christine got back which meant that I had the distincct advantage of knowing which controls were misplaced before I started! We haven’t made it to as many events in the series this year due to other commitments but it’s still been fun and I hope the club continues with regular local events next summer.

Rome Retreat

July 11th, 2015

ColosseumWork took me to Rome at the end of this week, facilitating a code retreat for some of my colleagues at the local IBM lab. The retreat itself followed a format we’ve used numerous times before with a focus on pairing and TDD although for the first time we also introduced a session on BDD. Starting with a plain English (or Italian) description really did seem to help the participants avoid starting with a focus on the details of the implementation. The experience also made me realise how much you are dependent on being able to understand the communication between a pair when trying to coach them!

I had a few hours to spare in the evening in which I seemed to manage to cover most of Rome on foot and, with the hotel being based near the Colosseum (I could see it from my room window), I managed to get a quick trip round the inside before it was time to depart for the airport. Unfortunately Fiumicino was in disarray following a fire two months ago which meant we spent around an hour sat on the tarmac. I’d certainly like to return to Rome when I have more time to explore but the trip did remind me that I should do so at a time of year when it’s a little cooler!

School Orchestra

July 5th, 2015

Christine playing oboeThe reason Duncan and I had the morning to ourselves was because Emma and Christine were at an one-day orchestra session at the junior school. Christine had dusted off her oboe and Emma had her recorder. The practice beforehand hadn’t gone too well as one of the two pieces they had been given was out of range of both instruments! Duncan and I got to come and watch the performance at the end of the day. I couldn’t tell you what Emma was up to as she was well hidden by her music stand but Christine was certainly giving it a lot of puff! There were sufficient adults there carrying the tune that all of the pieces were recognisable and Christine, at least, was sufficiently enthused to look up a local wind band when she got home.