Coast Path Finale

June 28th, 2014

Mass Beach RunHaving managed to get a reasonably sized SOC team together for this year’s Dorset Coast Path Relay it was perhaps inevitable that none of the other clubs would! As a consequence, it was decided that we would all join forces for a final record attempt before calling it a day.

SOC was allocated the section from Hardy’s Monument to Osmington. At ~15km I couldn’t really justify dragging 18 people down to Dorset even for a record attempt and we were eventually a (sub-)team of 10. I was off first and had a somewhat flustered start as it was shortly after being told that I had about 20 minutes to wait! I still haven’t completely thrown the cough that’s been plaguing me for the last month and my breathing was somewhat laboured. As I handed over to Andrew Nash it was clear that I wasn’t in any state to run the King of the Coast section later with Tim and Tamsin.

Christine and I were meant to help with a couple of hill sections but we managed to miss both of them. We therefore headed off to Studland for the children to enjoy the beach. Sadly when the incoming runner finally reached the group waiting for the mass run along the beach we were already well over the previous record time. Christine ran with them and then jogged back before we all headed to the pub.

Thankfully, of the promised sunshine and heavy showers, the latter part didn’t show its face until we were driving home. It’s sad to think of this as the last Coast Path Relay – maybe its time will come again…

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Back to Hilliers

June 8th, 2014

After having let our Hillier Gardens membership lapse for a few months we finally renewed it last weekend. We took a look at this year’s sculpture’s in the garden on a lovely sunny afternoon with an ice cream just to ensure that the children want to come back again soon! We went for the ‘Plus’ membership again which includes the Hants County Council ‘Culture-All’ pass so we can now once again resume our trips out to the various and varied locations it covers. This weekend the orienteering club’s summer series event was at Queen Elizabeth Country Park so free parking there is one we can tick off the list. Having arrived sufficiently late to miss the morning’s downpours, we were treated to yet another lovely sunny afternoon. The children enjoyed their yellow course, the various playgrounds, and yet another ice cream. It must be summer!

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Emma @ 7

June 2nd, 2014

Emma on her 7th BirthdayEmma’s birthday this year was a drawn out affair. Falling in half-term she had her party the weekend before. This was to have been a trip out to a cinema and restaurant with a few friends but, due to some confusion over cinema schedules (at one point it looked like Godzilla was going to be the only film on!), we actually ended up having those same few friends round to watch a film at our house which proved very easy for us. I donned black tie to serve lunch. Emma chose a selection of films from Google Play/Amazon Instant Video in advance and, after consulting her friends and tossing a coin for the tie-breaker, they ended up with the somewhat surprising choice of Charlotte’s Web, a film released before Emma was even born!

On the day itself, the weather forecast looked particularly poor. As a result, we deferred hunting for Fairy Doors at Furzey Gardens until later in the week and joined the crowds at Winchester Discovery Centre instead. I’m still not sure why Emma enjoys going there so much. The previous week she had declared that science was her favourite subject at school only to spoil things somewhat by adding that she particularly liked the bit where God made the world! Typically, of the presents she received, the small dressable dolls that Granny Sue had picked up in a charity shop appear to be the favourite, outlasting the novelty of the loom bands. She had to wait another week to move in to her main present from us: her own bedroom. In many ways it’s sad that we don’t get to listen to them chatting away to each other after we’ve said good night and, once Emma has a little more furniture, there will be the inevitable tears as they try to divide up the books and soft toys between them, but I think they will both appreciate having a little space that they can call their own.

 

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AWS Update

May 5th, 2014

At the end of April I went to the AWS Summit at ExCeL London, partly to keep up with the competition but largely because the attendees are a different crowd to those you get at your average IBM conference. I managed to miss most of the keynote, partly by design (no early start and an off-peak ticket) and partly due to someone driving in to a level-crossing in Southampton! Having watched the video subsequently, I don’t think I missed a great deal. The only announcements from Amazon that peaked my interest was the arrival of Amazon WorkSpaces in Ireland and the availability of the Twitter stream in Amazon Kinesis.

As in common with the rest of the day, it was the customer slots that were the most interesting. For example, SwiftKey talked about their use of Hadoop on AWS to crunch Wikipedia in other languages to build a starter set for their language models, through to CloudFront as the CDN for serving the final models up to their customers.

I had an interesting chat over lunch with someone who was actually an IBM customer and then wandered the expo watching demos by some of the likely suspects in the cloud deployment, management and monitoring space (Chef, Splunk, DataDog, …).

After lunch the breakout sessions began with six parallel tracks this year. I went to Deployment Done Right first, covering Elastic Beanstalk, OpsWorks and CloudFormation. The only new news for me was an aside that Beanstalk nows supports Docker. It seems like pretty lame support for containerisation though as you appear to get an EC2 instance per image. The accompanying presentation from Sportpursuit.com was most notable for the long list of open source software in use (Nginx, PHP, Magento, Varnish, Redis, Memcached, Elasticsearch, Jenkins, Capistrano, Capify EC2, Boto, …).

Next up was Dynamic Content Acceleration covering the CloudFront CDN and Route 53 DNS with the aim of knocking a second off your response times. The customer this time was import.io which is an interesting site in its own right, providing the capability to turn websites in to structured data (for free).

For the last session of the day I picked Scaling on AWS for the First 10 Million Users which did not, as you might expect, spend a lot of time on auto-scaling, but covered all aspect of application architecture that would contribute to scaling. The customer was the mobile taxi app firm Hailo who are pursuing a micro-services architecture. They are using containerisation (they didn’t specify which) and are apparently writing their own controller to manage the distribution of those containers across EC2 instances to balance workload.

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The Vyne

May 3rd, 2014

The VyneFor the second time this year we headed over to the National Trust’s Vyne Estate just the other side of Basingstoke to meet up with friends. As on our previous trip we were treated to lots of sunshine although there was a bit of a nip in the air for the first half of the day. There is plenty to keep the kids amused whether it is the sculptures scattered around the grounds, relaxing on deck chairs on the lawn, counting (toy) rats in the rooms of the house, the bird hide, or the imaginative playground. This time we also wandered a bit further in to the woods and enjoyed the bluebells and building dens.

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Synchronised training

May 2nd, 2014

For the past couple of years, uploading my running training has been a bit of a faff. I like to use a desktop app (SportTracks) so that, whatever the changing fads online, I still have all of my data in one place. (It goes back to 2006 when I first got my Forerunner 305. Some day I may even important my old Polar Training Software data.) The desktop app also has some interesting plugins. One of these I used to push my training to dailymile for comparison with a few friends and colleagues and for the widget on this site. However, I’m also partial to a bit of segment stealing on Strava. Sadly no simple SportTracks plugin for Strava so that was a separate upload.

After a bit of search and experimentation, my new workflow is to upload to the SportTracks website which then syncs seamlessly (in both directions) to the desktop app. Then I’m using the excellent online tool Tapiriik to automatically synchronise the data from SportTracks to Strava.

On the plus side, this means I’m now only downloading once and it doesn’t have to be on the machine with SportTracks installed. Also, without really thinking about it, it means I know have 8 years worth of data synced back to Strava!

On the negative side, Tapiriik doesn’t support dailymile so that will have to go by the wayside, at least for now. That means you’ll see a slightly squished Strava widget in the sidebar of this site. The other major downside is cost. The SportTracks site has an annual subscription of $35. Whilst the site is nice and they are continually adding good features, if it weren’t for the sync with the desktop app I wouldn’t be forking out that money. We’ll see how things are going come renewal time. Automatic sync on Tapiriik also comes at a cost but a mere $2 pa for what is a very slick site and available as open source if you really wanted to host it yourself.

Now I just need to decide whether to add Garmin Uploader to my shopping list so that I don’t even need to turn on the Mac! (Works with my Nexus 7 but not my S2 unfortunately.)

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Brecons JK

April 23rd, 2014

Emma CyclingThe second week of the Easter holidays we were booked in to a lovely cottage (once we found it!) called Heartsease near Brecon. We’d brought our bikes but I’d managed to forget the Trailgator for towing Duncan. Rather than cycling up to the waterfalls above Talybont as planned, we drove up, went for a walk, and then Christine and Emma cycled down to the dam where Duncan and I met them again (Duncan having practiced his cycling back and forth on the dam.)

Pen Y FanThe next day we repeated the walk we did two years ago up Pen y Fan. The main difference this time was that Duncan had to use his own leg power to get up to the summit! Both children were very good and it was only towards the very end of the walk that they both started to grumble a bit as they got tired.

On the third day of the holiday we were joined by Christine’s parents (in the nearby Pencelli Castle campsite) and they took the children to Dan-yr-Ogof caves leaving Christine and I to do another ascent of Pen y Fan, this time walking from near our cottage and taking in Fan y Big and Cribyn as well. The following day we all headed over to Cardiff and had a lovely time with Christine’s brother and family.

Then the serious business started – the JK. The Friday was a sprint race around Swansea University. I had a reasonable run finishing 8th on M35 in what was not a particularly tricky area whilst Christine picked up a Silver medal on her course. After a quick trip to the fun fair we then rushed back to the cottage to cook a big dinner with Christine’s cousin and family having arrived to stay in the cottage next door.

Saturday’s event was on Merthyr Common. It’s not my sort of area as I can neither run nor navigate fast in that terrain. I was therefore pleased with a 6th place in what would have looked like a respectable time if Duncan Archer hadn’t come and beaten the rest of the field by 10 minutes! On Sunday we returned to the same assembly area but the weather which, until this point had been very kind to us, had turned. I not only carried the mandatory cagoule but wore it all the way round my course! I finished 7th in a similar time to the previous day which brought me up to 5th over the two days. Christine failed to make it three second places in a row and dropped down to 4th.

We had to move out of our cottage by this point and went to stay with Christine’s parents in Monmouth. This meant we could leave the children there on the Monday whilst Christine and I went to the (sunny once more) relays at Pwll Du. I ran the last leg in the JK Trophy bringing the SOC team home in a respectable 17th place. Christine managed another 2nd (on first leg in W120+) although her team ended up 5th. Now we just needed a holiday to recover!

Posted in Family, Orienteering | 1 Comment »

Logsearch & Decker

April 4th, 2014

Yesterday evening I headed up to the London PaaS User Group meeting as there were two Cloud Foundry related sessions on the agenda. First up was David Laing talking about the open source Logsearch project, a bosh deploy of an Elastic search ELK log analysis cluster. His employer (City Index) has this hooked up to Cloud Foundry system logs and, in some cases, they’re also using it for analysis of application logs with addition parsers. They’re looking for people to get involved in the project and help with the next phase: anomaly detection. One major hole in the solution as it currently stands: it’s only suitable for private PaaS as their is no access control over the logged data.

Up second was an entertaining pitch by Colin Humphreys, Founder and CEO of ours hosts CloudCredo, on how to sell hats to monkeys. That was the back story anyway, it was actually about how there is space in the stack for something that gives you the flexibility of IaaS over what you run but the simplicity of management, scaling and load balancing of PaaS. That something is Container as a Service. Specifically, the ability to push Docker files to Cloud Foundry using a custom stack for the DEA. Something that Colin is referring to as Decker.

Colin gave a nice demo but it is obviously still early days. Currently you can only push Docker files not images. There is also no staging at the moment – the image is created when each instance starts – consequently it is not taking any advantage of intermediate images. There is obviously lots of scope for improvement and it’s definitely one to watch. It was also interesting that Colin is currently focussing on the Docker side with the DEA interactions set to change with the introduction of Diego. The project is open source but Colin recommended waiting until he writes some docs before you try picking it up!

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