schwuk.com

So with my new shoes and a pedometer my mother bought for me today, I set off on my third run.

The shoes (and possibly a few days rest as well) made a world of difference. Because I’m currently staying with my brother-in-law in darkest surburbia (Hersham, near Walton-on-Thames to be precise) and I was pushed for time, I went for a shorter run than my previous (successful) attempt.

According to the pedometer I…

• Ran for 21 minutes
• Covered 2.247 miles
• Took 3301 strides
• Burnt 275.7 calories

Being a typical geek, I love the idea of collecting this sort of information. Admittedly it’s not quite as cool as Mikes version, but I can’t really justify that sort of kit at my current level.

What is pretty cool about the pedometer is that only records when you’re moving, so if you do stop for a break, it’s deducted from your overall time.

Back when Gmail was first launched I was like “big deal”. 1GB storage? I’ve got my own server. Filters? I can run procmail (because I’ve got my own server). Webmail? I can run my own (because I’ve got my own server).

I used to have a fantastic email setup with postfix handling SMTP, spamassassin and ClamAV handling spam and viruses respectively, procmail for filtering, dovecot for IMAP and various clients (including Squirrelmail).

Then I upgraded from Fedora Core 1 to Debian Sarge (just before it became stable), and everything broke. Sure postfix still worked, spamassassin and ClamAV still scanned (although the former was never as good as it was) but procmail was broken horribly, and I used this extensively to filter my various mailing lists and to file spam for later inspection. When I couldn’t immediately fix this, I switched to using Gmail for mailing lists (and some personal email), and struggled on with my reduced functionality setup.

You see the problem was, when anything was run through procmail, it was stored with the owner & group as root:mail which meant the it was unreadable by me. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out what was causing this. After extensive Googling and enlisting the help of various people (of which Mike Knell – my brother-in-laws brother – was extremely helpful) I was still drawing a blank.

Tonight I fixed the problem though:

If no rcfiles and no -p have been specified on the command line, procmail will, prior to reading $HOME/.procmailrc, interpret commands from /etc/procmailrc (if present). Care must be taken when creating /etc/procmailrc, because, if circumstances permit, it will be executed with root privileges (contrary to the $HOME/.procmailrc file of course).

You see the problem was that I was using Maildir with procmail, and I was using a global procmailrc to configure this, and that’s where the permissions were coming from. Once I figured out the correct incantation to force procmail to use Maildir I was laughing:

mailbox_command = /usr/bin/procmail -a "$EXTENSION" DEFAULT=$HOME/Maildir/ MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir

I do like Gmail and may continue to use it for mailing lists, but now my mail configuration is back up to full strength (and my spam is neatly handled) I suddenly feel less need for it.

Today I turned 31, and with birthday money from various relatives I treated myself to some decent running shoes.

That’s one off my list!

I also got some running gear from my wife, so I am now much better equipped.

I’ve been looking into MP3 players and despite being quite enamoured with the iPod shuffle a friend showed me his £20 SD based player from Argos. He complained about it not playing by album, but seeing as shuffle doesn’t either, and generally use iTunes in Party Shuffle mode anyway this isn’t really much of a concern for me. I’ve doing some looking on eBay and there are various similar devices on offer for roughly the same price, and decent sized SD cards weigh in at roughly the same price I could have a 1GB (expandable) MP3 player for ½ the cost of the 1GB shuffle. The shuffle is still ‘cooler’ though…

I’ve found a very annoying feature of Typo:

When you create a post via the web interface (as I normally do) the date is set to the time you started writing the post, not the time you actually click “Publish”.

It should be fairly trivial to fix, I just need to sit down and do it.

Well that didn’t go according to plan.

After my first attempt I felt tired, but not too bad. The next day (yesterday) I was noticeably stiff, particularly the front of my thighs.

This morning I again woke at 6AM and headed out. I completed the first section (my circuit has five sections) without much of a problem. I felt I was slower and could definitely feel the stiffness in my muscles, but I ran it in about the same time as before.

As I progressed on to the second section a nagging pain in my right foot became more noticeable, and I realised I was sub-conciously favouring it which in turn was slowing me down more. After about approx. ½ of a mile, I decided I was going too slow to complete my circuit in my alloted time and the pain was too distracting. So I walked back to the start of the 2^nd section, and ran the first section in reverse.

So including breaks and the walk, today I think I ran approx. 2¼ miles in ~35 minutes.

The pain in my right foot affected the outside edge and heel. I’m not sure what the cause is but I suspect it’s simply a combination of bad running style and bad shoes, both of which can be addressed.

In hindsight I’m guessing it wasn’t too bright an idea to go again so soon after my first attempt – I didn’t really give my body time to recover. Next time I’m going to give myself a few days before trying again.

Things to buy:

• Pedometer (or more likely a GPS)
• Heart Rate Monitor
• MP3 Player
• Decent pair of running shoes!

At least two of the above might be solved with this.

I’ll might turn this into an Backpack list if I can be bothered.

I’ve been meaning to do something about my general fitness for a while. I never been a big one for gyms and machines – I much prefer ‘natural’ exercise.

So this morning for the first time in quite a few years, I got up and went running.

I got up at 6AM and was out of the house by 6:15. I covered a simple loop that is somewhere between 4 & 5 miles and delivered me back to my door. I started off running well, and finished running (not so well), but in between I did occasionally slow to a jog and also had a few (very brief) walks. I was back by 7:15.

Apart from general fitness, I do have a specific goal in mind but I’m not going to talk about that until I’m happy with my progress. I’m happy with my first attempt though!

My desk (and office) is now a lot tidier than it was…

This is by no means the worst I’ve seen it, but it was pretty cluttered. Most stuff on there has been there for ages, and rarely touched (or even moved).

This morning I decided to do something about it, then remembered a piece on Signal vs. Noise a couple of weeks ago about the same thing. Suitably inspired, I shovelled everything non-essential into a box, or in the case of the small monitor & extra keyboard I put them on top of the computers they were serving.

I’ve still got too many power blocks and cables, but it’s a start. In all honesty with my WiFi I’m finding I spend less time in here now anyway, so there’s no reason for it to be so messy!

This weekend I needed to make a trip to London to visit my sister and pick up my mother to bring her home. For various reasons, I decided the best plan was to drive there and back in one day.

That’s right, Cumbria to London – ~330 miles (according to Google Maps) each way and four motorways: M6, M42, M40 and (shudder) M25.

I need my head examined.

We set off just before midnight on Friday, stopped at Warwick services on the M42 for an hours nap and arrived at our destination at around 7AM. A fairly bust day followed, then we left again at 18:45. We paused briefly in Birmingham to visit my 92 year old grandmother and consume a backet of KFC, and arrived home at 2AM Sunday morning.

We were extremely lucky with the traffic – only stopping once on the way back when they decided to reduce the M6 to one lane, but everyone in lanes 2 & 3 decided to ignore the signs and wait to the last minute to get in. That winds me up so much!

For some reason I didn’t get up until noon today (or rather yesterday)…

So the other day I complained about various web applications and promised to hand roll my own one.

I lied.

I started digging a bit more into RoR, and played a bit with customising Typo and got addicted.

A short while later I had a working version of this site up and running, and looking pretty much as you see it now. This was all on a development box on my home network, so happy with the results I decided to take the plunge and push it up to my production server. This is where the trouble began.

I’ve been running a Linode successfully for quite a while now. I’ve always used Apache, but the limited RAM of my configuration just wouldn’t let me run Apache 2 with FastCGI without grinding the box to a halt. I spent a little while chatting to some folk on #rubyonrails and #typo on Freenode, and based on this I started looking into replacing Apache with LightTPD. It took me a while to iron out the creases, but once I’d got it figured out I was seriously impressed.

As you can probably guess, I’ve now made the full transisition – both to a LightTPD and Typo. Some things are broken (I need to figure out a decent redirection system) but generally things are working.

To make life easier for those who use their favourite feed readers, I started using FeedBurner to host/translate my feed. They provide an excellent, free service which includes (amongst other things) translating your feed to the correct formatter for the reader accessing it. This means I don’t need to worry about a) providing multiple feeds and b) updating/redirecting feeds if I change software again. For the record, the old textpattern RSS and atom feeds are now being redirected. Another nice feature of FeedBarner is that it combines feeds automagically, so my new feed contains content from both this site and my del.icio.us tags. In time I will (probably) also add my Flickr feed to the mix as well. Guess I’ll have to upload some photos first though!

My new feed can therefore be found at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/schwuk

I’ve spent some time over the past few days getting to grips with Ruby on Rails and Typo once again with a view (again) to replacing Textpattern. Typo has come a long way in a short time, and has some the very nice features. That said, I still feel I’m adapting my site to suit the engine, so I think it’s back to the drawing board.

I’ve also been busy using and evaluating various popular web applications:

• del.icio.us
• Backpack
• Ta-da Lists
• Flickr
• Upcoming
• 43 Things
• 43 Places

All are good. All provide what they promise, but all just don’t feel right to me.

Why?

Because I have my own server, and the ability to do these things for myself. Yes this makes me the exception rather than the rule, but when this is taken into account the only real benefits to those applications are:

1. They’re already available
2. “Everyone” is using them
3. They are (mostly) social applications

I’ve never been comfortable being a sheep following the flock, and I don’t like adapting my requirements to meets the services being offered. Why should I be limited to a 20MB/month upload (or pay the pro account) when I already have the bandwidth and hardware to host as many photos as I like.

As I said, I have the ability to write my own application(s) that will meet my own requirements. The only problem is if I do, I will lose the social aspect of some of the other offerings. That said, with the exception of del.icio.us I can find the social side distracting.

So, I think it’s time to expend some real effort on rolling my own blog software, combining the notes and lists features of Backpack and at least providing integration with other services if not replacing them.

Watch this space…