Owls Count

Yesterday was my last orienteering event for the year - the traditional Boxing Day event that my orienteering club organises, which is a score event with a novelty twist. The weather was good, which meant a good turnout - including the newest member of my club.
I went out of the start well - possibly running [...]

About a month or so ago I was feeling rather keen and decided to enter this event. In the end I ran the medium bike course, which was a course of about 16km. Though I managed to add quite a bit of distance to that.
The event used Longmoor, Woolmer, and Bordon, with the maps being [...]

I have been using Flickr to host my orienteering photos for a couple of years. Every now and then the Flickr team rolls out a new feature - collections and maps being two past examples. This month they have added two great features: stats and photo editing.
You need to be a pro member to be [...]

I have been using Minefield for a while. This will be released as Firefox 3 at some stage next year and there have been some good improvements. Recently I switched to using this runscript to solve the problems of using the non-default Firefox. Through the -no-remote switch I can also use Firefox 2 at the [...]

Such a contrast from last week. While it was cold, the sun was out and it was a good day to be out running. The pre-race information suggested that a lot of hill running was forthcoming and so it proved - 390m in 7.3km.
I started running well, but was a little hesitant for the first [...]

For the past two weeks I have been involved in the organisation for the British Schools Orienteering Championships. Last week it was preparing the equipment for use and this week it was drying it all and returning it. Today, finally, the house is looking like a home again, instead of a drying room.
On Saturday I [...]

I was able to make another of the fine BAOC events today. This time it was into the New Forest - to Red Shoot, which I do not think I had run at before. I chose to run the A course - 8.1km.
I started fast, too fast - the good open area inviting fast running. [...]

On Sunday it was the Southern Orienteering Championships, at West Wood near Marlborough. I had not originally intended to go, which meant I ended up entering on the day. I was running in a new pair of O-shoes and went out on the 5.8km M21V course.
The first two controls, of ten, contributed about half the [...]

This past weekend was the Second Oxford City Race. Whereas last year we were in the town centre, this year we were in the north of Oxford and starting from the Parks again. I have plotted my route. The overall comment would be that it was a little less tricky than last year, but still [...]

I noted in the tech press last week that Automattic had acquired Gravatar. Matt has posted the code to enable gravatars on his blog. I rather like the idea behind gravatars and have enabled them on this blog.

This past weekend saw the final of the Compass Sport Cup and Trophy competitions. The final took place in the East Midlands forest of Blidworth. In the final details for the event was the information:
Significant areas of forest mapped as runnable have bramble and bracken growth at this time of year making the runnability slower [...]

A while back I posted about the Web Trend Map 2007 Version 2.0. Since then I have seen a few more interesting web/internet maps:
e.maps - This site has a selection of web maps. I particularly like the World Web Map, which is a world map based but with the countries replaced with internet sites.
Map of [...]

I have been helping to finalise a map, for an upcoming orienteering event, and this morning I fired up OCAD (for the first time in quite a while, to add some logos to the map. It took me a couple of hours to add a handful of logos to the map. For reasons I do [...]

I order regularly from a number of online shops. Today I decided to order some items from Lush, as I will not be going near one of their stores for a while. I’ve ordered from Lush online before, but it seems that they have a new online store. This new store required me to register [...]

Wow. A fantastic event yesterday. The City Race took place in Warwick and included a trip round the castle. Simon E. has posted the GPS from his run, which gives a good indication of the course. There were a 43 controls in the 7.1km, which meant you really had to concentrate the whole way round [...]

Earlier this week saw the launch of a new website for British Orienteering. For reasons concerned with membership renewal the site has gone live before it is finished, which means that some features are missing or not fully working. First comment is that this is a big improvement on the old site - it looks [...]

I have had a while now and have decided to post a reflection on my two summer orienteering weeks - the O-Ringen and Spey2007. Before commenting on the two events I link to photo 1 and photo 2 of me on the run in on the fourth day of the O-Ringen and photo 1 and [...]

Tip #6 : Enhancing WordPress administration: Whenever I update a WordPress blog I think how overly complicated the ‘Write Post’ page is. There are lots of different pieces that you could use - most of which I have never had cause to touch. The post linked to suggests using Clutter Free to improve matters and, [...]

The new version of WordPress, the software used for this blog, was released yesterday. I took the plunge and updated straight away. Everything seems to be up and fine, but if any of you notice a problem then let me know.
However, on upgrade I noticed a jump in database queries on page load - nearly [...]

Recently I decided that it would be useful to use a task manager. Several of my colleagues are using Remember the Milk and I decided to join them, since then we can share tasks when needed.
I was really impressed with the signup process. It makes sensible use of technology to tell the user whether the [...]

As with many people, my computer rarely gets turned off. It was with interest that I noted the following coming through the blog world in the last week.
Less Watts
This site, from Intel, describes methods available to reduce power consumption on all types of machines running Linux. Available is software and tips that work to keep [...]

Today the army were offering, in conjunction with the local orienteering club, an one hour score event in Swinley forest. As this is fairly close to where I live, I caught a train, and went along - partly to meet with my parents, as they travelled through and collect some post from them.
As my knee [...]

Over the past week I have been following the Rugby World Cup and the Twenty20. Some good games, some good performances, and some bad. Certainly England fall into the bad category after a fairly dismal performance yesterday - a comment that can apply equally to both the rugby and cricket team yesterday.
Overall the Six Nations [...]

The Rugby World Cup started with a ’shock for the French’. I do not understand why it is being labelled as a shock. Yes, the French have been playing well recently, but Argentina have been steadily improving for years now and have now beaten France in five of the last six games. It was always [...]

Google announced this week that Google Reader now has search functionality. I have yet to fully try out the new feature, but the few quick searches I did yesterday worked well.
Also in the announcement was that the unread feed count will now go up to 1000, rather than the old value of 100. Before, if [...]

I know that some in the orienteering world are also into hashing. Well it seems that the authorities in New Haven, Connecticut, did not like the flour trail that two hashers had put out.
This link from Schneier on Security, where there is discussion of this incident and other ‘terror scares’.

I had not planned to do any orienteering for a while, but an opportunity came up to go to the BAOC event at Barossa today. They were running a one person relay event. The A course was four loops of just over 2km each. The B, C, and D courses were 3, 2, and 1 [...]

For several years now I have been keeping an orienteering/training log. This is something I programmed myself, as a project to learn php/mysql. I keep thinking about moving to a different system - Attackpoint or Nopesport for instance - but then remember how much info I have already and decide not to.
Over the last few [...]

When north is not north!
Over the last few months I had been noticing that every time I ran on a compass bearing I seemed to be ending up off to one side of where I had expected to be. I had been thinking that I was not running particularly accurately on the bearing, but on [...]

In the best traditions of the ‘rest’ day I kept fairly busy. I did not, however, take part in mountain bike orienteering - which sounds to have been fairly epic!
Tomintoul

My day started with a trip over to Tomintoul to visit the Whisky Castle. There I tasted a few, before picking up a bottle from the [...]

Day 4 - Culbin
My Route
Reasonable day, but could have been much better. On any of the longer legs I seemed to be zig-zagging rather than running directly in the direction I was planning on going - losing a few minutes in total. On the penultimate course I ran in the right general direction, but lost [...]

Day 1 - Alvie
My Route
A fairly good start to the week. I felt my running and navigation were reasonable, but I needed to push harder on the long legs - something that was a theme of the week.
Day 2 - Balavil
My Route
A good first day followed by a poor second. I had an early start, [...]

It seems that my laptop is 15 years old. Or rather the family of laptops it is from. I am fairly impressed with the IBM Thinkpad range.
Caught on camera – and found on Facebook: It seems that the University of Oxford is using Facebook photos to catch people breaking the exam celebration rules. That they [...]

Days 4 and 5, of the O-Ringen, were to the north and west of Mjölby, respectively. Both days finished through the edge of the town into the same assembly area. Day five included a bridge in the assembly area, after a run across the muddy last control. All of my routes from the week are [...]

Days 1, 2, and 3, of the O-Ringen, were to the east of Mjölby. The courses were on different parts of one big area, finishing in the same assembly field. All of my routes from the week are on RunOway. The walk to the assembly area crossed a river, which was rather high after the [...]

My father has uploaded his photos from the O-Ringen. Somehow I never got round to taking any photos myself!

While browsing the blog world I saw some links to the Web Trend Map 2007 Version 2.0. This is a rather cool tube-system like map of the ‘200 most successful websites on the web, ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective.‘
I did a quick check through the map and found only a few sites [...]

… for a few days.
Sweden was good and I will write about it at some stage. Also found time to read the new Harry Potter, along with many others at the campsite!

Ollie mentioned that the current weather forecast for the OO.cup, in Slovenia, was hot. This prompted me to check out the forecast for those of us travelling to Sweden for the O-Ringen. Weather.co.uk has a ten day forecast, which predicts rain next week. This forecast is combined to news that: The last days heavy rainfall [...]

The Wall Street Journal reminds us that ‘It’s been 10 years since the blog was born.‘ I have been blogging for just over half of that time - my LiveJournal is five years old.
Recently I have been reading more about OpenID. While doing so I found OpenID Delegate WordPress Plugin, which allows me to delegate [...]

I, like a lot of people, use Akismet to help block spam on my blog. Yesterday they announced that they had blocked two billion spam comments. While the work the people at Akismet do is fantastic there is something depressing in realising that 94% of the comments made to Akismet protected blogged are spam.

The latest Top 500 list came out today. Our new machine is number 36. It is the largest UK academic machine and one of four systems in Berkshire in the top fifty. I’ll post some pictures of it when I manage to get them off my colleagues.

Today is my last day of conferencing for a while. For the last six weeks I have either been attending a conference, travelling to a conference, or organising a conference. Tomorrow is a rest day and then it is back to writing the thesis.
Yesterday I presented Sparse Hybrid Monte Carlo Methods for Matrix Inversion. The [...]

I am back from Bulgaria and trying to catch up with all that has been going on while I have been away. In Bulgaria I attended the 6th International Conference on “Large-Scale Scientific Computations”. The conference was in Sozopol, which is on the Black Sea coast - my room was onto the sea. Then we [...]

For the past week I have been near Beijing, China. The primary purpose of the trip was to attend the International Conference on Computational Science 2007 (ICCS 2007). At the conference I presented, on behalf of Professor Ivan Dimov and Rayna Georgieva, Complexity of Monte Carlo Algorithms for a Class of Integral Equations. This is [...]

The plan, mentioned in my last post, was to update from New Orleans. However, a combination of poor hotel internet and lack of time meant that I completely failed to do this.
My main reason for going to New Orleans was to attend Phoenix Rising, though meeting lots of friends came a close second. During the [...]

Today starts a month of travels and conferences. The first, is in New Orleans. Plans are to do some updates while I am away, but that, as usual, depends on free time and computer access.

This past weekend I was in Wales for the 2007 British Orienteering Championships and British Relay Championships. However, the early May Bank Holiday weekend also means the Reading Beer Festival.

I woke up to a nice, sunny day and the promise of a good run round a reasonable area. Well I got most of that - missing out on the good run.
My route shows the silliness of my first leg. A rather good run around the area and eventually finding the control. From then on [...]

Recently the importance of making regular backups of important data was brought home to me. My desktop machine has two, old 40GB drives in it and one of them failed. It seems to have died completely - certainly I have not been able to get it to mount using any of the commonly available tools. [...]

Last week the new version, Feisty Fawn, of Kubuntu was released. For this new version there had been the release of an upgrade tool. The aim of this tool was to make the Edgy -> Feisty upgrade easy. For me the upgrade process was not quite as smooth as they seem to suggest.

Over Easter was the 2007 JK International Festival of Orienteering. The weather was rather good all weekend, which provided a good backdrop to the event.

Too sleepy to comment on the JK now, but have just finished uploading photos - so some links to those.
Sprint
Trail-O Day 1
Prizegiving
Relays

When designing and creating websites it is important to consider ease of use for those visiting the site. For the average person this is fine, but trying to imagine how a website looks to a colourblind individual is not easy. Now, however, there is a web tool which applies filters to your site, so you [...]

I really struggled to get moving today. The calf muscles were sore and running was difficult. I went round the first seven controls, including the long leg across the map, then retired. Which is rather a shame, as the course and area seemed to be good. From here it will be a couple of weeks [...]

On Saturday I attended a first aid course - to complete the final part of my Level Two British Orienteering qualification. I have been trying to attend such a course for a while, but the potential courses have, before this one, clashed with other commitments.
On Sunday it was off to Harewood for the first round [...]

Glorious weather to be running in today. Nice and sunny, but a reasonable temperature. Running at this time of year is good.
The course was really quick today. I ran 7:42mins/km, which is quick by my usual standards - back in January, for a slightly shorter course, I was over 9mins/km. I navigated cleanly [...]

I did not go to the BAOC event last week, as my heel was still sore. This week, with the event being fairly close I decided to go along. The heel has not fully recovered, but was good enough to run on.
I ran fairly well today. Managed to keep a consistent pace for most of [...]

The main struggle I had when I first started coding in Ruby on Rails was working out how to use tests. Ruby, and Rails, have a great testing framework, but I had no background in knowing how, and what, to test. As I have progressed with the language I have become more confident in writing [...]

Saturday night was spent in Leatherhead. I watched a fair amount of the Six Nations and had dinner at a local Italian restaurant. From the Travelodge it was a short journey on Sunday morning to the event.
When I put on my o-shoes I noticed that my heel was sore. I decided to go up to [...]

This weekend was the JOK Chasing Sprint, held on Banstead Heath. The whole of this weekend was made more difficult by me forgetting to take any contact lenses with me and, so, having to run in my glasses - not the best way to start.
Prologue
In the morning was the prologue. A 5.9km course, with an, [...]

I cannot remember where I got the first of these tips from, but I really am grateful for learning of it. I spend a fair amount of time ssh-ing into various machine I use. Having to type out the full command ’ssh [machine name]‘ is quite annoying - especially as some of the full machine [...]

Reasonable course and a fairly good area to run on. I made a silly five (plus) minute mistake at number six, when I stopped concentrating and ran one spur further than I should have. The navigation was not that difficult and generally it was a case of running as fast as possible on a fairly [...]

For my day to day internet browsing I use Firefox. One of the great features of Firefox is the ability to extend the browser using Add Ons (or extensions as they used to be known).
Last week I cam across FaviconizeTab. This extension allows you to reduce certain tabs so that all that is displayed is [...]

On Saturday I went up to Malvern to meet up with a group of friends from my undergraduate days. Due to complicated scheduling this was our 2006 Christmas meetup! A rather good day
On Sunday I was at Inside Park for an a local orienteering event. The photos from the event are here. [...]

The BBC is consulting over its’ proposed on-demand services. You can give your feedback here (not sure if that is UK only or not).
Of particular note are questions:
3) This concerns how long users will be able to store the content on their machine. I do not see how this suggestion can be feasibly implemented.
5) This [...]

Having been to the theatre last night I got in rather late. This meant that getting out of bed this morning was a bit of a challenge, but getting out of bed was well worth it. Really enjoyed the event today and liked the area.
I started well and managed to keep a good consistent pace [...]

On Saturday I went with friends to the theatre to see Terry Pratchett’s Feet of Clay: A Discworld Murder Mystery dramatised by Stephen Briggs. Rather good it was.

This week is another where I am teaching. This time I am just teaching the practicals, so I am only busy in the afternoons and not all day as last time. Though, at the moment, I have not done that much. There are only two students for this module. On Monday the students were busy [...]

After some recent poor weather it was good to wake up to a sunny morning. I really enjoy running on winter mornings like these. The poor navigation today was displayed to and from the event with a couple of trips round Farnham, as we struggled with the one way system and poor signs.
For the early [...]

How to mount a remote ssh filesystem using sshfs
I stumbled across this a few days ago and set it up on my work machine today. Seems to work very well and cuts out the need for using scp to transfer files back and forward between the machines I use. Mainly posting this here so that [...]

An event in the New Forest, in January, after some recent heavy rain, suggested lots of mud and marsh, but this was not really the case. While the paths were often deep in mud and the marshes wet, if you could avoid both then it was fairly dry and runnable. I decided to do the [...]

Not a great news day for either.
In the US the leading certifier for electronic voting systems was unable to document how it supposedly tested the machines for accuracy and security. It really does not encourage my confidence in having such certified systems used for elections, nor in the results of elections using such systems.
A team [...]

Software patents keep cropping up, as various governments pass laws concerning them and as various others comments on them. If you are after information then a quick search for ’software patents’ gives a reasonable selection of the media articles on and arguments for and against software patents. If you are British and anti software patents, [...]