Safe as Milk

24 hours, 181km

This is what a man who has run 181km in 24 hours looks like.

My friend, Stéphane Viossat, with whom I run in our club the AAAL, participated in the “24 heures de Saint Fons” this weekend, along with several other members of the club. Stéphane set himself a target of 180km, and with 20 minutes left he got there. He walked another lap just to be sure, and at 181.131km, sat down to savour the last couple of minutes of the day.

He had to go to the hospital afterwards to have two toe-nails removed and some nasty blisters disinfected.

I had the honour of running 5km with him between 101 and 106km around 11pm, after 13 hours running, when muscles started to tense and tiredness starts to set in. I hope I helped him through a tough moment.

I am in awe of achievements like this.

Sean Daniel, 4.1kg, 54cm, born 21:06 CEST 24/07/2007

Before…

Just after…

A little later

I’m delighted to share that Sean Daniel Neary, the newest member of the Neary family, was born at 21:06 French time today, a healthy 4.1 kg (that’s just over 9lb for you imperialists out there) and 54 cm tall. Mother and child are well.

Easy personal back-ups

I’m looking for a back-up solution which is easy to use. Ideally, I don’t want to have to decide what I need to back up and what I don’t - disk space is not an issue.

My dream app would be a graphical application which has back-up profiles - system configuration, personal data, application settings, media files, and maybe user-installed applications.

Ideally, I would be able to do incremental back-ups (à la rsync) where the weekly back-up will only be saving the new email, files and pr0n, and not the 30GB that was backed up first time round.

Also, a restore facility would be nice. In the past, when I have backed up files and had to restore, I have had issues because the user files were backed up for uid 501, and the corresponding account after installing the system anew was 502 (or something like that). I don’t want to have to think about user rights - I want to, as root, restore the system, and have user accounts, files, configuration all recreated as they were at the last back-up.

Anyone know of an easy one-click solution for Linux for the man who wants back-ups, but doesn’t want to have to think about them?

Update: I should probably mention that the back-ups will be to an external USB disk, and will be on-demand. I don’t want to leave the disk plugged in all the time, and I don’t want to have to think about plugging it in on Thursday evening to have the back-up done on Friday morning. Also, I’ll be backing up 3 different systems - including 2 on one double-boot machine. So ssh + rsync via a cron job is probably not the idel solution (but many thanks for the many people proposing it).

Balloon animals

Back at Christmas, one of the presents that Thomas got was a box of balloons and a pump, and a small book explaining how to make balloon animals.

Being a good father, I decided to have a go
It took me a while to get things right - a lot of balloons ended up getting burst, but I finally got some reasonable results.

I also had a few disasters - this is a mouse in progress that lost an ear, but didn’t completely burst:

And I practiced ear twists and lock twists on this one, about which Anne commented “Looks like haemerrhoids”:

But in the end, the parrot, the crocodile, the centipede, the hummingbird and the giraffe were my pride & joy.

The story continues…

A bunch of updates since last month:

FOSTEL

FOSTEL went really well - attendance was over what I expected, but we still had enough food & drinks for everyone (thanks to the very generous “traiteur”) and the content of both the presentations and BOFs was pretty good. A smidgin more organisation, and a round of introductions to start off the conference (which I wanted to do, and promptly forgot) would have been perfect.

As it was, I spent all my time running around sorting out last-minute issues, although I did get to have a good chat with some people, particularly over dinner. It was particularly good to see Craig Southeren and Jochen Topf, who have been giving me help with the conference from a distance.

I am still waiting to attend a free software conference where no-one has any trouble with the projector, though.

Roll on FOSTEL 2007 in Germany.

OpenWengo

We’re still in a heavy pre-release push for OpenWengo’s next release of the WengoPhone (I know, I know, I didn’t choose the names). Marco Marongiu talked to myself and Philippe Bernery from the project to ask us a little about the project’s past, present and future on the cusp of a major release.

Tendonitis

In spite of some early optimism from my tendonitis (it’s funny now that 3 weeks ago I was still wondering whether I’d be able to run the marathon), a short 2km run and the advice of my physiotherapist put paid to any hopes I had of doing any serious running for quite a few weeks. In addition, I haven’t had the chance to do any biking for the last couple of weeks either, and I’m starting to feel some of that condition going. Hopefully I’ll still manage to be fit for a 10k in a couple of weeks so that I can at least do some running when my friend Dennis comes over.

GNOME board

As usual, lots of stuff is happening with the board, and as usual, there’s much of it that we can only allude to in the minutes. And a couple of people aren’t happy with the level of secrecy in the board.

It’s a tough problem because in the same way that a developer doesn’t necessarily want to release his code until he’s got a working first prototype, if I’m working on something through the board, I’m not going to announce it to the entire membership until it’s reasonably consequential - to boot-strap things, you get buy-in from important companies & community members and nail down important elements of whatever it is you’re working on before going public.

One example where I’ve been confronted with this was when I worked on getting a GNOME store in place by getting a preferred merchandising supplier - in the end, I went public when we were still in contract negociations with someone, which then fell through (for a number of reasons). Would it have been better to keep quiet about the project until I was certain of success?

Profile

Why anyone would want to profile me, I don’t know, but back in February, I sat down with Joe Brockmeier in SCALE and chatted to him about my free software past and more. We got a bit waylaid back then, and followed up by email. The result was the bass for a profile of me which came out on linux.com recently.

Running is bad for your health

As some have noticed, I’ve been running for the past few months, training for a marathon at the end of April.

Since I started running, I have had a series of injuries - Achilles tendon from running uphill, a tendonitis in the groin from not stretching my hamstrings and adductors enough, and now, ITBS.

It’s another tendonitis which you get from running too long on a slanted surface, or poor posture during running, or pronation in your gait. Not sure which I did, although the doctor said I was fairly straight and he didn’t see any pronation, so it could be hip rotation, worn shoes, or just not changing footpath often enough.

The long & short of it is that whenever I run more than 10 or 15 minutes, I get knee pain. It’s nothing major, but it can take weeks to treat properly, so the chances are I’ll have to say goodbye to my marathon this time around… I am not giving up quite yet, but it’s not looking good.

Anyone reading this ever recovered from ITBS (syndrôme de l’essuie glace, ou tendinite du tenseur du fascia-lata en français) within 6 weeks of running a marathon? If so, what’s your secret?

And then there were 5 (in total)

It is with great pleasure that I present to you the newest member of the Neary family, which, while waiting for a real name to be chosen (once we know whether he’s a he or a she) will be known by the codename “toto”.

We had the first scan today, and everything is perfect. If anyone who hasn’t seen one of these needs directions, ask in the comments, I’ll let you know where all the bits are
Update: It seems some people thought that this was going to be my 5th child - I can confirm that the 5 includes myself and Anne - that’s 3 kids. Isn’t that enough?

Address hunt 2

Excuses pour l’interlude commercial.

Pour ceux qui cherchent un appartement à Lyon, j’ai une affaire à vous proposer… nous vendons le notre, un T3 de 80m^2, avec salon, cuisine équipé séparé, deux grands chambres, hall d’entrée, à proximité de Place Rouget de l’Isle dans le 3ème arrondissement. Il y a également une place dans un parking fermé, et une cave de 6.5 m^2.

Les rendez-vous sont par téléphone (06.07.62.23.06) ou par e-mail à moi-même (comme toutes les spammeurs de la planète peuvent attester, ce n’est pas difficile à trouver).

Can’t stand waiting

Heady times.

I’ve been away from home with work quite a bit over the past few months, but I’ve still found time to get the conference (http://www.libregraphicsmeeting.org for those who haven’t been paying attention) more or less organised.

We will have t-shirts. We will have goodie bags. We will have conferencees. We will have a big mess tryoing to figure out how to manage workshops, demos and BOFs. We will have food & drink. We will even have name badges!

I’m in that twilight state where you’ve put a lot of work into something, and you’re not sure how it’s going to go down. Will it be a roaring success or a giant flop? Will everyone (or most people) come away happy or annoyed at having wasted a weekend? I can’t wait, but I’m a little nervous all the same. I just want to get to Friday morning.

Now, I’ll just need to throw together a presentation to open the conference. In an hour between putting the kids to bed and leaving home to go away with work (again) this week. Thankfully, there has been a great team involved in the conference so far, so the last minute organisation and set-up is in good hands.

See you all in Lyon next week.

La fête des lumiéres

On the 8th of December in Lyon, every house lights some candles and puts them in the window. Children decorate small glass pots for the occasion. And throughout the town there are spectacular light shows and art installations.

The Fête des Lumiéres is a Lyon tradition which has grown in the past few years to a weekend festival of light, both bigger and more accessible than Paris’s “Nuit blanche”.

The origins of the tradition are open to question. One version is that the city of Lyon is thanking the virgin Mary for saving Lyon from German bombs during the second world war (a nice contrast between the black-out and a city full of light). However, some people I know have told me that their grandparents put candles in the window as children, suggesting that the tradition predates 1945.

The festival has outgrown its religious origins to become an emblem of the city, and people now come from all over the world to take part.

Thomas had great fun painting and decorating his jars, and last night we went to see a light-show in Place des Terreaux. We got home well after his bed-time, but it was a real treat to see the glint in his eye at the end of the evening.