Advice from a recent beginner

When you start running regularly, take it very easy before you start upping the distance. Your heart & muscles will tell you to go further & faster before your joints are ready for it. Trainers say that you can up your total weekly distance no more than 10% per week. And running more regularly is worth more than running long in fewer sessions. Four three mile runs is better than two six mile runs.

When you do decide to start running further, start doing it in fractions – run 1 mile, walk 1 minute, run 1 mile, walk 1 minute. If you’re on 10 minute per mile pace, that’ll drop you to 11 minutes per mile, but you’ll be able to run 7 or 8 miles easily.

Vary fast & long runs. If you’re starting to stretch out runs & regularly going more than 5 miles in a run, try swapping out one of those 5 mile runs for something like:

• Warm up 2 miles
• 4×800m at a faster pace (if you jog 10 minute miles, then try to run your half-mile split in 4 minutes) with 2 minutes  break between splits.
• Warm down 1 mile

If you always run long & slow, you’ll stay a slow runner. If you start training your body to run a little faster, you’ll improve the entire system – cardio & muscular. And you sweat more too.

To lose weight, do that 5 or 6 mile run on a Saturday morning – don’t starve yourself the night before, and drink water or tea  before your run by all means, but running in the morning on an empty stomach will help you drop those pounds. Once you go over about 30 to 40 minutes running time, you’re eating fat. If you’re diabetic, this might not be advised.

And don’t forget that every body is different, no one scheme or training plan works for everyone. Your body’s a machine, and it’s one which can be made very efficient with maintenance.

Once you get to the stage where you’re running that speed work, you might consider adding some shorter sprints & really start getting faster

Christmas cake

Ingredients (all weights approximate, mix & match to taste & availability for fruits & nuts, total quantities are what’s important):

• 300g currants
• 100g raisins
• 75g sultanas
• 75g prunes (can try dates or dried apricots also)
• 75g cherries (halved & stoned)
• 75g mixed peel
• Grated rind of 1 orange & 1 lemon
• 3 tablespoons port
• 1 tablespoon brandy
• 1.5 teaspoons mixed spice (I used cinnamon, cloves, muscat)
• 200g plain flour
• 2 – 3g baking powder (if you don’t have any, use half-in-half self-raising & plain flour)
• 175g butter
• 175g sugar
• 4 eggs
• 50g chopped or ground almonds
• 100g mixed chopped nuts (to taste – walnuts, hazelnuts, and my personal favourite: pine nut kernels)
• 1 tablespoon Golden Syrup (I didn’t have any, so used 2 tablespoons Maple syrup + 1 tablespoon honey, seems to work OK)

Preparation (night before cooking):

In a big bowl, put all the dried fruit, and soak it in boiling water (15 minutes). Empty water and repeat. This softens the fruit and lets the alcohol work more effectively. After emptying the water the 2nd time, add in the grated rind, the port and brandy (enough to moisten the fruit), and stir the fruit well so that the alcohol gets on everything uniformly. Also, take the eggs and butter out of the fridge to let them come up to room temperature. Leave overnight.

Grease a 20cm baking tin with butter, line it with greaseproof paper (or, as I did, tinfoil if you don’t have any), and grease the lining. Heat up your oven to a low heat – I put it at 120 degrees Celsuis (equiv. gas mark 1). Beware fan assisted ovens – they’ll dry out the cake too quickly. Use the mode with no fan.

Chop the nuts, and put them and the mixed spices in the flour. Mix well.

Ingredients (after preparation)

Break the four eggs into a bowl and beat lightly. Cream the butter and sugar together in a big mixing bowl (must be able to comfortably hold all the ingredients). Slowly add and mix the eggs (one spoon at a time) into the creamed sugar & butter. You don’t want the mixture to curdle, so make sure that each spoon of egg is well mixed in and you get something like a paste. Once all the egg is in, add the golden syrup (or, in my case, maple syrup & honey), and stir it in.

Fold in the spiced flour, mixing well. There’s no rush, add in the flour bit by bit to ensure a regular paste.

Then add in the soaked fruit (which should have grown nicely plump overnight). Mix until you have a nice regular consistency.

Spoon the mixture into your baking tin, flatten the top, and then bang the bottom & sides a bit to ensure there are no air bubbles inside. You can even drop the cake tin from about 20 – 30cm high to get them all out.

Bake the cake for at least 3 hours. Mine cooked for 5 hours (the oven could have been a little hotter). For the teetotalers in the audience, don’t worry, the alcohol burns off in the oven.

The final cake (before being eaten)

Ideally, bake your cake in November, and take it out of the tin every week, poke some holes in it with a skewer, and regularly feed it a drop of brandy, port, rum or whisky. The fruit will soak it up & be lovely & tender (but slightly alcoholic) by Christmas. In my case, we’re just going to eat it

La Fête des Lumières

I’ve written about the Festival of Light in Lyon before, and it’s coming around again. I’m going to bring the boys into Lyon with over 1 million other people to walk around cold streets looking at light shows on some of Lyon’s best known landmarks. This year will be bigger than ever, with a €2 000 000 budget, and I have had a sneak preview of some of the installations from training runs on the riverbanks of the Rhône and in Parc de la Tête d’Or. The light shows are always interesting, sometimes a little arty, often spectacular. This year, I would like to bring everyone up to the top of Fourvière to have a view of the entire city.

MAPOS 08

First up, next week I’ll be in London to give a presentation at MAPOS (nothing to do with cartography), the Mobile Application Platforms in Open Source conference. My presentation is titled “Increasing Ecosystem Cooperation”, and will be at 15:30 on Tuesday afternoon.

I will talk about the need for companies building on free software to make mobile application platforms to work actively to develop that platform. I hope to get the message across that building on free software is not a client-supplier relationship, but is more like a research grant or R&D function.

Companies in this space are used to surveying the market, choosing the best solution, and then paying for it, so that some third party will keep improving it. The integrator model which many distributions use, of modifying the basic building blocks according to your needs, and sending changes up-stream after they have been developed, is an intermediate model, which has both positive and negative sides. But what we really need is an active co-development, with companies building on our platform investing R&D dollars into targeted co-operation across multiple companies, to address coherently a problem space (such as the needs of mobile platforms).

GNOME Foundation members are entitled to a 15% discount on registration, for those thinking of going.

Bibliothèque Municipal de Lyon

On the evening of the 12th, I will be participating with a panel including some people from Handicap International’s Centre icom which I visited a few weeks ago. I will be presenting GNOME’s accessibility capabilities to a seminar on Information Technology and Handicap both to show its power and also to advertise its freedom (philosophical and financial) compared to proprietary programs like Jaws.

Christmas run

On the 14th, I’ll be in Aix les Bains, running in the Corrida des Lumières with a bunch of my club-mates from the AAAL – since running 39′10 last month in a 10k, I’ve been hyped about running another competition. I’ve been training well, and Christmas runs are always fun with mulled wine & dinner afterwards.

GUADEC co-ordination

Along with Vincent Untz, I’ll be flying out to Las Palmas on the 15th (oh how life is hard) to meet with Alberto Ruiz (for GNOME), the Gran Canaria Cabildo (the local government), and the KDE eV board members co-ordinating the conference from their end. We’ll be testing out the cheaper hotel accommodation option for the conference (I hope there will also be a “very low budget” option like a youth hostel or a campsite), meeting with local volunteers, and resolving the major issues we need to work out before we ramp up the next phase of the organisation – gathering and scheduling conference content.

Judo

Thomas started Judo this year, and he loves it. I have stayed around after bringing him a couple of times, and the warm-up they do is certainly fun, but challenging. On the 17th of December, Thomas will be having his end-of-year competition, the first time he’ll be in a Judo competition. It’s a bit of fun, really – and yet I hope that introducing an aspect of competition into the activity doesn’t in some way ruin it for him.

Christmas skiing

As usual, Christmas will be on the 25th of December this year. Last year we were in Ireland, but this year we’re going to celebrate with just the family, and the kids will get to wake up in their own beds.  On the 27th, Anne, the kids and myself are going to go into the Alps to meet up with the rest of her family for a week. We’re hopefully going to get in some skiing, go walking in the woods, eat too much, drink too much, and be very merry indeed. It’ll be my second time celebrating the new year in the mountains, and with the cold & the snow it feels like Christmas in the films. I love it.

Go

When Lefty wrote about trying to get a particular type of brush in Japan,the intricacy of the detail of the story made me think of Go. Go is an ancient game with a small number of simple rules, which result in a game of deep complexity and beauty, and a handicap system which allows unevenly matched players to play competitive games.

It is a game steeped in the kind of tradition that Lefty talks about – professional Go tournaments are played on goban cut from a particular type of rare wood, with white stones made from the carved and polished shells of a specific type of clam, gathered on a single beach in Japan, and the black stones being made from slate mined in a single mine. The Go board is elongated, just enough to make it appear square when you are sitting in front of it, and the size of the black and white stones are slightly different, to compensate the visual impression of white stones appearing larger.

I’m back playing regularly (mostly, unfortunately, with GNU Go, who is more than a match for me on bigger boards) and have taught Thomas the basics. He’s caught on surprisingly rapidly – he’s up to the stage where he can beat me in a 9×9 game with 4 stones. Go is a very intuitive, rather than analytical, game, and some of the key concepts like influence, “good shape”, life and death are quite abstract, making it a game that children can “get” quicker than adults.

I’ve also found parallels between the ebb and flow of a Go game and free market economics. The core principle that the goal is not to kill your enemy, but simply to reduce his territory while protecting yours through strategically placing your stones to create influence and strength, matches closely my ideas of how markets work.

Phew! That’s a lot of “stuff”.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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?

To get into the habit of running, I trained for and ran the Marseille-Cassis on Hallowe’en weekend – I got through the 21 kms in 2 hours and 1 minute (I beat the 2 hour pace-maker by a couple of minutes, she had faded in the heat at the end). The unusual think about the Marseille-Cassis is that you start at an elevation of 0, between kilometers 6 and 10 you climb from 100m to 320m elevation, and then from kilometers 16 to 20, you go back down to 0 again. It’s very tough on the knees and hips, but great fun.

Next weekend, in Brussels, I will be asking myself whether this is worth it – will the madness ever end. I have a 21km run to do according to the Hal Higdon training schedule I’m doing my best not to ignore, and I’m planning on doing it in Brussels early Saturday morning (with thanks to Martin Sevior for the link to the very useful gmaps-pedometer site).

How early? I figure if I want to be at the conference for 10am, I will have to be running by 7. So getting up at 6.30 ought to do the trick.

Which brings me to ask myself: is it marathon or masothon?