Safe as Milk

Garmin Forerunner 405 ANT+ protocol

Anyone anywhere know anyone working for Garmin who might be able to put me in touch with someone who can tell me what the ANT+ communication protocol is, so that I can give it to the good people developing gant, so that they can fix their driver to not crash in the middle of a transfer please? It seems to break for me for any transfer with more than one track.

I can see absolutely no competitive reason to keep the protocol private, it’s almost completely reverse engineered already, and this would cost Garmin essentially nothing, and allow us poor Linux users a way to get our tracks off our watches. The problem is there’s an inertia in keeping this stuff private. It’s hard to get the person with the knowledge (the engineer) and the person with signing power to publish the protocol (a VP probably) in the same place with the person who wants the information (little ol’ me) – it can take hours of justifications & emails & meetings… Can anyone help short-curcuit the problem by helping me get the name of the engineer & the manager involved?

Thanks!

Run a marathon… check!

Yesterday, on my second serious attempt (previously I injured myself 4 weeks before the race) I finally ran a marathon in Geneva, Switzerland.

Since getting injured in 2007, I’ve taken up running fairly seriously, joined a club, and this time round I was fairly conscientious about my training, getting in most of my long runs, speed work & pace runs as planned. I thought I was prepared, but I don’t think anything can prepare you for actually running 42.195 kilometers at race pace. Athletes will tell you that the marathon is one of the hardest events out there because it’s not just a long-distance race, it’s also a race where you have to run fast all the time. But until you’ve done it, it’s hard to appreciate what they mean.

This year, the club chose the Geneva marathon as a club outing, and around 40 club members signed up for either the marathon or the half-marathon on the banks of Lac Leman, and I couldn’t resist signing up for the marathon.

I wasn’t in perfect health, since I’ve been feeling some twinges in my right hip & hamstring for the past couple of weeks, but during taper before the race I’ve been taking it very easy, and I felt pretty good the day before. With the club we met up on Saturday 9th after lunch, and drove to Geneva to get our race numbers, and then to the hotel in Annemasse for a “special marathon runner’s” dinner (which had a little too much lardons, vinaigrette & buttery sauce to be called a true marathon runner meal), last minute preparations for the big day, and a good night’s rest.

Up early, light breakfast, back into Geneva for the race. Arrived at 7am, lots of marathon runners around, and the excitement levels are starting to climb. After the usual formalities (vaseline under armpits and between thighs, taped nipples, visit to toilet) we made our way to the starting line for the 8am start.

Nice pace from the start – a little fast, even, but by the 3rd kilometer I’d settled into my race pace, at around 4′40 per kilometer (aiming for 3h20 with a couple of minutes margin). Walked across every water station to get two or three good mouthfuls of water and banana without upsetting my tummy. Around kilometer 7, I started to feel a little twinge in the hamstring and piriformis/pyramidal muscle, and I felt like I might be in for a long day. It didn’t start affecting me for a while, but by kilometer 16, I was starting to feel muscles seize up in my hip in reaction to the pain.

First half completed on schedule, 1h38′55, and I was feeling pretty good. Not long afterwards, every step was getting painful. Around kilometer 26, I decided (or was my body deciding for me?) to ease off on the pace a little and I started running kilometers at 4′50 to 5′.

They talk about the wall, but you don’t know what they mean until you hit it. Around kilometer 32, I found out. At first, I welcomed the feeling of heavy legs – it drowned out the pain from my hip, and here was a familiar sensation I thought I could manage. But as the kilometers wore on, and my pace dropped, I was having a harder and harder time putting one foot in front of the other. Starting again after walking across a water stop at kilometers 33 and 38 was hard -  it was pure will that got me going again. My pace was slipping – from 5′ to 5′30 – one kilometer I ran in 6′. It looked like I was barely going to finish in 3′30, if I made it to the end at all.

Then a club-mate who was on a slower pace caught up to me, tapped me on the shoulder, and said “Hang on to me, we’ll finish together” (”accroche toi, on termine ensemble”). A life-saver. Manna from heaven. I picked up speed to match him – if only for 100m. After that, I said to myself, I’ll try to keep this up for another kilometer. When we passed the marker for 40k, I said I’d make it to 41 with him, and let him off for the last straight. And when we got to the final straight, I summoned up everything I had left to go for the last 1200m.

In the end, I covered those last 3200m in an average of 4′35 per kilometer – which just went to teach me that those 5km when I was feeling sorry for myself were more mental blockage than anything else, and I was able to overcome my body screaming out at me to stop.

The record will show that I ran 3h26′33 for my first marathon, but that doesn’t come close to telling the story.

Afterwards, I got a massage, drank a lot of water, ate some banana, and, feeling emptied & drained, a wave of emotion overcame me when I realised what I’d done.

Congratulations to the other first-time marathon runners who ran with me yesterday, and thank you Paco, I’ll never forget that you got me to the end of my first marathon.

Update: The marathon organisers had a video camera recording everyone’s arrival during the race. I discovered this afterwards, otherwise I might have been slightly more restrained after crossing the line.

You can see me arriving here, and Paco, who arrived a few seconds after me, here – for the extended sound-track.

Suggestions for running in San Francisco

I’ll be in San Francisco later this month, from March 22nd until the 29th, for OSBC, and I’ll be looking to get in a few training runs to get ready for a marathon I hope to run in May while I’m there.

I am staying in a hotel on Market Street, near the Civic Center, and I have a few runs in the training plan for that period:

• A 28km long run on the 22nd (which I’ll probably be doing to stay awake early evening to get over jet lag)
• A 16km run on Tuesday – 5km warm-up plus 2×4500m marathon pace, plus a few kms warm-down – it’d be nice to have a known distance around 3 miles for this one
• Some speed work (500m splits) on Thursday that I’ll probably skip or swap out for an early morning jog
• Another 28km long run on Saturday 28th, before flying out on the 29th.

Does anyone have any suggestions for good places to run? I would like to run around Crissy Field and across the Golden Gate bridge while there, if possible, and I notice there are some nice looking hills the other side of it in the Golden Gate park.

Anyone want to join me for one or more of the runs? I’m arriving early and leaving late so I’ll be all on my lonesome for a few days if anyone feels like going for a 2.5h jog together on weekend and show off the city for me. Drop me a line, we’ll work something out.

Update: Another idea which looks like it’d be great, having looked at a map of Marin County, would be to rent a bike for the day and go for a 3 or 4 hour ride. Anyone game?

39:04

Improved on my 10K personal best today. Happy, but not delighted. 38:59 would have looked so much better. Especially disappointed to have been under 3:50 for 4 kms, and over 4:00 for 4 others (not consecutive). Regular is better.

Also, I couldn’t resist having a couple of beers yesterday to celebrate Ireland unconvincingly beating England (and I never thought I’d see the day I got to say that) yesterday in Croke Park, 14-13. That probably played a role too.

Busy December…

I’m going to have a busy busy month of December.

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”.

Live from OSCON

OSCON has been pretty cool this year so far. It’s been really weird, since I haven’t been in North America too often in the past, and this is my first ORA conference, to be meeting people I’ve exchanged email with for years in the corridors, and bumping into people that I’ve been hearing about for ages. There’s also a decent scattering of people I already knew, too. Far too many to name individually without leaving people out & insulting somebody…

I arrived on Friday, and to help get over jet-lag, I decided to go out for an hour-long run. After losing all sense of orientation, and going North when I thought I was going East, that ended up being a 2 hour run.  Which was nice.

Over the weekend, the FLOSS Foundations group met, and we talked about lots of stuff – accounting, membership, CRM & donor management software that non-profits can use (there isn’t any that works well enough), merging foundations, and how umbrella foundations work (targeted funding, etc), best practices for dealing with donors (big and small), merchandising, CLAs, trademark policies, and a really interesting discussion on university outreach, the creation, aggregation & distribution of open course materials and university outreach.

All in all, a very valuable 2 days.

On Monday, I attended OMX, the first edition of the Open Mobile Exchange. Myself & Paul Cooper stepped in at the last minute to give a tag-team presentation on GNOME Mobile which went, to my mind, very well. Having 2 people was great, because it meant that all of the things we wanted to say got said (usually I end up being quite non-linear and saying “oh, earlier, I forgot to mention…”, with Paul that didn’t happen). There was a decent amount of GNOME Mobile presence in any case – Jim Zemlin had nice things to say about us, and Jenny Minor from Vernier and Lefty Schlessinger from Access gave presentations from the perspective of a device manufacturer and a platform developer.

Tuesday was a quiet day for me – finally got to have quality phone time with Anne, and attended the Maemo sprint meeting on IRC before eating with Stormy – we talked about a couple of cool things I’ve been working on for the past two days that I hope to be able to announce in the next few days.

All in all, a great conference, social & work merged, mixed, mashed, and with a spot of early-morning running & Tour de Francing.Happy happy joy joy.

Tonight: RedMonk beer tastes Good.

Malt Appreciation Society

So when’s the Malt Appreciation Society meeting this year? I have a bottle of cask strength 12yo Glengoyne I picked up today & was planning to bring along – no idea if it’s any good. So… when do I get to find out???

Also, anyone interested in going for an early morning run (not the day after the Malt Appreciation Society meeting) drop me a line, especially if you’re in or near the Golden Horn Sirkeci… we can do some early morning tourism at about 12km/h.

Live from LinuxTag

I arrived in Berlin on Tuesday for three days in LinuxTag 2008 to meet up with some members of the maemo.org community, see old friends, and generally chat with as many people as possible.

After arriving, I managed to  get out for a run, which was surprisingly pleasant – ourhotel is quite near the Tiergarten behind the zoological gardens, so while running around I accidentally went past some lovely landmarks, and managed to scout out a nice beer-garden beside the Neuen See where we had some nice Weisswurst last night.

It’s been fun so far – I met up with Quim and Marcell on Tuesday, and Kate, Peter, Niels and Marius yesterday. I spent a lot of time wandering around playing “spot the familiar face” – it was great catching up with Jochen Topf from Open Street Map (formerly FOSTEL organiser), Vincent Untz and Joe Brockmeister who are here for OpenSuse, Nils and Florian from OpenEmbedded and GPE.

I ran into Anne Oestergaard too, and it was great chatting with MaryBeth and Rob from OpenMedia Now, Knut Yrvin from Trolltech, and most of the KDE eV board who are here this week too – I met Aaron Seigo for the first time, after years of email conversations, and Sebastian and Cornelius are here too.

With so many familiar faces, it can be tempting to just talk to people you know, but I do like meeting up with new people at these things too – and the number one conversation starter I’ve had this week has been  Big Buck Bunny – my kids love this cartoon, so much that Tuesday they watched it on repeat for an hour. And it goes down well with the adults too. Mad props to Ton, Sacha and the gang on the great success – they have attained their goal of an accessible cartoon to follow on from the “arty” Elephants Dream.

Already today we’ve heard Cat Allman from Google telling us about Google Summer of Code and GHOP, and  the always entertaining Knut Yrvin on QT. After Knut’s session the maemo.org track starts, and I will be reporting as much as possible. Nick Loeve (trickie) proposed having a Wiki sprint today, and if I can get critical mass (and critical internet access) for that, we’ll do that a little later.

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.

Buying running shoes

J5 had a good experience buying runners which has prompted me to pimp my own favourite running store with the story of how I bought my last pair.

I arrived in Spode after having a relatively bad experience buying runners that weren’t suitable for my feet & gait. They sponsor lots of the local races around Lyon, so I knew that they were well suited to suggest shoes for running.

On arrival, I was taken in, was asked to show my old shoes, which were examined closely, and then a couple of pairs were produced.

What happened next was the big surprise for me. The shop assistant asked me if I’d brought socks. Bemused, I said that I hadn’t, and he offered me a pair. I thanked him and said that I had running socks at home.

“You don’t want to try them out?” he asked. And suddenly I understood. Putting them on in the shop and walking around just wasn’t going to give me an idea of what it was like to run in them. So I put on a loaner pair of socks, and headed off out of the store with the new runners on my feet for a 5 minute run. Repeat with the second pair. Both excellent choices, I went with the Vomero 2 from Nike, which had excellent ankle support and really great spring in its step.

So like John, great service, expertise and products, with a surprising touch, means that I’ll be getting sports shoes there until I can’t run any more – and I’ve been telling everyone about the store that lets you test drive your runners ever since.