News

London Marathon

12/04/2005

I'm running the London Marathon on Sunday. I have kept a training diary over the last five months to give people an idea of how much preparation is required. Running 26.2 miles really does take over your life for nearly half a year! Even though I managed to get my own place through the ballot, I am still hoping to raise money for charity. Any donation you can make will be greatly appreciated and will help Macmillan Cancer Relief lessen the challenge that UK cancer patients face each day. See the new running section for full details.

No Updates	12/04/2005
I really must have been busy, since this site hasn't seen any updates in a long time. I'll clean out the rubbish very soon so the placeholders are removed and what is left will be worth a cursory glance. Adding some content might actually make it to the top of my todo list one day.

Cycling London to Paris Complete

19/08/2003

I survived the cycle ride, making it all the way between London and Paris. I kept a little diary along the way just so you would all know how it went. It has taken a while to put together, I wanted to try and make it as entertaining as possible ;) There are a few pictures included but you can see them all in the full photo gallery for the trip. A big thank you to all those who sponsored me, I will be around shortly to collect the money if you haven't paid yet. If you didn't get around to making a pledge you can still donate through the online account or just send me an email and I will come and see you. All money has to be in by the end of September, at which point I have an Action Research tee-shirt to give to the highest individual sponsor.

Charity Ride Coming Up

19/07/2003

My London to Paris cycle ride starts this Wednesday! It seems to have come around so quickly, but hopefully I am fully prepared. Unfortuately, I failed to stick with the schedule completely, but the training didn't go too badly. There is still time to pledge some sponsorship, and if you are on my hit list I will be in touch shortly for a friendly reminder. I want to ensure I have raised as much as is possible for Action Research, so there is no escape! It looks like the £2000 target for waxing my legs is out of reach now (unless someone wants to be really generous), but the £1500 leg shaving is still a possiblilty. I am setting the deadline to Tuesday evening due to the early start of Wednesday morning, so hurry up with your final donations.

To ensure the ride is as comfortable as possible I have purchased a load of new kit. Instead of a small water bottle I have got a nice big three litre Camelbak BlowFish, which will also hold everything I need for the day. To complement the second hand SPD pedals I obtained, I have got a set of Shimano shoes and cleats. I have yet to use these in anger, but hopefully they will be comfortable and improve my performance on both climbs and general cruising. The final major purchase was a new helmet, and the Specialized M1 came highly recommended. Unfortunately, you can't get one of these for love nor money as the entire 2003 stock seems to have been sold, probably due to the recent hot weather this year. Since I wasn't in the position of waiting until late August for the 2004 model, I decided to go for the Specialized S1 instead. It is quite a pricey bit of equipment, but is so, so good. The airflow and comfort are outstanding and I am glad I spent the extra cash. There were a couple of other things on my shopping list, like patches, tubes, gloves etc - all the essentials for a ride like this.

Computers Fixed

16/07/2003

I finally managed to get my computer back up and running, I can't believe it took nearly a month! To be honest, I haven't really missed it that much, but it is good to have my main machine working again. Due to the dead floppy controller, the only option I had was a new install on a spare disk and restore from that installation. If I ever want to do a clean install from scratch then I will need a new motherboard, or hope that Microsoft provide an alternate method of supplying drivers to the install program. The other machines were easier to fix due to their working hardware, FAT32 disks and simpler problems. However, I really need to update my toolset with new version which support the NTFS file system. The laptop still needs attention, but I don't want to mess with that since I am not sure exactly what is causing the hangs. It will have to go to a repair shop when I get chance.

ADSL Change

09/07/2003

Today the ADSL connection moved off BT Openworld's slow, dynamic IP connection to Zen Internet. Although BT had served me well up until now, the dynamic IP was a bit of a pain. I now have 8 shiny static IPs to play with, giving me the possiblity to have a really nice, grown up setup at home. At the minute I shall keep everything hidden behind the one Bastion Host, but when I get some time (ha-ha!) I may go for a full DMZ configuration with multiple servers connected directly to the net. I have to report that the speed that Zen provide is pretty impressive, 456Kbps down and 241Kbps up. These current stats put me above the average for all ISPs listed at ADSL Guide. I should also say that BTO seem to have sorted out their migration procedures and everything went smoothly, probably because they have so many people leaving at the minute.

Dead Computers

18/06/2003

My new computer has decided to play dead for a bit, and with all the things I have coming up over the next few weeks I don't know when I will get chance to fix it. The Windows registry files are corrupted, rendering it unbootable. A BIOS update and registry restore should fix the problem, but a dead floppy disk controller on my motherboard is making it a bit problematic. I don't have any other bootable media at the minute to flash the BIOS, so that will have to wait. The real annoyance is the fact that the only place you can load extra drivers for a SATA/RAID controller under the Windows XP setup/recovery console is from a floppy disk. Apparently a CD or a Zip disk aren't good enough, so I am kinda screwed!

To compound the problem, my spare machine's hard disk is corrupting and the laptop is hanging whenever there is pressure around the keyboard. Don't you just love computers!

Sponsorship Request

22/05/2003

Unfortunately I have had a couple of slack weeks training for my London to Paris Cycle Ride. It is now time to pick up the pace if I want to keep up with the schedule (23rd July isn't that far away). It is also time to start collecting sponsorship as I need to raise £600 before the 11th June to guarantee my place on the challenge. My final target is £1000, but if possible I would like to raise even more. Any support your can provide will be gratefully appreciated and will benefit Action Research in their 50th year as an organisation. You can make pledges through the secure online sponsorship, or see me in person. To find out exactly what I have achieved so far, take a look at my training diary. Futher information and complete details can be found in the cycling section of the site.

Site Statistics	14/05/2003
I have recently trawled through all my old web logs, collating them into months, so some statistics can be generated. They go back to early 2002, but the summer months are missing due the site being down. From now on, the current usage statistics can be found in the code section.

Get On Yer Bike!

21/04/2003

The new computer has finally been built and is highly impressive. It needs some more work to turn it into something other than a pure games machine, but has been left in London over Easter during the traditional family holiday to a remote cottage on the Lleyn Peninsula near Snowdonia. This involves a lot of cycling, walking, reading, eating and drinking with no particular preference. A fourty mile round trip to Abersock yesterday, along with some commuting around Doncaster earlier on in the weekend, has brought my total training distance up to 500 miles, with just 40 hours in the saddle.

New Computer == No Cycling

10/04/2003

Last week I purchased some bits for a new computer and they all arrived by Friday. However, a trip to a lodge in the New Forest at the weekend meant it is only just being put together. This, along with backing up the old machine, has left no spare time to fix a puncture picked up in the forest. Therefore, it has been a rest week from cycling and there has been no work on the site. Things will probably stay in this unfinished state for a while until the new machine is up and running.

Public Beta Site Release

21/03/2003

After a couple of wasted nights, I gave up on JMagic and decided to manipulate the photos with direct calls to Image Magick. All photo galleries have now been generated, although yet to be linked in, and my aging P200 MMX linux box is smoking after many hours of continuous processing. Therefore, the site is almost sorted out and is now public facing. Hopefully, after another week of tweaking and content import, it should be ready for a bit of promotion.

Gallery Generation	10/03/2003
After a great holiday in Australia, which consumed most of February, I have finally got back to working on the site. A gallery generation script has just been completed to display the photos exactly as desired, rather than working within the limitations of Photoshop. As soon as I get a Java interface into Image Magick, the most important content should be back up.

Dynamic Pages

31/01/2003

I chose JSPs to put my site together, since this is the web page scripting technology that I know best. This means the header and footer pages are wrapped around each page automatically, but are able to change subtly depending on the page they are wrapping. After I have managed to import my current content into this new format I will be developing the code to do a lot more sophisticated stuff. My site will also be built into a J2EE web archive so it could be deployed on any available J2EE application server, of which Orion is my preference.

XHTML & CSS Standards

28/01/2003

As you can see from the buttons below, this site follows the latest web standards. It took a bit of fiddling with the code to be fully XHTML Strict compliant and some clean up of the style sheet was required. However, being verified as standards compliant still didn't mean the site rendered correctly in all browsers. I had lots of trouble between just IE5 and IE6, before I even considered Opera and Mozilla. Some more work and corrections to the button sizes resulted in a site which can be viewed in IE5+, Opera6+, Mozilla 1.2+ and KHTML based browsers (including Konqueror and Safari). If you are using an older browser, then I apologise if it doesn't look perfect, but it really is time you moved on otherwise we will be stuck in the world of bad HTML rendering forever.

Linux Box

11/01/2003

I have spent some time sorting out my ADSL Linux box and updating its configuration. This involved a new kernel, new ADSL drivers (to finally remove the old, old beta drivers), removal of unnecessary services, locking down the others, and the introduction of a firewall. It had done well to have run virtually maintainance free for so long, but the motivation of hosting this new web site prompted the sort out. It should now remain permanently connected to the net and reconnect whenever BT decide to be troublesome.

Site Redesign	28/12/2002
It was about time that I had a more professional looking site, anything had to better than the plain old blue background version which was knocked up in 2 minutes. I used the spare time I had over the Xmas holidays to give MrLister a long overdue redesign with a new colour scheme and some funky new images thanks to the help of Antony Croft.