Going Retro on GitHub

GitHub has been around for a while now, and I have finally got around to uploading some of my more retro projects to it.

Some are from my days of developing on the Amiga, and include code written in AmigaBASIC (shudder!), m68k assembly, Java and C.

The projects themselves range from IRC bots (good way of learning socket programming) to simple MUDs (ditto!).

Browsing GitHub is fantastic for digging out retro source code, including that of some Amiga scene demos. Perhaps one of the coolest items to make it up there in recent times was the original Apple II source code for Prince of Persia!

Check out my GitHub profile page, and say hello!

Migrating email to GMail

I recently moved extricate.org to sit on Amazon EC2. This meant I had to decide what to do with my email. Should I just leave it on Dreamhost and access it via IMAP?

In the end, I decided to enable Google Apps for my domain. Free for 10 users or less so that will do nicely. GMail has a fantastic interface nowadays and after using it for a while I was happy that I would use it instead of IMAP, although IMAP is on offer should it ever be needed.

Getting up and running was straightforward, with the main element being to point my DNS to the new servers. Google walk you through all this via their setup wizard, so well played to them there. One immediate issue was that my new email address already existed as a ‘personal’ Google account, and that conflict needed to be resolved. In the end I renamed that account, started a ‘blank’ new one, and migrated the data across.

I transferred most of my email from Dreamhost by using Thunderbird. Having enabled IMAP on GMail, the folders could be consolidated and dragged between accounts. This wasn’t particularly fast as it was reliant on my home broadband connection. When it came to larger folders, I needed a better way!

Take it to the cloud…

It made sense to perform the copying via my Amazon EC2 server, as it wouldn’t be constrained by my home network connection. It did mean finding some suitable Linux command-line software. I decided upon imapcopy. I downloaded it straight from the home site.

However, this software is quite old and does not support secure connections, as required by GMail’s IMAP servers! This is where stunnel came in, which may be installed from the Amazon Linux AMI repositories:

sudo yum install stunnel

Configuration guide: stunnel and imapcopy.

I then just needed to configure imapcopy (ImapCopy.cfg). Naturally, the DestServer had to be sent to ‘localhost:1143’ so that the routing occurred through the new tunnel. I also explicitly stated what I wanted to happen:

copyfolder INBOX.Sent
DstRootFolder “Migrated”

It was then just a case of running imapcopy and away it went! It worked flawlessly which meant that all my email was now accessible within GMail.

A successful migration!

Moving extricate.org to Amazon EC2

I have been continuing work with Amazon EC2 recently. I am a big cloud fan (evangelist?) and, as a result of that, it was time to eat my own dog food and move my domain over.

My host for a couple of years has been Dreamhost. They provide an excellent hosting service, including a very comprehensive control panel and secure shell access. Nothing wrong there at all: I just wanted to go down the Amazon route.

Another factor is that the Dreamhost servers are based in the US. This meant that the site always seemed slightly sluggish to me, so I was hopeful that moving hosting to Ireland (The ‘EU-West’ region in EC2 terms) would speed things up.

Instance and OS selection

It made sense to embrace the AWS Free Usage Tier, which meant I elected to go with a ‘Micro’ instance:

613 MB memory
Up to 2 EC2 Compute Units (for short periodic bursts)
EBS storage only
32-bit or 64-bit platform
I/O Performance: Low
API name: t1.micro

64-bit was a natural choice. There is no ephemeral storage with this instance size. That was fine by me, as I wanted to ensure that everything was secure in the event of the instance terminating for whatever reason. Hurrah for EBS!

I tried out two different Linux images: Amazon’s own flavour, and Ubuntu Cloud. There was not a great deal in it, and although I am more familiar with Ubuntu on a day-to-day basis, I went with Amazon Linux. It is optimised by them for their own platform and has a CentOS pedigree.

Getting up and running

The instance was very quickly provisioned. I followed the standard WordPress Installation Guide, which included getting Apache and MySQL up and running on the box. Both of those are in the Amazon repositories. WordPress itself I did directly from the source, copying themes, plugins and other content data from my old host via scp.

I needed to bring the old MySQL database across as well. A simple mysqldump got the required SQL which was trivial to import. I used phpMyAdmin to help out with user creation and permissions, as it is a lot friendlier than tapping things out on the command line.

Memory considerations

During testing, MySQL was terminated due to the instance running out of memory. By default, there is no swap space provided. Swap space is easy to provision if required, be that via a swap file or swap partition (allocating a new EBS volume).

However, it should be noted that using swap space will naturally increase I/O, along with charges!

I decided to keep things streamlined and not enable swap space. Instead, I toned down Apache’s memory usage, as by default it would spin up 10 servers to handle requests. I went with the following settings:

StartServers 2
MinSpareServers 1
MaxSpareServers 3
ServerLimit 8
MaxClients 8
MaxRequestsPerChild 1000

Everything has been stable since then.

CloudFront

WordPress a great cache plugin: WP Super Cache. I soon got this up and running, and took advantage of its CDN support. This allows it to rewrite wp-content URLs in order to be served up by the Content Delivery Network of your choice.

Here’s a good tutorial on this: ‘Setting Up Amazon CloudFront CDN in WordPress is Really Easy!’.

This handily takes further load off the micro instance, and therefore performance is improved.

Route 53 DNS

That just left DNS over at Dreamhost. Amazon offer this service as well, in the form of Route 53. I set up a Hosted Zone for extricate.org and it was very quick to set up the required entries (pretty much just copying over from Dreamhost). The zone was instantly provisioned and worked perfectly once I instructed my registrar to use the new servers. Very easy!

The results…

I’m happy to report that everything just works! Performance is snappier as well, although I am sure that the server now sitting more local to me is a big boost here. I also love having full ‘root’ access over the system now.

That did leave migrating my email, and that is a future article!

Minimalist Running: I’m Flying!

Things are going really well in my continued adventures with minimalist / natural running. To begin with, the Inov8 F-Lite 230 shoes are amazing. Absurdly comfortable and light. Well worth the money and I keep eyeing up other shoes in their range!

The transition has gone excellently. I am now comfortably performing my usual outdoor 5k training runs. To begin with, my goal was “Get round the route with no injury; it isn’t about speed”. I realised at the end that I physically had a lot left in the tank, and had set an average time! Not bad for an effective ‘sighting lap’. It was also very obvious that any knee pain was absent. Knee soreness had become a feature of my running in ‘traditional’ running shoes, and was part of my decision to transition.

As my confidence has grown, I’ve started to increase the speed. This has taken a bit of adjustment, as before I would increase my speed by drastically increasing my stride length. Now, I am increasing my cadence instead, keeping my feet below my hips. It has felt a little strange, particularly when my GPS reports that I am hitting quick speeds but it feels like I am just gliding along!

To help with pacing, I performed the Cooper Test on a treadmill. This particular test forms part of my referee promotion in the coming season. I set it for a steady 13.5 km/h, which would equate to a 2700m distance. That’s typically what I was hitting in my old running shoes. I comfortably hit that in the new shoes, including upping the speed at the end to bring it home! Most notable to me was that afterwards, again, I had loads of energy left and no soreness. Wow!

Today I decided to run a 5k but for a good time. I had a strong pace throughout, and the end result was that I beat my PB (set last year) by 25 seconds! And, you guessed it, I had energy left at the end to up the speed for a continued duration. In the old shoes, and with my old style, my legs would have been too sore to do that.

I am really, really happy with how this is working out so far. I have increased my performance and reduced my injury level. Lots more fun to be had here! I am sure that the CrossFit and weight loss have aided this whole process, and long may it continue.

Operation De-Lard: 7.3 kilograms and counting…

In my End of Season Review, something that I needed to sort out was the weight that I had put on during the season. It had perhaps been creeping up slowly over a couple of years, but most noticeable over recent times. The end result was that I had gained over 10 kilograms.

This was not good for various reasons:

  1. I was starting to feel sluggish in terms of agility when refereeing.
  2. I was picking up ‘niggly’ injuries, such as to my knees, due to increased loading.
  3. I FELT FAT!

It was time to sort this out.

Now, I’d got down to a good weight for me (78 kilograms) before. Judo and weight training combined with around 2000 calories per day. I tracked that with DailyBurn Tracker which was good at the time, and keeping a record helped to keep me honest. This time around, I went with MyFitnessPal which is an EXCELLENT site with a wonderful community spirit. Its mobile apps are impressive as well, and all for zero cost!

To begin with, I tried 1500 calories per day but this was too low. After a few days, I was feeling lethargic and hungry all the time, so I sensibly upped it to 2000 calories. This is a good level for me. If I want to eat more, I simply ‘earn’ the calories through exercise! My Garmin Forerunner 410 GPS / HR watch is brilliant for tracking those bonus calories. This is much better than the horrible ‘save calories to cheat later’ approach that some eating plans advise.

That’s the nutrition side of things. How about the exercise?

I’m continuing the running: A combination of distance and speed training. I’ve also taken up CrossFit circuit training in order to build a stronger and more balanced body. Running is great but it only helps me from the waist down! I’m really enjoying this mixture of activities at the moment. On the running front, I’m also working on transitioning to minimalist / natural running as heel-striking is a horrible way to treat your knees!

So far, I have lost 7.3 kilograms in just over a month. I’m incredibly happy with this progress as it has been pretty quick but in a controlled and healthy way. I feel like I have my body back again, although there is plenty of work still to do.

To me, none of this feels like a diet, more like how I should be treating my body with respect!

Natural Running: Too Much Too Soon?

I recently took my first steps in natural running. About 5k on a treadmill, to be precise, in order to get a feel for the mid-foot/toe motion as opposed to my usual (very) heavy heel-strike technique. It felt great and so much lighter.

However, the very nature of this style is that the calf muscles and Achilles tendons are having to do more work. They are partly protected in a traditional running shoe as the shoe is taking over! Despite only doing 5k at a gentle pace, I suffered from some bad calf soreness over the weekend which ruled out any further running. Thankfully, it is pretty much back to normal today.

By contrast, my Achilles is just fine and I’m not surprised by this: When I first started football refereeing, I had major problems in that area, even though running was not new to me. Why? Changes of direction and speed. It’s one thing to go out for a jog where your tempo rarely changes. When refereeing, your speed and direction is constantly changing, and my Achilles did not know what hit them! It took a while to settle down, although I did not help particularly by refusing to rest properly. The end result: Strong Achilles.

I need to be more careful with the transition. Today, I intend to do a simple 5k on the treadmill (The weather outside is awful!), but most of it will be in my usual running shoes, with a bit of natural running in the my new Inov8 shoes at the end. A safe mixture. After all, I didn’t get any pain during the previous run: The DOMS came afterwards!

My calf muscles are getting more of a load in other ways too: I’m working on learning jump-rope for conditioning (via CrossFit) and being light on your toes for that necessitates calf-loading!

Natural Running: My First Steps

It’s fair to say that I do a reasonable amount of running. This breaks down into a mixture of football refereeing, so-called ‘normal’ running and sprint / interval training.

Some of this is pretty intensive. In football refereeing, the movements involved include: Walking, jogging, sprinting, running backwards, stepping sideways and combining them all together. This means that the body is under a lot of acceleration and deceleration load. Over recent times, I’ve experienced some knee pain which has been linked to these loads, with normal running not causing a problem. What’s going on?

Firstly, I did put on about 10 kilograms over the course of last season. This would not help at all! Thankfully, I am working on that, with over a stone of weight now lost as part of a strong healthy eating and exercise change of regime. I’m combining that with circuit training, in the form of CrossFit in order to build an overall stronger and more flexible body. My flexibility in particular is REALLY bad and this is always a big risk factor for sporting injury.

Secondly, how’s my equipment? As mentioned above, I’m okay with normal running, and have some excellent Saucony ‘Stability’ running shoes which have served me really well. No blisters and no pain. This is over a variety of ground from tarmac to grassland. I’ve experimented with various football boots to try and replicate this on the field, and my primary pair at the moment are the Asics Lethal Tigreor 3 ST boots. They have a raised heel which is said to help prevent load, injury and so on.

Am I missing a trick?

For CrossFit it is important to have neutral shoes when working with weights. I got a pair of Inov8 F-Lite 230 shoes, which look, well, exactly like this:

I LOVE THESE SHOES. They are incredibly lightweight, comfortable and breathable. Within moments, I was realising just how clunky and heavy my running shoes were.

Now, these notably don’t have a raised heel. This promotes ‘natural’ running. There’s a lot of material around of this, but ultimately it removes the heavy heel-strike action which is common with running shoes. Here’s a good video to detail it a bit more:

Now, I’m happy to go with neutral shoes rather than barefoot! I started out with a gentle 5k run on a treadmill. I deliberately started by heel-striking for comparison. As usual, there was a constant “THUD! THUD! THUD!” on the treadmill. I then shifted into a natural style, with my weight forward and landing on the ball of my foot. Instantly, the impact was MUCH reduced and, well, it felt more natural. I gently increased the speed throughout the workout, being sure to increase my cadence rather than thrusting my legs further out in front of me.

My calf muscles are still recovering (Nothing serious, just the expected levels of soreness). I am using muscles that I have not used when running before, due to the running shoes compensating. I am looking forward to developing this slowly over time: A controlled transition period is key or serious injury could occur.

How will this translate to football refereeing? Well, classic football boots are relatively neutral. Take the Adidas Copa Mundial, for example:

The heel is not particularly raised. These aren’t as flexible as my Inov8 trainers (not surprising: the boots need to hold the cleats in place) but I feel that the natural running principles are still sound. Weight forward, no heel striking, keep those feet landing under the body! Was just trying to raise my heel in different shoes and boots a crutch to avoid fixing my incorrect form?

It’s always exciting when taking the first step on a new journey, so it will be interested to see how this one goes!

My End of Season Review

My football refereeing season of 2011/2012 is at an end. Now is the time for self-analysis in order to see how well I did, especially in comparison with my goals, and decide where I would like to go in terms of moving forwards.

THE GOOD

  1. I GOT MY PROMOTION: I succeeded in going from level 7 to level 5 (a ‘double jump’ promotion) in one season. This required a great deal of commitment and I’m pleased that there was no drama along the way.
  2. CUP FINALS: I was very pleased to be selected for a total of five cup finals. This was nearly six but unfortunately I was away on holiday for the last one. It is always a honour to be considered for a cup final and they were a great way of rounding off the season.
  3. I DIDN’T GET INJURED: Well, kinda. I will touch on this more in the next section. Essentially, I got through the season without any major problems, which was important considering how many games I needed to get in for the promotion.
  4. I ENJOYED IT! Isn’t this the most important thing? I enjoyed my games, the challenges that they presented, and the various people that I met during the season: Players, officials and fellow referees. Some early advice I received was “Enjoy your refereeing” and how true that is!

THE NOT SO GOOD

  1. MY WEIGHT: Despite being so active, I managed to to put on about 10 kilograms during the season. This was down to eating very badly. It started to have an impact on my joints plus how generally nimble I felt when refereeing (twisting and turning, changes of direction and so on). Not only that, I’m not happy with how I was looking towards the end of the season!
  2. INJURY: Linked to my weight. My knees started to play up a bit towards the end of the season due to the repeated impact of the stop/start running. Essentially, a case of Runner’s Knee. Nothing serious as rest abates it but those extra 10 kilograms were hardly helping! Oh, and having an ‘out of balance’ body, but I will come to that later.
  3. LEVEL 4: I’m now going for promotion again, to level 4. I’ve had my first assessment and while it is a commendable result for my first assessment at my new level, it is not as high a mark as I would like.

GOING FORWARD…

  1. WEIGHT LOSS: This is already going very well, and I’ve lost over 5 kilograms so far. I’m sticking to a 2000 kcal diet, with exercise allowing extra calories! MyFitnessPal is an excellent site for tracking this.
  2. FITNESS: The off-season allows me to be more stuctured in my routine. I’ve been working on a combination of normal running, interval and speed training. This has included working towards my fitness test which needs to be done in August/September (I am well on track for this). I’ve also started CrossFit in order to keep my body in good balance, to aid in flexibility and injury prevention. I’m really enjoying this.
  3. I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO 2012/2013: I’m really looking forward to the new season. I feel like I’m going to be great physical shape when it comes around, and I have a level 4 to earn!

Bring it on 🙂

Cup Final Season

Cup Final #2 !

Now that the season is drawing to a close, the leagues are winding down and referees are put on rotation for the dwindling number of remaining fixtures. However, it also means it is time for the various Cup Finals!

To begin with, I was very happy to be appointed as Reserve Referee to the Surrey FA Women’s Cup Final. This worked out to be my third county cup final in two seasons. The game itself was very one sided, with Chelsea Ladies pulling a convincing 10-1 win over Fulham Ladies. However, I enjoyed it due to doing something new. In particular, controlling the benches (not that much needed to be done here, just minor tidying) and working the electronic substitution board as required.

My second cup final was as Assistant Referee for the Surrey County Intermediate League (Western). The sun held true and this was a really enjoyable game for me. It was strongly competitive and settled with a single goal. I ended up awarding an (obvious) penalty due to the referee being unsighted, although it was not converted, as well as making a (fairly obvious) ball over the line call (it wasn’t!). The big decisions were all correct and as a result the game had no drama attached to it. We had a strong team of officials. Here is a good selection of photos.

I have a final on my Sunday league coming up, and for that one I am the referee. I’m really looking forward to that it. Then I can go on holiday and put my feet up!

It’s certainly been a very enjoyable season for me with some real achievements. To be rewarded by being appointed to finals is a real honour. What will the next season bring?

Enhanced Promotion: Success!

It’s been a fun year since March 2011. I’ve now been informed that I have been successful in completing my Enhanced Promotion attempt with Surrey FA, which now means that I am a Level 5 (Senior County) referee.

There has been a fair amount involved in this:

  1. Attending two Promotion IST (In Service Training) events.
  2. Passing two exams on the Laws of the Game.
  3. Refereeing a minimum of 40 games (Thankfully, I easily surpassed this, with major kudos to the referee secretaries that I have worked with).
  4. Being assessed a minimum of six times.
  5. (Voluntarily) passing the FA Fitness Test. Not required for level 5 but seemed a good idea at the time 😉

The support from friends, family and (of course) my fellow referees has been outstanding. Thank you to all!

What’s next? Well, I intend to fully enjoy the remainder of the season and relax into my new level. It will unlock a few other refereeing opportunities which I intend to take up. I have also submitted my application to go for level 4 next season in order to keep up the momentum! Plus any chance to be assessed further is a good thing.

In terms of personal development, the key aspect for me has been that I have really enjoyed the journey so far. If you enjoy something, you are going to progress, if you wish to do so. I will try and remember that when I am next being shouted at on the field of play, of course 😉