Ghost is a nice way to configure your development machine for subdomain based application access.

Dont you hate running out of stuff?

• Sitting on the toilet, dropping the kids off at the pool; the penny drops. No toilet paper!
• Wake up starving, put your favourite cereal (cheerios) in a bowl. No milk!
• Excited about another breakfast of champions, doh!

Im fed up of running out of things so have been developing a healthy? obsession with buying stuff in bulk. Its a good feeling when you know that you have enough supplies to eat beans on toast for another 10 days straight.

By default: rails helpers will add a timestamp onto the end of the asset so when you redeploy the file the browsers will recache the file because the timestamp has changed.

eg.

  <script src="/javascripts/all.js?1242919746" type="text/javascript"></script>

To setup mod_expires apache on debian based:

  sudo a2enmod expires

Then in your config

  ExpiresActive On
  <FilesMatch "\.(js|css)$">
    ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 year"
  </FilesMatch>

You can easily add image types to this as well but often css loads images and designer often forget to use these helper methods. So in the real world just doing it with js and css makes it safer to do with maximum performance gain.

By default apache does not perform gzip compression. I recently turned this on and along with a small increase in load I noticed a large performance increase from the client side.

To turn it on (debian / ubuntu)

  sudo a2enmod deflate

Now im not a fan of copy and paste configs but included below is the mod_deflate config I am currently using. At least read it before using. (Doesnt gzip certain file type and turns off some gzipping for older browsers.)

  SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
  SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ \
      no-gzip dont-vary
  SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \
      \.(?:exe|t?gz|zip|bz2|sit|rar)$ \
      no-gzip dont-vary
  SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.pdf$ no-gzip dont-vary
 
  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
  BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

I recently started venturing outdoors to climb instead of at the normal sweaty climbing wall. Its great to climb outside and I like the natural feeling of climbing on rock.

Got a long way to go to hone my technique.

Here is a video of a californian dude, showing us how its done.

Cunojavrihytta to Katterat

The beast day. 30km due north and we had to get a train at 15:08. An early start was on the cards.

Up at 6am, started at 7am with a good tailwind and hard snow. The time constraints changed the feeling of the day, we were in race mode. Skinning a lot faster, and resting was kept to minimum. Helen kept hurrying me along and was a bit more stressed about the situation than me.

Helen hurrying me along

After 2.5 hours we made it to kvilebu (pictured above). This tiny little hut has 2 beds and must take a beating in the winter as it is in a really exposed spot. At this point we realised that we were 1.5 hours ahead of schedule. The combination of determination, tail wind and favourable snow conditions had really paid off.

We pressed onto the first descent of the day. The snow was in bad shape having been destroyed by strong winds at some point. The gradient was pretty serious though which made for a good time, something like 35-40 degrees I reckon.

Line into hunddalen

This is were we really appreciated our wide skis with sharp metal edges. Although lighter mountain skis are better most of the time, they are rubbish for descending. For me, its mostly about descending!

Next we skated out of the frozen riverbed and onto the next descent where we passed a bewildered group of men inspecting some hydro equipment. Again the snow wasnt ideal, we straightlined a lot of the descent to maximise speed. This meant that as we entered the hundalen valley flow we managed to get a fair way across it!

We stopped for a power break and basked in the glorious sunshine. (It really warmed up after about 12pm most days. But was often cold circa -15 at the start of the day.)

Next we skinned towards katterat and as we approached the final section I became very excited and took off my skins. This was a mistake. It turned out to be very undulating so we had to skate for a lot of the uphills with heavy rucksacks. I ended up exhausted and sweatier than a ‘paed in a playground’. Finally the frustration was over and there was a sloppy powder descent back to Katterat station, where it all began.

This is a former German stronghold from the German occupation of Norway during the second world war.

I heartily recommend ski touring in the mountains around Narvik. April is a great time it seems, as days are longer and warmer, whilst the snow conditions are still good.

See this post for a list of things we took on the trip. Really cutting down on what you take avoids a heavy pack which really spoils the fun.

We met one guy who has a packed to the brim 130L rucksack; and others who were pulling sledges as well as rucksacks. Not my idea of a good time.

Next on the list is some ski touring in either the swiss or french alps. Also planning on taking up the sport of splitboarding to keep the snowboarder in me alive and well.

Finished!

Introducing daily photo a wee web application which lets you upload photos to flickr on a daily basis. This allows you to make the most of RSS feeds and social applications that link to your flickr account.

Daily photo will also be useful if you run a photo blog which is powered off flickr. The ability to decide when photos appear is functionality which flickr is sorely missing.

Daily photo is a wee app, written in hours rather than days. Functionality is as minimal as possible while getting the job done. Steps to getting your flickr uploads scheduled are as follows:

• Go to daily photo
• Sign up for an account
• Check your email and confirm your email address
• You will be redirected to flickr where you confirm that daily photo can have access to your account for uploading of photos.
• Upload photos to daily photo with names, descriptions and tags. Define on what day you want the photo to be uploaded to flickr.
• Sit back watch your flickr account update automagically!

Front page

Your Photos upload queue

So if you have a need for daily photo, your welcome! Fill your boots.

Lossiestua to Cunojavrihytta

(lifted straight from my notebook)

A ‘shorter’ day this time, again in brilliant sunshine.

The day started with a nice little descent into the valley. Leaving the hut without your skins on is a good feeling. Gravity assisted excitement from the word go. Bags are starting to get lighter now which adds to the skiing experience.

DNT Logo

There was a little more wind today so breaks were taken at sheltered spots. Behind boulders were a favourite and we started tucking into the banana cake. It is really good stuff!

The error of the day was trying to cross the outlet of an underground hydro station. The water was warmer as it had been underground and this resulted in a huge uncrossable torrent, sitting in a deep snow gorge. Suffice to say, we went round.

We stopped for lunch sometime after 1pm as it was starting to get pretty hot.

Cooking at lunchtime

There was a mirage as we approached cunojavrihytta in the form of another hut! We went hard and as we got close we realised it was just a wee one and had to ski on further for some minutes in the baking lunar landscape.

There was an exciting section in the middle where we got to choose our own lines through some undulating rocky terrain. We have spent a lot of time just following skin trails, which is a little bit boring sometimes. Its like a string course through the snow without the exciting pictures at control sites. And you have to provide your own sweeties.

All in all a fairly easy day at 4hrs. This should allow us to be prepared for tomorrows beast. I actually just managed to sneak out on my own for some extra. I skied up a wee hill near the hut in the evening sunshing. Pretty nice decent with long sweeping turns.

Cuno at dusk.

Self portrait

TEAM USA - My Friend is a Pro (Album Version) from Mike Thomas on Vimeo.

Hunddalshytta to Lossiestua

First ‘serious’ day.

Up early and away to escape the insanity of the full hut. It was another blue sky day, but at 8:30am it was -18 degrees centigrade. Welcome to the arctic circle.

There was a cold headwind to being with which froze my trusty sigg waterbottle solid. Luckily, Helen had some water so it was all good.

We knew that there would be another group following out skin track later in the day. We drew a few pictures in the snow for them. My favourite was the classic immature sketch of male genitalia that I drew.

Thankfully there were a few descents, the first one had an amazing backdrop and was more of a cruise than anything else. I enjoyed finally getting my skins off and the feeling of turning with fat powder skis.

Product Placement

Next, we climbed up to a col. Due to the fatness of the skis it means that the skins are also relatively wide. This means you are able to skin straight up fairly steep slopes. This saves you a lot of time, but with a heavy bag buts a lot of strain on the central system. I was ‘poked’ (as my kiwi friend would say) as I reached the summit. Soaking wet. Time to change my thermal.

Lunch break; Had polarbrøds smeared with children.

Children in a tin

Next, I taught Helen how to rip your skins off without taking your skis off. Something which saves an age at transitions.

We skied down the longest descent of the trip making nice lines in the sun baked snow. Heres a shot of Helen in action.

I managed another cheeky sun baked descent to wee loch later in the day. It was cheeky in that I had to do a 15min skin out as a result when Helen just traversed and beat me by ages. I like descending tho; the feeling of slashing the slope was well worth the tiring skin out.

Arriving at Lossiestua

We arrived at Lossiestua before any of the other groups. Beating the large group by 2.25 hours. Total for the day: 6.25 hours.

The wind is getting up as I write this into my little black book. Buffeting the hut; reminding me of the harsh reality of where we are. I feel lucky that the weather has been so good, so far.

Danny MacAskill has been at it again, this time with the help of Dave Sowerby (bmx legend, I think he did the film ‘lifestyle’ which had a lot of footage of tranent?).

Some of the stuff is mind blowing, and its great to see all the familiar parts of Edinburgh.

Monit in the ubuntu dapper repositories is a bit old. I found the following to work
for me.

  sudo apt-get install libssl-dev build-essential bison flex
  wget http://mmonit.com/monit/dist/old/monit-4.9.tar.gz
  tar xvzf monit-4.9.tar.gz
  cd monit-4.9/
  ./configure && make && sudo make install

I recently went on a Ski Touring trip with Helen. I kept a little diary of the trip so I have decided to put it online as a blog post in case other people are planning a similar trip.

Day 1 – Katterat to Hunddalshytta

We took the train from Abisko Turistasjon to Katterat late morning. Started with very heavy packs and skinned up from the station in brilliant sunshine. Jackets and hats were quickly discarded.

We adopted a travel plan of one hour effort followed by ten minutes rest. This is my standard ‘expedition’ plan as its worked for me before both running and cycling.

After a couple of hours, we caught up a couple who had a little baby in a sledge. The dad was pulling it along, and it seemed content.

A sledge, for babies.

At one point, Daddy decided to ski down a fairly steep slope (35 degrees) with the sledge attached to him. Mummy got quite excited by this as the sledge bouced around which erupted into a mouthful of heated abuse.

It took 3.25 hours to ski into the hytta, arriving relatively early in the day to secure beds. As the day progressed more and more people arrived and the place was properly bursting at the seams when the lights went out.

It was amazing to see the mountains in perfect blue sky. They are truly of the mini alpine category and look like smaller versions of mountains you may see in the swiss and french alps.

I was looking for a way to set the request host when testing an application I am currently working on. It has ‘basecamp-style’ subdomains; I wanted to test these.

Insert the following snippet at the bottom of test_helper.rb to set the host to ‘test.local.host’

  # This is a hack on rails to allow testing of subdomain based systems.
  require 'active_support/test_case'
  module ActionController
    class TestCase < ActiveSupport::TestCase
      def setup_controller_request_and_response
        @controller = self.class.controller_class.new
        @controller.request = @request = TestRequest.new
        @response = TestResponse.new
        @request.host = "test.local.host"
        @controller.params = {}
        @controller.send(:initialize_current_url)
      end
    end
  end

The most inspired blog has a great article which describes free and paid administration interfaces available at the moment.

Below is a list of stuff recommended for a multiday hut to hut ski tour on randonee skis inside the arctic circle.

Ski Stuff

• Ski boots
• Skis
• Skins
• Poles
• Transceiver
• Probe
• Shovel
• Sunscreen + Lip cream.
• Buff x2
• Hat x2
• Outer warm gloves
• Liner gloves x2
• Lightweight Goretex Jacket
• Thermal underwear (Bottoms) x2
• Thermal underwear tops (x3)
• Windproof Salopettes
• Lightweight fleece / jumper
• Warm Socks x2

Personal Items

• 45 L Rucksack
• Tshirt x1 (Luxury Item)
• Boxers x2
• Camera
• Googles
• Sunglasses
• Silk Sleeping Bag Liner
• Slippers
• Normal socks x1
• Sleeping bag
• Down Jacket / Gillet
• Thermarest?
• Toothbrush
• Water bottle / Thermos
• Headtorch
• Book

Food

• Turmat
• Sweets
• Peanut Butter
• Polar bread

Shared Items

• Map
• Compass
• Lightweight Stove x1
• Lightweight Canister
• Lighter
• Toothpaste
• Compeed for blisters
• Simple tools and duct tape
• Little bit of leukotape
• Hut key
• Tiny washing up and sponge
• Mobile Phone