This easter I took the opportunity to visit the Lofoten Islands up north with a group of friends. This is a premium ski destination but I was not sure why, so a trip to find out was in order!

The weather breaks after surprise evening powder.

In the spirit of the DIY series, this post aims to let you experience lofoten as a ski destination without needing to pay huge amounts for a commercial option. I would say however, that more so than other destinations the mountains here are pretty gnarly and the weather changeable. So its not really a place for your first ski touring trip. If you consider yourself inexperienced, consider hiring a guide as this might improve the quality of your holiday.

Looking out to sea

Getting there

We took the hurtigruten from Trondheim to Svolvær with the car. Despite being extremely slow compared to flying this method of transport turned out to be chilled and well recommended. It can likely be expensive in the summer season but they often have deals in the ski season.

Rows of Tasty Peaks

If you are coming from abroad either attempt to fly into Svolvær or a cheaper option may be to fly to Bødo with SAS or Norwegian . You can then get a fast ferry direct to Svolvær, the recommended base.

Accomodation

We stayed at lofoten feriesenter which was quite good, with OK prices and good local ski touring possibilities. And also close proximity to the local ski resort if you want some powder laps to the avalanche danger is high. It was not amazing however, so if you want something unique or high class, maybe look elsewhere.

Angry Lofoten

Places to Ski

Best bet is to look at the guidebooks and decide what is a good plan based on conditions. As your trip progresses work out which aspects have the best snow and continue to hit similar aspects! The map is also a good place to get inspired.. have a look at the map and go where looks good! However, avalanche danger can be very high mid season so take the precautions necessary.

Scooby and Rulten

varsom.no is the norwegian avalanche forecast site which is worth looking at. Be aware however that often the forecasts and dangers are forecast by the use of weather models rather than on the ground checks / forecasting. This means that sometimes the snow is safer than is forecast and other times it can be more sketchy.

View from Kleppstadheia

Assuming stuff is good to go the following peaks might be worth your attention.

• Rundfjellet
• Geitgaljartinden
• Småtinden
• Presten Couloir (on the way to Henningsvær)

Rando training classic style

Guidebooks

Toppturer i Norge – Fri Flyt
Norway – Lofoten Ski and Kayak by Fabio Pasini

Video

I put together a wee video of the small amount of footage I captured during the trip.

Lofoten Påske from Alastair Brunton on Vimeo.

Japan has been gaining a reputation for a few years as a place with consistently some of the deepest driest snow available. Winter monsoon storms from Siberia bring dump after dump after dump to the northern island of Hokkaido.

With an ailing economy and cheap long haul travel from the likes of Scandinavian Airlines, this powder paradise has opened up for Europeans. After snapping up a flight deal in summer 2012 a group of 5 of us set our sights on the land of the rising sun.

Craig gets his stabilisers out.

This is a simple guide / report on our trip there so if you are planning a similar trip this should give you some info which might be useful.

How to Get There

Japanese Temple

You need to get to Sapporo Chitose airport. There are some airlines which fly directly to Sapporo but we opted to fly into Tokyo with SAS then get an AirAsia internal flight up to Sapporo. This worked out relatively well but a delay with the AirAsia flight caused some stress. Do not eat the AirAsia airplane food!

Hire Car

Rocking the pimped out toyota vellfire

Probably the best way to get around Hokkaido is with a hire car. We went for a hire car for the half of the trip but I would recommend in retrospect having a hire car for the whole time, as the freedom is excellent and it immerses you more in the culture.

We booked a pimping Toyota Vellfire from Toyota Rent a Car

Out..

And in..

Places to ride

Niseko

Mt Yotei from Hirafu

Niseko United piste map

Look at 360niseko for daily snow reports, this also links to daily avalanche reports which are released at about 0730 each morning and are useful because the snow pack is changing a lot.

This is the largest and most famous resort in Hokkaido and well worth the visit. We stayed at niseko lodge when we were there. A relatively cheap backpackers hostel which is right next to the slopes. If you are looking for budget accomodation, this is the place.

Apres ski was relatively poor, but you dont go to Japan for the apres! Also, avoid this resort if you are allergic to Australians.

If the weather is ok, go through access gate 3 and climb to top of annapurri mountain. From here you can ski lines down the same aspect, or ride the backside bowl. (we didnt ride the backside but it might be amazing.) You need to get a bus back for this, so check that it is running.

There is a short avalanche course you can do which allows you to access a semi closed area in niseko village ski area. You get a bib and they let in 60 people a day.. we didnt get round to this but it comes highly recommended from some locals we spoke to.

The trees to the skier’s right in niseko annapurri resort are really fun.

Heelside slash

Mt Yotei is a volcano near Niseko which it is apparently possible to ride, 5 hours up 20 mins down. There is also a crater that you can also ride! Black diamond tours might be able to take you on a day trip if you are keen.

Rusutsu

Rusutsu piste map

Mark hits it fast

Quiet powder paradise.

Rusutsu, is amazing for snow and fun. Go to Mt Isola and East mountain, ride in the forest to the sides of the black runs. There are some short chairlifts that you can lap on. It would be best to go here after a snow fall when there is fresh snow and maybe niseko upper reaches are closed.

Ally gets deep in rusutsu

Asahidake

Asahidake piste map

Unsure about this one. Despite its glowing reviews on powderhounds we were slightly disappointed.

Mouse with adequate gear

We went there on a bad weather day which I dont think gave us a proper representation of the resort. If you just ride the resort below the single cable it is relatively flat and boring and doesnt suit snowboarders at all.

However it seems to me as if the cablecar is really just an access for backcountry travel and the potentially for long, untracked deep powder lines is large. We however found only wind affected snow in blizzarding cold conditions.

Kamui Ski Links

Kamui Piste Map

In terms of resort action, this was my favourite of the whole trip. This is an authentic Japanese resort for the Japanese and there are loads of people learning to ski using the same hire equipment from 20 years ago! Its amazing to see ski groups of 15-20 people having a great time on skis for the first time.

Generally the level of riding is not super high here which results in lots of untracked powder lines in the trees!

Styling it

Little gems for this place were skiers left of the main cable car (but remember to exit onto the first piste that you cross horizontally and dont be tempted to carry on.) and the back bowl from the top of the cable car. Warning this involves quite a bit of hiking to get out of and stop riding when you see the flourescent orange tapes. (unless you have skins!)

Sapporo Teine

sapporo teine piste map

OK night skiing, renowned but never properly explored properly by us. It was a nice experience to finally go night skiing in Japan and the trees to skiers right of the night skiing area made for a good time riding in the dark with massive headtorches.

Night skiing at Teine resort..

It did start to get a little dull so craig and I took to breaking rules to keep us entertained.

Smiles and waves

Kiroro Snow World

Kiroro Snow World Piste Map

Lots of untouched super deep lines possible here at Kiroro

Absolutely off the hook, recommended.

Kiroru is amazing. There is a big powder bowl under the main gondola (skiers right) which has a nice exit which mops you up and takes you back to this piste. There are also loads of ski touring opportunities so take your skins to this resort. We skinned up from the car park one day, but there are loads of lines higher up also. Consider hiring a guide here, but we didnt. The snow out of the resort was extremely deep and the same as the films you see of hokkaido riding.

This was the first resort and area where I really saw people using skins and skiing a long way off piste.

Wee windlip drop

We only managed to explore the right side of the area because the riding in the trees was so good and the powder so sweeeeet.

Love this shot

Above you can see some of the epic snow available on the island of Hokkaido.

One of my final face shots of the trip.

Finally

The Crew

I really enjoyed our trip to Japan with good friends and I hope to get the chance to visit it again one day. Craig put together a wee video with the snowboarding footage that we captured during the trip.

Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,
Wi’ murd’ring pattle!

I’m truly sorry man’s dominion,
Has broken nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal!

I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
‘S a sma’ request;
I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,
An’ never miss’t!

Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin!
It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!
An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,
O’ foggage green!
An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin,
Baith snell an’ keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,
An’ weary winter comin fast,
An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell-
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro’ thy cell.

That wee bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble,
Has cost thee mony a weary nibble!
Now thou’s turn’d out, for a’ thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter’s sleety dribble,
An’ cranreuch cauld!

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an ‘men
Gang aft agley,
An’lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!

Still thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e’e.
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!

Node.js is really fast. We use it to run various APIs and low level HTTP tools in a very high traffic environment. It can be a bit of a mind bender getting your head round callback / event based programming. One of the patterns I often forget is a function which loops over a dataset, calling an asynchronous function which needs wait until all the callbacks have been fired before returning a result. This needs to be done in an asynchronous, non blocking manner.

Here is a real world example in coffeescript.

The main concept to be grasped here is that a results array is maintained and the final callback occurs only when the results array is the same size as the dataset which is being looped through. (In this case the mos object.)

There may well be a cleaner way to do this, if so please let me know in the comments!

At the end of last year after being subjected to Helen’s marathon training and related chat, I decided it would be good idea for me to enter a marathon and see how I could do with a bit of training. Turns out the Berlin marathon is the fastest course in the world so I decided to enter that and break 3 hours. Then I could retire from marathon running. (or that was the plan)

Training Plan

I decided to train with a training plan provided by the veritable 3KM runner Marius Bakken. It would be straightforward to sort out training week to week.. I enjoyed training with a training plan and think that this is the way to go for any level of marathon runner.

How the training went

Eeer min that could be mt blanc up there

I was quite distracted initially with the climbing adventures and the tour de mt blanc on mountain bike so July and early August was a little broken up training wise. However, the training in August / September went well without any major setbacks. All in all I think I could have trained harder for a little longer in the buildup but it was not a disaster by any means.

One mess up from my execution of the training was my pace for the effort 1 sessions (of which there were many). I tended to run these at 6:30 min/km, when they should have be run at 5min/km. This might have why I felt that the marathon training was relatively easy.

View of svånåtind

Preparation and strategy

After a half marathon of 1:27:42 I looked at the options for projecting my marathon time. Marius said something around 3:10 and Runners World were saying 3:01. I decided to go for the Runners world prediction and aim for a marathon time of 2:59:30.

Feeding strategy would be to stop at most drinks stations and drink 1/3 to 1/2 a cup of water along with SIS Go Gels every 30 mins. Garmin would be used only for reporting km pace splits and for displaying overall race time. Not any more info as this clouds the mind.

Race report

Up early and a white carb breakfast of white rolls and honey, plus a coffee and a bit of water. Drank some more on the way to the start. Due to staying near the start I opted to bypass clothing drop and thus the main start entrance and approach the start from the south. This meant that there was less queuing and more time to chill before the start.

I dont think I drank enough before starting as my pre race pee was a little yellow. Bustling around in the start area, the sub3 pace makers were in the 2:45 -> 3:00 pen, while I was in the 3:00 -> 3:15.

Boom, all the balloons lifted and we were off! People everywhere.. follow the blue line and try to keep to the correct pace. Dont run too fast. 4:30 for the first km was OK. My aim now was to slowly reel in the pacemaker balloons.

The first 20km went well, was relatively comfortable and I did the first half at like 1:28:30 and felt strong. Sadly this didnt last long. By 25km I could feel that I was beginning to get tired and I needed a plan. I decided to back off the pace slightly to see if this helped. When 30km rolled past, my quads were pretty sore. Was this the wall? No seemed like a pretty small one.

I needed to switch to plan B which was a sub 3:10 with km splits of around 4:30. By 35km I was finished physically but still well under the 3:10 final time. I decided to just keep going and put everything into keeping moving. Mark provided some valuable spectating to keep me inspired. A caffeine gel along with a few roadside bands succeeded in pushing me toward the brandenburg gate.

Reccying the course beforehand proved to be very helpful because I knew what was coming and how far I had left mentally. Its good to know what is coming up rather than being in the dark.

Sprinted for the last 200m from Brandenburg gate to the finish line. Surprisingly the sprint didnt feel that hard and came in at 3:09:23. The way the race went, I put everything into that time so was satisfied with no regrets.

After finishing, my body really did feel like it was about to collapse / cramp up but I kept moving and all was OK. Surprisingly, some non-alcoholic erdinger beer was a great recovery drink.

Recovery

In the days after the marathon I could barely walk down stairs or sit down! Mark found this pretty amusing and one of the main recovery sessions was a visit to the Berghain world famous techno club.

I can relate to the reasons that Es Tresidder mentions in his recent marathon post for reasons to come out of the mountains and onto the roads. But also agree with the feeling afterwards that marathon running is a great activity. Read es’s post for a much better discussion on this point. Definitely more marathon racing to come!

Introduction

I had wanted to complete this traverse since Jack, Hallvard and I didn’t manage it in 2009 due to weather conditions, tiredness and access to the mountain restricted due to mine removal in the area.

I reccied the mountain in 2010 with Emily Wall and it looked doable. A rough route description (in Swedish) is very helpful and google translate can also improve the reading experience.

From http://home.swipnet.se/hoglin/rondane/hetta.html

You can actually do the traverse both ways. Vestoppen to Stortoppen has one roped climbing pitch, where Stortoppen to Vesttoppen has 4 pitches. We went Stortoppen to Vesttoppen but saw an equal amount of traffic (guided) going the other way.

There was a party with the mountain guide guiding company that we bumped into. They seem like a good bunch and have seen them guiding around Romsdalen before; they seem to know their stuff. Tor Olav Naalsund has a guiding gig with field productions and I heard him give a good presentation about this last year.

Thwarted from the beginning

We rocked up at Hjerkinn at 10pm on the Friday night, planning to drive into Snøheim and sleep there, with plans for a 7am start. Weather forecast was excellent.

However, there is a new bus service which only runs at certain times of the day, so we had to camp 20km away from where we had initially planned. Max scrounged a duvet from the army camp as he had no sleeping bag. We planned to get the first bus at 8:30 am. Jose then arrived and we briefed him on the shitness.

Waiting in a filthy bus queue

Saturday morning arrived on the back of many mosquitos and we were greeted by a bus at 8.15am. Shit we thought! Its early! I was also totally full. As were the next 3 buses. We eventually got started the traverse at 10:30am pretty pissed off. We didnt see any wild reindeer; starting 3.5 hours later than planned. Also 150kr between the 3 of us, 300kr return where driving was like 50kr for the car. The snøheim bus is a pilot scheme, fingers crossed it gets binned and that its not just a tourist tax.

Walking out from Snøheim

If you are considering doing this route, sort out the logistics and ideally get the bus into snøheim the night before or cycle.

Fun and Games

We hammered up to Stortoppen with excellent pace and no rest stops in under 2 hours. At the top with wind increased quite a bit so we had to put lots of warm clothes on. We were surprised at the few cm of fresh snow and how cold it was on the top ridge. We gobbled down some lunch then started with the traverse for real. Some walking along to Midttoppen followed by downclimbing, then scrambling up to the base of the first pitch at Hettpiggen.

Snowy downclimbing

Max led the first pitch; a snow grotty start then it opened up with some nice blocks in a wee gully. The climbing was nice and fun and he was up at the bolted belay ledge in no time. The norwegian TV program 71 grader nord came over here and there are 3 bolts left at the top of the Hettpiggen pitch. Apparently they are getting removed so dont rely on them being there.

Max at the top of the first pitch.

Following the first pitch, there is fairly straighforward scrambling up to the top of Hettpiggen on loose rock. Following this there is some downclimbing to a sloping plate (platta on the topo). The topo shoes a rappel after the plate but we opted for a short abseil down the plate itself, then the standard abseil. Take some tat with you to avoid relying on what is there at the anchors.

About to start abseiling

At this point we were moving really well through the traverse and it was going smooth, like clockwork.

The Waiting Game

After the notch between Hettpiggen and Vesttoppen we ran into a DNT Fjellsport (mountain sport) party that were working on the final pitches up to Vesttoppen and the completion of the traverse. They were already on the pitch ahead of us so all we could do was sit and wait, it was about 4pm. At 6pm we got kitted up for climbing.

Perpendicular lines

Ali Babas Pitch

It was my turn to lead up a muddy, wet and snowy diagonal crack. Fun and games and a great introduction to alpine trad leading. It turned out to be fairly desperate and I had a small fall 1/3 of the way up onto a ledge with served to put me into a really intense survival focus. After I had completed the pitch (had to pull on a cam it felt very good to have completed it.

My sunny belay ledge.

More waiting, waiting for the party ahead of us and Jose who was now spurred into action, led the next pitch beautifully. It was about 9:30pm.. and one of the party ahead had an injured shoulder.

Twilight Scrambling

Unsure of the correct route and it being late in the day we sent Jose ahead to scramble away up towards the summit with rope to avoid a potential silly fall. This went pretty smooth and we passed the group ahead of us, it was looking good. Next, instead of traversing out right and onto the summit ridge we decided to climb direct to the summit.

Jose did another sweet lead up here and I followed, hauling up the Norwegians’ rope who had asked for help. Max, rocked up next and some brief smiles about finishing the traverse were shared.

All smiles on the ledge near summit of vesttoppen

Transcontinental Rescuers

As I belayed up one of the locals it became apparent that they were in need of help, it was getting dark and they had an injured climber benighted close to the summit. Max stepped in here and took control of the situation. We setup a hauling system and brought the injured climber up (he was quite heavy) and then the remaining members of the party. It was now circa 1am, well and truly dark.

Red sky at night

We bid farewell to our new friends and the Chilean, Belgian and Scotsman wandered back to Snøheim from Vesttoppen. This was grim and took ages!

Snøheim Matress Madness

We rocked up at the shiny new DNT hut at about 3am and ate the rest of the apple cake. From here grabbed some matresses and slept in the hall. A good nights sleep actually as we were pretty tired after 16 hours!

The next day after waiting for ages we eventually got on the shitty bus back to the cars at Hjerkinn.

Beside the shite snøheim buss

Epilogue

All in all a really exciting ridge traverse, the bus system makes access annoyingly complicated.. cycling in is a better plan. Also starting as early as possible in summer will mean you should get the route to yourself.

I have had an annoying problem recently with a shell script where it would not show the output of an scp command in realtime. Initially I was fighting with different methods of capturing output in realtime from a ruby script.

The solution to this which I went for is using IO.popen

eg.

  def stdout_redirect(command)
    f = IO.popen(command)
    while line = f.gets
      puts line
    end
    f.close
  end

However, this was only part of the solution. It wasnt working so I even tried implementing a solution in python.

  import subprocess
 
  def myrun(cmd):
      """from http://blog.kagesenshi.org/2008/02/teeing-python-subprocesspopen-output.html
      """
 
      print "Running " + cmd
 
      p = subprocess.Popen(cmd, shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)
      stdout = []
      while True:
          line = p.stdout.readline()
          stdout.append(line)
          print line,
          if line == '' and p.poll() != None:
              break
      return ''.join(stdout)
 
  myrun('scp -r "remote_server:/directory/test_copy" ~/test_files/')

To my surprise, all was quiet so had a check in the terminal and it would output fine. Hmmm.

  file1.txt                                                                                                                                                                         100%    0     0.0KB/s   00:00    
  file2.txt                                                                                                                                                                         100%    0     0.0KB/s   00:00    
  file3.txt                                                                                                                                                                         100%    0     0.0KB/s   00:00    
  file4.txt                                                                                                                                                                         100%    0     0.0KB/s   00:00    
  file5.txt                                                                                                                                                                         100%    0     0.0KB/s   00:00    
  file6.txt                                                                                                                                                                         100%    0     0.0KB/s   00:00

After some time with mr google, I managed to track down the issue with scp itself. It runs the isatty() function to check and see if the command is being run in a shell. If it is not, then all is quiet! This means ruby, python et al do not get scp output.

The solution thanks to stack exchange was to send all output to a shell!

eg.

scp -r "remote_server:/directory/test_copy" ~/test_files/ > /dev/tty

Hope this helps you if you are having a similar issue!

Lots of outdoor gear nowadays has superfluous features. Extra straps for attaching ice axes, ski poles, shovel pockets, ipod holders, waterbottle holders, hood clips, phone clips the list goes on. Most of the time you don’t need this stuff and often these features are there to make the product more appealing in the outdoor porn shop. This practice is totally understandable as it generates more sales for the manufacturer and retailer.

However, often you don’t need this crap, and one of your best friends in this situation is a pair of scissors. Just cut all the superfluous features off with a pair of scissors / knife. The result being lean gear.

Dont stop there, if there is a piece of gear which isnt performing quite as you would like, or you have some ideas about how it could be better, just mod it! Find someone with a sewing machine (thanks mum!) and implement your ideas. A custom setup suited to you will enhance your enjoyment of the outdoors and the activities you perform there.

The video, all in english is below:

In true DIY style here is a rough guide to ski touring in the Sunnmøre (Sunnmore) area of Norway. This also applies to splitboarding.

Sunnmøre is as famous as Lyngen Alps as a ski touring location in Norway. Alpine peaks which come right out of the fjords make this a special place to go skiing.

Fjord from fingeren

There are glaciers, steep peaks which require mountaineering, couloirs and easy slopes.

Getting there

Best bet if you are coming from outwith Norway is to fly to Oslo, then fly to Ålesund. You can then hire a car from all the regulars, I recommend Avis. If you are driving, look at the map and drive there.

Accomodation

View from standalhytta

If you are skiing in ‘classic’ sunnmøre I recommend staying in the Ålesund skiklubb hut, Standalhytta. Anyone can join to become a member and then it is 150Kr (~£15 per night) to stay in simple but comfortable accomodation (sauna, walk in fridge, pro kitchen, dishwasher). Large groups work fine also but phone ahead and book if you are a large group. See here

If you are skiing on the other side of the fjord, Patchellhytta offers a great base for more extreme tours. There is also a youth hostel in Hellesylt it is 350kr per night with breakfast.

Where to ski / ride

In no particular order, Kolåstind, Nordre Sætretind, Nivane, Fingeren, Randers Topp, Slogen, Kvitegga, Skarasålen, Saudehornet, Sykallen are famous peaks of varying difficulty. Best bet is to buy the book Toppturer i Norge for something to get you started.

Skinning towards the summit of Kolåstind

Lars gets a faceful!

*ørsta from nivane*

Riding the light snow.. super nice.

Also make sure you buy a map of the area and dont just rely on GPS devices.

When to go

Weather can be dodgy here and avalanches are a real problem for the roads (and hills) in the area. I recommend mid to late season and a week of your time to visit and experience this area. April / May is more likely to give you stable snow and good weather. However we were there in early April and this video shows how much fresh snow there was.

Pictures

Here are a collection of my choice shots from the two trips I took there this season.

Busy on kvitegga

Summit of Nordre Satretind

Summit of Kolastind

Skinning out of the fjord, randers topp

More info

If you want some more information about sunnmøre or ski touring in Norway, leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.

Install openssl development libraries and prerequisites.

sudo apt-get -y install build-essential libssl-dev libreadline5-dev zlib1g-dev

Install yaml

#!/bin/bash
 
cd /usr/src
sudo wget http://pyyaml.org/download/libyaml/yaml-0.1.4.tar.gz
sudo tar xvzf yaml-0.1.4.tar.gz
cd yaml-0.1.4
sudo ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
sudo make 
sudo make install

Install ruby

#!/bin/bash
 
cd /usr/src
sudo wget http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.3-p125.tar.gz
sudo tar xvzf ruby-1.9.3-p125.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.9.3-p125
sudo ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --enable-shared --disable-install-doc --with-opt-dir=/usr/local/lib --with-openssl-dir=/usr --with-readline-dir=/usr --with-zlib-dir=/usr
sudo make
sudo make install

Install rubygems

  !#/bin/bash
 
  cd /usr/src 
  sudo wget http://production.cf.rubygems.org/rubygems/rubygems-1.8.17.tgz
  sudo tar xvzf rubygems-1.8.17.tgz
  cd rubygems-1.8.17
  sudo ruby setup.rb

This is applicable if you want to run a certain version of ruby globally on your production server. If there is alreadt a version of ruby installed, check /usr/bin/ruby, /usr/bin/gem and /usr/bin/bundle and update the links accordingly.

eg.

  sudo rm /usr/bin/ruby; sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/ruby /usr/bin/ruby
  sudo rm /usr/bin/gem; sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/gem /usr/bin/gem
  sudo gem install bundler --pre
  sudo rm /usr/bin/bundle; sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/bundle /usr/bin/bundle

Happy compiling!

The symptoms being strange characters appear in your content fetched from the db.

Often in ubuntu mysql server installs the default is latin1 when rails stored everything in utf8. In some cases (like mine) you end up having utf8 data stored in a latin1 table.

Dirty conversion script follows.

  DBFROM=site_production
  DBTO=new_site_production
  LOGIN=site
  PASS=XXX
  mysqldump  --extended-insert=FALSE --default-character-set=latin1  -u $LOGIN -p$PASS $DBFROM >site.sql
  cat site.sql |sed  -e 's/DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;/DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin;/'>site2.sql
  cat site2.sql |sed  -e 's/SET NAMES latin1/SET NAMES utf8/'>site3.sql
  echo " drop database $DBTO; create database $DBTO character set utf8 collate utf8_bin;"|mysql -u $LOGIN -p$PASS
  mysql -u $LOGIN -p$PASS $DBTO <site3.sql

So the year is coming to a close and I’d like to communicate some wee open source tools I’ve been working on this past year.

Below is a list of open source tools I have released recently. I would not go as far as to call them open source projects as there is rarely anyone involved in these projects apart from me. I learnt at frozen rails that its great to get involved with other peoples open source projects instead of going out on your own all the time. (something I have a habit of doing.)

If anything here catches your eye, or you want to use it, get involved.

Chef Cookbooks

I have been building a fair amount of server infrastructure lately and have been using the excellent chef tool to help with this.

Along the way I have released a few cookbooks which I have extracted from the work I have been doing. These are in a relatively rough state but do work and are in production use. If you want to help me improve any of these, please go for it.

chef-squid
chef-oh-my-zsh
chef-ipcoffeetables
chef-backup
chef-locales

Deployment recipiez

I have been doing a lot of varied application deployments, all with capistrano. For the last couple of years I have been maintaining a collection of customs scripts which I was including in each project. Versioning was becoming difficult and git submodules are not an amazing workflow.

With bundler its possible to manage dependencies well and it can be used outside of rails projects. Recently I have been writing messaging apis in NodeJS and deploying quite successfully with capistrano and a few setup scripts.

With recipiez its possible to setup a node deployment with upstart, nginx, logrotate and monit. This creates a nice “production ready” environment for deploying node apps.

I have packaged it up and released it as a gem. Instructions for use are in the Readme.

recipiez

OpenSSL Extensions

This is a library written by Nathaniel Bibler of Ruby5 fame. I have used this extensively in an SSL certificate reselling app I have been working on which has not yet seen the light of day.

This library was my first github pull request success. Where you open a pull request, discuss the change with the author, make a few alterations, then it gets merged upstream!

openssl-extensions

Wee Flickr

This is a little sinatra app which is meant to get deployed to heroku. It allows me to include images in blog posts very easily and give me a little textile snippet to paste into blog posts.

This scratches a very specific itch but is a example of a sinatra app communicating with the flickr api. It also has a random image function which give a random image from your flickr stream. This is used on my random flickr desktop script which I use at work.

wee_flickr

Solon

This is a gem for integrating with sage pay server. It lacks the standard api of activemerchant but as the service is offsite it doesnt work that well with the activemerchant api.

Using it might help you if you are doing a sage pay integration within a rails app.

solon

Merry Christmas!

Skinning in front of Store Vengetind

In the spirit of DIY with the likes of the haute route post , here is a description of the DIY Campervan we created last summer.

Helen and I went on a trip to France this summer past, starting in Nottingham and finishing in Inverness after a nice tour of France and parts of the UK.

Wild camping is banned in France along with a few of the other central european countries. Meaning that if you want to be ‘out in the nature’ you need to stay in a campsite or hotel.

However, there is a big campervan culture in France which means that campervans are accepted all over the place and there is a network of aires which provide essential services such as water and waste disposal.

The downside of campervans is that they are very expensive to buy and hire .

Famous refuge and gash

If you want to spend time in the alps or the pyrenees a good way to do it is with a DIY Camper™

There are some amazing Van conversions out there which take a lot of time and money to create. This is not one of them. This conversion can be done for minimal funds and in a couple of days.

Vehicle

Buy a van, max 2m high as this means you can park in regular car parks. Features to look out for are low mileage, ply-lined, carpeted. without bulk head, turbo diesel, side and back doors. Buy something which has a decent resell value as you will likely want to sell the van on after your trip.

As of 2011 £2000 would be a good budget. We started with a Mercedes Vito electricians van purchased from Autotrader vans.

Post training lunch in the heat.

Sleeping

You can pick up an IKEA sofabed for about £100, this acts as both a sofa and a bed! Jobs a good un!

High altitude camp spot.

If you have more time / expertise an mdf sleeping platform design is far superior as it allows you to store luggage underneath the sleeping area when you sleep.

Mods

Solar Shower in Action

• Inverter for a DC power supply (Laptop and Mobile) – sourced from Maplin.
• Large water container. You need a lot of water storage as often days can pass without water. – sourced from Decathlon.
• Solar shower. A large black back with a nozzle attached was excellent for cheeky washes. – sourced from Decathlon.
• Seat organisers, these clip onto the back of seat.
• FM transmitter, good way to listen to Ipod / Phone in the car without modifying the stereo.
• Screw hooks on the ply lining for organising stuff.
• Cooking was done outside with an MSR Whisperlite International stove running on petrol.
• Take a basic tool kit for repairs. Our main issue was the back section of the exhaust needed tied onto the chassis for most of the trip. If you get a good van you will hopefully escape mechanical issues.
• Curtains for the back doors with velcro attachments. Well made by Mrs Palmer.

Tips

• Use the aires in villages for services (but buy something in the village!). You can also sleep in them as well.
• When driving long distance we split the driving and did 2hr efforts, which can be maintained.
• The pyrenees is a lovely area.

4×4 intervals followed by Barbeque

Every half an hour a cronjob runs which runs the following script.

change_desktop.sh

  #!/bin/bash
 
  utime=`date +%s`
  file="/tmp/#{$utime}.jpg"
  curl -L http://weeflickr.heroku.com/random_image > $file
 
  /path/to/change_desktop.rb $file

It makes a call to the wee flickr app which redirects to a random photo from your photostream. (Chooses a random set, then a random photo within that set.) This file is then saved to disk and is passed to a ruby script.

change_desktop.rb

  #!/usr/bin/env ruby
 
  # Author: Alastair Brunton
 
  require 'rubygems'
  require 'appscript'
 
  include Appscript
 
  file_path = ARGV[0]
 
  app("Finder").desktop_picture.set(MacTypes::FileURL.path(file_path))

rb-appscript

Note: This has only been tested on snow leopard and the scripts are currently pretty brittle.

The random flickr photo functionality is available from wee_flickr photopicker.

You also need to delete the /tmp photos now and again so I have a little dirty cron that runs once per day.

  #!/bin/bash
 
  cd /tmp && rm *.jpg

This is a little tool for embedding flickr images on blog posts. For some reason flickr makes this hard to achieve through the web interface so this little sinatra application solves the problem.

This may be a violation of the flickr terms of service, so you might want to remember to credit flickr on the blog posts.

This app is designed to be deployed to heroku.

Steps to deploy

• git clone git://github.com/pyrat/wee_flickr.git
• sign up for heroku account (heroku.com)
• (sudo) gem install heroku
• edit FLICKR_USERNAME in app.rb to yours
• commit change locally (git commit -v -a)
• heroku create [your app name]
• git push heroku master

ALL DONE!

If you click the paste board a textile snippet is copied to your clipboard. It assumes that you are writing your blog posts in textile! And this can be pasted into your blog post.

You may want to use this tool as a base for a markdown or plain html embed code system.

Source is on github, wee_flickr