Wors World

Apr

Training Training Training

On Saturday I added 5lb to my already heavy bergen

http://www.anthonypounder.com/blog/cns!400938DCD454D501!741.entry and hopped onto the stepper machine.

Keeping it on the low resistance setting I stepped it out for an hour until the machine broke. It felt like the elastic band had snapped/slipped which meant there was no longer any resistance, anyway, I gave up and resolved to investigate / repair it later. My back gave me a little bit of stick during the hour but not as much as my 1st effort.

Next morning I was up with the larks for a training run with Bunde. We’d planned a circa 10 miler taking in some very tasty hills which we figured would help on the P Coy Challenge. We set off at 07:30 and immediately I felt knackered – my legs were tired from the stepper exertion and we seemed to set off like bats out of hell. We spotted a couple of runners ahead and we were soon past them, this was about a mile and already I was beginning to worry about the pace and my strength :-(.

We continued to run the planbned course and I felt like I was just hanging on (or out as they say in the military) until we got to about 5 miles. 5 miles was of course the turnaround point as we’d planned a 10 miler but we kept on running and decided to take a circular route home rathre than simply turning round and heading back.

I felt better & better as the run continued and we chatted about the London Marathon and how it was 4 years since I’d last ran it. At about 9.5 miles we came to a hill known as Jubilee Hill. Jubilee is a hill which neither of us had ran before but we decided to give it a go as it would be good training for "The Land of Nod", a fearsome hill about 9 miles into the P Coy Challenge.

I set off fairly slowly at the bottom as I was a bit concerned about my ability to run the whole way and just over half way I was very concerned as it got steeper and steeper and my legs were beginning to regret the hour long session on the stepper the day before. My stride length grew shorter and shorter as I neared the top but I made it and was still able to speak (well swear) when we made it.

The rest of the run was down hill from there and 12 miles were completed in 1:39, not my fastest time ever as I’ve managed a half marathon in 1:37, but it’s a fair pace considering my lay off last year.

Taking the stepper apart later that day revealed that the band had simply slipped off – I reattached it and it was good to go.

Categorized in P Coy Challenge

Apr

Weird!

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For this post you should know that I have a fascination with sharks which was borne out of reading the book and seeing the film "Jaws" whilst a young and impressionable youth. I can’t switch over a TV programme if it features sharks and I can’t help myself from switching over to any TV programme that mentions sharks. I also swim in the sea very, very reluctantly with one eye scanning the bottom and the other scanning the surface for fins

. Jaws scarred me for life it seems.

OK, so I’ve told you about my weird thing about sharks, now onto what I think is the really weird stuff…..

I was idling a few minutes away by keying my internet pseudonym(?) "WorTony" into Google and seeing what came up. I reckon most of you wont have a clue as to why I’m know as "WorTony" but that’s a story for another day. WorTony is to me, a fairly unique name so I was intrigued to see a link which mentioned Wor Tony and Great White Shark so I clicked the link……

If you can’t see what was so intriguing look for the plays that Julie Davis has worked on…..

Spooky!

Categorized in Miscellaneous

Apr

Weighted Training At Last!

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So tonight I went out running with Bunde. We ran without weights for about 5 miles and spent most of the time arranging when and where we are running at the weekend. We’re planning a 10 miler without weights but the run will be very useful as it incorporates a few absolutely beastie hills for us to get up and down – all good.

When I got back from tonights run I filled the bergen that I’ve borrowed with a bit of light weight and got on the stepper.

I cracked on with the stepping for 30 minutes and decided to call it a day as the bergen (as lightly filled as it is) was causing me to bend my lower back and was beginning to ache – I’ll have to watch out for this when I get it loaded up for real. Still it’s a start and I’ll press on from here – longer sessions and more weight as and when I can manage it.

I intend to knock out a fair few sessions on the stepper before hitting the roads – the bergen should look good as it looks absolutely stuffed and really heavy – it’s only filled with sleeping bags and it’s own weight for the moment though

Categorized in P Coy Challenge

Apr

Relocating SVN Repository

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While Intelligent Decisioning Ltd are a Microsoft Gold Certified partner, we still make use of Subversion (Svn) to host our code repository. I know that Team Foundation Server is a great piece of s/w but it’s big, complicated and requires all developers to have Team Foundation server functionality and some of the devs we work with don’t.

I’ve recently moved our Svn repository from an internally hosted service to an external hoster. They’re cheap at $60 a year and it takes away a certain amount of admin from me and my fellow ID colleagues.

To move the actual code repository requires use of the command line utility svnadmin. The command I used was svnadmin dump /path/to/repos > myrepos.dump which creates a single file that Svn can import to populate a repository. BTW, make sure you type the redirect pipe ">" otherwise your server will dump the binary contents of the repository to the screen resulting in a crazed beeping session that you just can’t stop :-).

Once I had the "dump" file, I imported them into my newly created hosted repository which went without a hitch and switched off our old repository.

All done? Well no, not quite.

When you attempt to carry out any Svn repository functionality (update,commit, compare etc.) you’ll find that your TortoiseSvn (the Svn repository client) is still pointing at the old repository – good job I stopped the old repository otherwise I may have been blissfuly unaware that I hadn’t actually connected to the new.

To point TortoiseSvn to the new repository you need to use either the TortoiseSvn relocate menu option or use the svn command line.

I tried the menu option first and was presented with a message telling me that "The repository at ‘https://ourhoster/id-live/project’ has uuid ‘f
881a828-44c3-41be-a4ae-c8af87ade81f’, but the WC has ‘68393c81-089e-e149-a2b0-4f7cc15966ed’".

A bit of Googling told me that I needed to use the command line and issue an svn command "svn switch https://ourhoster/id-live/project" – I tried and it failed with the message as above. There is also a –force command option which I tried "svn switch –force https://ourhoster/id-live/project" – no joy.

Further Googling led me to try "svn sw –relocate https://ourinternalserver:8443/svn/project https://ourhoster/id-live/project" which also failed – I then edited this to be "svn sw –relocate https://ourinternalserver/svn/project https://ourhoster/id-live/project" – success.

Categorized in Computers and Internet

Apr

NUnit – No Test Fixtures

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I’m writing some SharePoint code and using NUnit as part of my unit testing strategy.

I was writing some tests for a method that I’d already written (I know, I know it’s not TDD – I think of it as a technique which I term "TAD" Test After Design ;->).

I’d already deployed the code to SP once and I attempted to run the tests using the NUnit GUI. The NUnit Gui reported that my assembly had been built "using no known testing framework". The assembly showed a yellow question mark and when I pressed "Run Tests" the GUI reported that there were no tests to run "Reason: has no test fixtures".

After a bit of Googling which pointed at it being either a NUnit version issue (I’m using the latest version) or a permissions thing related to network drives (which I’m not doing).

Using the VS addin TestDriven.Net I noticed that the GAC version of my assembly was being pulled in and executed rather than the latest version of code in VS. I deleted it from the GAC (after IISReset) and my tests executed fine 🙂

Categorized in Computers and Internet

Apr

InfoPath FormServer

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If you’re using SharePoint and InfoPath forms, make sure you get the correct url to the form otherwise odd things will happen…..

I coded up a BDC entity page that linked to an InfoPath form, passing values from the BDC entity to the form. I put the InfoPath form into the FormTemplates list on my SP site and coded the the url pointing directly at the .xsn (I passed the parameters to the form as name=value pairs).

When I clicked the link, the form was opened in a browser but the onload code was throwing exceptions when it tried to set form elements passed via the url.

I spent a bit of time debugging this, including adding exception handing and writing the exception details to the form. By chance I clicked the link and happened to watch the url as it was opened, I’d been distracted to this point, and I saw that the url which I clicked was changed to call FormServer.aspx with a parameter of my form name and the parameters that I wanted to pass to the form.

The issue was that my parameters were having their case changed from mixed case to lower case – my code in the InfoPath form was looking for mixed case parameters.

Make sure you use FormServer.aspx to open your forms or you maybe bit as well.

Categorized in Sharepoint

Apr

Subversion, Cruise Control, NUnit & MSBuild

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DRAFTED on November 30 but not published until now…….

I’m currently employed as a .Net development consultant for a large telecomms company. There’s me and another guy who have been drafted into develop a publish/subscribe system, allowing messages to be published from publishing applications to any subscribed servers.

We’re developing from 2 separate locations in the UK and currently don’t have access to the telecomms companys infrastructure, thereby making it hard to develop code concurrently – we’ve been emailing source to each other :-(.

I’ve decided that until we get access to the companys source control system, I’ll setup Subversion (SVN) to host our code and use Cruise Control (CC) , NUnit & MSBuild to provide us with an centralised, automated build environment. They’re all products that, individually, I’ve had a lot of experience with but until now I’ve never tried to automate builds out of SVN. They’re all free thanks to the Open Source effort.

The process of installing and configuring appears to be well documented so wont be repeated here, instead, I’m looking to document the issues that I had after installation……

I logged onto a server that was hanging about in the office not doing a great deal and I started by downloading and installing the latest version of SVN (source code repository), TortoiseSVN (sourec code repository client accessible from Windows Explorer) and VisualSVN. For all the products it was a simple matter of run setup, click Next, click Next, Finish and went really well. I used the VisualSVN Server Manager and created myself a repository, added users and groups and added them to the repository.

I accessed the url where VisualSVN Server Manager had created my repository and had to install the certificate that the installation process had installed for me (it’s a self signed, non trusted cert).

Next, I downloaded and installed CC. I got into the ccnet.config and setup the relevant sourcecontrol and msbuild sections.

I switched to my dev machine and installed VisualSVN with VS integration. Opening my solution I added it to the SVN repository I had created earlier. Switching back to the build server, I checked the CC log (ccnet.log) and saw:

ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.CruiseControlException: Source control operation failed: svn: OPTIONS of ‘https://myservername:8443/svn/MySolution’: Server certificate verification failed: issuer is not trusted (https://myservername:8443)

I puzzled over this for a while as I was thinking "I’ve installed the cert – what’s wrong with it?". I didn’t puzzle for long though as I had a social event to get to :-).

Returning to this, I Googled ths issue and discovered (much to my embarassment) that I’d only installed the cert for my user only – Cruise Control was running as a server with local system as it’s user. I decided to setup a new user to run the service under and changed the logon details of the service. I ran IE as this user and installed the cert for this user. I also created a new Subversion user and added it to the root Subversion repository.

Restarting the service fixed the error but then I came up against this:

ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.CruiseControlException: Source control operation failed: svn: OPTIONS of ‘https://myservername:8443/svn/MySolution: authorization failed (https://myservername.local:8443).

Checking the sourcecontrol tags details with the Cruise Control documentation resulted in me modding the sourcecontrol tag in ccnet.config to add user id and password attributes:

This resulted in another error

ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.CruiseControlException: Source control operation failed: svn: Server sent unexpected return value (403 Forbidden) in response to OPTIONS request for ‘https://myservername:8443/svn/MySolution’

. Process command: svn.exe log https://myservername:8443/svn/MySolution -r "{2008-11-29T17:06:33Z}:{2008-11-30T17:07:01Z}" –verbose –xml –username MyServiceAcc –password xxxxxxx –non-interactive –no-auth-cache

Googling again brought me more info and I gave the CC service user full control to the directory where Subversion deploys the repositories.

Still not fixed.

I took the command line that CC creates for the sourcecontrol task and changed it to use my credentials – it worked. I spent another half hour or so changing the password of the SVN user which CC runs as without fixing the problem (it must be permissions related) before deciding to add my credentials to the ccnet.config – NOT BEST PRACTICE! I’ll look at this again when I get it all working :-).

On to the next issue:

ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.CruiseControlException: Unable to load the output from svn: <?xml version="1.0"?>

<log>

<logentry

revision="11">

This turned out to be a known issue that has been fixed :

http://confluence.public.thoughtworks.org/display/CCNET/Welcome+to+CruiseControl.NET

so I downloaded it and installed it and it went away.

I also installed the SMTP component of IIS to allow the CC config to send email results of the build – not really needed as CC comes with a utility (CC Tray) which allows you to monitor the state of the builds on the build server but I thought I’d do it anyway in case we ever meet a need to support interested parties who don’t want the tray.

I had to forward port 8443 through the Belkin router to allow external access to Subversion and that was that – internal and external access to Subversion and continuous integration up and running.

Since I drafted this I’ve used this setup for a number of other development projects and it’s great – simpler and lighter than Team Foundation Server (which I will return to at some point). It’s ran without a blink since then ……

Categorized in Computers and Internet

Mar

Using the BDC – Battle Scars

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I was changing the stylesheet that accompanies the BDC web part that displays an entity using Sharepoint Designer 2007.

After styling up the data which included adding an HTML anchor element, I saved the page and switched to the web site to see it in action. When the page refreshed I was presented with an error "The title property of entity myentity is set to an invalid value".

After much head scratching, and rejigging of stylesheet I eventually worked out that the error appears to be some kind of general purpose catch all that was caused (in this case) by my creating the anchor element and supplying the text before the href attribute. This caused the error:

<a>Anchor text

<xsl:attribute name="href">

<xsl:text>http://theurl</xsl:text>

</xsl:attribute>

</a>

this fixed it:

<a>

<xsl:attribute name="href">

<xsl:text>http://theurl</xsl:text>

</xsl:attribute>

Anchor text

</a>

I guess this is some kind of HTML schema type issue rather than a SharePoint BDC web part issue but it’s another one of those Gotchas!

Categorized in Sharepoint

Mar

Computers Make Me Go Aaaarrrghhhhh!

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Came home from work today and moved some bedroom furniture as we’re having new carpets fitted tomorrow.

At 08:20 I switched on my laptop and set off to do a little bit of dev work……

No wireless network connection available. "Damn!", why isn’t that connecting? I checked the settings, rechecked the settings. I attempted to connect and reconnect and reconnect. I could get local only access meaning no internet (whicH I needed for the task in hand).

Multiple ipconfigs showed nothing other than I was connected apparently correctly. I restarted the router, removed the power from the router and cable modem multiple times – "local access only".

An almost identical laptop I have connected to the internet without issue. I rebooted the failing laptop numerous times – "local access only".

I went for a long shot and checked the access on my iPhone (which refuses to connect to my wireless network) to discover that even it could connect to the internet fine – isn’t it great?

A final reboot of the router, modem and laptop, ipconfig /renew and that was it, I was back on the net – 1 hour and 55 minutes after I’d first set off. This isn’t the first time that I’ve experienced this and I hate to think how much of my life I’ve lost doing this kind of thing. Now that I’ve got that fixed I can’t face doing the work I set out to do so I’ll have to put off now until tomorrow.

It is usually said that computers are very predictable, that they never change their behaviour. I think the only thing predictable about them is that they will always be unpredictable, things that used to work will stop working without any intervention, and that things will fail when you really can’t afford them to.

Having said all th

Categorized in Computers and Internet

Mar

Ashby 20 2009

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So I got myself a place in the 2009 Ashby 20. I’d left it late so had to call the organisers on the Saturday night before the race (21:30). I had an anxious wait after leaving a message on voicemail but they called me back and I was in. I called Bunde and let him know – he was well pleased that he didn’t have to run it himself – although having to run round with me would wreck his time – he’s ran it in 2:39 in the past.

Up at 07:00 on the Sunday morning, I picked up Bunde @ 08:15 and we made the registration by 09:00. I collected my number (997- the race is limited to 1,000) and we changed and headed for the start. The sun was shining but there was a bit of a cold brezee keeping it cool. The race was off at 10:00 and I Twittered to record the fact. At 2 miles I Twittered that I’d taken 19 minutes to complete the distance and waited until I’d completed 5 miles in 45 minutes before sending another. Between 2 and 5 miles, I overtook the Gorilla (a guy running in a gorilla suit which must be a hellish hot nightmare), "Great" I thought, at least I’ve passed him……..

5 to 10 miles passed and the official course time showed 1:26 – this felt a bit too quick for me and at the half way point I was feeling a bit anxious about the rest of the race….I was too knackered to manage to Twitter at this point so gave up.

Miles 10 – 19 are a second lap of miles 2 – 10 so I knew what was coming in the second half of the race.

At mile 13 I was really feeling it and by the drink stop at mile 14 I stopped to have a drink, eat chocolate and gel. Getting going again was a nightmare and my feet were sore, left calf and thigh felt as though they were going to cramp. I sort of got to mile 15 before stopping again and this time I walked without being at a drinks station. I formed a strategy of running/jogging from mile to mile with a stop for a strengh gathering walk when I made it. This soon broke down and I found myself walking at the half mile as well as the mile with Bunde yelling at me to "get moving", "it’s a walk in the park from here" – shades of the London Marathon 2005 I think.

After about mile 17 I was seriously considering jacking in an walking back as by now, my groin (left and right) was done in, every step felt like a bone juddering droip from a height and it all knacked.

Miles 18 – 19 were a nightmare, my stride was tiny and my body was knackered (ironically my knee which was operated on last Sept was holding out fine, but the rest was in tatters. Passing mile 19 there is a heck of a hill (just what you need at 19 miles) and to add to the nightmare a strong wind was bearing down the hill into our faces.

At about 19.5 miles, the Gorilla caught me up and we ran shoulder to shoulder for a period during which I said to him "I hope you don’t have a sprint finish in you", "Nah" he replied, "You’ll be home before me". At the top of the hill, the course drops towards the finish and I saw the 400 metre sign – I’d left the Gorilla behind by this point. My legs now were really beginning to cramp and I could barely stride the length of my feet but I was ahead of the Gorilla. I knew he was close cos as I entered the finish funnel, runners who had already finished the race were waving the banana from the goody bag as I passed by them. At about 100 metres the Gorilla went for it and he out sprinted me by about 5 seconds. I crossed the line and felt I was going to throw up. The race time showed 3:06 but Bunde has his stopwatch on it and reckoned it was 3:05:21 – my chip time will be available later but I am taking 3:05:21 :-).

I saw the Gorilla after the finish and said "I thought you didn’t have a sprint finish left?" and he replied "I hadn’t thought about it until you mentioned it". If only I’d been too knackered to open my mouth I would have him :-(.

Anyway, that’s the Ashby 20 done – it represents unfinished business for me as I was supposed to run this in 2005 but due to family circumstances I wasn’t able to take part. I’m pretty sure that I would have recorded a much faster time but "hey ho", that’s the way it goes. I ran the London Marathon in 2005 and my 20 mile time was 3 hrs so I wasn’t that much faster but I did manage another 6 miles then – not something I could have done at the Ashby 20.

Would I have finished without Bunde yelling at me for the last 5 or 6 miles? Possibly but I would have walked far more than I did – big thanks to him for dragging me to the end (he did the same for me at the London Marathon 2005).

Will I run it again? I don’t know at the moment. It’s a well organised race with plenty of marshalls, drinks, gels and sweets all around the course. There are some hills, although none of them are "killers". It’s a 2 lap affair which I think is not as good as a route that is always different but all in all it’s not bad.

Will I run the London Marathon now? Again, I don’t know at the moment. I reckon I have 2 – 3 days of pain before this race is out of me and I’ll see what I can manage training wise over the next few weeks. London is a flatter race than the Ashby of course……..

23/3/2009 – UPDATE

The results have been published on the Ashby 20 website. I came 604 of 828 :-(. The gorilla (Timothy Sturlla) was 600. Huge respect to Tim for completing the course in a gorilla suit again. I’ve often wondered when the fancy dress guys do their training. When I was training for the marathon I was down the canal on a Sunday morning by 07:30 – nothing TOO unusual in that but if I was galloping down the canal dressed as a gorilla/rhino or similar that would be a completely different matter 🙂

Categorized in P Coy Challenge

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