test please delete

[mudskipper]

I like endomondo.

[norrahe]

Android Running App, Running GPS Tracking, Running Training Apps for your Android | MapMyRun

Does everything you need and can be used with their website to upload your stats and keep track over time.

If you don't want a phone app then a basic GPS unit will do the job and can work with the website as well. Garmin do some basic wristwatch type units. Pay around £80-90 for a basic model.

Hmm, think Mr N has summat like that lurking around somewhere, it also measures heart rate as well.

[norrahe]

Making beetroot soup now. Beets are quite a light colour, so the soup may end up being pink.

[zeitghost]

Making beetroot soup now. Beets are quite a light colour, so the soup may end up being pink.

Much like your wee will be then.

[norrahe]

Much like your wee will be then.

Have made sprout puree too! <pfffft>

[DaveB]

Have made sprout puree too! <pfffft>

Purple gas?

[NickFitz]

Home!

It took a bit of messing about to get anything useful happening with the ClientCo laptop - apart from anything else, the department head had to come over and "Run as administrator" the installers for any software I wanted on there; and it seems that I have no web access for anything but internal sites. Literally every single domain I've tried has been blocked, for reasons such as "Search engines and portals" (Google), "Technology and Internet" (software I need), and "None" (lots of other stuff).

I've had to download stuff on my Mac, then move it across using a USB stick in the form of a small rubber hand that some vendor gave me at a conference last year

Oh, and Chrome's developer tools have been disabled (which I didn't even know you could do). IE's aren't, but the JS debugger on there is a right pain. So I'm having to use Firefox.

And it seems I'm not allowed to receive email from outside the company either: I tried emailing my work to date to my corporate email address, but it never arrived. Nor did a couple of other emails with documentation I need. So all that ended up travelling on the rubber hand too.

Then I had to dream up some way of getting my stuff working in such a way that I could test it. It's a JS client for a REST API, and as the test harness I've slung together (I have no specs for any kind of UI yet) relies on XMLHttpRequest to send requests and receive responses, I was stuck facing the cross-domain problem: my stuff, as far as the browser is concerned, needs to live on the same domain as the actual API endpoint.

If I could install Apache, I could set up a proxy to fix that in a jiffy, and that might also be easy with IIS, but of course I'm not allowed to install Apache or set IIS up locally. It's not possible to give me file access to the API server either, as that's under the vice-like grip of a different department, who won't put anything on there until it's finished.

No problem, I thought: I'll use Charles proxy, and map a fictitious remote folder to a local one. Dead easy, I do it all the time. Except it turns out the laptop has a version of Java installed that (incorrectly) rejects HTTPS connections unless a specific (optional, according to spec) header is enabled, so Charles (a desktop app written in Java that actually works and seems native on all platforms, and is really good at MITMing HTTPS) is prevented from handling them.

So I had to install Fiddler. It's a good app, which I've been using occasionally for many years, but there are a few things that are clunkier than on Charles, and the local mapping is one of them.

Still, I got there in the end: if my browser makes a request to https://api.example.com/banana/{whatever} then the files get served off my local disk while appearing to the browser to come from the server, so I have finally actually got stuff doing stuff

So that was my afternoon

[Alias]

Home!

It took a bit of messing about to get anything useful happening with the ClientCo laptop - apart from anything else, the department head had to come over and "Run as administrator" the installers for any software I wanted on there; and it seems that I have no web access for anything but internal sites. Literally every single domain I've tried has been blocked, for reasons such as "Search engines and portals" (Google), "Technology and Internet" (software I need), and "None" (lots of other stuff).

I've had to download stuff on my Mac, then move it across using a USB stick in the form of a small rubber hand that some vendor gave me at a conference last year

Oh, and Chrome's developer tools have been disabled (which I didn't even know you could do). IE's aren't, but the JS debugger on there is a right pain. So I'm having to use Firefox.

And it seems I'm not allowed to receive email from outside the company either: I tried emailing my work to date to my corporate email address, but it never arrived. Nor did a couple of other emails with documentation I need. So all that ended up travelling on the rubber hand too.

Then I had to dream up some way of getting my stuff working in such a way that I could test it. It's a JS client for a REST API, and as the test harness I've slung together (I have no specs for any kind of UI yet) relies on XMLHttpRequest to send requests and receive responses, I was stuck facing the cross-domain problem: my stuff, as far as the browser is concerned, needs to live on the same domain as the actual API endpoint.

If I could install Apache, I could set up a proxy to fix that in a jiffy, and that might also be easy with IIS, but of course I'm not allowed to install Apache or set IIS up locally. It's not possible to give me file access to the API server either, as that's under the vice-like grip of a different department, who won't put anything on there until it's finished.

No problem, I thought: I'll use Charles proxy, and map a fictitious remote folder to a local one. Dead easy, I do it all the time. Except it turns out the laptop has a version of Java installed that (incorrectly) rejects HTTPS connections unless a specific (optional, according to spec) header is enabled, so Charles (a desktop app written in Java that actually works and seems native on all platforms, and is really good at MITMing HTTPS) is prevented from handling them.

So I had to install Fiddler. It's a good app, which I've been using occasionally for many years, but there are a few things that are clunkier than on Charles, and the local mapping is one of them.

Still, I got there in the end: if my browser makes a request to https://api.example.com/banana/{whatever} then the files get served off my local disk while appearing to the browser to come from the server, so I have finally actually got stuff doing stuff

So that was my afternoon

Lot of that stuff going on here...REST Services, RDF, Triples Stores, Linked Data...very interesting too

[NickFitz]

Strange side effect of this cold: vinegar smells exactly like bleach

I first noticed it a couple of nights ago, when eating some bought-in chips. It was so strong that they also tasted of it and I had to stop eating them, and was seriously wondering if they'd somehow been contaminated with some kind of cleaning fluid

Then tonight, I've made chips myself and when I put vinegar on them, the same thing. Not as strong, and this time it didn't affect the flavour: but a distinctive bleach smell when I first put it on them.

Both times it was my vinegar at home, not from the counter in the chippy or anything, and it's from two different bottles of Sarson's malt vinegar, bought at different times, and kept in different rooms.

Very odd

[NickFitz]

In other food-related news, I've just finished a 12oz rib-eye steak, with a suitably large quantity of chips

I think my appetite must be coming back