Update: Cycling to work moved to RunKeeper
- Route: #1
- Distance: 8.1 km
- Time: 22 min
- Conditions: prime, cycling under the raising sun, +5C seems to fit into the perfect temperature range for cycling in a city.
Cycling to work – Day #2
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Tag Archives: london
Cycling to work – Day #1
Update: Cycling to work moved to RunKeeper
- Route: #1
- Distance: 8.1 km
- Time:25 min
- Conditions: first minute in the sun, then dramatic change “When the wind blows and the rain feels cold”…and thing layer of ice is forming on my ankles and lower legs, but thankfully with no head in snow; it lasted for the first 3km and was enough to soak me well. Next, cycling in light rain. My shoes had been wet for the rest of the day. Tip: always have spare trousers and socks backed up in your office (t-shirts are obvious).
New year, new challenges, new ideas. My new idea is to start logging cycling commuter chronicles and perhaps similar log for climbing, and running too if my weak strong will allows. Apparently, I have too much time up on my sleeves. Anyway, I’m going to post rather short log messages than detailed blog posts (if Twitter allowed ~300 characters, I’d probably use Twitter).
I have been cycling to work since I got my first bicycle here in London. A lazy weekend during spring 2010, I made a trip to Brick Lane where I spent 90 quid, and a lot more hopes I hadn’t been buying from a thieve, to get my very first fixi. (If anyone in London used to have bright green fixi (though I bought it as black) with white handlebars and black saddle (photo) and it was stolen, then let me know :-) .) I got my bicycle and started regular commute from N1 to WC2R.
Long story short, whenever I have to struggle through the crowds to get into the lifts in Covent Garden Underground Station, I honestly suffer. Cycling is simply great. The only disadvantage is that I no longer have 40 minutes per day to read a book.
Kudos to folks from CycleStreets for the great service useful in optimising cycling routes.
Tip: every time you approach a minicab, imagine you are cycling on streets of one of the large cities in the far east and apply no trust rule whatsoever.
Interface Versioning in C++ Video
Friends from Skills Matter has put video with lecture about Interface Versioning in C++ given by Steve Love last Thursday. The lecture was organised by London chapater of ACCU.
Generally, Steve addressed problems of the DLL Hell and ABI compatibility proposing a not-so-simple, but applicable and usable solution for number of most common problems. Along the video, slides are also available, so it should be easy to grasp the idea.
I’ve received copy of Steve’s code and I’m preparing a few more tests which I hope to describe in details and post here soon.
It is snowing
in London!
I’ve just looked through window in my office near Covent Garden and I can see it’s snowing at 10:44:28 (local time).
It is constantly landing snow!
The best of snow!
in London!
Celebrating year one in London
I arrived to London in the small hours on Friday December 5, 2008. My better half Pantera joined me on December 22, 2008.
On Monday, December 8, 2009 I’ll be celebrating year one of great time, hacking and company at Cadcorp.
Productive Saturday Climbing
Today, Pantera and I we hit the Castle Climbing Centre early in the morning. It’s nice to have wide range of routes available when the centre is nearly empty as people are recovering after Friday buzz ;-). I am (exceptionally?) weak today. Probably, it’s because the last 2 weeks I conducted endurance oriented sessions only. First, I jumped upstairs to climb a few V1-V3 boulders on the overhang featured bouldering wall. I tried the new orange V5 boulder. It’s beautiful, but I couldn’t prevent my body swinging a bit after quite dynamic move to 4th hold. I’ve put the V5 on my short list, definitely. Next, we hit number of top-rope routes. Pantera was working on technical 5 and 5+ and I was trying to mix strength and stamina problems:
- The Slabs: 6b (blue), 2 x 6c (pink/green)
- Tall Walls: 5 (green), 6b+ (green/orange spots)
- The Fang: 2 x 6b (orange/lilak spots), 2 x 6c (pink s.o.s., including loss of a few layers of my finger tips skin ;-))
- The Stack: 6c (red), 7a (yellow, made 1/3 of the route, 3 moves only)
No rock rings, no campus. Finished bouldering a couple of V0-V3 on the Panels.
While my muscles were busy pushing enormous amount of ATP molecules through their fibres and cells, my brain was busy solving design issues of how to make C++ interface of GDAL library better. It is clear that neither dataset nor raster band can have semantic of plain value objects. Both, dataset and raster band, represent real world physical resources and they are more like reference objects. In spite of that reference semantic is dominant in the world of GDAL objects, I’d really like to make them CopyConstructible and Assignable. I know it can be achieved straight away:
std::tr1::shared_ptr<GDALDataset> ds(::GDALOpen("file.tif", GA_ReadOnly), ::GDALClose);
But, I just don’t want to make yet another Gigantic Rats Nest Of Pointers. I would be happy to keep all the ugliness out of user’s sight. I think it’s feasible. Perhaps I will even Pimpl my Ride GDAL.
I’ll probably need one or more climbing sessions to finish the design of better GDAL, so I can start slinging some code around. Next climbing on Monday in Swiss Cottage with Jo, Chiara and Pantera.
Endurance Hunny, Move!
Yesterday night, I went to the temple of power where Pantera, my personal trainer recently, arranged 3 hours climbing session focused on endurance :-) So, I had to climb 18 routes with grades (Sport, French), mostly, above 6. Here is the list: 6a, 6b+, 6c, 5+, 5+, 7a (first time attempt, 50%, bloody features), 6c, 6c, 6a, 6c, 6b, 6b, 6a, 6b+, 6a, 6a, 5, 5.