My son is very keen, as many boys his age are, on video games.

Xbox, Wii, Playstation, Nintendo, flash games, Scratch, Bin Weevels; it goes on and on.
It's what he loves and especially things like scratch.mit.edu are where I try and push him with the hope that it will encourage him to learn more about the world of technology and how games and computers generally work.

Recently, I discovered "Gamestar Mechanic" and interesting site that lets him play a young game player come game game designer who must go through a variety of quests Pokemon style.
Whats nice about the site is that it teaches game design not just game playing. The NPCs in the quests and the levels in the quests teach him about how games work and he gets to design his own games too.

Embedded below is one of his first attempts, a two level affair. Which I must confess I can't beat, give it a go! :-)

So in my $dayjob, I have for the last couple of months been working almost exclusively in Perl development.

I have mainly been doing PHP web stuff for the last couple of years, so it's been interesting looking at Perl again. Coming back to Perl has reminded me how nice a language it is to work in and how many powerful tools it has.

What is interesting coming back to it is noticing how much talk there is about how Perl has lost ground to PHP, Python, Ruby etc. There is the Modern Perl movement and a push currently to up the social media war. For example the "Ironman" challenge trying to get modern articles on Perl online.

What has not changed is Perl 6 is still vapourware prety much.

Anyway...

So Perl Best Practices is great, especially when coupled with PerlCritic.
My tendency is to work like this:

1. Run PerlTidy on whatever code I am working on.
I have some local standards setup to match the style of the team I work with.

2. Hack away
Preferably I "try" to start by writing a t test file or a script that automates testing the script I am working on when the code is not a module. So TDD with unit tests where possible and TDD with regression testing when a script.
I'd love some guidance in this area if anyone wants to comment.

3. Run the code through PerlTidy again

4. Run the code through PerlCritic.
I have this setup at level 3 or 4 currently. Depending on how clever I am feeling or how messy the code is, I tend to run PerlCritic over and over at different levels and try and fix up as many things as I can.

5. Commit the code and get a colleague to review the code.

6. Fix the changes recommended and send it back fro review again until it passes.

7. Merge it into the main codebase.


It's been great to get back into Perl and I shall post more about it over the coming days, weeks, months. :-)

P.s. If you are interested in Learning Perl, you should check out Gabor Szabo's Beginner Perl Maven course on Udemy.

On the 27th of October I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to deliver a talk at Anglia Ruskin University on coaching digital natives, social media and social hardware.

The talk is the v2.0 of the original DIgital Natives talk I gave at the University of Bath in 2008.

In the talk I tried to cover in a fairly short time what a digital native is, what social media is and why either of them matter. I also added a section on Social Hardware or the "Internet of Things" and how it relates to coaching.

Anyway... I was able to take a video of the talk and here it is:





Lance
If you can't see the video, try it on Archive.org:
http://www.archive.org/details/DigitalN ... lMediaTalk

On Sunday September 25th 2011, I became a marathoner. I completed the New Forest Marathon in the abysmal time of five hours and forty minutes. It was one of the most painful experiences in my life and I have informed my wife that she has permission to slap me if I ever suggest I run another!

The idea for running a Marathon has been bubbling under the surface for quite a few years. Mainly thanks to the Pheidipidations podcast from Steve Runner. I've previously run a ten mile race and a half marathon (January this year).

As with my half marathon, I used a training program from Runkeeper.com.
Sadly, unlike the half marathon, this time I slacked off the last two months before the marathon! And that is what did me in!

I had been training like a trooper, keeping to the program, fitting in the scheduled runs. But unfortunately for me, all that great base work was wasted. The way my run went proved the old adage that "Piss poor preparation, leads to piss poor performance".

When I look at the mile times I did, I also suspect I went too fast too soon. I didn't feel like I was running hard, but all of my first 5 miles were run under 9:30 pace. In fact only two of my first 10 miles were over ten minutes per mile.

After about 15 miles it all went horribly wrong. From about 16 miles my leagues were cramping and the going was bad, really bad. I tried to walk some of it off, but I was walking REALLY slow. The alternative was trying to run through the cramps, but that hurt and tended to generate more cramps.

I was hurting and came very VERY close to quitting a bunch of times. It was on reflection, interesting how my mind played tricks on me. At about 19 miles for example; I decided a marathon was only 23 miles long. So I only had 4 miles to go. A couple of miles later, my mind realized that a marathon is 26.2 miles. Weird. Two miles of confusion.

I don't know where it happened, but around the 23 miles mark, the sweeper vehicle caught me up. The sweeper, is a van that comes around and picks up stragglers or hands out disclaimers saying you are outside the end of the race and you are on your own.

Being caught by the sweeper van, spurred me on and I managed to catch up with the van and overtake it and get "back in the race". Shortly afterwards I was overtaken again; then overtook it again with maybe two miles to go. And I stayed ahead till the race finished!

Coming down the final length, I was greeted by my wife and my twin 8 year olds. And they ran with me the last 200 yards or so and the ordeal was over!


I am very happy to have finished the race, it hurt like hell. But I am pleased I finished. One of the little conversations I had with myself, was saying that I had to finish, else I would feel like I had to run another one so I had actually completed one… and there was no way I wanted to go through that again.

The interesting think about running the 26.2 miles that makes a marathon is that you body is not designed to do it. You can't run that distance without training, nutrition, hydration and lots of perspiration.

It is obvious to me that the last two months of training is key to a marathon. I had hoped that the base training I had done would carry me through; but it was no where needed. I needed a lot more miles under my belt and more long runs.

I had good hydration and nutrition, plenty of sweets and carb gel packs. And I drank at every drink station (approx every 4 miles). Which was something i worked on and planned for.

The legs were what gave out. And today I know they gave out bad. I have a sore lower back and also pain around my lower ribs. I am presuming the lower back is form the strain and the ribs from the grunting, groaning, wheezing and swearing and of course gasping for breath as I tried to run.

I should have seen it coming, the last few runs I did managed to fit in that were of reasonable length (8-10 miles) I felt some discomfort/pain in my upper thighs/hips. This was what I felt at about 10-11 miles into the marathon, before it expanded and blew up into full blown cramps shortly after.

It was rather an emotional experience, I was a broken man by the end. I gave it my all, more than I knew I had in me. I managed to finish in a poor time, but I finished just inside the official race period (out running that evil sweeper van).

I don't desire to run another marathon, I am happy to have completed a huge challenge. Even if I didn't get the performance/time I had hoped for.

An ordeal, but the marathon is supposed to be an ordeal, a trial. I made it the full distance and that is enough for me, I feel like I discovered and exceeded a physical/emotional/mental limit within myself. And for that experience the 5 hours and 40 minutes of pain was worth it perhaps.

I am writing this as I wait to go for a 5 mile run, sadly being summer in England; it's pouring with rain. So, a quick blog update till it drys out a little (hopefully).

So, running, yeah doing a lot of that. I am running the New Forest Marathon in Spetember and am on week 9 of my training programme for it. Running 4 times a week, last month I ran 123 miles! My training runs include upwards of 15 miles. I have found running in summer has it's own set of problems (compared to last years winter training programme).

I have also been very busy Judo-wise. Coaching two clubs as well as my recent involvement with the European Judo Union and International Judo Federation computer teams. This has been a great new thing in my life, I LOVE IT! I get to go to some of the top Judo competitions and do my IT thing with other people who love Judo and IT. This month for example, I get to go to the Cadet and Senior world championships. How cool is that!
Earlier I went to the Moscow Grand Slam, which was amazing both on the side of Judo and of course going to Russia. I had forgotten till I got there that I really was fascinated with Russia in my mid-late teens. I was lucky enough to get a quick tour of Moscow before departiung and got to walk Red Square... WOW!

IT-wise, blogs and podcast are neglected as a result of the two items above I guess and also because of my latest project "CarMindr", which is my response to that "has my MOT expired??" panic. I've built and just launched a simple email and text message reminder service. It is different from other services out there as it is simpler and does not make a "land grab" for peoples personal information. My feeling was/is that the service should give value for any personal information it collects; not just get that info as a matter of course and then try and spam people.

I launched on Monday and so far the traffic is growing steadily and reminders in the system are growing steadily. Please do check out the site and let me know what you think.

Another project that I have been involved in is the 2012 Commonwealth Judo Championships. I am the IT director for the project, working with my JudoSpace colleague Dr. Mike Callan to put on the most innovative and exciting Judo championships you could imagine! It's going to be amazing! It is being held at the Wales Millenium Centre, which most people recognise as that place on Torchwood. It's an amazing venue and the format includes shows for teh finals blocks that include not just Judo but singers, dancers, bands and other performers! (All to be confirmed of course).

Well, the rain has dropped down to slightly wet, so I had better run.