This evening I ran the Winchester 5KM race.
No records broken, one ankle almost broken! :)

Okay it was just a minor sprain half way round lap two, but it hurt. :(

Anyway... 33 minutes for 5km, is that good?

Busy day in the office today.
I was out of the office on Friday & Monday, so much catching up to do.

I was also building a small server today, which shouldn't have been an issue, but guess what it was. HP SATA raid arrays and Windows still don't get on and it requires loading the drivers during windows installation. Sadly modern machines often don't have floppy drives and Windows still wants it's extra drivers on a floppy.

The solution was/is a great piece of freeware called nLite ( www.nliteos.com ) which is great for customising and most importantly in this case slipstreaming drivers into a Windows install.

Basically the software copies the Windows install CD onto your local hard drive then adds the changes you need and then burns a CD for you which has the changes you've asked for.

The question that remains is why is a "modern" operating system like Windows 2003 R2 unable to cope with an HP embedded hardware array. Also why would Windows need a floppy disk to install the extra driver? I suppose the last one is why the custom HP install CD didn't have the drivers slipstreamed already?

Last night and this evening I have got some work done on my little project to take the data from my Nike+ runs and add them to my Traineo workout log.

The Nike+ side is pretty well covered thanks to other peoples efforts, I am able to easily get a XML file with my latest run info. So parsing that and getting it ready for posting to Traineo looks easy. (not actually coded it yet, but looks easy enough)

I spent last night testing out the Traineo API, which is not extensive. :(
And tonight I have been coding up some functions (ohh... I went with PHP by the way) to:

1) Get the API key
2) Get my current weight (using the Key)
and
3) Post my latest run data.

It is three that is the issue, this is not working as yet. Didn't help that I think I encountered a bug with the API code. But Maxwell has been helping and sent some helpful info my way. So hopefully I'll have another shot Tuesday night (after my run) and will be able to get it working.

If I can get that aspect working, all I'll need to do is write some code to check the latest run info against a token from the last time I ran the script and then post the info across if I have done another run and the data has changed on Nike+

So... not working yet, but close.

Another week down, spent all day today in London at a client's site. TIRED!
Left the client's. then back to the office to get a iShared box reimaging so it can go out for a client who needs it in the morning.

Next week is going to be hard too. I have loads to get done in my final week before I go to University of Bath and my colleague is on a client site for most/all of the week. So, more to do. And I have at least one day in Birmingham.

I am really looking forward to going to Bath, I am in desperate need of a break. I'll be busy at Uni, but you know it's JUDO! So it is as good as a holiday...almost anyway.

Running is going well, we have the Winchester 5KM on Thursday. My little beginners group who have been doing the www.c25k.com plan with me shall be running and then having a meal on Friday night together, excellent!

Anyway... the weekend is here, so maybe I'll get some rest. :)

In the last week or two I have been investigating how to link Traineo and Nike+

Basically, I love Nike+, I run it counts the miles.
I love traineo, it has all that lovely web 2.0 goodness etc.

BUT...

I have to enter my mileage manually. :(

Thankfully it looks like I'll be able to script up a hack to pull from Nike+ and add it to my Traineo profile. WOOT!

I have all the details I need i think.
The big question...Perl or PHP.

Stay tuned.

Lance