Still running: Minimalist, Week 15

Over the last few months I’ve been clocking in ~180km in my Vibram FiveFingers. For the most part I take it slow; I run when I feel like it (which is rather often), and I check out routes I’ve not ran before. Sometimes these are long, sometimes not so much.

And I’m happy to say that apart from a one-time, mild case of shin splints caused by running too slowly (I’m not kidding) a few weeks back which “grounded” me for a few days, I am without injury and pain. I run a lot on paved roads these days, due to the currently bad weather and my unwillingness to wrestle muddy tracks. Back in my Nike days, this usually gave me bad sacroiliac joint pain. These days, I’m fine. No complaints, really.

I’ve bought a second pair of FiveFingers KSOs a while back, and since my current client is a KSO fan and owner as well I was able to wear them in the office. It’s good, really.

So yes, I’ve embraced minimalist running. Not just in the shoes department, but also in my mind. My stance towards me running has changed over the last few months; I’ve become more relaxed and calm about it. It doesn’t feel like a drag anymore, like something you just have to suffer through; I run because I like it and because I want to.

Most days I don’t even take a watch with me; I glance at the wall clock when I head out the door and check it again when I come back. That’s accurate enough. And in order to find out the distance I’ve traversed I turn to Google Earth or DailyMile’s handy “pedometer” map feature.

My feet have become stronger, I think my feets’ arches are not as flat anymore, and my toes have straighten out a wee bit. The money I’ve spent on my FiveFingers was a good investment in my health, methinks. The downside is that I don’t like my “real” shoes anymore. ;)

A sweet side story: when my parents visited us a few weeks back, they saw the FFs and tried them on, deciding they like them. So they’ve both bought a pair, and to my big surprise picked up light trekking as a hobby! Even my mom is having fun. So much, in fact, that they both bought a second pair “for colder days” — KSO Trek. Clearly, I’m an influencer…

So, minimalist running still works for me; it works very well, in fact. And I still enjoy my Vibrams. And yes, I would and do recommend both to everyone interested in running.

Still running: Vibrams, Week 2

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Wore my Nike Free yesterday, as they’re the most flexible (actual) shoes I own. No time for running, tho, also still some residue muscle pain.

Today: Beautiful morning, decided to ignore the bus and walk to the subway. 3.5 km in my Nikes, and while they’re pretty good, I miss the ability to wiggle my toes.

Came home, went for a 3.5 km VFF walk with Dana. My calves seem to man up, finally. With a bit of luck I might be able to go for a run on Thursday again!

Wednesday

Came home, my legs still aching a bit, but I thought “eh, what the eff” and went for a 5 km run. Didn’t even take a watch or anything; I just felt like running. The last time this happened to me was never. And I had fun.

To be honest, the combination of THE BOOK and MY NEW SHOES caused this almost eerie, constant desire to get out and run. I’m not making this up; it’s uncanny. I’ve never had this urge to just crunch some miles. And it’s not because of stress at work or anything. I’m calm, I’m my usual sunny self, not stressed out… It’s just a deep-seated feeling that running would be the right thing to do right fucking now. For no apparent reason. (Perhaps they’ve put brain-altering chemicals into the book; I don’t know… I don’t know.)

And I won’t lie, I’ll enjoy it for as long as it lasts. It might go away tomorrow or next week or in five years time, I don’t know, but I’m cool with it. There are worse urges, really.

Also: I can predict the future! Tomorrow, walking will hurt. (I wish my calves would man up quicker.)

Thursday

Turns out I can’t predict the future after all — I can walk rather painlessly today. Apparently all the extra post-run stretching and muscle rubbing¹ was a good idea.

Had a discussion with another (ex) Y! about running barefoot’ish. It’s not just about not running on your heels, but about foot strength/health in general. In running shoes, the foot’s arch is bolstered and propped up to various degrees. And your toes are pretty much suspended. When running without shoes, the arch acts like a spring, and the toes react to the underground, but they can’t do that when shod.

The difference is not just that you’re running on your forefeet, it’s about giving the foot (and therefore the leg) a chance to work as intended.

Friday

5 km, ‘twas okay — not more, not less. The humidity took me a bit by surprise, and my big lunch wasn’t helping the cause either. So: eh.

My lower legs are slowly adjusting to the change. Atta boys!

One of the Vibrams is slowly coming apart a bit at the heel (where the mesh is glued to the rubber “skin”), which is a bit strange after only one week of moderate use. They’re not falling apart or anything, their function isn’t impaired, it’s just a visible “glitch” I’m not too happy with. They’re one week old after all.

I’ll hit the sports store on Monday and ask for either a replacement or (some) money back.

Saturday, Sunday

Rest of the week were wasted on shitty weather and/or me freezing, so no running.

Still running: Going Minimalist

Reading Christopher McDougall’s highly interesting and inspirational “Born to Run”, I came back to my idea of running (semi-)barefoot. Turns out there are a lot of people with the same idea, and companies catering to this idea. So last Thursday I treated myself to a new pair of Vibram FiveFingers KSO.

VFF are basically what you would get if you dipped your feet into molten rubber, minus, you know, the excrutiating pain, blistering skin and earache caused by your own frantic screaming. They’re a thin, highly elastic second skin for your feet, and not much else, really. Needless to say, I love them.

Being the serial enthusiast I am, I’ll try to keep a short-form diary of my semi-barefoot running progress and findings for my own sake.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Was paid by a client today, there’s money to be spent! Went to the sports store to see whether they have Vibrams in stock; the answer was a resounding yes. Tried them on and was sold. 10 minutes and €105 later I was the proud owner of a brown pair of Vibram FiveFingers KSO.

Wore them on my way home; not bad. A bit strange at first, but I quickly forgot about them. Went home, the weather’s nice, decided to go for a quick and easy run. Didn’t expect much, but was surprised.

Without trying to, I ran the first 5km straight, without much effort or being winded. Had to take a quick breather (while walking) because I was starting to feel light side stitches. Walked for ~250m, then took off again. When I got home and checked my time, I noticed I had beaten my usual time by roughly 5 minutes. And I was barely exhausted after those 7.4km.

The fun thing about barefoot running (or running with nothing but a thin layer of protection wrapped around your feet) is that your body instinctively knows what to do. You straighten up involuntarily, you (normally) don’t land on your heel but on your fore- or middlefoot, and you keep your feet right below your frame while running.

All you have to do is forgetting your old shod running style, really, and listen to your instincts.

Now, when your feet are cushioned (i.e., stuck in your average shock-absorbing running shoe), you tend to land heel-first while going for long strides. A long stride means more distance covered per step, right? True, but it’s rather unnatural, because if you’d do it without shoes, you’d end up in a world of pain as the body isn’t made for this kind of self-beating.

So, after the first few steps in my new VFF my body adjusted. I was going rather slow, well within my comfort zone, my back was straight as a candle, yet I didn’t fall into my usual thump-thump-thump rythm.

Awesome shoes! To be fair, when I got home I definitely felt my calves… they were more sore than usual. No, wrong… They were sore, and they usually aren’t. Then again, usually I am sweat-drenched and exhausted by the time I am back on my own doorstep — not this time, so I consider it a good deal. :)

When Dana came home, she wouldn’t stop laughing at them.

Friday, April 23, 2010

Holy shit, my calves. They feel like I’ve actually used them for the first time in my life.

Still, have a good feeling about the Vibrams; even about my calves. I was expecting sore muscles; after all, I’m completely changing the way I run. Obviously, I’ve done that.

Wore the VFF when getting out for lunch. Not much walking there, but I felt like giddy like a little boy about his new Spongebob shoes, and I never want to take them off again.

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Took Dana to the sports store so she could see whether the Vibrams are something for her. Like me (even more like me) she could use stronger feet, and naturally I want to share this new sensation with her. She’s picked out a pair of grey KSO.

After we got home we went for a casual 5km walk on my running trail. She liked it, although her feet and legs were a bit sore. Don’t tell her, but I was expecting this. ;)

My calves are still hurting a bit.

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Beautiful day, and despite the slightly sore muscles I decided to run. Not the best idea I’ve ever had, really. ;) Now they really hurt.

Well, suits me. I don’t blame the shoes, tho. I just didn’t listen to my body; the outcome should teach me.

Stupid me, always pushing too hard.

How to reset your keyboard on OSX

Somehow, after connecting my new Logitech G9 Laser mouse tonight, two keys on my MS Natural Ergo keyboard were swapped. Highly annoying. After some digging around the Googles, I learned that in order to “reset” your keyboard —i.e. making OSX forget your keyboard type— all you have to do is a

rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.keyboardtype.plist

Once done, disconnect the keyboard, plug it in again, and the “New keyboard found, wot is it?” dialog will pop up again. Problem solved, case closed.

Thanks to Riccardo Raneri, on whose blog I found this hint. Credit where it’s due.

City At World’s End, 58 Years Later

A while ago I’ve decided to do a little time travelling. In literature, that is. So I’ve picked up a novel called “City At World’s End”, written by one Edmond Hamilton. It’s a story about a little rural community in the US heartland having a “super-atomic bomb” go off above it, causing a rift in time, catapulting said city into the far future, and the fight of its citizens to remain on Earth. Adventure!¹

It is exactly what it sounds like: pure pulp. The characters are rather flat; the premise is unintentionally hilarious. Yet, it’s a pretty charming read. :)

When I’ve picked the book up at feedbooks.com, I had a hunch about what I was getting myself into. After all, this novel is (at the time of this writing) 58 years old. That’s right, it’s from 1951. But I’ve chosen the book for exactly that reason (also I was told it had spaceships) — I wanted to know what successful scifi was like in the 50’s of the last century. From their point of view, I’d probably be like one of them “space folks”.² But how would I end up thinking about their view of the future? How would I end up describing their vision of the times to come?

Turns out I’d only use one word, as before: “charming”. Well, that and “a bit naïve”. :)

An example. Said rural community, called Middletown, leaps one million years into the future. One million years! The sun is dying, the Earth is cold, mankind has spread across the galaxy… yet all humans they meet are still ordinary humans like you or me.³ Given that the first homo sapiens entered the stage just around 400.000 years ago, one would expect meeting rather different beings after another 1.000.000 years. Apparently, evolution took a break or something.

But at least there are aliens! One of them is Chewbacca. No, I’m not making that up. There’s a Capellan (i.e. an alien from Capella) whose description is pretty much 100% Chewbacca. He’s big, hairy, ape-like, friendly, loyal and a very good engineer. His name is Gorr Holl. — I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE, GEORGE LUCAS.

Then there are the communications. People tend to park their spaceships just out of town (they have spaceships!), yet someone forgot to invent the walkie-talkies, because there’s still a lot of people running back and forth, waving and yelling to alarm the others.

Also, the space-age people from one million years in the future are familiar with Einstein. That’s fame, I’m telling you. (No mention of Michael Jackson, tho.)

And then… women. Oh, the women, what with their constant wailing or their firm resolve or their pre-Doris Day’ish behaviour. Really, the picture painted of the females is an interesting one, saying quite a bit about the age the book was written in. On the one hand, we have Carol, the protagonist’s girlfriend. She’s the friendly, quiet type who likes the “old ways”. (Not what you think.) Beneath her surface is a fragile young woman, almost a girl still, shaken to her core. On the other hand, there’s the new space love interest, Varn Allan from space, the administrator of this neck of the woods space. On the outside, she’s a cold and efficient bureaucrat! But during the book, we learn that beneath her surface there’s a fragile young woman, almost a girl still, shaken to her core. Diversity! Dope.

So. I know the comparison is not entirely fair, but putting “City At World’s End” and its long-term vision (I fail to come up with a better term) next to today’s books, like “Accelerando” by Charles Stross or (less hard scifi) “Old Man’s War” by John Scalzi, it looks, well, less visionary. I am aware that in terms of “scifi seeds” today’s authors have a better (?) starting point than the authors 50 years back, but they seem to do a better job in dreaming up a future working as canvas for their books. Maybe I’ve just picked the wrong author here, who knows. And maybe the people in the 50s just weren’t ready for too “far-fetched” visions yet?

Anyways. The tech and the portrayal of the people are equally fun, and reading the book made me grin and laugh quite a bit. But of course snickering is easy for me, from my cushioned seat in front of my computron device. It’s 2009! Yes, we may have global warming and a outrageous lack of everyday space travel and jetpacks, but still: it’s an exciting time to be alive. There’s new technology surfacing almost weekly, from biotech to personal gadgets to propulsion engines and whatnot.

Well, my verdict: If you are wondering what to read next, get yourself an old scifi book. You might have fun. Many of them are free & legal downloads by now. Both Feedbooks and ManyBooks (if it’s up…) are good places to start looking. And if you’re unsure what to get, either just pick one with closed eyes or ask around at GoodReads. :)

Tools of the trade

Assaf passed the ball,¹ and I’m gonna run with it. So Mr Cooper asks “What are your tools of the trade?”.

On the desk

iMac 24”, 3.06 GHz C2D, 4GB RAM, early 2009 model. His name is Rupert, and he’s great. Got him in February after my previous iMac” broke down after running ~3 years straight.

Dell 2005FPW. Really nice and affordable monitor. Tilted by 90°, because I can.

iPod touch 16GB. I don’t leave home without it.

JBL On Stage. It was a parting gift I got from my co-workers a few years back, and I really like it. I mostly use it for the iPod dock these days, but I’ve packed it a few times to serve as a portable sound system while on the road.

MS Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. One of the best ergo keyboards on the market, hands down. Oh, and yes: that’s a wire. I think a wireless desktop keyboard is an useless concept — it’s sitting on your desk, about half a meter away from your computer, it’s rarely moved (if ever). This is a very common scenario, and in my book it’s stupid to waste energy (batteries etc.) for powering a wireless connection to bridge a distance that short.

Logitech MX510. Good, affordable, reliable mouse. Also cable-bound, see above. Sitting on a tw@ mousepad.

Sennheiser headset. Full sound, the mike is a bit quiet, not the USB version.

CanoScan LiDE 200. No-frills flatbed scanner.

iWork ‘06 Install DVD. Used as coaster.

Belkin n52. Funky little left-hand keyboard/peripheral, mostly for gaming, but I’ve heard of people using it for serious work like 3D stuff. Might be a myth, tho.

Belkin 7port USB hub. It’s not bad. Has some troubles with my external soundcard, tho.

Not in the picture:

• 13” black MacBook, 2GB. Also running Snopard, and kept lean. Used for working remotely.
• Western Digital MyBook Pro, 500 GB, Firewire. For backups.
• Creative Xmod. Keeps me from having to plug my headphones in and out all the time. If there was a software solution which would let me switch sound output between the built-in speakers and the headphone jack, I wouldn’t need this.

In the dock, in my mind

I ride the Snopard, naturally.

• Textmate, of course. What else?!
• Tweetie. I like it for keeping track of my various Twitter accounts. Both on the Macs and the iPod.
• Terminal. I prefer it over pretty much every other shell app so far.
• My homedir repo. This is one of the first things I install on each of my local & remote boxes. All command-line-related stuff goes in there, the very same repo is used for each machine, and it’s just crazy handy. Tip of the head to Norm for the initial one and Brad for a suitable version to fork from. :)
• Mailplane. The ability to keep an eye on several Google Mail accounts at once is nice.
• Launchbar. Awesome. Besides app launching I mostly use it for its clipboard history and calculator.
• VMWare Fusion for all my virtualization needs. Got a cheap license a few months ago and never looked back.
• Dropbox. On all of my machines. Lovely, lovely piece of software.
• OmniFocus for all my todo needs, on all my machines, including the iPod.
• I’m currently giving BusySync a spin. After trying to coerce Snopard’s native Google Calendar conduit into a) synching two 2 machines and b) not sucking for a few hours I’ve decided my time is too valuable to keep trying, and went with BusySync. Which is really nice and painless so far. I’ll probably buy it once the trial is over.
• Minuteur for Pomodoro-like 2-hour sprints. (The Pomodoro app is a bit too much for my taste. It’s not bad, but not for me.)

Dev Env acting up when trying to do bulk operations

(What a title…) I was pulling my hair out over the last two days when I was implementing bulk operations in a project of mine.

In this case, the list of operations to do in bulk is compiled in the browser, and then the single requests are sent one by one to the server as single AJAX requests. (Think “mark this as read” functionality.)

My problem was that the first and second call in the bulk list usually went through well, but the rest of the calls just ran against a wall since all of a sudden Rails had problems finding the either logged in user or was missing certain methods and/or attributes. Highly annoying as well as completely erratic, as I was sure my code was okay in the first place.

When trying the same operations on a one-by-one basis, all was good. No issues whatsoever.

So while trying to figure out what the fuck was going on, I’ve played around with different ways to get the current user, checking for the availability of its methods and so on, all to no avail.

At one point I’ve disabled the protect_from_forgery call, and one or two different errors started to appear:

A copy of ApplicationController has been removed from the module tree but is still active

That was new. So I’ve started digging around for an answer, and found it in an old Ruby Forum thread.

Turns out that Rails’ development mode was the culprit, as the app’s code is reloaded on every request; so when a lot of concurrent calls are made, the code might reload slower than the calls are coming in and hijinks ensues.

The overly simple solution to this problem? In /config/environments/development.rb, I just set config.cache_classes to true, meaning the code isn’t reloaded all the time — and as it turns out, my code runs just fine after all! Happy happy joy joy.

The downside is that I’ll have to restart my dev server every time I make a code change, but in this particular case, that’s not a big deal.

The big blog move of 2009

Just a heads-up: I’ve moved my blog today — in two ways. First, I’ve ditched my self-hosted Wordpress setup in favor of Tumblr. Because I ♥ Tumblr.¹ Second, it’s now sitting on blog.zottmann.org instead of carlo.zottmann.org. Old article URLs 301-redirect to their new locations, so all should be well.

Also, I’ve cleaned up the blog history; about 2/3 of the old posts are gone. Most of them either simply lost their context, contained nothing but (now) broken links or are not worth keeping online. Doing my part to keep the intertrons lean!

The move was made possible by Wordpress’ export-to-XML feature, the Tumblr API and a few lines on Ruby code. (The latter is a big hack job, but it works for me. You’ve been warned.)

And to top it of, I’ve picked a new Tumblr theme named “PostCreate” and hacked it to my liking.

I’m pleased so far. :)

Excellent Localmemcache

Yesterday’s Munich on Rails meetup was the usual mix of interesting talks and geeky, delightful conversations. When I say “usual”, I of course mean it’s been the kind of evening I by now kind of expect. ;) Many thanks to Roland for organizing and the Experteers guys for the venue and the food. Nom!

Anyways: interesting talks.

Marco Otte-Witte presented his Excellent gem (gotta love the name) for static code analysis. It’s mostly aimed towards checking Rails code for smell, although —and he made that clear— it’s not targetted at people who strive for the blissful state of “zero warnings”. It’s more relaxed in that way; merely showing you unusual (or stupid or silly) parts of your code, such as missing validations in your models or having instance variables in your partials and the likes. Sadly, at the moment it’s not dealing with HAML templates yet, just ERB. (He’s looking for volunteers, by the way.;)) Here are the slides:

I can actually see myself using it.

And then Sven C. Koehler presented his somewhat irritatingly named¹ yet spiffy Localmemcache. It’s a local, shared-memory-based, persistent key/value store, which looks pretty fascinating. I was a wee bit confused by it until it finally clicked — you wouldn’t be able to tell from its name, but it’s not related to memcached. Aha! It’s a C library with Ruby bindings which offers a more or less simple storage system (values are of the type String, but of course that would include Marshal‘ed data) and apparently blazingly fast — his benchmarks showed that Localmemcache is almost as fast as accessing native Ruby hashes. Its not for everyone —for example, as I understand, it requires a 64-bit Unix system— but it looks like a pretty interesting alternative to memcached for single-machine setups like, say, your single production machine or your local dev box. This should ease the issue of sharing data between different Ruby processes, for example. I’m definitely going to check that out.

Oh, and Peter Schrammel presented a concept for a truly private asset server. As I’m not entirely sure whether this is really public information yet, I’ll keep my yapper shut here. :)

Afterwards we all headed to the Park Café for conversations and drinks. All in all a very nice evening, even though I was still a bit groggy from the day before — the München Twittwoch. (Which reminds me, I should probably whip up a quick post about that as well. Eh.)

Again: my thanks go to the MoR organizers and all the people who showed up, I had a good time. :)

Update: Artikel von Marco zu Excellent auf RailsMagazin.de