Couch25K Week 6 Run 3

On Saturday morning I was keen to get Run 3 done. This consisted of 25 mins non-stop running. My only target is to do the time and not concern myself with distance. I've got into the habit of running in Bedford Park. Nice environment and not as busy as the streets. Just after 6 am, the park is quiet bar the occasional visitor. Most noise comes from the squirrels who I discovered are accomplished scavengers. They scramble out of bins disturbed by my approach. My pace is slow and Claire's voice (Get Running Android app) is there to give me encouragement. The 1st 5 mins is reasonable. I concentrate on breathing naturally, in through the nose and out through the mouth. With all the warnings from my brother and brother-in-law about the risk of running at my age and weight (which was circa 248lbs at the start of the programme) I opt to mostly run on the grass at the side of the tar path. It's a little uneven and probably worse for me, in hindsight. Each 5 minute notification from Claire urges me on but this was a bit harder that Week 5 Run 3. From the start of that run I felt tremendous and after 5 mins I felt this was easy. Not so this time around, I don't feel as comfortable, it's hard work. I keep control of the breathing and keep to the pace. My worry is that there is no room to slow the pace if push come to shove, I am at the slowest pace I can go without stopping. Thankfully the 20 minute marker comes and I gain encouragement to keep going. I actually think about mindful meditation and if it's possible to meditate whilst running ... like walking meditation. I'm still contemplating that. Then the final minute comes ... 24 minutes done. I can actually increase my pace, not by much but enough to feel I am coming to the finish line. Yes, it's great to meet the target. I didn't feel as elated as on Week 5 Run 3, that 1st 20 mins complete was a major breakthrough... but I do feel good! 5 mins walking and then I do a bit of stretching. I need to spend some time learning what stretches I should do. I use the stretches from the Insanity programme, good old Sean T! I must start and finish that insane programme, one thing at a time, though! On Tuesday I'll start Week 7 Run 1. C'mon!

Couch25K Week 5 Run 3

It really seemed unlikely but this morning I ran for 20 mins. Super slowly, yes, but this Couch25K programme really works!!!

I was pretty worried about Run 3 as I struggled with the 1st 8 mins in Run 2 and then just managed to complete the 2nd 8 mins.

Anyway, today, the first 5 mins was easy and I felt so good that I thought maybe I really can do these 20 mins.

At 10 mins, Claire says "You've reached halfway and can turn back" and there I was awaiting for the 10 mins notice and then next thing I know , Claire says, "You have run for a quarter of an hour" or words to that effect! After that I knew that I was going to do it. When I got that final 60 secs warning I picked up the pace (well, a little).

It is such an awesome feeling from struggling in Week 4 to this. I think the whole of Bedford Park must have heard me shout "YES!!!" when I completed the run.

I have never run for more than 5 mins before this programme. Bring it on. Next, please!

Elated.

Mark D

Couch to 5K Week 5 Run 2

This couch potato has finally stepped up to do some exercise.

Now let's get this straight, right. I have NEVER run for any length of time beyond a 100m and that was school days which is a long, LONG time ago.

About 6 years ago I remember trying to jog with a small group of work colleagues. I don't think I lasted beyond 5-10 mins. Embarrassing but I put it down to just plain not enjoying running.

Anyway this Couch to 5K programme has got me hooked, so far so good.

I got my FitBit One going alongside my Polar FT7 heart rate monitor and using the android GetRunning app.

This had me starting in Week 1 with 8 x 1 min runs.

Week 4 finished with an introduction to a 5 minute run.

Week 5 is really exciting and very scary!

Run 1: 3 x 5 min runs ... which I managed to do!

Run 2: 2 x 8 min runs ... WOW!! Struggled with the 1st one as I over paced myself. 2nd one, slowly does it and made it. YAAAYYY!

Ok, it's the big one tomorrow.

Run 3: 1 x 20 mins ... er, sorry, what?! Ok, breathing and slow pace again. See how we go!

Report back later.

Pentaho and Designing Reports

I've spent a few weeks playing with the Pentaho Report Designer 3.5 and 3.6M2.

The idea was to replace some existing Excel pivot table 'complex' reports with web-enabled simple versions.
The Report Designer is a pretty user friendly tool.
My one issue is the regular pauses while the tool polls the query.
Actually it is a quite frustrating issue as no-one else on the forums seemed to suffer from similar.

Upon further investigation, I can see that we need to give our users more power.
I started to look at Pentaho Metadata and then Pentaho Analysis Reports/Mondrian.

Over the past week I have spent playing with the Schema Editor, Mondrian and OLAP.
This is the good stuff. Where there is always initial reluctance to use something new, Pentaho Analysis Reports is probably much better than Excel Pivot tables and should easily pacify the converted user. After all they can still export their data to many forms including Excel.

Actually, I am really impressed by and excited with Pentaho Analysis Reporting, OLAP and this sort of report design. It is fantastic stuff and I can't wait to show some analysis reports to the users.

Pentaho Reporting - Reporting heaven

A few years ago we checked out Pentaho version 2 and it was looking a pretty cool product - actually suite of products.
As things happen the real demand for a change in reporting attitude has only happened more recently. And here I am implementing Pentaho BI Server 3.5.
The more I look at this, the more I like it, if at all possible!

Pentaho has made the switch from default JBoss installation to default Tomcat.
I can understand why as Tomcat is much easier to set up basically due to less complexity.
As an out and out JBoss follower I had the fun of getting the manual installation working. Now the problem with the opensource community flavour is that you have to hunt for the documentation. No doubt the Enterprise flavour comes with it all indexed clearly in one place!

I have turned to two books to assist.

Pentaho Solutions - Roland Bouman/Jos van Dongen - Great book for an overall in-depth guide to using the Pentaho suite! Excellent installation guide. However now that I want to focus on the Reporting I find I need even more detail hence the next book I have on order:

Pentaho Reporting 3.5 for Java Developers - this one should arrive at my door tomorrow but from the glossary this will provide the detailed guide I need for using the Reporting tools. Can't wait for it to arrive.

I've also invested in the Pentaho Community Dashboard Framework (CDF) tutorial and that is looking good.
Only just started the tutorial but the CDF has much promise!

Anyway, our users are getting excited by what they see on the BI server. I better get converting some of those horrible extremely heavy Excel pivot tables!

JBoss PermGen errors

After trimming back the grails project to its bare bones and STILL getting the permgen error and doing a few tweaks to the JBoss 4.0.4 version JVM 1.6.0_06b,. I tried the suggestion here:

http://delta-1.blogspot.com/2008/02/javalangoutofmemoryerror-permgen-space.html

This seems to have fixed it although it's only been 5 hours or so! I'll give it a couple of days but the error was happening easily with 15mins of a server restart so it's looking a bit good.

This did not happen for the same deployment to test version of JBoss 4.2.3 but one needs to mimic the live environment exactly so one cannot be sure if the same fix needs to be applied in a live environment for JBoss 4.2.3.

Hope this helps someone, anyway.

Grails - The Essential Tool

Over the past year or so I've been following the Grails programme with just a little dabble to see what it's all about.
Just recently I had the need to produce a small data maintenance app to hook up with OpenCMS. Having been more of a back-end programmer recently I decided it was time to put Grails to use or, rather, avoid a java struts process!

Trust me, Grails is a REAL breath of fresh air ... create the domain class, generate the controller and try out the scaffolding.
Hibernate is applied immediately!

After creating a few domains and building a small webapp, it was time to evaluate the generated views.
Ok, this is fine for a smart user/techie but a real user needs both user-friendliness and validation. After a bit of research, GSP tags provide the usability and static constraints adds the validation. Nice and easy!

Testing is a doddle ... grails run-app brings up the jetty server and testing is immediate. Change the code and test immediately, no need to restart the server!

Next was to apply Spring Security ... a couple of hours later the app is running with decent login controls applied.

Within a couple of days, I had an app I could put into production!

A little research again and two plugins look to be immediately useful - the export plugin and the filter pane plugin.
The export plugin exports the data list to so many data formats - csv, excel, pdf, odi, etc, etc!
The filter pane plugin generates a filter pane to apply filter selection on the list data.
Separately they are beautiful and simple to apply but a little more work was required to get them to work together but that just might be me!

My main nightmare was running into PermGen errors on deployment of the webapp to JBoss 4.0.4. Now this app ran pretty excellently before the introduction of the plugins, mind you! Suddenly, soon after interaction with the grails webapp, the dreaded PermGen error appeared in JBoss.
And I have to kill JBoss to restart it ... the clean stop doesn't work after PermGen!

Anyway, I have to deal with those issues, after all, it is Grails 1.2-M2 I am dealing with. I also wanted to put it on Jboss 5.1.0GA but there are issues with Spring 3.0.4M
When it comes to stuff like this I do try to be on the leading edge which, as we can see, is a bit dangerous.

Now I have been a big fan of the Hibernate framework and then I heard about the Spring Framework which included the option to use Hibernate!
Now the apple in the pie is that Grails includes all this good stuff. In actual fact, when you check it out Grails includes a lot of good stuff.
Absolute-ly fan-tastic!!!

I have been living and breathing Grails these past couple of weeks and it's great.
I promised myself that this is the year to step up on production and this is most certainly one of the tools to have in my armoury!

Let me say this, if you are a java developer looking to do front-end development and you need a RAD tool e.g. your struts production isn't exactly lightning fast, then you REALLY SHOULD TAKE A LOOK AT GRAILS!!!

Some research was provided from Mannings' Grails In Action book, a subscription to GroovyMag.org and of course the well documented grails.org site.