Zibblog

A couple of weekends ago, I ran in the 4th annual Jungle Run in Los Gatos. You can sign up to either run it as a 10k or half marathon. Two years ago I tried the half marathon, but both last year and this year, I didn’t feel like I was in good enough shape to do as well as I would like. (Personally, I feel like rainy weather has lasted rather late into the spring for the last couple of years, but that might just be me.). If you want to read about last year’s experience, I blogged it here. This year, Mike was out of town during the race, so my main goal was to beat last year’s time of 46:59 (7:30/mile). The race had been experiencing a pretty steady decline, but the final results showed 280 10k runners and 369 half marathon runners, which was the highest total number of runners since the first race in 2003. Joe commented last year that he wanted to see an entirely white running outfit to scare the other runners with my paleness, so I wore a white shirt this year.

The race itself was a lot of fun. At the 2 mile point, I was at just under 14 minutes total (around the same pace as last year), and I knew that the last couple of miles were probably going to hurt. The pack seemed to have sorted itself out by that point because I think only about 2 people passed me over the course of the last 4 miles and I don’t know if I passed anybody myself after mile 3. Around mile 5, I felt like throwing up for a little while, but I only had a mile left so I figured I’d just run through it. I crossed the line at 46:05 (7:25/mile), so I was pretty happy to put in my best time ever. I always find it hard to believe the amount of extra effort it seems to take to turn a normal weekend run of 8:15/mile or so into 7:25/mile.

If a race is small enough, you’ll have an uneven distribution across age groups. 4 women in the 20-29 age bracket beat me, but somehow I ended up finishing first for 20-29 men. It probably says more about a lack of good runners in my age bracket than it does about my ability, but I did end up with a rhino for my trouble.

Lately, I’ve started listening to FLOSS Weekly, which is a podcast on open source software under the TWiT (This Week in Tech) umbrella. Last week, I was listening to Episode 6, which had an interview with Larry Augustin. It had some interesting history on VA Linux, SourceForge, etc., but there was also a lot of talk about the state of open source enterprise software. I thought that many of my former coworkers would be able to find something of interest there.

For anyone that doesn’t follow that sort of thing, the 3.2 release (Callisto) of Eclipse was released the end of last week. I just started playing around with it at home since I don’t want to destabilize my work setup, and it seems to work fine with all of the plugins that I use on a daily basis. Lately, I’ve found the following add ons to be really good.

• PHPEclipse – It’s not super fancy, but it has some nice little features like refreshing an internal web browser on file save.
• RadRails – I’ve started playing around with Ruby on Rails and this is another set of plugins that provides some nice integration, especially if you’re a windows user.
• Ruby Development Tool (RDT) – RadRails is built on top of this one, which provides a lot of the Ruby editing framework.
• Subclipse – Subversion + Eclipse. If you want to use this with Callisto, then I recommend reading this page.

There’s a lot of smaller plugins, but these are the main major ones that I always install. Recently, I started playing around with eclipse plugin development and I found the EclipseZone forums to be a really good place to find answers to detailed questions about anything related to eclipse. At some point, I’ll probably blog about the plugin that I play around with every once in a while for packaging and editing firefox extensions. When the source isn’t quite so hacked up, I’ll throw that up too.