Marathonfoto.com rip off

I posted a reply on the boards.ie Dublin Marathon 2008 thread and through I’d cross post here.

Hi guys, I’ve not read all the posts yet but well done to all. It was a great day.

It was my first and with a injury from the half marathon I struggled across in 4.07, sooooo happy to finish.

Throughout the whole adidas series I’ve been outraged at the price of the marathonfoto.com photos, €25 per download is insane!! You can get a CD with all your photos for €35 (which makes no sense at all) but you’ve got to wait about two weeks for that.

So in the interim I’ve managed to sniff the url for the higer res images (used in the flash based image cropper [which they seem to have disabled for this race]).

If your thumbnail page URL is

http://www.marathonfoto.com/order_assigned_photos.cfm?BFI=c32mk37rje&OID=22272008F1&BibNumber=7265&CustomerNumber=S24G12&Currency=EUR&Language=EN

you need to extract the customer number from it, mine is S24G12.

When viewing this page you can see all your photos with a number to the right. This is the photos number. The first one on my page is 55798583.

Using this photos number and my customer number I can download a much higher res version of the photo than the crappy thumbnail

http://www.marathonfoto.com/image_server.cfm?image_type=PhotoProof&customer_number=S24G12&negs_number=55798583&Orientation=P

Where you replace S24G12 with your customer number and 55798583 with your photo number.

I hope the above is useful 🙂

Finally, I don’t want to be too negative so I will say that marathonfoto.com is a great service but your thumbnails suck and your pricing model is bizarre. I have officially complained to them and they will be getting €35 from me when they’ve completed the identification of the race.

Impossible is nothing

“There will be days when you don’t know whether you can run a marathon, but there will be a lifetime knowing that you have – impossible is nothing”

I’ll give a more detailed post soon about the pain of the marathon but suffice to say I managed to finish it.

Impossible is nothing

Guaranteed to pump you up music needed badly

As some of you know I’m doing the marathon on Monday and I’m sh*tting myself already. I haven’t been able to train for the last 3 weeks because of an injury so I badly need something to compensate. I’m going with pain relief drugs, energy gels and some really kick ass tunes and possibly some cheating (with the aid of a moped or maybe a segway). Much appreciated if you can list the artist and title of some guaranteed music to speed me on my way (any genre).

Update: – This is what I have so far (2.7 hours [that’s not my target time by the way 😉 ])

Moving to Ubuntu (….kind of)

I’ve signed up for a masters in UCD (Advanced Software Engineering in University College Dublin) starting in December. I’m really looking forward to it and as a treat I bought a new (used) laptop that’ll be just for Uni work. It’s an IBM Thinkpad T43 (Centrino 1.7Ghz and 1GB ram with 40GB HD, Wifi, Bluetooth, PCMCIA, Expresscard and all the other usuals) I bought it on ebay (where else?) for £240 delivered. The build quality is excellent and I’m very happy with it. I’ve got Ubuntu 8.04 running on it and it’s going quite well. I’ve encountered the following problems:

  • I get an “not enough memory” error when I try and hibernate
  • Wireless seems kind of flaky especially with the upgraded NetworkManager, I can’t connect to my Dad’s network and keep getting a 169 IP address but this happens on my Vaio too so I suspect it is the Intel Wireless hardware and my Dad’s DHCP server not playing nice together.
  • I can’t get mobile broadband working (either using the new NetworkManager or UMTSMON)
  • Audio when playing video took a while to get working and had to change from Pulse to the ALSA sound architecture.

Lest not forget that there are millions of positives with Ubuntu, especially the Synaptic package manager and power management.

I’m loving Gnome and I’m trying to find a few cycles to play with MonoDevelop properly. I’ve been trying to get the localising feature in MonoDevelop working with an ASP.NET web application but no joy yet. I can get it working on a command line app though :).

Mr. and Mrs. Smyth

My two friends, Frank and Nicola, finally got married at the weekend. It was without a doubt one of the best weekends ever. I expect the hangover following the weekend to be equally epic. Well done guys!!!! Sadly I’ve no pictures of the weekend trip to Roundstone as my camera was mysteriously smashed (there’s no mystery really – there’s a 100% chance it was me acting the billy goat).

Frank and Nic

Frank and Nic walk down the aisle as man and wife (FINALLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

I can only presume this is the pre-nup they're signing.

I can only presume this is the pre-nup they’re signing.

Me and the beautiful bride
Me and the beautiful bride

All the lads

All the lads

.Net Development – XslCompiledTransform with XMLWriter ignores output method

As XslTransform is now obsolete, I now use XslCompiledTransform to transform my XML and XSLT documents. When transforming I want an XmlDocument returned so that I can further manipulate the output, to achieve this I use XMLWriter but for some unknown and baffling reason XMLWriter does not respect the ouput method of the XSL document and will ALWAYS give you XML and by XML I mean closing self closing tags etc. which is no good when you’re outputting HTML with textarea, link and script elements. I hate to do it but the only way to be confident of correct output was to parse the output string and replace these elements using a beefy regular expression. Does anyone else know how to force XHTML or even HTML output when using XMLWriter and XslCompiledTransform. I’ve given up looking.

Triathlon number 3 – Llanrwst 2008

Last weekend I completed my third triathlon (Llanrwst tri 2008) but this time it was in Wales (where I live now). It was a 400m swim in a very small 20m pool, 25km bike ride on a surprisingly hilly course and finally a 5km run on a very hilly course which was half road and half off-road in a forest. It was a great day and I was very happy with my times and my position (23rd/172). My speedo on my bike decided to stop showing me my speed so I had to rely on how much my thighs were burning and my Garmin 405 to know how I was doing. Pete’s Dad took the photo below of me coming out of the second transition and starting my run. Despite the smile my legs were on fire and felt like jelly after the bike.

Triathlon-Llanrwst-2008-Phil-cropped-2-web.jpg

Adidas marathon series 2008

Last year I competed in the Adidas Frank Duffy 10 mile race and came 487th overall. I’ve been training non-stop since then and last Saturday I did the same race again and came 143rd taking nearly 11 minutes off my time (1:04:44 this year). You can see from the photos below that it wasn’t an easy race to say the least 🙂

Frank Duffy 10 mile 2008

I ran with the guy on the left of the picture for about 3 miles before he lost me. I nearly caught him at the end though.

Frank Duffy 10 mile 2008

A sprint to the finish.

About a month ago I also did the Adidas 5 mile runner challenge and came 123rd (31:21).

Adidas 5 mile 2008

Next year I’ll be setting my sights on the top 100…… Bring on the marathon.

On another note, the proof watermark is there because marathonfoto.com want €25 for each photo…. OUTRAGEOUS!!!!!

Archive of an SVN changeset

All too often I need to release changes to a staging or live server and I always felt the releases were taking too long.

At Karova we use SVN and I always try and commit any releases in one changeset. I wrote a python script to archive all the files listed in a changeset. It’s been very very useful so far. Simply run the python script in the root of your repos and you will be prompted for the changeset number. The script then archives all the files in that changeset in a zip file named by changeset. You’ll need the svn client in your path for it to work though.

svnarchivebychangeset.zip

Enjoy.