Swimming, 4th May 2017

Posted on May 5, 2017 by james

The force certainly wasn’t with me today. Whole pool to myself for most of the session — I could have swum diagonally had I wished to, but it was a real struggle. I attempted that same Swimfit session again:

12 lengths front crawl
8 lengths breaststroke
4 lengths backstroke
1 minute rest
2 x ( 2 lengths each of front crawl, backstroke, breaststroke ) 15 sec rest after each length
8 x ( 1 length each of front crawl, backstroke, breaststroke, 30 sec rest )
10 lengths fast front crawl, 30 seconds rest every 2 lengths
8 lengths easy front crawl

My breaststroke still isn’t quick by any stretch of the imagination, but the backstroke is definitely the real killer. I think I might try it with a pull-buoy to see if that helps. Perhaps some kick work would be beneficial too.

Anyhow, eventually I managed to get through it and brought the total distance up to 2.5km with front crawl.

Total distance for the month: 10,700m
Total distance for this year: 158,100m
Distance compared to annual target: 19,900m under

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Swimming, 3rd May 2017

Posted on May 3, 2017 by james

Another rushed swim, so again just 2,500m front crawl in the time available. I felt very sluggish today and a bit sniffly. Hopefully I’m not getting a cold. I want to keep things moving though. It’s all too easy to let a skipped day turn into three or four and suddenly it’s very hard work getting back into things.

Total distance for the month: 8,200m
Total distance for this year: 155,600m
Distance compared to annual target: 20,400m under

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Swimming, 2nd May 2017

Posted on May 2, 2017 by admin

I was very late leaving for the pool today so I just got my head down and swam front crawl for the remainder of the session, making 2.5km in the end. It was a bit of a struggle too. Even though I felt as though I was working hard I seemed to be quite slow.

Total distance for the month: 5,700m
Total distance for this year: 153,100m
Distance compared to annual target: 20,900m under

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Hatching plans

Posted on May 1, 2017 by admin

Today I’ve ordered some eggs to put in the incubator. We didn’t raise any chicks last year and we’re down to only a few hens now, so it’s about that time again. In fact if I left it any later I don’t think it would work out in terms of fitting around other things we have going on.

We like different colours of eggs, so I’ve ordered a dozen each of White Leghorn (that lay white eggs), Cream Legbar (blue eggs) and Copper Black Maran (dark brown eggs). Assuming we get a few cockerels then I might let the Marans and Cream Legbars cross-breed as in the past we’ve done this and had second generation hens that lay green eggs.

Best get the incubator out and make sure it’s all working 🙂

I’d really like to try raising some ducks from eggs too, but I need to organise a suitable environment for keeping them first.

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Super pleased

Posted on May 1, 2017 by admin

After a number of false starts I finally got supers on the last of my hives today. It was my intention to do this a while back but then the weather turned quite cold (we went from shorts weather to requiring several layers to keep warm pretty much overnight) and the bees weren’t too keen on flying so I didn’t want to open the hives up. In fact I almost didn’t get it done as the forecast for today changed from slightly overcast on Saturday to raining all day yesterday so I’d planned wet weather jobs for today. When the forecast changed yet again to “sunny spells” this morning and reality appeared to be fulfilling that promise on my drive home from the swimming pool I had to change plans once more.

This year we seem to have more oilseed rape in the fields than I can remember ever before, but it’s been in flower for ages. Probably since the start of April. I’m really not sure how much is getting pollinated if the bees aren’t that keen to fly. If the forecast can be believed then it looks as though temperatures should be much improved this week so perhaps they’ll become more active now.

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Swimming, 1st May 2017

Posted on May 1, 2017 by admin

The pool was fairly busy today and quite a few people were lane-swimming so I stuck to front crawl. My plan was to do 2.5km, but when I’d done that I felt good for another 500m and after that I decided I’d do the extra eight lengths to make the distance up to two miles. Doubtless there will be payback tomorrow, but that’s another day. Takes a good chunk out of the distance I’m behind target for the year, too.

Total distance for the month: 3,200m
Total distance for this year: 150,600m
Distance compared to annual target: 21,400m under

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OSX compile problem understood

Posted on April 28, 2017 by james

Understood, but no solution is in sight unfortunately.

It turns out that configure doesn’t play nicely with -Werror and whilst my code still compiles and works on Linux when compiled that way it’s mostly luck. OSX does not (in my house at least) come with such a large dollop of good fortune.

Were it not for the fact that I have code for other projects that will fail to build with -Werror embedded in my code tree there was a possibility that adding the following to the top level Makefile.am would have helped:

WARNINGS = -Werror -O2 -g

warnings:
        $(MAKE) V=0 CFLAGS='$(WARNINGS)' CXXFLAGS='$(WARNINGS)'
        $(MAKE) V=0 CFLAGS='$(WARNINGS)' CXXFLAGS='$(WARNINGS)' $(check_PROGRAMS)

allowing me to run

  $ make warnings

to build the system where warnings cause a compile error. In my case I don’t unfortunately see such a handy workaround.

On the positive side, I did at the same time discover that the option

  AM_SILENT_RULES([yes])

in configure.ac significantly decreases the verbosity of the compilation process, so I shall tuck that one behind my ear for later.

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Swimming, 28th April 2017

Posted on April 28, 2017 by james

My last swim of this month unless something unexpected happens at the weekend. And a hideous fight it was, too. After 1km of front crawl I was pretty much running on empty. I even started to get the shakes because I had so little energy left. I pressed on to 2.2km, all front crawl, but there was no real joy in it. I think my efforts with the Swimfit session earlier in the week really just took too much out of me.

Still, an acceptable total for me for this month and I’ve improved my position compared with my annual target by a whole 400m.

Total distance for the month: 40,400m
Total distance for this year: 147,400m
Distance compared to annual target: 22,600m under

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Swimming, 27th April 2017

Posted on April 28, 2017 by james

One more go at the Swimfit session for this week, made up to 2.6km with front crawl. It was a bit of a struggle to be honest. I just didn’t seem to have the energy any more.

Total distance for the month: 38,200m
Total distance for this year: 145,200m
Distance compared to annual target: 22,800m under

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Further frustrations with OSX…

Posted on April 27, 2017 by james

Recent versions of the command line tools for Xcode appear to have changed the way the -pthread argument to the compiler is handled such that it generates a warning if used in a call to the compiler that actually only links existing objects into an executable. When used to compile C or C++ into .o files it’s fine.

This wouldn’t be a big deal but for the fact (as stated elsewhere) that I compile my own code with -Wall -Werror. The warning then causes the link stage to fail. Unfortunately fixing this is not a simple case of removing -pthread from my link command because it isn’t me who puts it there. In fact that flag is added by libtool as it is also used during the compilation of one of the third-party libraries I’m linking against, libhidapi.

I thought salvation had come my way last night when I discovered that clang on OSX has another flag, -Qunused-arguments, which is supposed to prevent the compiler issuing warnings about unused command line arguments. But here’s where I am now:

If I build the project as normal, with -Wall -Werror, all the code compiles happily but fails at the link stage because of the -pthread warning. If I repeat the command manually without that flag then the link stage works.

If I build the project only changing CFLAGS to add -Qunused-arguments then compilation again completes happily, but the link stage this time fails with hundreds of duplicate symbols, many of which appear to be inline functions from the libm. Linking manually removing both this and the -pthread flag fails the same way.

I can only assume that -Qunused-arguments is causing some other side-effect, perhaps when configure is run, but at the moment I just can’t find it.

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