David and Katherine Goodwin

On Sunday I entered the first Knill - Nash dash, which was an 8 mile cross country run organised by the local running group - The Presteigne Pacers.

Despite the wet weather, which meant my road-running-shoes slid everywhere, I had a great time, and managed to come 24th (I think) out of 42 with a time of 1 hour 11mins 18s. My legs ache, and my body is generally sore nearly 24 hours afterwards - presumably because I normally run on the flat - or near flat - and the start and end sections of this race were both relatively hilly,

Meg update (for initial pictures, see here).

In no particular order, here's what we've found so far.

• Rowan really likes her, and she's very good (so far) with his poking/pulling of her nose, eyes, fur etc
• She wees when excited/scared/$insert_emotion here
• She is destructive - but only at night - she has already chewed chopsticks, my ipod, a sling, Rowan's soft toys and more
• She can jump very well

On Saturday (yesterday), we visited Birmingham Dog's Home. They had so many dogs there - a number of who could probably have been a good fit for us. Thankfully they also weren't stupid and anal about not providing dogs to people with children less than 5 years old and suchlike like other places are/were.

Yesterday, we took Bonzo (aka "The Beast") back to his owner (my mother) - since then he's run off twice - firstly getting almost to Presteigne (last night), and then once again this morning (although we don't know where he is yet!).

As luck would have it, Kat and I went to bed early last night, and I left my phone downstairs charging - so this morning I was greeted with about 8 answer phone messages from various people who had found him and were trying to capture him.

Having heard much about SELinux over the last few years, I thought I'd finally make an effort to use it on two servers I've been setting up for a customer. My main desire to use it is because the customer has a fairly large code base, which is programmed in a number of different styles over a number of years by different developers. I'm sure there are vulnerabilities in the code.

On one server, once I got over general teething problems (e.g. if I mount a disk to /var/spool, I'll need to get it relabelled) it seemed to work fine - so I've left it to do it's thing.

Some time ago, Packt publishing sent me this book to review. Here it is, being somewhat overdue!

ISBN: 978-2-847190-88-8
Author: Shu-Wai Chow
Title: PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects
Publisher: PacktPub.com
Number of pages: 278

My initial interest in this book was due to a requirement to "do" SOAP/XMLRPC etc. The book concentrates on creating a number of "mashups" (joining together remote web based services in one interface) which includes using :

Aside from Rowan getting bigger and noisier over time (and he slept for a record 8 hours last night in one "sitting"), my last week has almost returned to normality with the arrival of Bonzo (my sister's dog) to our household. He's visiting in order to get trained and neutered. Unfortunately for him, he's not fit enough to run my normal running route around Bromsgrove (but I'm sure this will change with time).

This morning while on my normal morning run, Bob (who was on his elasticated lead) ran out into the road. Unfortunately a car hit him and his back legs were paralysed. Thanks to the kind builders working nearby, I was able to get him to the vets, and after an emergency call out, X-rays and so forth it was determined that his spine was broken. At around 8:30am he was put to sleep, and we took him to my mother's farm to be buried alongside Cassie.

Rest In Peace Mr Jangles, you'll be missed by us all. We had some excellent memories together.

It seems Linux User and Developer will have another issue out soon; which, if things go to plan will have a column written by me on whether being free (as in beer) is a good thing or not for open source adoption. I suspect after the magazine has been published, I'll publish the article on here too.

Here's a great (relatively short) podcast on the power of marketing and branding.

"How to Ignore Marketing and Become Irrelevant in Two Easy Steps" - Steve Yegge, Google.

http://mc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail3375.html