Austrian skin track machine gets deep. Kolåstinden, Sunnmøre

In true DIY style here is a rough guide to ski touring in the Sunnmøre (Sunnmore) area of Norway. This also applies to splitboarding.

Sunnmøre is as famous as Lyngen Alps as a ski touring location in Norway. Alpine peaks which come right out of the fjords make this a special place to go skiing.

Fjord from fingeren

There are glaciers, steep peaks which require mountaineering, couloirs and easy slopes.

Getting there

Best bet if you are coming from outwith Norway is to fly to Oslo, then fly to Ålesund. You can then hire a car from all the regulars, I recommend Avis. If you are driving, look at the map and drive there.

Accomodation

View from standalhytta

If you are skiing in ‘classic’ sunnmøre I recommend staying in the Ålesund skiklubb hut, Standalhytta. Anyone can join to become a member and then it is 150Kr (~£15 per night) to stay in simple but comfortable accomodation (sauna, walk in fridge, pro kitchen, dishwasher). Large groups work fine also but phone ahead and book if you are a large group. See here

If you are skiing on the other side of the fjord, Patchellhytta offers a great base for more extreme tours. There is also a youth hostel in Hellesylt it is 350kr per night with breakfast.

Where to ski / ride

In no particular order, Kolåstind, Nordre Sætretind, Nivane, Fingeren, Randers Topp, Slogen, Kvitegga, Skarasålen, Saudehornet, Sykallen are famous peaks of varying difficulty. Best bet is to buy the book Toppturer i Norge for something to get you started.

Skinning towards the summit of Kolåstind

Lars gets a faceful!

*ørsta from nivane*

Riding the light snow.. super nice.

Also make sure you buy a map of the area and dont just rely on GPS devices.

When to go

Weather can be dodgy here and avalanches are a real problem for the roads (and hills) in the area. I recommend mid to late season and a week of your time to visit and experience this area. April / May is more likely to give you stable snow and good weather. However we were there in early April and this video shows how much fresh snow there was.

Pictures

Here are a collection of my choice shots from the two trips I took there this season.

Busy on kvitegga

Summit of Nordre Satretind

Summit of Kolastind

Skinning out of the fjord, randers topp

More info

If you want some more information about sunnmøre or ski touring in Norway, leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.

On ubuntu server 10.04 you might want to avoid rvm and rbenv and just go straight for installing ruby on your server.

Install openssl development libraries and prerequisites.

sudo apt-get -y install build-essential libssl-dev libreadline5-dev zlib1g-dev

Install yaml

#!/bin/bash
 
cd /usr/src
sudo wget http://pyyaml.org/download/libyaml/yaml-0.1.4.tar.gz
sudo tar xvzf yaml-0.1.4.tar.gz
cd yaml-0.1.4
sudo ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
sudo make 
sudo make install

Install ruby

#!/bin/bash
 
cd /usr/src
sudo wget http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.3-p125.tar.gz
sudo tar xvzf ruby-1.9.3-p125.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.9.3-p125
sudo ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --enable-shared --disable-install-doc --with-opt-dir=/usr/local/lib --with-openssl-dir=/usr --with-readline-dir=/usr --with-zlib-dir=/usr
sudo make
sudo make install

Install rubygems

  !#/bin/bash
 
  cd /usr/src 
  sudo wget http://production.cf.rubygems.org/rubygems/rubygems-1.8.17.tgz
  sudo tar xvzf rubygems-1.8.17.tgz
  cd rubygems-1.8.17
  sudo ruby setup.rb

This is applicable if you want to run a certain version of ruby globally on your production server. If there is alreadt a version of ruby installed, check /usr/bin/ruby, /usr/bin/gem and /usr/bin/bundle and update the links accordingly.

eg.

  sudo rm /usr/bin/ruby; sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/ruby /usr/bin/ruby
  sudo rm /usr/bin/gem; sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/gem /usr/bin/gem
  sudo gem install bundler --pre
  sudo rm /usr/bin/bundle; sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/bundle /usr/bin/bundle

Happy compiling!

When upgrading to ruby 1.9.3 I noticed that the behaviour of interpreting characters from mysql tables has changes. This is due to the character encoding behaviour differing from 1.8.7.

The symptoms being strange characters appear in your content fetched from the db.

Often in ubuntu mysql server installs the default is latin1 when rails stored everything in utf8. In some cases (like mine) you end up having utf8 data stored in a latin1 table.

Dirty conversion script follows.

  DBFROM=site_production
  DBTO=new_site_production
  LOGIN=site
  PASS=XXX
  mysqldump  --extended-insert=FALSE --default-character-set=latin1  -u $LOGIN -p$PASS $DBFROM >site.sql
  cat site.sql |sed  -e 's/DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;/DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin;/'>site2.sql
  cat site2.sql |sed  -e 's/SET NAMES latin1/SET NAMES utf8/'>site3.sql
  echo " drop database $DBTO; create database $DBTO character set utf8 collate utf8_bin;"|mysql -u $LOGIN -p$PASS
  mysql -u $LOGIN -p$PASS $DBTO <site3.sql

Tame deer above Glen Brittle

So the year is coming to a close and I’d like to communicate some wee open source tools I’ve been working on this past year.

Below is a list of open source tools I have released recently. I would not go as far as to call them open source projects as there is rarely anyone involved in these projects apart from me. I learnt at frozen rails that its great to get involved with other peoples open source projects instead of going out on your own all the time. (something I have a habit of doing.)

If anything here catches your eye, or you want to use it, get involved.

Chef Cookbooks

I have been building a fair amount of server infrastructure lately and have been using the excellent chef tool to help with this.

Along the way I have released a few cookbooks which I have extracted from the work I have been doing. These are in a relatively rough state but do work and are in production use. If you want to help me improve any of these, please go for it.

chef-squid
chef-oh-my-zsh
chef-ipcoffeetables
chef-backup
chef-locales

Deployment recipiez

I have been doing a lot of varied application deployments, all with capistrano. For the last couple of years I have been maintaining a collection of customs scripts which I was including in each project. Versioning was becoming difficult and git submodules are not an amazing workflow.

With bundler its possible to manage dependencies well and it can be used outside of rails projects. Recently I have been writing messaging apis in NodeJS and deploying quite successfully with capistrano and a few setup scripts.

With recipiez its possible to setup a node deployment with upstart, nginx, logrotate and monit. This creates a nice “production ready” environment for deploying node apps.

I have packaged it up and released it as a gem. Instructions for use are in the Readme.

recipiez

OpenSSL Extensions

This is a library written by Nathaniel Bibler of Ruby5 fame. I have used this extensively in an SSL certificate reselling app I have been working on which has not yet seen the light of day.

This library was my first github pull request success. Where you open a pull request, discuss the change with the author, make a few alterations, then it gets merged upstream!

openssl-extensions

Wee Flickr

This is a little sinatra app which is meant to get deployed to heroku. It allows me to include images in blog posts very easily and give me a little textile snippet to paste into blog posts.

This scratches a very specific itch but is a example of a sinatra app communicating with the flickr api. It also has a random image function which give a random image from your flickr stream. This is used on my random flickr desktop script which I use at work.

wee_flickr

Solon

This is a gem for integrating with sage pay server. It lacks the standard api of activemerchant but as the service is offsite it doesnt work that well with the activemerchant api.

Using it might help you if you are doing a sage pay integration within a rails app.

solon

Merry Christmas!

Skinning in front of Store Vengetind

Vanny in Fontainebleu

In the spirit of DIY with the likes of the haute route post , here is a description of the DIY Campervan we created last summer.

Helen and I went on a trip to France this summer past, starting in Nottingham and finishing in Inverness after a nice tour of France and parts of the UK.

Wild camping is banned in France along with a few of the other central european countries. Meaning that if you want to be ‘out in the nature’ you need to stay in a campsite or hotel.

However, there is a big campervan culture in France which means that campervans are accepted all over the place and there is a network of aires which provide essential services such as water and waste disposal.

The downside of campervans is that they are very expensive to buy and hire .

Famous refuge and gash

If you want to spend time in the alps or the pyrenees a good way to do it is with a DIY Camper™

There are some amazing Van conversions out there which take a lot of time and money to create. This is not one of them. This conversion can be done for minimal funds and in a couple of days.

Vehicle

Buy a van, max 2m high as this means you can park in regular car parks. Features to look out for are low mileage, ply-lined, carpeted. without bulk head, turbo diesel, side and back doors. Buy something which has a decent resell value as you will likely want to sell the van on after your trip.

As of 2011 £2000 would be a good budget. We started with a Mercedes Vito electricians van purchased from Autotrader vans.

Post training lunch in the heat.

Sleeping

You can pick up an IKEA sofabed for about £100, this acts as both a sofa and a bed! Jobs a good un!

High altitude camp spot.

If you have more time / expertise an mdf sleeping platform design is far superior as it allows you to store luggage underneath the sleeping area when you sleep.

Mods

Solar Shower in Action

• Inverter for a DC power supply (Laptop and Mobile) – sourced from Maplin.
• Large water container. You need a lot of water storage as often days can pass without water. – sourced from Decathlon.
• Solar shower. A large black back with a nozzle attached was excellent for cheeky washes. – sourced from Decathlon.
• Seat organisers, these clip onto the back of seat.
• FM transmitter, good way to listen to Ipod / Phone in the car without modifying the stereo.
• Screw hooks on the ply lining for organising stuff.
• Cooking was done outside with an MSR Whisperlite International stove running on petrol.
• Take a basic tool kit for repairs. Our main issue was the back section of the exhaust needed tied onto the chassis for most of the trip. If you get a good van you will hopefully escape mechanical issues.
• Curtains for the back doors with velcro attachments. Well made by Mrs Palmer.

Tips

• Use the aires in villages for services (but buy something in the village!). You can also sleep in them as well.
• When driving long distance we split the driving and did 2hr efforts, which can be maintained.
• The pyrenees is a lovely area.

4×4 intervals followed by Barbeque

Recently I wanted to change my desktop pic randomly and use flickr as a source. The currently working solution (a bit dirty) as it stands is as follows.

Every half an hour a cronjob runs which runs the following script.

change_desktop.sh

  #!/bin/bash
 
  utime=`date +%s`
  file="/tmp/#{$utime}.jpg"
  curl -L http://weeflickr.heroku.com/random_image > $file
 
  /path/to/change_desktop.rb $file

It makes a call to the wee flickr app which redirects to a random photo from your photostream. (Chooses a random set, then a random photo within that set.) This file is then saved to disk and is passed to a ruby script.

change_desktop.rb

  #!/usr/bin/env ruby
 
  # Author: Alastair Brunton
 
  require 'rubygems'
  require 'appscript'
 
  include Appscript
 
  file_path = ARGV[0]
 
  app("Finder").desktop_picture.set(MacTypes::FileURL.path(file_path))

rb-appscript

Note: This has only been tested on snow leopard and the scripts are currently pretty brittle.

The random flickr photo functionality is available from wee_flickr photopicker.

You also need to delete the /tmp photos now and again so I have a little dirty cron that runs once per day.

  #!/bin/bash
 
  cd /tmp && rm *.jpg

The latest in amazing trials riding! source: Steev

Another amazing trailer for the next ‘travis rice film’ due out on September 7th!

Orienteering Flag

This is a little tool for embedding flickr images on blog posts. For some reason flickr makes this hard to achieve through the web interface so this little sinatra application solves the problem.

This may be a violation of the flickr terms of service, so you might want to remember to credit flickr on the blog posts.

This app is designed to be deployed to heroku.

Steps to deploy

• git clone git://github.com/pyrat/wee_flickr.git
• sign up for heroku account (heroku.com)
• (sudo) gem install heroku
• edit FLICKR_USERNAME in app.rb to yours
• commit change locally (git commit -v -a)
• heroku create [your app name]
• git push heroku master

ALL DONE!

If you click the paste board a textile snippet is copied to your clipboard. It assumes that you are writing your blog posts in textile! And this can be pasted into your blog post.

You may want to use this tool as a base for a markdown or plain html embed code system.

Source is on github, wee_flickr

Chris looks out to Sea

I spent easter in the Lyngen Alps area of Norway, this alpine landscape has seemingly endless possibilities which are untapped by the masses. It is difficult to get to, in a foreign land and the peaks are relatively extreme.

Here are some tips for doing it yourself on the relative* cheap.

*It is Norway afterall.

Getting There

Take a flight to Tromsø, sas and norwegian fly there. You will most likely be flying from outside Norway, take a flight to Oslo first then there are direct flights to Tromsø from there. There is also apparently a direct flight from Riga (Norwegian sun seekers flight), so if you can get there it can be a cheap option.

Transport

Looking up Tomasrenna and Lakelvrenna

Lyngen has been made famous in the international skiing community by the lyngen lodge with stories of skiing direct to and from the boat! This looks like an excellent holiday which you should for sure do if you can afford it. They also seem to spend a bit of time in Kafjord (across the water from Lyngen) which can sometimes have better snow.

In reality, most of the big, famous peaks are best accessed by car. So hiring a car from Tromsø is likely the best plan. The regular suspects of Avis, Sixt and Hertz operate from there. Shop around.

Accomodation

MIT Fablab and Koppangen Brygger are two good places to stay. (I have stayed in both.)

Koppangen Brygger

If you are looking to go a bit cheaper there is a DNT Cabin and at least one unlocked independent hut in the area (Fastdalshytta). These are like posh bothies, and you need a special key to get into the DNT hut. It is about £11 GBP per night to stay in Jægervasshytta . There are some sweet peaks which can be accessed direct from this hut.

A free option is to go for some camping action. You need to be pretty hardy but there are some good spots in the south west side of the lyngen alps (near Lakselvbukt a bit further south near the alley entrance Ellendalen).

Maps and Guides

• Lyngen Alps Turkart 1:50000 – this is the best map to get.
• Toppturer i Norge by Friflyt – The bible for ski mountaineering (top tours) throughout Norway with quite a few in Lyngen and the surrounding area.
• Toppturer i Troms by Friflyt – A new book describing toppturer in the Troms area of Norway. Has an extensive section on Lyngen.

Video

Here is a video compilation of our recent trip to the Lyngen Alps for Easter 2011.

Have a good trip if you are going and give me a shout if you have any questions.

Koppangen at Dusk