Today is a study day, and I’m reading up on HTML5. We do a lot of user interface development for my product, and I’ve always had a strong preference for industry standards above proprietary products such as Flex and SilverLight.

HTML5 has some cool features but the transition to the full spec in the industry will take a while. However, many aspects are already supported by major browsers. Incidentally Secha, a Javascript library we chose for my product at work two years ago, is making a major push into HTML 5/CSS3 and today released a new product to support their vision.

I’m reading “HTML5 for Web Designers” by Jeremy Keith, a great introduction. I’m at the car dealership today to get some major maintenance done. They’re fixing the breaks, battery, the engine cooling system… a big job.

I installed the second beta release of Drupal 7 on my OpenBSD server. Over-all, the beta looks very solid. This morning I spent some time testing and porting modules from version 6 to 7.

One thing I ran into is that Drupal 7 now requires PDO extension to be installed on your server. During the installation I saw this error message (I’m running OpenBSD 4.5):

“Your web server does not appear to support any common PDO database extensions. Check with your hosting provider to see if they support PDO (PHP Data Objects) and offer any databases that Drupal supports.”

Here are the steps I took to install these PDO database extensions on my OpenBSD server:

As root, run this:

pkg_add ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/4.5/packages/i386/php5-pdo_mysql-5.2.8.tgz

To complete the installation add the following two extension to your php.ini (for me, /var/www/conf/php.ini).

extension=pdo.so
extension=pdo_mysql.so

Restart Apache and you’re good to go.

Yours truly with a medal, when I just got home.This morning I ran the Cannonball Half Marathon in Greensboro, NC. It was my first half marathon in 18 months, and given my lack of training while we were traveling earlier this year, I wasn’t sure how this would go.

I’m so happy with the result! My time was 2:06, only a few minutes short of my P.R. and I felt great. I really should do this more often.

In fact, I only decided on Thursday to sign up for this race. I hadn’t ran since last weekend — lots of obligations this week made running in the evening impossible — and I decided to take advantage of this unplanned tapering.

Early in Greensboro

Greensboro is an hour driving due west of Durham, and I got up at 5.00 am to make it to the start line. The race was well organized, and I liked the fact that they had mile markers on every mile. It was great weather for a run — at the start it was 45 degrees, two hours later about 58 degrees. After the race there was a band playing Blues Brothers music.

Negative splits

I really tried to control my pacing this race. Usually, I start a little too fast in the first two miles, for which I’d pay the price later on. I set myself the goal to finish within 2:15, which is pretty much a 10 minutes per mile, but with the understanding that if I felt strong half-way the race I could speed up. It has been 18 months since my last race, so I didn’t want to start too fast.

Almost all my chervil plants died this week when I forgot to water them.

It is safe to say that growing herbs has been unsuccessful for me, and for the herbs.

Perhaps I’ll find chervil soup when I’m in the Netherlands for a week at the end of November.