Javia blog

Last Sunday I participated in Warsaw’s half-marathon. I’ve run it to the end, 21km, in just under 2 hours and 5 minutes; that is an average speed of ~10.1km/h. I was lucky the weather was good, warm and sunny.

All in all, it was a great experience, and I’m really happy I participated. I would recommend it to anyone to run a half-marathon, at least once. And it’s not that hard: I’ve only had 2 weeks of training (running in the park) prior to the course. For two days afther the half-marathon, my legs muscles were hurting a bit..

My wife waited for me at the finish line. We were expecting I’d take 2h30min, and she was surprised by my performance
I’ve got a medal (everybody who finished got one), and there will also be a nominal dyploma mentioning my time.

And a tip for prospective long course runners: you may run as slow as you want, as long as you keep running (not stopping or walking). If you get tired, or you can’t breath enough, slow down the pace as much as you need, but keep running — this is the most efficient way to gain time (not stopping).

I have just made available the source code for my projects
Menstral and Javia Calculator under the liberal MIT License.

To get the source code you need a subversion client.
The svn repositories are here:
Menstral Source Code and
Javia Calculator Source Code.

Enjoy,
Mihai

I’m thinking about open-sourcing my two JavaME (mobile phone) projects, Menstral and Javia-Calculator.

My reserve to open source them until now was caused mainly by a hope to transorm these projects in a commercial offering at some point. So my recent inclination to open-source them also means that I’m not planning to make any money from these projects anymore.

The main reason for open-sourcing is to allow the programs to evolve (bug-fixes & enhacements) even as I have less time (and inclination) to do everything myself. Of course I’m aware that just open-sourcing a project doesn’t automatically create a community around it, and this is the open-source challange.

I have to choose a code repository (SVN). The choices I consider are: SourceForge, Google Projects, and self-hosted. Self-hosted is more work, but also allows for the greatest flexibility.

Considering the license: MIT or GPL? I personally like the MIT license more, as I consider it less restrictive (and much shorter) than GPL. On the other hand, GPL protects against the possibility of competitor closed-source projects freely taking advantage of the code.

I’m going to participate in Warsaw’s Half-Marathon which takes place on March 25 — three weeks from now. For me this is the first time I take part in an official half-marathon. The running length is about 21km, and the time limit is 3 hours (the runners who don’t complete the course in this time have to abandon). My main target is to just run it to the end, but as a secondary goal I’d like to do it in under 2h30.

Since today I began training, which consists in running in a park which is not too far from where I live. So I have about 3 weeks for the training; I’ll post a table with the distance I run during this time.

Initially I wanted to run a full marathon (42km), but this is an ambitious goal for a sedentary developer like me. Compared to a marathon, a half-marathon is much easier (more than twice easier).

Here is the starting list where I appear under the name ‘preda’, with T-shirt number 465. It looks it will be crowded, with about 1000 runners.

Training: