My swim was 2 minutes faster than last year, but my bike was 6 minutes slower–even though it felt like I was hauling ass–and my run was 2 minutes slower–though it felt much slower because of a really bad stitch/side-ache that came on after about a mile.

Still, it was a fun weekend and a good race.

Swim: 00:23:02
Transition 1: 00:04:18
Bike: 01:17:21 (19:20 mph avg.)
Transition 2: 00:01:02
Run: 00:48:03 (7:44 min/mile avg.)
Total: 02:33:46

(T1 wasn’t particularly fast either, I had some problems getting my wetsuit off and then putting socks on)

Over the years I worked on features such as Gmail Chat, helped start the massive undertaking that was the Gmail frontend rewrite, and integrated gadgets into Gmail. Most of my work, though, could be classed as “infrastructural”; helping to keep Gmail development ticking and making the battle-hardened components available to other teams at Google.

In parallel, I co-founded The Closure Library with Erik and saw it grow from a small 20% project to become the de facto JS library at Google, receiving contributions from hundreds of engineers across dozens of projects. It was eventually open sourced in 2009 and now has an awesome team working on it fulltime.

My work on infrastructure meant moving onto Google+ was a logical progression, where I have worked for the last 18-months as tech-lead of the excellent group of guys who make up the Frontend Infrastructure Team.

But, what’s next?

I’m still interested in what can be achieved by throwing together some computer-codez and by the possibilities afforded by the web. I think we’re living in really interesting times and there are many companies doing amazing things.

Ultimately I was most excited at the opportunity to work somewhere that was still small, has a great team, and has lofty goals. The choice then was Obvious.

I’m posting photos to Google+ as the week progresses.

On a recent visit to my parents in England I found my very first point-and-shoot, a gift from my Grandma for my 5th birthday. It was all crusted up with battery acid, but still had a film in. I of course had it processed and was surprised to find six photos from our 1990 family trip to Venice.

The photos are bleached out, burnt, or double-exposed, but seem rather apropos in this era of Instagram and the burgeoning cult of lo-fi.

There are a few more photos on Picasa.

Ok, so here are some tech notes on the implementation, though this is all pretty standard these days.

For the photos page I wanted to make use of the HTML5 History APIs. But rather than make the photo page standalone I decided to “Ajaxify” the whole site. The site dynamically loads content, avoiding full page loads, using similar patterns to the ones we employed in Gmail and Google+.

If you navigate directly to a certain page it will be rendered on the server. Once the page has loaded, the JavaScript will listen for clicks, intercept any links that can be handled client side, request the page contents via an XMLHttpRequest, update the UI, and change the browser location using history.pushState. For all pages except the photos page, the XHR simply requests the page with ?mode=body which tells the sever not to render the chrome.

This was made simpler by the fact that I’d already written a small library (Surface) that does all the heavy lifting and simplifies the management of single-page applications. The trickiest part was getting WordPress to work properly and unfortunately meant changes that will need to be reintegrated after every WordPress update.

The photos page is all rendered client-side and simply requests the photo data from the server. The photos are stored on Flickr and I actually use the Flickr API to get the list of photos for each album rather than hard coding them.

The top navigation uses Raleway from the Google Web Fonts archive.

The site works best in the latest Chrome and Firefox builds, but IE degrades to using full page navigations, though the photos page only works in IE9+.

The transition across wasn’t as simple as I would have liked.  Even though I keep a backup of all my photos, I haven’t been good about keeping titles, meta-data, and sets in sync over the years.  So I wanted a way to download a set of photos from Flickr and re-upload elsewhere.  There were a few existing ways to do this, but they were either hacky scripts, installable apps, or required plug-ins.  I wanted something web based.  So in the end I wrote my own tool.

The result is Flixtractr, a little web app for downloading sets of photos from Flickr as a zip file.

Since the original photos can end off being quite large doing the zip building server side would have required a large amount of transient storage for any moderate number of concurrent users.  I decided instead to build the zip on the client.  I tried several different paths, but ended off using the new Blob and BlobBuilder APIs available in the latest builds of Chrome and Firefox.

Using Chrome 16 I’ve managed to generate a 650MB zip file containing a set of 97-photos ranging in size from 3MB to 11MB (some older versions of Chrome are known to crash when the zip exceeds 128MB).  I’d probably recommend you avoid such big sets though :)

If you try it, let me know how it goes.  If there are problems or you have feature requests, post about it on the Google Group.

[Update: if Flickr says "oops" when you try to connect. Wait about 15s then refresh the flickr page. There seem to be some reasonably wide-spread problems with Flickr OAuth. There's a thread on the Flickr API group discussing the problem.]

Anyway, today–in accordance with my yearly resolutions–I entered the Silicon Valley Long Course Triathlon.

At 66-miles long, the course is a few miles shy of a half iron man:

The swim is 1-mile, but two laps. So you have to run out of the water, sprint down the beach, and dive back in. The horizontal-vertical-horizontal transition nearly made me barf. This leg took under 30-mins.

The bike is 56-miles, and takes you all the way to Gilroy and back. It’s a pretty flat ride so most of the time was spent in aero-position which I’m not yet used to. I really didn’t feel like eating on the ride, so had to force down my power bars. Other than that it was a smooth ride and took around 2-hours 40-mins.

The run is 9-miles and flat. My right foot was completely numb for the first 2-miles. I was averaging between 7:30 and 7:45 min/mile splits, which isn’t too bad after the ride and considering it was only the 2nd time I’d run that distance since the San Jose half-marathon last year. My time was about 1:10.

The official results aren’t online yet, but my overall time was 4-hours 21-minutes. I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but had estimated around 5-hours. So, not a bad first time. It wasn’t as cardiovascularly intense as the Olympic distance events but I certainly feel more exhausted afterwards. 70.3 next??

At the beginning of the year I set myself the stretch goal of getting a 2:20 time in the Wildflower Olympic Triathlon. I knew it would be almost impossible, but wanted an ambitious target. This morning I ended off finishing in 2:25:50; which I’m really happy with and is about 14-minutes faster than last year’s time. I give myself a 0.8…

The time put me at 61st (of ~1800) overall and 17th (of ~200) in my age group. My bike was definitely the strongest stage (34th overall) and is the main reason I got the position I did. My swim (404th) and my run (238th) were distinctly worse off.  Got some work to do there.

It was a fun weekend “camping” (we rented an RV) down by Lake San Antonio. Even my parents — who are visiting from England — came by and cheered us on.

Photos to come when I’m more recovered.

NB: Results -
Swim: 00:25:25
Transition 1: 00:02:06
Bike: 01:11:27 (21 mph avg.)
Transition 2: 00:01:02
Run: 00:45:50 (7:23 min/mile avg.)
Total: 02:25:50

When people ask me back home if I like living in San Francisco, one of the first things I tell them about is the easy access to the amazing countryside.  The bitter-sweet of it, though, is that since getting a dog a lot of these areas aren’t open to us unless we leave Ada at home, which rarely seems fair.

So it was pretty disappointing to learn that Golden Gate National Recreational Area (GGNRA) are planning to restrict yet more areas, including two of our favorite spots Fort Funston and the Marin Headlands.

Other areas being affected include Stinson Beach, Homestead Valley, Oakwood Valley, Muir Beach, Rodeo Beach, Fort Baker, Fort Mason, Crissy Field, Fort Point, Baker Beach, Lands End, Sutro Heights, Ocean Beach, Mori Point, Milagra Ridge, Sweeny Ridge, Pedro Point.

The public will have 90 days to comment either for or against the report once it is released, and historically, anti-dog groups have been extremely vocal.  There are several motivating factors to the proposed changes, including environmental impact, safety, and annoyance to others.  But when it comes down to it only 1% of GGNRA is open to people with dogs as it is; the problems affect a tiny percentage of visitors, and could likely be solved with less sweeping changes.

I saw kids chasing birds on Stinson Beach yesterday, should we ban people with kids from the parks?

If you at all care about this, please help provide a more accurate perspective by responding to KQED’s Survey and filling out the official comment form.

The official documents about it are here, the entire proposal is very long (2400 pages) but if you’re interested, the Executive Summary, Chapter 1 (background and purpose), and Chapter 2 (details of the options) are pretty interesting.

Please pass along this information to people who may be interested and ask them to get involved.

· Survive March’s 5-day heli-skiing trip to Alaska.  (80,000ft of vertical!)
· Do another half-marathon.
· Get a sub 2:20 time on the Olympic course at Wildflower (1.5km, 40km, 10km).
· Finish the Silicon Valley Long Course Triathlon (1-miles, 56-miles, 9-miles).
· Renew sky diving certs and do at least 15 jumps.
· Go on holiday somewhere warm… with beaches and scuba diving.

No, I haven’t quit google to work for a Mexican drug cartel.

This is an outtake from a photo shoot.

Mike invited me along to help him photograph the Mountain View S.W.A.T. team. We were to attend a live-fire exercise to get shots of the guys in their full tactical gear; the deliverables would be used for trading cards that they hand out to kids and as promotional material.

The conditions were pretty tough. We were in the open air, in the blazing sun. Going natural light alone would have meant high contrast and dark shadows. It took a lot of faffing around we settled on something we were happy with:

We clamped a 4ft diffusion panel to some 7ft stands, to act as a sun shade. We then had my ABR800 camera right as the main light and a bare 430exII off left for fill. To get a good exposure we were at about f/16 with the strobes providing 50% of the light. To get a nice bit of background blur, we stuck on my 3-stop ND filter to give us f/5.6. Not too shabby.

The guys were all really nice (I admit to being a little surprised…) and in good spirits (amazing, considering they were wearing heavy gear and the temperature was around 95F). Unfortunately, due to range rules, we were not allowed to take any photos of their actual exercises; it’d have been fun to photograph them shooting from moving vehicles.

I’ll hopefully upload some of the actual photos soon, I’m just waiting for permission.

Last week I volunteered to help out the gym at work and take some headshots for the intranet. They wanted something a bit better than you’d get with a point-and-shoot, and I wanted some practice taking pictures of people other than myself and Tessa.

Since the shots may need to be used in a variety of situations, including small thumbnails on the website, I opted for low-contrast lighting, using a ring flash to kill the shadows and side-lights to add highlights. I had the ABR800 ring-flash on camera without a tripod, so after the hour-and-a-half session my right-arm was pretty tired.

In the end 22 people flowed through, which only gave me a few minutes per person. Some of them were only on a quick break in between training sessions, others uncomfortable and not wanting to be there.

Overall, I think the results came out pretty well, considering. Hopefully they like them.

Man, I thought I was going to die on the run…

Well, that’s a slight exaggeration, but I did feel really tired, got the chills (again), and was having a hard time keeping my legs moving.  Time slowed and I felt like each mile took an age. But in actual fact they were only taking about 7 minutes 12 seconds (average… which is a pretty fast time for me).  The bike went as hoped, where I averaged 20.25 mph.  For the swim, I was just hoping to match my Wildflower time, but managed to knock off 4-minutes.

Swim – 0.93 miles in 26:40
T1 – 2:01
Bike – 24.9 miles in 1:13:46
T2 – 1:09
Run – 6.2 miles in 44:34
Which gives me a finishing time of 2:28:11.   Over 10 minutes faster than my time on the–admittedly much hillier–Wildflower course.

The only slight hiccups were the elbow I took to the jaw during the swim and the subsequent mouthful of lake water I swallowed, and then on the bike the aid station was unmanned so I ran out of water at about the 20-mile marker.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the result.   I don’t think I could have done much better.  Position wise, I came 15th in my age-group of 64, and 106th of the 429 finishing men.  But as I said in my other post, at my level that’s not a very meaningful metric.

So now the question for next year is: do I try for a half-Ironman or do I stick at the Olympic distance and try to improve my times?  Or maybe both…

Prep
At 4am the alarm will go off; It’s Your World will be playing on NPR.  Get up.  Have a cold shower.  Get dressed (race shorts under civvies).  Head down to breakfast: blue-bottle coffee, 2-pints of water with electrolyte mix, toast and honey.

I’ll have packed my bag the night before, but just do a last check through.  Pump tires on bike to 120psi.  Get Tessa and Ada ready, head to car by 4:45am.

The drive to Almaden Lake is 55-miles and should take less than an hour.  Tessa will drop me off and go find parking.  I’ll have registered the day before, so head straight to the transition area and set up my spot.  I should have an hour before the race starts, so I’ll familiarize myself with the transition area, the entrances and exists, and the swim course.  If allowed, I’ll do a warm-up swim, nothing hard, just enough to get the blood flowing.  Stretches.  And the requisite trips to the porta-potties.

Swim
I’m in the third wave, starting at 7:08.  I’ll stand one row back from the front, on the inside.  I’ll take the first 100m easy, trying to avoid feet, and picking a path through the carnage.  After that I’ll settle into a comfortable rhythm, avoiding the temptation to race.  A mistake I made last time was going too wide, so try to keep an optimal course.

Transition to bike
My wet suit’s a two piece, so I’ll have the top off by the time I get to my spot.  Take off the bottoms.  Socks on.  Shoes on.  T-shirt on.  Helmet on.  Put 3 gel packs in back pocket.  Grab bike.  Run for the exit.

Bike
The bike course is wide, smooth, and relatively flat.  I’ll be pushing hard.  I’ll have a gel pack at the start, one half way, and one at the end.  I’ll alternate between water and energy drink, sipping regularly.

There’s a 7% climb for 200-vertical-feet between miles 15 and 16.  After riding in Marin, this should be easy.

I want to average above 20 mph.

Transition to run
Simply drop bike off, take off helmet, switch shoes, and grab race belt with my number.

Run
Like the bike it’s a flattish course.  I’ll take the first mile to ease my legs in, then settle into a race pace.  I want to push close to my limit.  I won’t have my heart rate monitor so I’ll pay attention to my breathing and if it gets laboured will ease off.  I’ll take water every mile at each aid station.

Finish
At the end of the day I know I’m not going to place very highly.  I could say I’d like to finish in the top 10%, which would be very cool, but is meaningless; it is a measure of other entrants not myself.  My goal is for everything to go smoothly and to feel like I couldn’t have finished in a quicker time.  But, shit happens and if something does go wrong I’ll just do my best to get to the end.

Today is Bike To Work Day in the SF Bay Area. A few hundred people turned out at the 24th and Mission BART station at 6:30am this morning to make their way to the South Bay for work. There were three different routes heading to Google, I joined a group of about a dozen people taking the 46-mile, very picturesque route down Skyline.

A few more photos and a couple of videos here.

So… if you read the last post you’ll know I was heading to Wildflower to do the Olympic triathlon this weekend. Now, this is no Iron Man. The Long Course is on Saturday and is a half-Iron Man; the Olympic is an “Intermediate Distance” event and is a mere 1-mile swim, 25-mile bike, and 6-mile run. However, each of the Wildflower courses is known for being particularly grueling.

Tessa, Sani (my fellow racer), his brother, and I drove the 300-miles to Lake San Antonio on Friday afternoon, and set up camp.

On Saturday, we did some swim training, a light bike ride, and watched the Long Course competitors. These guys are seriously hardcore. The winner will finish the 1.2-mile swim, 56-mile bike, and half-marathon in 3-hours 55-minutes. The last person will take nearly 10-hours, biking and running in the scorching California sun. Seeing the people of all shapes and sizes do this race made me feel really quite lame. The Team-in-Training people were particularly impressive; many of whom certainly don’t look like athletes, but they all support each other and with serious mental willpower finish the course to support the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

Today, after two cold and uncomfortable nights in a tent, was our race. The start is split into waves, with the collegiate men going first at 9am. Then the male age groups, then female. My wave started at 9:25.

The swim started with the usual carnage; legs and arms flailing everywhere, people almost swimming over you, kicks to the face. By the first buoy it had thinned out only a little, so I decided to go wide to avoid the masses. By the half way point I was now overtaking stragglers from the waves in front; some swimming breaststroke, some lying on their backs staring at the sky. By the final buoy and the last-leg back to the dock I got overtaken by the front guy of the wave behind me. Appropriately wearing a ninja-black swim cap. The swim felt long, when training I think I go into a kind of meditative state, but in the excitement of race day it took forever.

After the first hill, the bike was relatively straight forward. I pushed it quite hard, taking satisfaction from over taking guys on $5000+ tri-bikes, and feeling awe at other guys on $5000+ tri-bikes flying past me. The course was a there-and-back, with 2 biggish hills either way. My “nutrition strategy” was to have an expresso-gel at the start and end of the ride, a honey gel in the middle, and then alternate water/electrolyte drinks throughout. This worked pretty well.

The run was killer. As always it hurt like hell trying to run after biking for over an hour. And the course was tough. There were aid stations at each mile giving out much needed gatorade and water, but even with these I started getting chills about half-way round. At this point the sun was high in the sky and it was getting hot; I feel so bad for the women who didn’t get to start till 11am. The run course was nearly all up hill for the first 5-miles, on road and dirt trails. Then a 1-mile knee crunching decent to the finish line.

I felt pretty rough by the time I crested the final hill, but I kept going and made it to the finish with a time I’m pretty happy with.

My total time was 2-hours 39-minutes, which put me 24th in my age group of 224 guys, 142nd out of all 1200 men, and 166th overall out of over 2000 competitors. For context, the winner came in at 2-hours 2-minutes, median time is 3-hours 19-minutes, and the 90th percentile take longer than 4-hours.

Swim: 00:29:49
Transition 1: 00:03:04
Bike: 01:19:31 (18 mph avg.)
Transition 2: 00:01:09
Run: 00:46:10 (7:43 min/mile avg.)
Total: 02:39:43

Not too shabby, but plenty of room for improvement.

Now, off to finish this 2002 Moon Mountain Syrah and eat some honey sandwiches, oh, and I should probably shower at some stage.

Tomorrow we’ll be heading down to Lake San Antonio for my 2nd Wildflower Triathlon. Last year I entered the Mountain Bike course. This year I decided to up the ante and try for the Olympic distance.

The course is a 1.5km swim, a 40km bike, and then a 10km run (that’s 1-mile/25-miles/6-miles for the imperially inclined). While it’s no Iron Man, they say the bike “should be considered relatively difficult” and the run is a “combination of road and trails, through campgrounds and challenging hills”.

The training has been pretty tough. I injured my back last October, which meant I started the running training later than I would have liked. I’ve also found it stressful finding the time to train (doing an IronMan must be almost a fulltime job).

For the last couple of months I’ve been working out 5 or 6 days a week; with weights, runs, and swims in the infinity pool, during the week; then long bike rides, runs on the embarcadero, and swims in the bay, on the weekend. Running after cycling is hard on the legs, my knees and ankles are pretty sore this week.

Anyway, I do it because I enjoy the challenge. Hopefully I’ll finish with a reasonable time and legs that still work. I’ve already signed up for the 12km Bay-to-Breakers run in 2-weeks and the Silicon Valley International Triathlon in 6-weeks.

Wish me luck!

On its own, the Closure Library isn’t very compelling for the average web developer. The dynamic loading is intended for unit tests and development, and using it in production would cause users to download masses of unused code.

Luckily for us, the Closure Compiler was open sourced at the same time. The compiler knows about a lot of the idioms used in the Closure Library and does a really good job of removing dead code and optimizing what remains. The team also launched a web service with a RESTful API so you don’t even have to run the compiler yourself.

Even with the web service, the development-debug cycle isn’t ideal. So when I found myself wanting to use some of the Closure Library for my new photo site I hacked together a PHP class that provides a convenient interface to the compiler web service, caches the optimized code, and recompiles when the sources have changed. Pretty basic, but quite useful I think.

I know PHP is looked down upon by many programmers, but it is easy, convenient, and widely available. If you have a PHP based site and want to use the Closure Library and/or the Compiler, it might be worth heading over to the project page and seeing if it might be useful.

[php-closure]

Coming relatively late to the party, I joined Flickr at the start of 2008 and haven’t looked back since. The thing that is most compelling for me is the social aspect, something that a personal photo site could never achieve. It pushes me to take more photos and to try to be more creative.

With this in mind I felt the photos left on this site were getting dated and unrepresentative; photos from university ski trips and my early travelings in China, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Instead I’ve put together a portfolio of sorts.

So Flickr is my photostream, Picasa gets random albums for sharing with family and friends, and while I don’t feel I’ve found a particular style yet, this site gets my best attempt at a photographic portfolio.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZkEde-9QAk

Click the resolution menu and maximize or head on over to YouTube to watch it in full 1080p.

And yes, that is me crashing into a tree at 0:29. And yes, it did hurt. I ended off with rather bruised ribs.

I think what I like most about road biking is how much distance you can cover in a relatively short period of time.  For example, this afternoon I took a 2-hour ride round the tip of the SF peninsula and was able to take in views of Crissy Field, the Golden Gate, Ocean Beach, Lake Merced, and Golden Gate Park.

Here’s the route, logged on My Tracks. You can click the start/end point for details.

View SF Ocean Beach Loop in a larger map