Helping Disabled Passengers Travel with Confidence

This is a reproduction of a blog post originally made on the IBM Emerging Technology blog at https://www.ibm.com/blogs/emerging-technology/helping-disabled-passengers-travel-with-confidence/ (link now dead).  Original article published on 3rd April 2019, re-publication to this blog was on 11th June 2021.

Introduction

Disabled or disadvantaged passengers have every right to fear travelling with multiple high profile cases of unfair and appalling levels of service evident in the media, particularly for rail passengers. Our team have been tackling this problem recently in collaboration with the IBM Travel and Transport team and 50% funding through Innovate UK’s call for Accelerating Innovation in Rail (round 4). The project was the brain child of Sam Hopkins and won the internal IBM Hybrid Hackathon event in 2016.

The Problem

 The rail industry in the UK is a complex one and travelling on our railways can be a difficult experience for anybody. If you’re disabled then the experience can be difficult at best and demeaning or impossible at worst. Depending on the type and severity of their disability, disabled travellers need to plan for eventualities such as whether a station is fully accessible, whether and when staff are available to help, when and where they might be able to use a toilet, how and where to board and alight the train, the list is as long as the wide range of issues people may have. Today, assistance is on offer, but this is complex due to the nature of our fragmented system and passengers (or their carers) may need to contact multiple companies 24 hours in advance of travel when planning their journey. This process of organising their journey is extremely time consuming and can be as much of a frustration as the journey itself.

The Challenges 

The UK rail industry is highly fragmented with different parts of the operation split among different companies. For example, Network Rail oversee the infrastructure such as maintaining tracks and signalling; Rolling Stock Operating Companies (ROSCOs) own the trains; and Train Operating Companies (TOCs) operate the trains and run passenger services in different regions around the UK. In order for a disabled passenger to make a journey, the Train Operating Companies are legally obliged to provide support both off the train at the station and on board the train during the journey. However, a passenger may be travelling through a large number of regions and across services provides and hence need to understand which company will be responsible for their journey at any given stage. Understanding this takes quite a bit of research and can be difficult, it also requires that everything they require on their journey lines up across the network they’re travelling on and this is certainly not guaranteed on our network today.

Our Solution

We have created a mobile application for disabled passengers, supported by an enterprise grade back end architecture. During the project we established a principle that the disabled passenger should always be connected to a member of staff. This connection provides continuous support available whenever required by the passenger and is designed to help

alleviate the anxiety felt by this group of passengers when travelling. The connection comes in the form of a chat application similar to how passengers may already use common applications such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. The passenger can type anything they want to the member of staff they’re connected to and get a human-level response to their query from staff local to their situation. During their journey, the passenger is handed over between staff members such that they’re always connected with a local staff member who can offer physical assistance if required.

A typical journey story starts with the user programming their journey in a similar way to how they might on existing rail applications. They search for their departure and destination stations and select a time and route they wish to travel. Some time later, they embark upon their journey. When they arrive at the station, they either press a button to start the process or the app uses geolocation to detect their arrival at the station. They are connected to a member of the station staff who can answer questions and provide physical assistance to board their first train. Once boarded, the station staff hand the passenger over to a member of staff on board the train. This hand-over process is transparent to the user and they will simply see a new greeting from the next member of staff in the chain once they have been connected. The process continues with the on train staff handing over to station staff at the destination station in order to provide assistance alighting the train. This process can repeat as many times as necessary until the final destination is reached.

Technical Implementation 

Our solution has a strong server-side implementation with an MVP level front end to exercise the APIs provided.

We base the solution entirely within the IBM Cloud, using a Cloudant instance for database hosting, App ID for authentication services, Message Sight for highly reliable messaging built on top of the MQTT protocol, and NodeJS for writing our APIs on top of the Express framework and where necessary calling out to other APIs such as the Transport API. Security and privacy have been key concerns in the design to ensure chat messages are securely delivered only to their intended recipient. The application itself is authenticated at each of its routes and all of the server-side APIs also use the same App ID authentication. Novel to this solution is the capability of third-party authentication from Message Sight to App ID, a first-of-a-kind implementation.

The front end application is currently written in VueJS. This has been designed with accessibility in mind given the intended audience. It is a simple interface conforming to web accessibility standards that is compatible with screen readers. This component was never intended to be the final solution and we see another interface being developed in the future that is likely to build upon the current one. For example, a fully native solution or perhaps one written to be more native-like using technologies such as Native Script.

Moving Forward 

The solution is complete and ready, subject to customisation, to be adopted by the UK train operating companies. However, we do see the need for an improved user interface to be developed before the solution is truly ready to be used in the wild.

Further to the current solution for the rail industry, we recognise the issues faced by disabled travellers don’t stop with the UK rail system. Similar issues are faced when using our road network, taxi services, ferries and of course our airports. The principle established within this project of alleviating anxiety through the connection to a supporting human member of staff is likely to remain. We hope this is extended into the other areas we’re considering with the next most obvious choice to tackle being the airport use case.

Self-Signing SSL/TLS Certificates

Things have changed a bit since I last looked into setting up a Certificate Authority (CA) and using that to self-sign my own certificates, not least that the use of the Common Name (CN) field appears to have changed. Chrome in particular seems to insist on the use of the Subject Alternative Names (SAN) extension rather than (or in addition to) using the CN field. So these are my notes on how to set up your own CA and use that to sign certificates. I'm conscious this is bound to go out of date so at the time of writing I'm working with Firefox 64, Chrome 71 and OpenSSL 1.1.1.

Setup
First of all, create a config file along the lines of the following and call it anything you like but for these notes I'm going to call it ssl.conf.  Note, if you want to you can start with a different template or look at your own openssl.cnf file which on Linux is commonly found at /etc/pki/tls/openssl.cnf.

[ req ]
default_bits       = 4096
distinguished_name = req_distinguished_name
req_extensions     = req_ext

[ req_distinguished_name ]
countryName                 = Country Name (2 letter code)
countryName_default         = GB
stateOrProvinceName         = State or Province Name (full name)
stateOrProvinceName_default = England
localityName                = Locality Name (eg, city)
localityName_default        = MyCity
organizationName            = Organization Name (eg, company)
organizationName_default    = MyOrg
commonName                  = Common Name (e.g. server FQDN or YOUR name)
commonName_max              = 64
commonName_default          = localhost

[ req_ext ]
subjectAltName = @alt_names

[alt_names]
DNS.1 = localhost

You can change any of this template and indeed you'll need to change the common name for the certificates you're generating. The CN can be changed either on the command line during certificate creation or by changing the default in ssl.conf. You will also need to change the list of names under the "alt_names" section, this list should contain one line for each host name your machine might be known as. The list starts at DNS.1 for the first entry, then you can add DNS.2 for the second entry and so on.

NOTE: the specification and a lot of the documents available in this space indicate that an IP address can be used in the CN.  My testing seems to indicate that while this is the case, certificates produced in this way will be rejected by modern browsers.  Hence, you should list only hostnames as the CN but IP addresses still appear to be acceptable in as "alt_names".

Create a Certificate Authority
You'll need a certificate and key file to act as your own CA:

openssl genrsa -out RootCA.key 4096
openssl req -x509 -new -nodes -key RootCA.key -sha256 -days 3650 -out RootCA.pem -config ssl.conf

You can inspect the certificate with:

openssl x509 -in RootCA.pem -text -noout

Create a Certificate Signing Request (CSR)
Now you have a CA you can create a CSR that can be used with your CA certificate to generate a client certificate:

openssl genrsa -out server.key 4096
openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr -config ssl.conf

You can inspect the certificate with:

openssl req -text -noout -verify -in server.csr

This time it's really important to ensure your host names are listed under the "X509v3 Subject Alternative Name" section of the certificate.

Generate a Signed Certificate
You can now use the CSR to create a signed certificate that can be used to serve up content over a secure connection:

openssl x509 -req -in server.csr -CA RootCA.pem -CAkey RootCA.key -CAcreateserial -out server.pem -days 3650 -sha256 -extensions req_ext -extfile ssl.conf

Note: if you want to create a different format of certificate here you can simply replace server.pem in the above command with something like server.crt, for example.

You can inspect the certificate with:

openssl x509 -in server.pem -text -noout

Again, it's really important to ensure your host names are listed under the "X509v3 Subject Alternative Name" section of the certificate.

Use the Certificate Server Side
You can now put your server.pem and server.keyfiles to work and serve up content over a secure connection.  There's too many ways to do that to list here but it could be used with a web server to serve HTTPS or a websockets server to serve some sort of socket connection as a couple of examples.

If you want to inspect the certificate that's being used on the server, replace <hostname> and <port> in the command below:

openssl s_client -connect <hostname>:<port> | openssl x509 -noout -text

Use the Certificate Client Side
My use case here is with a web browser and so you'll want to import your <i>RootCA.pem</i> into your browser environment.  There are two main ways of achieving this, you can either:

1. Import directly to the browser
2. Import to the key store on your operating system

It's quicker and easier to import directly to the browser but this will of course only cover that one browser on your system whereas if you use the operating system method then any application that consults the OS for certificates will see your CA certificate.

For Firefox, go to "View Certificates" in the preferences; click the "Authorities" tab and then the "Import" button; select your <i>RootCA.pem</i> file and click OK.

For Chrome, go to "Manage Certificates" in the settings; click the "Authorities" tab and then the "Import" button; select your <i>RootCA.pem</i> file; click the check boxes to trust the certificate and click OK.

Building Tensorflow GPU on Fedora Linux

<update on Sept 13th 2019>
I have written another post on how to install (rather than build) Tensorflow GPU for Fedora that uses a different and much simpler method.  See Installing Tensorflow GPU on Fedora Linux.
</update>

First off, let's say that there are easy ways of configuring Tensorflow for GPU usage such as using one of the docker images.  However, I'm a bit old school for some things and having always done so I've recently got Tensorflow going on my machine using my GPU.  Tensorflow CPU support is quite easy to do and generally works quite nicely using the pip install method.  GPU support, I've always found, is quite a bit more difficult as there are a whole bunch of things that need to be at just the right level for everything to work i.e. it's quite brittle!

What follows are my notes (it's in the name of the blog) for how to build Tensorflow from scratch to enable GPU support and I do this on Fedora Linux.  If you want to know why it's worth bothering going to this effort, I've tested the Keras MNIST CNN example as a bench mark.  It takes:

• 11 minutes 7 seconds on my CPU
• 2 minutes 55 seconds on my GPU

That's just over 3.8 as fast on my GPU as per my CPU so for large jobs this will be huge!

Some info on my machine and config:

• Lenovo P50 Laptop
• Intel Core i7-6820HQ CPU @ 2.70GHz (4 core with hyper threading)
• 32GB RAM
• Nvidia Quadro M1000M (CUDA compute capability 5.0)
• Fedora 28 running kernel 4.18.18-200.fc28.x86_64

Install Required Nvidia RPMs
You need to get everything Nvidia and CUDA installed on your machine first.   I quite like the Negativo17 repository for Nvidia on Fedora Linux and so I use this but you could also go with RPM Fusion or even download everything directly from Nvidia.  For me, right now, I have this little lot installed:
cuda-9.2.148.1-2.fc28.x86_64
cuda-cli-tools-9.2.148.1-2.fc28.x86_64
cuda-cublas-9.2.148.1-2.fc28.x86_64
cuda-cublas-devel-9.2.148.1-2.fc28.x86_64
cuda-cudart-9.2.148.1-2.fc28.x86_64
cuda-cudart-devel-9.2.148.1-2.fc28.x86_64
cuda-cudnn-7.2.1.38-1.fc28.x86_64
cuda-cudnn-devel-7.2.1.38-1.fc28.x86_64
cuda-cufft-9.2.148.1-2.fc28.x86_64
cuda-cufft-devel-9.2.148.1-2.fc28.x86_64
cuda-cupti-9.2.148.1-2.fc28.x86_64
cuda-cupti-devel-9.2.148.1-2.fc28.x86_64
cuda-curand-9.2.148.1-2.fc28.x86_64
cuda-curand-devel-9.2.148.1-2.fc28.x86_64
cuda-cusolver-9.2.148.1-2.fc28.x86_64
cuda-cusolver-devel-9.2.148.1-2.fc28.x86_64
cuda-cusparse-9.2.148.1-2.fc28.x86_64
cuda-cusparse-devel-9.2.148.1-2.fc28.x86_64
cuda-devel-9.2.148.1-2.fc28.x86_64
cuda-docs-9.2.148.1-2.fc28.noarch
cuda-gcc-7.3.0-1.fc28.x86_64
cuda-gcc-c++-7.3.0-1.fc28.x86_64
cuda-gcc-gfortran-7.3.0-1.fc28.x86_64
cuda-libs-9.2.148.1-2.fc28.x86_64
cuda-npp-9.2.148.1-2.fc28.x86_64
cuda-npp-devel-9.2.148.1-2.fc28.x86_64
cuda-nvgraph-9.2.148.1-2.fc28.x86_64
cuda-nvgraph-devel-9.2.148.1-2.fc28.x86_64
cuda-nvml-devel-9.2.148.1-2.fc28.x86_64
cuda-nvrtc-9.2.148.1-2.fc28.x86_64
cuda-nvrtc-devel-9.2.148.1-2.fc28.x86_64
cuda-nvtx-9.2.148.1-2.fc28.x86_64
cuda-nvtx-devel-9.2.148.1-2.fc28.x86_64
nvidia-driver-cuda-libs-410.73-4.fc28.x86_64

You might wonder about some of the above, particularly why you might need a back level version of GCC.  When Fedora 28 has a quite capable GCC version 8 why on earth would you want version 7?  The answer lies in my comment about things being difficult or brittle, it's quite simply that CUDA doesn't yet support GCC 8 so you do need a back level compiler for this

Install NVidia NCCL
This library isn't available through an RPM installation or the Negativo17 repository and so you must:

• Go to the Nvidia NCCL home page 
• Click the link to download NCCL (requires an Nvidia developer login account)
• Agree to the Terms and Conditions
• Download the NCCL zipped tar file that matches your CUDA version (9.2 for this blog post)

At the time of writing the file required is nccl_2.3.7-1+cuda9.2_x86_64.txz

I simply untar this file into /usr/local and create a symbolic link as follows:

• cd /usr/local
• sudo tar -xf /path/to/file/nccl_2.3.7-1+cuda9.2_x86_64.txz
• sudo ln -s nccl_2.3.7-1+cuda9.2_x86_64.txz nccl

Install the Bazel Build Tool
You're going to need a build tool called Bazel which isn't directly available in the Fedora repositories (that I know of at least) but fortunately there's a version in a copr repository you can use as documented run the following commands:

•  dnf copr enable vbatts/bazel
•  dnf install bazel

Get a Copy of Tensorflow Source
For this it's just as easy to use git as it is anything else.  You can directly clone the 1.12 release of Tensorflow into a new directory by running:

• git clone --single-branch -b r1.12 https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow tensorflow-r1.12
• cd tensorflow-r1.12

Simply replace r1.12 in the above commands if you want to use a different Tensorflow release.

Run the Tensorflow Configure Script
This step is actually quite simple but you'll need the answers to some questions to hand, simply run:

• ./configure

I accept all the default options with the exception of:

• "location of python" set to /usr/bin/python3 since Fedora still uses Python 2.7 as the default version at /usr/bin/python
• "build TensorFlow with CUDA support" set to Yes
• "CUDA SDK version" set to 9.2 (this value should match the cuda version you have installed and at the time of writing 9.2 is the current version from the Negativo17 repository)
• "location where CUDA 9.2 toolkit is installed" set to /usr
• "cuDNN version" set to 7.2 (similar to the cuda version above, this value should match the cuda-cudnn package version and 7.2 is the current version from the Negativo17 repository)
• "NCCL version" set to 2.3
• "location where NCCL 2 library is installed" set to /usr/local/nccl
• "Cuda compute capabilities you want to build with" set to 5.0 (but this value should match the CUDA compute capability of the GPU in the machine you're building for)
• "which gcc" set to /usr/bin/cuda-gcc (to use the back level GCC version 7)

Fix Bazel Config

The above config command writes a file but the location isn't compatible with the latest version of Bazel.  Presumably this issue will be fixed at some point in the future, it's not an issue with Bazel 0.18 and below as far as I'm aware, but has just become an issue on 0.19.  Simply copy the config to the correct place:

• cat tools/bazel.rc >> .tf_configure.bazelrc

Build Tensorflow with GPU Support

This took around an hour to complete on my machine:

• bazel build --config=opt --config=cuda //tensorflow/tools/pip_package:build_pip_package
• bazel-bin/tensorflow/tools/pip_package/build_pip_package /tmp/tensorflow_pkg

The first step is the long one for the build, the second simply builds the python wheel file.

Install Tensorflow with GPU Support

You've got your wheel file so simply install and enjoy:

• pip3 install tensorflow-1.12.0-cp36-cp36m-linux_x86_64.whl 

Run Some Code

The first time I attempted to run some code to test I got an error:

• failed call to cuInit: CUDA_ERROR_UNKNOWN

This can be solved by making sure you have the nvidia-modprobe package installed.  Alternatively, you can run the little script below the following explanation.

This seems to be some sort of permissions issue and running the following simple script to output the GPUs available on my machine but as root seems to have fixed the above issue i.e. put the following into a script, run that script as root, then any time you want to run code as an unprivileged user the above issue is fixed and the code will work:

from keras import backend as K

K.tensorflow_backend._get_available_gpus()

If the above works then you can try out the Keras MNIST CNN example code.

VueJS Example for IBM App ID

I was recently working on a project in VueJS that needed an authorisation layer added to it.  It turns out there aren't any existing examples of how to do this anywhere, unusually not even on Stack Overflow.  So I set about writing one and thought I would share it.  My work was based upon some other useful examples and information, particularly a blog post from the IBM Cloud blog.

Before I go any further, the code samples are available and documented on GitHub as follows:

1. IBM App ID API Server
2. App ID VueJS Client

The code is deliberately split into two such that:

1. the API Server is used to demonstrate how to secure an API on the server side.  This is done with the WebAppStrategy of App ID which is simply an implementation of a strategy package for passportjs.  The code here isn't anything particularly new over existing examples you can find on the web but it's necessary in order to fully demonstrate the capabilities of the client code.
2. the VueJS Client is used to demonstrate two things:
1. how to secure a VueJS route for which I can currently find no example implementations on the web
2. how to call an API that has been secured by App ID by passing credentials through from the client application to the API server

The API Server should be relatively trivial to get up and running as it's a standard NodeJS API implementation using Express.  If you refer to the WebAppStrategy and the blog post I mention above then you'll see the sample code I've come up with is broadly the same i.e. an amalgamation of the two.

The VueJS Client code can be simple to get up and running as well but it's probably more important to understand how it was created such that you can apply the same principles in your own application(s).  For this then, the explanation is a little longer...

Start by running the VueJS command line client (cli) to create a bare project and for the sample to make sense you will need to add VueX and Router components using the tool:

vue create vue-client

Then understand the 3 modifications you need to make in order to have a working set of authenticated routes.

1. A store for state. 
It doesn't really matter how you achieve this in VueJS, you can use any form of local state storage.  The example code I have come up with uses VueX and a modification to the store.js code you get from the client above.  The idea of this is such that the client application can cache whether the user has already authenticated themselves.  If they have not then the client must request authentication via the server.  If they have, then all the credentials required for making an authenticated call to a server-side API are already available in the browser.  Essentially, this is a speed-up mechanism that stops the client from requesting client credentials on each API call since the session store for the authentication actually lives on the server side when using App ID.

2. A new VueJS Component
This is the component whose route is to be protected via authentication.  In the case of the example code below the standard vue cli "About" component has been used and modified slightly to include an authenticated call to the server API.  The thing to note here is that the credentials from the client side must be sent over to the server with each API call.  Using the fetch API as per the below to implement your GET request means you have to add the credentials: 'include' parameter.

<template>
  <div class="about">
    <h1>This is a protected page</h1>
    <h2>hello: {{ hello }}</h2>
  </div>
</template>

<script>
export default {
  data: function () {
    return {
      hello: undefined
    }
  },
  computed: {
    user () {
      return this.$store.state.user
    }
  },
  methods: {
    getProtectedAPI () {
      fetch('http://localhost:3000/protected/get-some-info',{
            credentials: 'include',
          }).then(res => res.text())
          .then(body => {
            console.dir(body)
            this.hello = JSON.parse(body).hello
          })
    },
  },
  created() {
    this.getProtectedAPI()
  }
} 

</script>

3. A VueJS Navigation Guard
You need to write a function that will be added as a VueJS middleware upon each route change.  The middleware is inserted automatically by the VueJS route code when using the beforeEnter call on a route.  This is known in VueJS as a Navigation Guard.

function requireAuth(to, from, next) {
  // Testing authentication state of the user
  if (!store.state.user.logged) {
    // Not sure if user is logged in yet, testing their login
    const isLoggedUrl = "http://localhost:3000/auth/logged"
    fetch(isLoggedUrl, {credentials: 'include'}).then(res => res.json()).then(isLogged => {
      if (isLogged.logged) {
        // User is already logged in, storing
        store.commit("setUser", isLogged)
        next()
      } else {
        // User is not logged in, redirecting to App ID
        window.location.href=`http://localhost:3000/auth/login?redirect=${to.fullPath}`
      }
    }).catch(e => {
      // TODO: do something sensible here so the user sees their login has failed
      console.log("Testing user login failed - D'oh!")
    })
  } else {
    // User already logged in
    next()
  }
}

The requireAuth function does the following in plain English:

1. Using the VueJS client side cache, test if the user is already logged in
2. If they are not. then ask the server if the user is already logged in
1. If they are not, then redirect them to the server login page
2. If they are, then cache the information and load the next piece of middleware
3. If they are, then simply load the next piece of middleware

Each route you want to protect with the above function must have a beforeEnter: requireAuth parameter specified on the route.  When this is done, VueJS will call the requireAuth function before the component specified by the route is loaded.

{
  path: '/protected',
  name: 'protected',
  beforeEnter: requireAuth,
  component: Protected
}

Note: there are methods by which you don't have do call window.location.href to redirect the user to the login page (which does seem like a bit of a nasty hack.  However, these methods require the modification of the webpack configuration and so were kept out of scope of this example for the purposes of being simple.

South Downs Way Walk

I've just finished a pretty extraordinary journey, both physically and mentally, here's the story...

The Short Version - 100 Miles, 4 Days, 2 Charities

This bit of the blog post is a summary for the TL;DR brigade...

• Starting in Eastbourne on 31st May
• More or less 4 marathons in 4 days
• Finishing in Winchester on 3rd June
• Raising funds for:
• The National Eczema Society
• Parkinson's UK
• You can still donate (please do):
• https://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/team/DadsbeingLads
• We raised over £4500 (more than £5500 including gift aid)

I have made all the pictures available on Flickr in my South Downs Way Walk Album.

The Longer Version

My best mate decided he wanted to challenge himself as a consequence of coming to terms with his 40th birthday.  He called a few of us to the pub a few months back.  We settled on the idea of walking the South Downs Way in 4 days for 2 charities.  I was nuts enough to go along with this idea and I'm writing the morning after successfully finishing the entire route with him.

In the car on the way to get started...

The people you need to know about in this story are:

• Matt Wettone - team leader
• Me (obviously)
• Andy McGrath - team super hero
• Pete and Phil - team members
• Stephen Warwick - honorary team member
• Tim - Matt's dad, team logistics
• Linda - Matt's mum, team chef

...all done and in the restaurant at the finish

The reason for doing this has already been much better explained by Matt than I'll manage to come up with so if you're interested in that then head over to our donation page or I've saved a copy of his text at the bottom of this post.  My personal reasons are fairly simple in as much as I'd find it hard to turn Matt down, doing something for charity is always worthwhile and challenging yourself every now and then has to be worth something as well.

It turns out that it certainly was a challenge both physically and mentally.  I'll try to be brief below with a summary of each day...

Day 1 - Eastbourne to Housedene Farm

Vital statistics: 27.4 miles in 8 hours 26 minutes moving time (3.25 MPH, moving average), about 58,000 steps and 3968 feet of elevation gain.

We planned Day 1 to be 24 miles long but ended up doing 27.4 miles.  This was due to starting further back than the documented start of the South Downs Way, we started at Eastbourne Pier, another 1.5 miles along the coast.  Also, the distance charts for the Eastern half of the walk seem to be about 10% out in terms of accuracy so we picked up another couple of miles we weren't expecting.

Matt, Andy and I left Eastbourne in heavy rain.  I think we were all excited and apprehensive but keen to get started.  After the first couple of miles, we climbed up onto the Seven Sisters and for the next 10 miles or so found ourselves repeatedly going up and down each of the 7 cliffs.  That was really hard work, especially in poor weather, and set the tone for the rest of the day as being a really tough day.

We pretty much dodged a bullet with the weather though, the rain cleared up by around 11am and it became overcast and warm for the remainder of the day, perfect walking weather.  The rest of the country seemingly got drowned in thundery showers that day so we were really lucky.

We finished the day in good spirits but with Andy starting to struggle a bit with a knee problem and having picked up a blister along the route somewhere.

Day 2 - Housedene Farm Camp Site to Amberley

Vital statistics: 29.7 miles in 9 hours 5 minutes moving time (3.23 MPH, moving average), about 62,000 steps and 3186 feet of elevation gain.

This route was also longer than the planned 26.5 miles we had in mind for day 2.  We picked up the trail where we left off the previous evening at Housedene Farm and walked to Amberley.  Pete joined us, meeting at the start point in the morning and intending to walk the next 2 days.

Andy put in a heroic effort just to be ready for the start.  From the previous day, all of us thought there was a real danger he may have to pull out for at least day 2, but somehow he managed to be ready and start walking with us again.

The weather was decent enough for walking in as much as it wasn't sunny and the temperature was probably mid teens.  However, we basically spent the entire day walking through cloud.  The most we saw all day was dew drops forming in our hair from all the moisture in the air.  The dampness did make it a little tougher but we found the biggest drawback of this weather was the lack of reward for climbing some enormous hills.  For example, we walked the length of the south rim of Devil's Dyke and none of us have the foggiest (pun intended) idea what it looks like.  Visibility was between 20 and 100 yards all day!

At about 18 miles Pete wasn't able to continue, having aggravated an old knee injury.  We decided it was best for him to leave the trail and get picked up early so he headed to a nearby road for rescue.  At that point, Andy took the tactical decision to accompany Pete on the journey home to give himself more time and a better chance of recovery to finish the route, leaving just Matt and I.  This was definitely one of the low points for all of us in the team that day.

Matt and I soldiered on through the cloud for another 11-12 miles after that.  We were due to be picked up at the agreed point but due to a traffic accident and resulting traffic chaos, Tim was unable to meet us until 40 minutes or so after our agreed meet time.  Matt and I decided to add some more miles to make day 3 a bit shorter and easier.

Day 3 - Amberley to Queen Elizabeth Country Park

Vital statistics: 25.2 miles in 8 hours 3 minutes moving time (3.13 MPH, moving average), about 54,000 steps and 3287 feet of elevation gain.

Day 3 was a huge mental struggle for me.  We had lost Pete the day before, Andy was with us again and struggling through.  But the main problem was having eaten fish and chips for dinner the night before and not slept a wink resulting from the indigestion that followed, I was both extremely tired and feeling rather nauseous as well.  I kept going, putting faith in my physical ability (physically I felt fine), force fed myself as many calories as I could (I really didn't want to eat) and by around 2pm was starting to feel a little better.

There were a huge number of highlights on Day 3 that really helped:

• We were joined in a fairly last minute addition to the plan by Stephen Warwick.  It was lovely to have someone new in the team with fresh legs and a different dynamic.  Stephen's used to lengthy exercise having walked some trails in the Himalayas and also ridden from Lands End to John O'Groats.  He really helped me get my head in the right place to soldier on with some good team talks and deliberately poor maths.  "We're half way" he said at 11 miles.  "No we're not, go back and re-sit your GCSE" I replied knowing full well that we'd be the wrong side of 25 miles by the time we'd finished the day.
• The weather was much, much better.  We could see.  It was warm, not hot.  That was lovely.
• We'd previously walked from Buriton to Didling during training, about the last third of Day 3.  So there was a point when we reached the part of the trail we knew.  That was a huge moment for all of us.  We stopped there and celebrated with a banana each (we know how to live).  Matt and I had now walked to the point where we knew we'd walked the entire length of the remaining trail into Winchester during training and most of that done in a day.  We started to believe this might actually be possible.
• Amy, Matt's sister, joined us at Harting Down and walked the last 8 miles or so with us.  That was another huge boost to us - thank you, Amy!
• Linda also joined us for the last 2 miles into Queen Elizabeth Country Park.  Since she's suffering with Parkinson's, I thought that it was particularly poignant for her to join us.  I'm really glad she did. 
• Donations were still coming in, we'd had a particularly good donation day on Day 2, and for those people who decided to wait until we started walking - many thanks - you helped keep us going and our spirits up.

The last few miles were really tough for Andy.  Carrying his injury, he hobbled along to the finish, doubtful about whether he could complete Day 4.  Testament to Andy though, he sat down in a disabled parking space in the car park, causing much hilarity.  Other than in quite a lot of pain, I'm not sure exactly how he was feeling, but I imagine very proud of getting this far but also worried about the potential disappointment of not being able to finish the whole thing on Day 4.

Day 4 - Queen Elizabeth Country Park to Winchester

Vital statistics: 24.1 miles in 7 hours 12 minutes moving time (3.35 MPH, moving average), about 51,000 steps and 1972 feet of elevation gain.

The start of day 4 was met with mixed feelings.  We had all stayed at home the previous night, our first night home for the previous 3 nights.  Seeing family and sleeping in your own bed was great.  However, Andy was unable to recover from the previous day in time and we had a message saying that he wasn't going to be able to join us for the final day.  That must have been a very hard decision to take but you'd never know it, having been delivered with the sense of humour and good grace Andy had shown throughout the walk.  We'd miss him but we did have Phil joining me and Matt with his fresh legs for the final day.

Matt and I were buoyed by the fact we'd walked the entire length of this day during training and done so in a single day.  That feeling of confidence and the fact we knew where we were going and exactly what lay ahead at each stage of the walk certainly helped.  It made things a lot easier when we were getting tired during the day.  It's probably due to a mixture of factors but we walked a little faster on day 4 too.

Andy parked in Winchester and walked backwards along our route to meet us and walk into town the last few miles.  Still struggling, that must have been a hard walk for him too but it was great to cross the line with the main team of 3 of us and Phil who joined for the final day.

We arrived in Winchester a bit earlier than any of us might have expected.  But with due warning, friends and family were dotted throughout the last couple of miles to meet and greet us.  That felt amazing, picking up more people as we got closer to the end point.  We were clearly going to make it, feeling extremely tired, but unstoppable at the same time.

We went for food and drink.  Left the building to be driven, a long way home but a shorter distance than we'd walked each day, that felt weird.

We're done.  This is now history.  But please consider a donation, if you haven't already.

Matt's Original Text

Taken from https://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/Team/DadsbeingLads

"Thank you so much for visiting my page. My name is Matt and this year I will be turning the grand age of 40. I was inspired to take on a challenge to mark the occasion and hopefully do some good while I'm at it. 

On 31st May I will be walking the South Downs Way. This is a walk that is 100 miles long and I will be attempting to cover it in 4 days. This means covering something close to a marathon each day. To help me do this I have put together a team of close friends. They will be joining me for either all (Graham & Andy) or part (Phil and Pete) of the walk. 

Together we are raising money for The National Eczema Society and Parkinsons UK. Here's why... 

I was diagnosed with atopic eczema aged just 3 months and I still struggle with the disease to this day. With the help of my parents, my family, close friends, some incredible doctors and some equally astounding nurses, my skin is in a far better condition that it ever was as a child. In July of 2017 my wife and I welcomed our second child into the world. Sadly he too has been suffering with eczema. 

The work that the National Eczema Society do is vitally important in the development of new treatments, drugs and support for sufferers of this condition. I am passionate to find something that not only helps my life but helps the generations to come (including my son). 

In September 2017 my Mum was diagnosed with Parkinson's. Prior to the diagnosis as a family we had seen her deteriorating. She was walking much slower than normal, she dragged her feet, her right arm developed a tremor, her speech was much quieter and she wasn't herself. 

My sister got married in early September and while helping to setup the day before Mum tripped on a kerb and broke her arm. Having recognised she wasn’t herself, Mum had been having various tests. A cardiologist she’d been sent to contacted the GP to say he thought Mum should be referred to a neurologist because he thought she had Parkinson’s disease. It is very likely that not picking her feet up (due to Parkinson's) caused her to trip and fall. 

Since then she has been given a medication, seen a Parkinsons nurse and a physiotherapist. This has meant a significant improvement and she is now standing much taller (quite a significant given how 'tall' she is), she is speaking more freely, she is interacting with all her grandchildren with a vibrancy that was missing. 

The work that Parkinsons UK do is vital for people with this disease. They provide invaluable support and research that could not be possible without the support of donors. 

I would be so grateful if you would like to sponsor my team and I as we embark on this challenge and help raise some money for some fabulous charities. 

Don’t forget to gift aid your donation so we can get even more from the Taxman."

Last, but very much not least, a great debt of thanks to everyone who has supported us.  Those of you donating your hard-earned cash to our two fantastic causes, thank you.  To our wives and families who we've abandoned to fulfil our own personal challenge, you're tired too from holding the fort while we've been gone, thank you.  Finally, particular thanks to Linda and Tim for the logistical support, you were a part of the team as well and we wouldn't have completed the journey without you.

Kids Sponsored Walk with Dads

On Saturday 11th November, my 3 year old is taking on a 3 mile sponsored walk.  We're going from Bushy Leaze woods in the next village of Beech to the Bushy Leaze children's centre in Alton.  Basically, a walk across the town in which we live.  It doesn't sound far but it's a long way for little legs with some steep climbs over rough terrain too.

The idea is to raise funds for the centre and in particular to continue running the dad's group.  The group used to get government funding through the sure start scheme but all this funding was cut last year along with a lot of other funding the centre was able to get.  We're going to our bit to make sure the group can continue to run for future generations.  One of our friends has helped set the centre up as a charity so they can continue as much of their outreach work and things like the breast feeding clinics can continue to run too.

You can read a little more and sponsor us at the following web page https://mydonate.bt.com/events/walkwithdad/450291

Please feel free to share the story and donation link as you see fit.

Thanks!

Moving to giffgaff

Much like moving bank account, it's not very often I move mobile network.  I tend to favour staying with the same provider unless they provide me with a good reason to leave.  My current network, TalkMobile, have just done so by completely shutting down their PAYG service and so are only able to offer me a contract (that I don't want) or a rubbish deal to move to Vodafone (they're a Vodafone MVNO).

I thought I'd write a similar post about my experience moving to the giffgaff network today to the one I wrote about Moving to TalkMobile back in 2012.  You'll see from that link that joining TalkMobile was extremely painful.  However, I'm happy to report I found the network very solid and reliable with what I can only presume is good coverage (there's always black spots, right?) on the Vodafone network.  Getting them to do anything was always painful as there's little option for self-service so it's more or less always a call to their support staff.  The staff are very polite and extremely helpful but the processes and presumably the systems they have to use seem somewhat antiquated today.

So in comparison to my previous blog post about moving to TalkMobile, moving to giffgaff went a bit like this:

Day 1 (yesterday)

1. Register a giffgaff SIM a friend gave me and create a new giffgaff account all in one simple guided wizard on the giffgaff web site
2. Request a PAC from TalkMobile
3. Go through the number transfer process via another simple wizard on the giffgaff web site

Day 2 (today)

1. Observe a short outage in mobile service as my number was transferred just after lunch
2. Happy customer

So now I'm looking forward to years of good service from giffgaff until they provide me with a good reason to leave some time in the future.

By the way, if you want to grab a giffgaff SIM then feel free to register via my referral link as we'll both get a free £5 credit if you do.

New Thinkpad P50

It's been a while, but true to our 4 year hardware refresh cycle, I've just received my latest laptop - a Lenovo P50.  I've been installing it with Fedora 25 since Friday and configuring and copying data over this weekend ready to swap laptops first thing this week.  I'm looking forward to trying out the new machine although I'm not quite sure why as the specs are barely different from the machine I was given 4 years ago.  It's certainly the best indication yet I've personally experienced of Moore's Law coming to a complete halt as well as many of the other specifications not improving a huge amount either.  The two most noticeable differences are likely to be the more powerful graphics chip and the inclusion of an SSD.  That said, there is twice as much RAM in this machine and I had upgraded my previous machine with an SSD as well so that particular upgrade isn't going to be noticeable for me at least.

My previous machine was a W530 and the one I had before that was a T61p (with a T41p before that) and so I'm well used to this particular line of Thinkpad laptops.

Here's the specifications of the machine I've got, as ever there are variants of the P50 so if you have one or are thinking of getting one the specifications could be a little different but will be broadly similar to this:

• Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6820HQ CPU @ 2.70GHz (5433.79 bogomips in Linux)
• 32GB DDR4 2133MHz
• Samsung MZNLN512 (PM871) 512GB SSD
• 15.6" 1920 x 1080 IPS (non-touch)
• 6 Cell Battery
• Wireless A/C
• NVIDIA Quadro M1000M 4 GB
• Front Facing Web Cam, Mini Display Port, HDMI Out, Headphone, 4x USB3, Smart Card Reader, GBit Ethernet, Thunderbold, Fingerprint Reader

So looking at those and comparing in more detail to what I had before it seems my gut feeling was pretty good.  The CPU benchmarks are more-or-less exactly the same and certainly within tolerances of error as well as other performance increases that will effect the benchmarks such as the memory clock speed.  Here's the comparison between the W530 CPU and the P50 CPU:

The same can't be said of the GPU benchmarks though so it looks like GPUs are continuing to gain in power even when CPU speed increases have run out of steam:

The other noticeable difference I hadn't spotted before is the battery size.  That's very apparent when you pick the machine up as it's actually a little bit thinner (probably also due to the lack of DVD/combo drive) as well as not as deep i.e. it doesn't have the big battery sticking out of the back that has been common place on this line of Thinkpad machines over the past decade or so.  I'm guessing (without having done any research on the matter) that this is probably due to improvements in battery technology so I'd think Lenovo have probably moved over to Li-ion or Li-po batteries.

In terms of running and using the machine, it does seem very nice so far as one might expect.  It's running Fedora 25 very nicely and hasn't caused me any issues at all during setup.  I'm not really expecting any either as most if not all of the hardware seems pretty well support by Linux these days.  I think, in fact, Lenovo even offer to supply this machine pre-installed with Linux if you want.  That said, there looks to be one possible sticking point in terms of hardware support at the moment but this is very minor.  That is, the build-in fingerprint reader doesn't seem to have a driver available on Linux yet.  I did some very brief research into this yesterday and it's not clear why vendor support is lacking for the device at the moment although I did find at least one effort that has gone a fairly long way towards reverse engineering it and starting to write a driver so I would guess within the next year we'll see some sort of support for the fingerprint reader too.

All in all then it's a good machine even though it's not a huge upgrade over my 4 year old laptop!

Becomming a Fedora Package Maintainer

Those of you that know me well will know I like Linux.  Don't get me wrong, there's a lot wrong with it and the community can be a pretty harsh place where more or less everyone has an opinion they think is the right one.  I don't get a lot of chance to contribute for various reasons but earlier this year I was (finally) accepted to be a package maintainer for the Fedora project.

Since I like Linux I do tend to use it on the desktop both at home and at work.  I do more or less everything with Linux and Open Source software including photo editing with GIMP.  It bugged me that Fedora ship a library called lensfun which is a library of lens correction data but the only piece of software using it within Fedora was Digikam.  Preferring GIMP I decided to set about packaging and supporting gimp-lensfun for Fedora.

Becoming a Fedora Package Maintainer is a well documented process as there are joining instructions and package review guidelines for the packaging guidelines.  Whilst well documented, there's a heck of a lot of stuff you have to read through and comply with before you can submit your first package review request.  This is further complicated by not yet having any reputation within the Fedora community and so you have to build this up in other ways before your package will be recognised and one of the senior community members agrees to sponsor you as a package maintainer.

I eventually raised my first package review request for gimp-lensfun in April 2013.  Over a period of a few weeks people throw rocks at what you've done according to the various guidelines that you either didn't see or forgot about.  This is actually really good and helpful as it ensures quality and consistency between all the new packages being accepted into Fedora.

What I wasn't prepared for was the length of the wait.  I know this isn't an earth shattering change to Fedora but it took me over 2 years to get noticed enough for my package to be accepted and for me to be sponsored as a Fedora packager.  I think I'd probably still be waiting now but I bugged a few people on IRC to point out my review request had been sitting there for so long.

Finally! My first package was released into the wild for Fedora 21 and 22 and I've been given the chance to give just a little back to the community.

Compiling the 8192eu driver for the Raspberry Pi

I recently had the need to Wi-Fi enable a Raspberry Pi and so bought a D-Link DWA-131 Wireless USB Adapter.  I knew from something I'd read that it was a bit of a gamble in terms of whether it would be supported by the Pi under Raspian.  It turns out there are currently 3 revs of this adapter with different chipsets in each.  The one I got was the latest E1 version identified with the USB Device ID 2001:3319 that requires the realtek 8192eu driver.

Here's how to get it working under the September 2015 Raspian Jessie running Kernel 4.1.7+ for which I found some similar instructions a helpful starter:

1.  Get up to date and ready for compilation

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install build-essential git


2. Grab the Driver Source

git clone https://github.com/romcyncynatus/rtl8192eu.git

or from

http://support.dlink.com.au/download/download.aspx?product=DWA-131


3. Patch the driver source for Kernel 4.x

cd rtl8192eu
Apply the following patch to rtw_android.c

diff --git a/os_dep/linux/rtw_android.c b/os_dep/linux/rtw_android.c
index 40ddf07..f7c496e 100755
--- a/os_dep/linux/rtw_android.c
+++ b/os_dep/linux/rtw_android.c
@@ -342,7 +342,11 @@ int rtw_android_cmdstr_to_num(char *cmdstr)
 {
        int cmd_num;
        for(cmd_num=0 ; cmd_num<ANDROID_WIFI_CMD_MAX; cmd_num++)
+#if (LINUX_VERSION_CODE >= KERNEL_VERSION(4,0,0))
+               if(0 == strncasecmp(cmdstr , android_wifi_cmd_str[cmd_num], strlen(android_wifi_cmd_str[cmd_num])) )
+#else
                if(0 == strnicmp(cmdstr , android_wifi_cmd_str[cmd_num], strlen(android_wifi_cmd_str[cmd_num])) )
+#endif
                        break;

        return cmd_num;


4. Grab the rpi-source tool (to download the Pi kernel source)

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/notro/rpi-source/master/rpi-source 
chmod +x rpi-source
sudo mv rpi-source   /usr/bin/
sudo rpi-source -q --tag-update


5. Install the Pi kernel

sudo rpi-source --skip-gcc


6. Build and install the driver

make ARCH=arm
sudo make ARCH=arm install
sudo bash -c 'echo "options 8192eu rtw_power_mgnt=0 rtw_enusbss=0" > /etc/modprobe.d/8192eu.conf'
modprobe 8192eu