Final ride in Normandy, France!

Yes, all good things must come to an end. Soon to be back to flat cycling in the Netherlands, but first my last ride.

I cycled from Isigny-Sur-Mer, through Grandcamp-Maisy along the beach, climbed out of that village past Pointe du Hoc, taking a big climb from the US Cemetery (needed my second gear to get up the last bit, was very steep), down along Omaha beach and climbing up past the museum to finish at Port-en-Bassin.

Total ride was 40 km and we ate a huge seafood dinner with the whole family (11 oyster starter, can you imagine?) before hanging the bike on the car to drive home.

Utah beach ride!

Today I toured up north, through Carentan, Dead Man's Corner, and up to Utah Beach. Lots of great climbing on the way and speeds of 36-38 km/hour on the long stretches of road for a total of 56km's. Legs seem to be adjusting to the climbing, not tired after the ride at all.

Cycling to Omaha Beach!

My second ride in France. I covered 57 km from our house, via La Cambe to view the German cemetery (slide show). It has over 21300 German soldiers, many unknown.

From there I went on through the country side down towards the coast through one lane villages like Asnieres where I stumbled across a memorial in a field from a P40 crash site from the D-Day invasion.

I went down along Omaha Beach for another look at the memorial site:

From there it was up a steep climb at Verville-Sur-Mer, down along the coast at Grandcamp-Maisy and home to Isigny-Sur-Mer.

Viewing the Utah beach landing routes in Normandy, France

We toured through the northern part of Normandy today. From Isigny-Sur-Mer we headed through Carentan where some of the heaviest fighting went on. We stopped at Dead Man's Corner and spent some time in Sainte-Mere-Englise:



We ended at the famous WWII landing site of Utah Beach. A few photo's give you an impression:


Here is a nice video view of what you see when just exiting the waters onto the beach:

Omaha beach landing birds-eye-view

Toured the famous WWII D-Day landing site of Omaha Beach. Here is a slide show and a video impression of the view the soldiers had upon reaching dry beach:



After taking a look around, we happened upon a flag raising with the Mayor and an Omaha veteran with a group of US school children, very moving.

First ride in France!

My first ride through France is in Normandy on Fathers Day. I took a short exploration ride up to Pointe du Hoc and back to Isigny-Sur-Mer, getting caught in the rain on the way home. Welcome to the quickly changing weather in Normandy! Total ride was 34 km's and I walked around a bit at the battle site.

AbTLinux - caching package installs now!

Having not put time and/or energy into my AbTLinux project lately I decided to push for at implementing one of the failing unit tests (only 27 to go!).

I choose caching a package, which is in the AbTLogManager and runs now after a successful package installation. You can see the coding progress on our Trac (if you get some Trac error message, just hit refresh until it goes away).

Only 26 failing unit tests to go!

Mocking up packages in AbTLinux with FlexMock

I was looking for a solution to mocking up objects for my Ruby project Unit Tests and came across the FlexMock project.

I have been looking for something simple that would allow objects, in my case software packages, to be easily tested without all the overhead of actually running through downloads, configuring, building and installing a real package. The obvious solution is to mock up the package object and test that. FlexMock provides a rather extensive tool set for mocking up my package objects.

As of yet I have not exactly decided where and how to integrate this, but I will. For now I have included the library into the code base and will get back to this soon.