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Packing up the car on a cold frosty morning I wondered “what am I thinking“. Actually… that’s much like most early start dive trips except this morning I was shivering a little I was heading down to Vobster Quay in Somerset to meet several other equally foolish people for an interesting new event organised between members of Yorkshire Divers (YD).

The drive down from Cardiff was interesting due to the amount of fog and I had to crawl the car through Bristol. Upon reaching the dive site we saw that the water was in the same state as many people from around the country had been the previous night…. steaming

So why had a small hardy bunch gathered in the middle of Somerset on a freezing December morning? Well its the age old story of getting dressed up as father christmas and jumping into cold water to raise money for charity. Every year members of YD work hard and selflessly to raise money for various charities and this year it was the turn of the RNLI, appreciated by many divers in the UK.

During the dive the Santas were joined by a christmas fairy, a snowman, and a pagan viking (celebrating the Winter Solstice). It doesn’t exactly sound like the most seraphic underwater scene but it was the good kind of strange being surrounded by such a group of people underwater. One of the nice things is that the group was diving everything from single tanks to twinsets and rebreathers. We all came from different diving backgrounds PADI, BSAC, TDI, IANTD, GUE but we were all there to have a bit of winter diving fun as one big underwater group

A chilly first dive of around 45 minutes took us over to the rear end of an aeroplane fusilage where everyone posted for festive underwater christmas photos. Floating inside an aeroplane fusilage, underwater, hearing two guys singing “We’re walking in the air” has to count as one of the most surreal experiences of my life! Maybe narcosis does take significant effect at less than 30 metres as I spent most of the dive smiling or laughing mask filling with water all the time

We finished on a boat wreck which had been festively decorated by staff at Vobster Quay. Those who turned up to keep watch on the surface later told the group how people had exited the water looking confused asking “Umm did anyone else see all the father christmas’ underwater?”.

On surfacing all involved took readily to a nice hot cup of tea, some some mince pies, and pulling christmas crackers. Those celebrating the winter solstice were soon offering people a small cup of meade to warm the soul after a cold dive, another welcome addition to the day.

Later we were joined by an enthusitastic young journalist who wanted to come along for a dive to experience the group of Santas. “Crazy“ I thought, but we had a spare Santa outfit, so as soon as we could feel our extremities then once again it was time to jump in. We obtained some interesting video footage for the BBC which included several santas disappearing into in long dark tunnel and some very festive rebreather divers.

Upon exiting the water maybe a little of the enthusiasm was lost but there were definate smiles from our new friend. Everybody should dive with a group of Santas!

Overall the whole group had a fun enjoyable day despite the temperatures, and we certainly managed to spread a little of that Christmas magic for everyone at the site that day. I’d like to thank Tim from Vobster Quay for the use of their facilities and donating £5 for every scuba diving Santa, Gareth Lock from “Images of Life” for his excellent underwater photography skills, everyone who took part today, and also everyone that has donated money for the event. Donations can be collected until the mid-Feburary 2008 via our JustGiving page: http://www.justgiving.com/ScubaSantas/.

See you next year!

Lloyd Watkin

See more pictures here: Scuba Santas 2007

I’d been looking forward to this race for a good couple of months! The Christmas Pudding challenge promised a big sand dune and a spell of stream running. I was not disappointed. My first race at Merthyr Mawr, before this race I didn’t even know that the highest sand dune in Europe was almost in my back yard. After parking the car a couple of miles away and running up to the start I saw the monster in front of me *gulp* much bigger than I was expecting.

 Here’s a picture of the sand dune from near the top as you can see its a big one at about 300ft! The way up was tough and with lots of people I couldn’t go any faster even if I’d wanted to. Anyway there was a bit of congestion at the top of the dune so there was a few minutes of waiting around (good time for everyone to catch their breath). The next thing I know I’m plummeting straight down the other side at full speed, half worried I’m going to bowl over at any moment, but my its good fun

From there we head out across a flat wind swept area before what I heard to refer as the ‘orrible hill, and it was just that. A long steep hill up to the golf course (at least it wasn’t covered in sand too). So did the usual trick, drop the arms, reduce the stride length and switch into “Disney’s Little Engine that Could” mode….

“I know I can, I’m sure I can, I know I can, I’m sure I can”

…which slowly became, “I’m not sure I can, I know my legs hurt” Slowly but surely I got to the top of the hill and had some nice views down to the sea.

I figured the mid-point couldn’t be far away at this time and upon approaching not only were we offered water but mulled wine and mince pies. Now being the highly professional athlete I am of course I opted for the mulled wine, vitamins, water, warmth it all made sense…..surely? A good cup of hot mulled wine it was and with the long slow decent I started flying along - alcohol fueled possibly

Around back to the dunes which again made the running a little tough and in the back of my mind the stream was coming. Next thing I know we’re running through a shallow bit of water, some tried to skirt around the outside but for a laugh I headed through the middle Got out of that one when a marshall mentioned there was another couple to go. Lets say the third one was pretty deep and cold, almost got up to places I don’t wish to have frozen off, but fortunately the crowd was spared me shreaking like a girl had that happened!

Post race I collected my soup and bread roll and Christmas Pudding and ran back to a warm car for the drive home accompanied by some loud JayZ courtesy of Radio 1.

 This was to be a quick 5km race around Bute Park in Cardiff, however the weather over the past week meant that a last minute change of course was required reducing the course length to around 3km (best guess!). The announcement system was terrible (being polite) so I don’t think many people actually had much of an idea what was going on.

The race went ok, nothing much to report except although things in the gym has been going well it doesn’t make up for a lack of running in the outdoors! I have the Merthyr Mawr Christmas pudding next weekend which I’m really looking forward to although the weather has prevented much running outside. This will need to fixed over the next week

Cardiff Santa Dash 2007 Photos

Advanced Diver Training was a quick inexpensive website set up for a scuba diving instructor. The budget was small but this does not mean that the quality of the end product had to be low. The site was created, edited, and up and running within 3 days at a small cost. We hope you agree that the site has a professional look and the site owner is able to update and edit the site without further intevention of a website designer. This website was developed with the open source software wordpress.

Advanced Diver Training - PADI/IANTD training in nitrox and trimix

Keyfinder required a new online store for their business. Open source software solutions wouldn’t have provided the features that they required, therefore Evilprofessor Designs stepped in and created them a fully custom webstore with full PayPal IPN integration. Keyfinder staff can fully customise the website through an admin interface which includes updating orders and registations, editing page text, and add/edit/update product listings.

Keyfinder - Security and peace of mind for your keys…

What am I doing? I’ve been in bed all week with a bad cold, I’ve managed one run since the Cardiff Half where I pulled my left calf, and now I’m stood out in the freezing driving rain about to run another one!!! Standing at the start line, soaked to the bones already, the hooter goes…. here we go again Continue Reading »

I’ve come up with a problem recently returning data via an XML feed using AJAX. In my case I was returning a list of images each having several links to perform various tasks (e.g. set as main image, add as thumbnail, add full image, etc).

The first load would go through fine and all images and their links would appear as I’d expect. There was also no problems in IE7, Safari (on Windows), or Opera 9+. When it came to Firefox 2 the image list would be cut short! Editing the javascript it basically seems that the returned data would be cut off at 4096 characters.

It took a while to track down the result. I thought initially this might of been a javascript maximum string length problem, but that other browsers just let the issue slip. Not that either. Anyway it turns out that text nodes are split at 4096 characters.

It’s quite simple to fix you simply need to normalise() your returned data in your AJAX script. Simply add the second line once you’ve gathered your XML data:

xmlResponse = xmlHttp.responseXML;
xmlResponse.normalize();

This will solve the 4096 character limit when using Firefox 2 or any other browser I haven’t checked that doesn’t normalise the data automatically.

A quick and easy way to protect yourself from mySQL injection attacks in PHP is to use…

$sql = "insert into table set ";
 foreach ($_POST as $key => $data)
 {
     $sql .= $key." = '".strip_tags(htmlentities(addslashes($data)))."',";
 }
 $sql .= mysql_query(rtrim($sql,',').";") or die(mysql_error());

What this script does is to take your $_POST data and remove anything malicious from it. Looping over the $_POST data we build up an SQL statement. At the end then we simply execute using with mysql_query.

NOTE: This does not validate your data, it just helps prevent malicious attacks.

Another version of this that I use to to grab all my form information into variables to to place the following code within the foreach loop instead…

eval("$".$key." = '".strip_tags(htmlentities(addslashes($data)))."';");

This makes up a list of variables following your forms field names and strips malicious code from them. This method then allows you to do some form validation before inserting data into your tables

So today was it, my first half marathon. Training had gone fairly well, I’d managed to do my over the mountain half training several times my best time on that being 1 hour 57 mins roughly. A few days of tapering, which generally meant I felt rubbish and there I was standing on the start line at 8:30am. I finished in 1 hour 48 mins 44 seconds. Continue Reading »

Dive Signs required a low cost solution due to being a start up company. Dive Signs are a family run business based in Essex they sell highly reflective vinyl stickers for the scuba diving industry. The solution for Dive Signs was a customised install of Zen Cart, the entire site took less than one week to get up and running and they are already expanding their online catalogue.

Divesigns.com - Highly reflective vinyl signs for scuba diving