Archive for the 'biking' Category

My New Toy (and a Bug Fix)

Published
by
barneyb
on July 25, 2007
in biking
. 9 Comments

As if I were lacking on the toy front, last night I picked up a Garmin Edge 305 bicycle computer. I'd been looking for a GPS data logger for a while, and this one is pretty much exactly what I'm looking for. In addition to the time/lat/long/elevation track points, it also has a heart rate monitor and a cadence/wheelspeed sensor which is also correlated to the track points. This yields more data than you can shake a stick at.

I haven't yet figured out exactly how I want to approach the problem of extracting, storing, and visualizing all this data, but I've got some ideas. The data is a superset of what I already track with my bike dashboard (by design), so I'll continue to use that as a base, just with the ability to drill down into more detail per ride. Wheeeee!

I also fixed a rounding error in one of the dashboard's view definitions that artificially inflated mileage (and therefore average speed) throughout the app.  I'd misaligned my CAST AS DECIMAL and ROUND calls, and ended up rounding at the wrong spot.  The raw data was uncompromised, only the view's computations based on it were affected.

Bicycle Dashboard Again

Published
by
barneyb
on July 17, 2007
in biking and flex
. 0 Comments

Another relatively minor change: the charts now use a DateTimeAxis instead of a category axis.  This way temporal spacing is preserved, rather than just ordering, and the axis isn't as cluttered, because it can drop labels without affecting the display semantics.

My New New Bike

Published
by
barneyb
on July 16, 2007
in biking and personal
. 5 Comments

This weekend I picked up my new new bike, a Fuji Cross Comp.  The other bike just wasn't stiff enough.  To be fair, it was a huge frame and designed for comfort not rigidity.  This one, however, is like a friggin' rock.  I can't bend it at all, no matter how hard I crank on it, let alone enough to interfere with the derailleur.  It's also got better components, bigger wheels, a bit different gearing (2×10 rather than 3×8), and it a kg or so lighter.  It's a cyclocross bike, so it's got small gears and quasi-knobbies on it at the moment.  Should have slicks and bigger rings this week sometime, at which time it's going to fly.

And in case it wasn't obvious, I love riding.  ;)  I haven't done anything seriously active for the past 7 years (I quit swimming in January 2000), and I didn't realize how much I'd missed it.  Riding's nice, because you get fairly constant scenery changes (unlike the bottom of a pool), dynamic exertion from hills and such, and it's just so much fun work your way up a big hill and get to scream down the other side.

More Bicycle Dashboard Updates

Published
by
barneyb
on July 13, 2007
in biking and flex
. 0 Comments

I just pushed a couple usability tweaks to the bicycle dashboard app.  First, the profile you're viewing is now persisted in a cookie, as well as session, when you return to the app, you'll still be viewing the same thing, even if your session expired.  Before you'd always revert back to me, and while I'm ridiculously good looking, there isn't a picture of me in the app, so all you get to see is my boring numbers.

Second, I resorted the ride listing so that by default the most recent ride is at the top.  That's what I'd intended from the beginning, but it didn't work, and I hadn't taken the time to figure out why until now.  Turns out that my reference maintenance code reorders stuff when new data is pulled in and it does the state substitution on existing entities.  It uses a couple Dictionary objects as lookups for the substitutions, and they don't maintain insertion ordering (and why should they?), and I didn't consider the ramifications.  But that's fixed now, and also means that the bike selector when adding a new ride will work "correctly" in that it'll automatically select the bike you've ridden most recently, rather than the one your rode first.

More Bicycle Dashboard Updates

Published
by
barneyb
on July 7, 2007
in biking
. 2 Comments

I just pushed some new updates to the bicycle dashboard, including multiuser support and the ability to store a map URL for routes.  Currently the multiuser support is limited to just having an account, and if it's public, for other people to view your ride information.  I'm planning to add groups of some sort to allow multiuser reporting, for riding clubs or the like.  I'm still trying to figure out the best way to deal with a couple "weirdnesses" that present themselves, but all the data will continue to be per-rider, so it'll be accessible through whatever group structure I end up implementing.

The route maps stuff is nothing more than  URL field that causes rendering of a 'view' link that loads the URL in a new window.  As such, you can use whatever you want for your maps.  Now that Google Maps has custom rerouting, that's pretty hard to beat for ease of use.  But you can use whatever you want as long as it lives at a public URL.

Bicycle Dashboard Update

Published
by
barneyb
on July 3, 2007
in biking and flex
. 1 Comment

I made some mods to my bicycle reporting dashboard last night and just pushed them live.  Highlights include being able to break down the charts by bike, route, or day of week, legends to support showing multiple series, control over the chart baseline (zero or autodetect), and formatting of the "elapsed time" axis labels.

Now that that's working right, multiuser is next on the list, and I'll probably throw a "route link" field in there as well so you can link to a map of your route if you have one.

Fun with Flash on Linux

Published
by
barneyb
on July 2, 2007
in biking, flex and personal
. 6 Comments

So I got home this evening and wanted to record my commute with my new logger app, and guess what, it crashes Firefox. Roughly one-in-four loads of the app are successful, other attempts cause a segfault as the player tries to load the SWF. It seems to work better in SeaMonkey, but still not perfect. I know Linux is the "we don't really care" platform for Adobe (and Macromedia before), but I'd almost prefer no player at all to a crashy one. Anyone have any hints?

Bicycle Goodies (i.e. Info Porn)

Published
by
barneyb
on July 2, 2007
in biking, flex and personal
. 8 Comments

While on my seemingly endless airplane rides, I finished up a first draft of my bicycle reporting app, and made it available at the seemingly random address of http://www.barneyb.com/bicycle/.  ; )  Yes, it's Flex, and yes, I chose that platform of my own volition.  It's still a little rough around the edges, but it's all functional, and I used it to record this morning's ride.  Much better than using the command line MySQL client.  Of primary interest is the graphs of the stats.  I haven't gotten very far into them yet (was having some issues - surprise - getting the charts to work right for the more complex cases), but they're there, and the average speed one has a positive slope (yah me!).

There's a couple "weird" characteristics to the UI, but they have sound backing.  First, the entire UI is modal-free excepting the login form.  I didn't want to be stuck editing something and realize that I hadn't created some related entity and have to cancel out to create it.  I also wanted to be able to view the listings while adding/editing entities, so all the forms show up in tabs along with the listings so you can easily switch back and forth.

Second, the whole UI is publicly available.  I didn't want to build a separate admin area, so the editing UI doubles as the detail view UI.  The "Save" buttons are disabled unless you're logged in, and that's backed up on the server-side, of course.

Last, while not easily apparent, is the security of the authentication without using SSL.  Part of the AS3 Core Lib is MD5 hashing capabilities, so when the password is entered client-side, it gets hashed before sending to the server.  This provided a nice solution to password transmission that didn't require an outward facing self-signed SSL certificate (which isn't very friendly) but also doesn't compromise passwords.

Once I get stuff a little cleaner, I'll post source.  I'm also thinking of making it multi-user, but there are some weird issues (like handling public browsing) that would need to be dealt with.  Time will tell what becomes of it.

I also added contextual ride history to the single-entry pages on my blog.  I'd added it to the listing pages a while ago, but realized that a large percentage of my audience reads my blog via the XML feeds, so they never see the listing pages.  So rides within 24 hours of a given entry will now show up on the single-entry pages.

My New Bike

Published
by
barneyb
on June 22, 2007
in biking and personal
. 4 Comments

Got my new bike yesterday and rode it to work this morning.  Whee!  Definitely needs some tuning (seat height, handlebar placement, dérailleur tension, etc.), but it's quite nice.  Integrated shifting alone is huge.  I'll get a pic some time and post it, but for now, it's all for me.  ;)

Riding My Bike

Published
by
barneyb
on June 13, 2007
in biking and personal
. 4 Comments

No, not my motorcycle, an actual bicycle. With the move last month, I'm now just shy of 10 miles from the office, which is a far more reasonable bicycle commute than the 20+ I was before. Not to say that 20 miles is an incredibly long ride, but more than I'd want to do for a one-way commute. 10 is a lot more reasonable.

My dad graciously donated his old touring bike to the cause, and boy and I out of shape. I've never been a particularly strong person, but I've always been able to exert to my limits and sustain it. Not anymore. Covering the 10 miles is no big deal, but the number of times I have to remind myself to take it easy is annoying. But that'll come down as I get back into it. Fortunately it's cooled down for the past couple weeks after. We'll see how it goes when it gets hot again.

So far, no real muscle aches or anything, which is nice. Definitely can tell I've been working, but I'm still able to bound up the stairs without issue. Sitting at my desk all day has led to some stiffness, but it's not too bad. Need to start doing a better job of stretching and such after riding to help the muscles "clean up".

Most exciting news of all is that I'm getting a new bike next week. Dad's is a solid bike, but after riding it a while, I wanted to change a few things to suit me better. After talking to the guy at the bike shop, it wasn't going to be significantly more to just get a new one compared with upgrading. And while newer isn't always better, getting a fresh set of everything will certainly reduce the amount of maintenance and upkeep required for a while.

With me an my penchant for info porn, I've been logging all kinds of relevant data about rides. Expect to see pretty visual displays of that data with the next "whenever I feel like it" or so. Might even have to break out CFCHART with the public consumption requirement, rather than my usual SVG charts.