Errors with this blog

I have been told that sometimes when closing my blog people receive javascript errors. I am investigating this issue and have removed some widgets that have been slowing the blog down anyway. Please let me know if you experience any problems

Datamining my own site for feedback

One of the things I do is see what kinds of statistics I get this blog. I see what search strings people use to find it, how many page loads I get, what promotion methods work, etc. One nice thing about this is that my traffic is steadily increasing. More and more users find my site every week. Another result is that my blog is most definitely a bike blog with a side of politics rather than the other way around. Almost all of my hits come from people interested in cyclists, though there are a number of political readers.

Recumbent cyclists are a core readership group for me. I see lots of raptobike, lowracer and velomobile hits on my site. One interesting thing I noticed is that I had a number of people hit my site where were searching for "Raptobike Weight". That makes sense but it floated near the top of my statistics yesterday so I wanted to answer it directly.

What does a Raptobike weigh?

• Stock a raptobike weighs about 29.5 lbs or 13.4 kg.
  Weight savings can easily be found in a carbon seat, a lighter set of wheels, and lighter tires.


• My Raptobike hasn't yet been built up as it is in the process of shipping but I choose all of the above areas to focus on as well as brakes, chainrings, pedals, and the chain. I will be weighing it when the build is complete. I did add weight by choosing a Rohloff hub but I expect to come in around 26-27 lbs (12 kg)

Other interests I see seem to be bicycle hacks and homebuilt accessories. As I do more in this area I will document each step and the cost of my projects. I will also document the trip I make to the OHPV Human Powered Challenge in May. That should have a lot of velomobile, lowracer and homebuilts. There will be a lot of electric powered bikes and vehicles there as well so I should have a lot of material to write about in May.

I will continue to cover politics since it is fun and interesting as well. If there are any topics you want to see me cover, let me know. I may listen.

Stupid Unix tricks that save me

I multitask a lot during my day, just the nature of having both development responsibilities and support responsibilities. One of the tricks I use a lot is using various shell scripting tricks interactively. For instance.

sleep 600; /home/duncanw/workspace/qavod3/qavod-ccor-m.sh

That silly line will sleep for 5 minutes then run my qavod-ccor-m.sh script. So I can restart a server by hand, then run the above command. It will wait 5 minutes for the startup to complete and then execute my little script. So I don't have to pay attention, and I don't get impatient about the 5 minute wait.

I also execute a lot of interactive for loops in bash. For instance

for site in `cat /tmp/x`
do
ssh $site
done

When I need to check some arbitrary list of servers for some condition, I can just type that in above interactively and voila, I won't loose track of where I am. I will check all the servers in the list and the shell keeps track for me.

I know this isn't rocket science but this type of off the cuff interactive shell scripting helps me a ton. I do similar tricks with python interactive shells, mostly to do math and convert epoch timestamps into wall clock times.

Lucy on Flickr

IMG_1373, originally uploaded by Watson House.

Lately I have been trying to decide which photo site I prefer, Flickr or Picasa. Picasa has nicer photo editing and makes it easy to get the pictures off of my camera, flickr has better web features. I really like the various flickr features.
1- The photostream concept is great.
2- Moxi integration, so my DVR can be my slideshow.
3- Great sharing via groups and adding to other photostreams.
4- Nice support for embedding and blogging.

I think I will give Flickr a try for the next month or so to see how I like using it.

Obamicon.me

There is this very cool site called Obamicon.me that allows you to create, rank and save various Obamicons. Quite a bit of fun, and I could waste so much time on this. But I did create one of me on my recumbent. My wife Kristin took the original picture.

Typealyzer

I keep playing around with Typealyzer. It is a site that will analyze web pages and blogs for you to try to determine what personality traits were dominant during the writing of said blog. It has some nice tools and the results are supposed to correspond to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator temperament test, which is sometimes used by various employers.

It is a fun toy which fascinates me for some reason.

My results vary depending on what I post but it tends to show this:
ISTP - The Mechanics
The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.

The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.

The Joy of Python

I am a big python geek, so this xkcd is a definite favorite.

coding project

I have a Garmin Edge 305, which is a great tool. I love it. It has excellent reception and I have yet to have an issue with losing signal in 2 weeks of every day usage. Considering that with my old GPS I ran into signal issues on every ride, this is a major improvement.

The garmin is also great for generating data on each ride for training purposes. I push my data from my garmin into Motionbased.com and the garmin SW every day. Great stuff but I want more reports, I want to see my miles grow over time, I want to see how my heartrate averages are doing, etc. I also want to link into bikejournal without having to do everything by hand.

So I am considering using published API's and tools to access the garmin directly and generate my own reports. I can also then make a one button push to publish to bikejournal which would be very nice for me.

Tools to look at for this:

• Pygarmin - Python garmin library for accessing all sorts of garmin GPSs
• This blog post talks about linux and the garmin edge.
• GPSBabel is a great site for linux and GPSs

I will probably use a local DB to store the data and a python/TK front end. I want linux support to be a big part of this as I use linux at work and home though I still have a Windows PC around.