In the blog article named “25 amazing people celebrated by Google“, you will see some people celebrated that way by Google. All are great, but I do really like the following :

My Training Center release is the 2.0.3 for Mac OS X, the TCX file is available through the “export” function of the file menu, it generates an XML file with all your activities, training and routes.

Download here : convert-tcx-tokml.pl

Usage:

1. first export the database from the Training Center to a TCX file (here 20081221.tcx)
2. ./convert-tcx-tokml.pl -f 20081221.tcx

   Available laps (using -l to specify one)
   
   [...]
   2008-11-29T13:10:39Z    Biking    3255s  17449m
   2008-12-16T12:13:44Z    Biking    1984s  34914m
   2008-12-21T13:01:04Z    Biking    9411s  18254m

3. On the activity list find the one you want to convert and use the first field in the -l option:
   ./convert-tcx-tokml.pl -f 20081221.tcx -l 2008-11-29T13:10:39Z > my_activity.kml
4. The generated KML file could directly be loaded in GoogleEarth
5. You can customize the two XML fields with a text editor in the KML file in order to get a better presentation in Google Earth
6. A compressed KMZ version could be obtained with the zip command, useful for sharing by email :
   zip a my_activity.kmz my_activity.kml

It has been a long time without writing here, but I have been terribly busy with our new e-commerce solution (cf bikeo.fr).

This is my very first yahoo widget, so please be gentle if you find a bug and let me know in order to ease correction.

Let me know if you find it useful (or not).

Since we don’t have a lot of snow down in Lyon, France, I promise to try once relocated in Canada.

Robots are scanning the web pages in order to index their content. This allows human users to make request and _try to_ find the content they are looking for. Every search engine is doing this hard job of looking at all pages on the web, following links and reading content, tradition use to impose them to harvest slowly each web site in order not to overwhelm these

Following these rules allows a regulation directly at the source (the robot), but in some cases each web site can install filter in order to protect part of the content or suppress a specific robot to dig. Normally the first job of a robot is to check whether or not it can scan the web site pages, but some are not playing this game well.

This bad behaviour is the one of qihoo a Chinese robot and search engine. It is visiting my blogs on a regular basis but scanning pages too quickly (every 3 to 5 seconds a page is scanned). Since I don’t write specific content for Chinese people at this time and in order to limit qihoo robot scans, I installed some weeks ago a robots.txt filter, but the QihooBot robot is not taking it into account. Since I am not the only one complaining about this specific behaviour, I decided tonight to escalate the filtering through a mod_rewrite Apache rule.

RewriteCond  %{HTTP_USER_AGENT}  ^.*QihooBot.*
RewriteRule  ^.*html$       /norobots.html  [L]

I am not used to do such things, a lot of robots are scanning the Internet all day long and we don’t always know what for, but I do think some of these robots are preparing the next Google or Exalead. But this time it was enough. I home my filter list will not be expanded in the future.

See also: “Crawl politely or don’t crawl at all“.

This video is really amazing even if we have seen some of the features in other project, like folder and file manipulation (see bump:top). But the way zomming and selecting a zone is perform seems really to be disruptive as well as the multi-user on the same screen.

Hope to see that one day on the wall of the office…

Even if the main basic functionalities are present, the Training Center tool is missing export features towards market standards, mainly GPX and the KML, respectively an exchange format between GPS products and a representation format for Google Earth.

On one hand, there are some small bugs but not blocking, on the other hand, exporting towards GPX is annoying when missing and used to exchange traces with the community or other equipment. I thus write the few translators available here below, from the internal format of Garmin Training Center towards both GPX and KML as well as a GPX to race translator. They are written in Perl and thus easily executable on the majority of the operating systems of the market, natively on Mac OS X and Linux, but requiring Cygwin installation on Windows.

• history to GPX converter (hst to gpx)
• history to KML converter for Google Earth
• GPX towards race converter (GPX to CRS)

[update May the 19th 2007] Received by email from Brian Davis (Denver, Colorado) this is a corrected version of the GPX to CRS converter, for the new 3.2 release of the Training Center 3.2 : GPS-GPX_to_Garmin_Course_TCX.pl this script uses the Tcl/Tk extension for Windows, if you want my original script modified : convert-gpx-to-crs-3.2.pl.

If you like these tools, please let me know.

But these pictures are short lived, the next pass of the satelite injected by Google will erase them.

A little travel from home, to some extent.