Had a bit of brainwave last night... A couple of days ago I hacked together a basic graph to post up here showing heart rate zones. I also recently posted up a graph that my Polar gear kicks out showing various statistics. I suddently realised that there was nothing really stopping me from taking the raw Polar data and shoe-horning it into Google Graphs to come up with a dynamic online graph!
I've spent the morning studying the Polar file formats, and hacking out the bits I need, and it now looks like I have a prototype script up and running. At the moment there are a couple of assumptions regarding data ranges, however its not the hardest thing in the world to put in some proper validation. Once thats done I'll have a script that can accept any file from my Heart rate Monitor, and output a nice and pretty graph onto a webpage.
Click here to see the script in action...
Friday, 16 May 2008
Twitter Woes
Been doing a little fiddling to ijy.cc last night, and noticed that twitter.com was down...
I've redone ijy.cc so that rather than having to deal with backend security myself, now I use a number of high profile online services, and instead pull in the content from them into a single "digital footprint". The end result is that my page is currently dependant on;
I then grab the RSS feed for each of these sites, do some fairly simple data manipulation, and throw it into a fairly simple XHTML/CSS template. Its very easy for me to maintain, and also to chuck the stuff out to other places (for example, my Blogger blog also posts to MySite on lack-of...
Twitter being down has the effect of killing ijy.cc, as I haven't bothered with any kind of cacheing, and PHP4 (which 34sp is running on) does not support timeouts on the PHP function running in the background capturing the RSS feeds ( file_get-contents, for those who care... ). So I thought I'd do a bit of checking to see if the Twitter downtime was a common occurance, or just bad luck...
Turns out that they have been struggling for about a year, ever since they "went big" in March '07. So much so that a monitoring site made their downtimes public and gave free access to their downtime reports. I know within my company that our targetted uptime for customer facing systems is in the region of 99.8 % over the space of a year (and if we get anywhere near that everyone starts running round like headless chickens), so 98 % average, and dips as low as 92 % is fairly shocking. Of course, I haven't seen the other feeds go down as yet, however they are all backed up by Googles frankly imposing infrastructure, which suffered a whole 7 minutes of downtime in 2007...
...that said, how can Twitter actually make money to fund their horrendous bandwidth and data centre costs? While their page rank is not massive, behind all that you have loads of user-developed apps throwing data too and from them...it must all add up to one fat pipe somewhere. Becase of the nature of the service (small messages, accessible freely from many 3rd party apps) selling advertising is going to be very hard, unless you plan of irritating your entire userbase by doing mass broadcasting. I really see how they are going to struggle to make money, as quite simply people are not visiting their online real-estate, so they aren't getting the eyeballs. It seems that general internet opinion is that like many other big names out there now (google, facebook, skype etc etc) Twitter can plan a business model once they have the userbase...I suppose we'll have to see, but right now I'm a little skeptical.
Of course, all this doesn't help me much... I like the concept of Twitter, and it fits in with the theory of how I've set ijy.cc up. The box will stay for now, and I'll have to live with Twitter's unreliable uptime, however if it stoops too much worse I may have to look at either a technical solution (cronjob-ing and cacheing the feed, which is what happens on lack-of), or looking for a more reliable alternative to fill my top right-hand corner...
I've redone ijy.cc so that rather than having to deal with backend security myself, now I use a number of high profile online services, and instead pull in the content from them into a single "digital footprint". The end result is that my page is currently dependant on;
I then grab the RSS feed for each of these sites, do some fairly simple data manipulation, and throw it into a fairly simple XHTML/CSS template. Its very easy for me to maintain, and also to chuck the stuff out to other places (for example, my Blogger blog also posts to MySite on lack-of...
Twitter being down has the effect of killing ijy.cc, as I haven't bothered with any kind of cacheing, and PHP4 (which 34sp is running on) does not support timeouts on the PHP function running in the background capturing the RSS feeds ( file_get-contents, for those who care... ). So I thought I'd do a bit of checking to see if the Twitter downtime was a common occurance, or just bad luck...
Turns out that they have been struggling for about a year, ever since they "went big" in March '07. So much so that a monitoring site made their downtimes public and gave free access to their downtime reports. I know within my company that our targetted uptime for customer facing systems is in the region of 99.8 % over the space of a year (and if we get anywhere near that everyone starts running round like headless chickens), so 98 % average, and dips as low as 92 % is fairly shocking. Of course, I haven't seen the other feeds go down as yet, however they are all backed up by Googles frankly imposing infrastructure, which suffered a whole 7 minutes of downtime in 2007...
...that said, how can Twitter actually make money to fund their horrendous bandwidth and data centre costs? While their page rank is not massive, behind all that you have loads of user-developed apps throwing data too and from them...it must all add up to one fat pipe somewhere. Becase of the nature of the service (small messages, accessible freely from many 3rd party apps) selling advertising is going to be very hard, unless you plan of irritating your entire userbase by doing mass broadcasting. I really see how they are going to struggle to make money, as quite simply people are not visiting their online real-estate, so they aren't getting the eyeballs. It seems that general internet opinion is that like many other big names out there now (google, facebook, skype etc etc) Twitter can plan a business model once they have the userbase...I suppose we'll have to see, but right now I'm a little skeptical.
Of course, all this doesn't help me much... I like the concept of Twitter, and it fits in with the theory of how I've set ijy.cc up. The box will stay for now, and I'll have to live with Twitter's unreliable uptime, however if it stoops too much worse I may have to look at either a technical solution (cronjob-ing and cacheing the feed, which is what happens on lack-of), or looking for a more reliable alternative to fill my top right-hand corner...
Thursday, 15 May 2008
It can't be good for you...
Roadrunners last night, and another really hard session. It was touted as a "bleep test for endurance running", and it really did work out like that. We had to do 400 metre laps, with a 60 second recovery between each one. You started at your 10k pace (so a 1.38 lap for me) and then each subsequent lap had to be 2 seconds faster... I was running with Harry from work, and we managed to surpass both our expectations, and get down to a lap time of 1.14 before finally failing on the 1.12 attempt.
I reckon that from fresh I could have achieved a faster lap, however as we slowly got faster and faster I could see my heart rate staying high throughout the recovery period, and the last 3 laps we were starting while I was still well over 160-bpm (for reference, my resting heart rate is about 50, and the highest I've ever recorded myself is at 190, while more training is done about 170-175, with race pace at 180'ish...I normally recover pretty quickly down to 120-130). I'm really enjoying the RoadRunner workouts...they are a very different type of training to anything I've done before, and really challenging.
I've got the Woodley 10k this weekend, so after circuits tonight it will be rest and recouperation until Sunday. In theory I'm playing cricket immediately afterwards, which may be an interesting challenge (I use the word "play" in a very loose role...I can't bat, I can't bowl, and whenever I'm in the field my body goes onto autopilot and moves out of the way of highspeed cricket balls...)
Once this weekend is over I really have to step up my distance runs. I reckon 2 runs of 10 miles a week should do for now. One will remain on Monday, and teh other will have to fit in at the weekend, and I suspect that as the temperature rises its either going to be very early morning or stupidly late at night. It will be hard work, however I need to hit the targets...
I reckon that from fresh I could have achieved a faster lap, however as we slowly got faster and faster I could see my heart rate staying high throughout the recovery period, and the last 3 laps we were starting while I was still well over 160-bpm (for reference, my resting heart rate is about 50, and the highest I've ever recorded myself is at 190, while more training is done about 170-175, with race pace at 180'ish...I normally recover pretty quickly down to 120-130). I'm really enjoying the RoadRunner workouts...they are a very different type of training to anything I've done before, and really challenging.
I've got the Woodley 10k this weekend, so after circuits tonight it will be rest and recouperation until Sunday. In theory I'm playing cricket immediately afterwards, which may be an interesting challenge (I use the word "play" in a very loose role...I can't bat, I can't bowl, and whenever I'm in the field my body goes onto autopilot and moves out of the way of highspeed cricket balls...)
Once this weekend is over I really have to step up my distance runs. I reckon 2 runs of 10 miles a week should do for now. One will remain on Monday, and teh other will have to fit in at the weekend, and I suspect that as the temperature rises its either going to be very early morning or stupidly late at night. It will be hard work, however I need to hit the targets...
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