HOWTO: Fixing Dodgy GPS Data for Strava

Not exactly a typical ride for me.

GPS devices, such as smartphones or Garmin bike computers have had a huge impact on training. By integrating traditional cycle computer data, such as speed, cadence, and heart rate with location, these tools allow users to make the most of their training hours. With the addition of tools such as Strava, you can analyse your rides, analyse your strengths and weaknesses, see how fast you’re climbing and just generally understand better how you are tracking across the season.

But occasionally weird things happen, resulting in messed up GPS data (see above). Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to fix. We’ll use a free/open source cross-platform GPS editor called Viking. I’ll assume you’ve managed to install it and get it up and running.

First, you need to have access to the .gpx file. With a Garmin that’s pretty easy, but if you’re using the Strava app, you need to export one, like so:

Exporting a GPX file from Strava

Then you open the GPX file in Viking and get this:

You can see that there’s just two rogue data points to the west of my ride that are messing with my real ride data which you can see when you zoom in.

After you’ve selected the ride, or as Viking calls it, the “track”, you can delete the rogue “trackpoints” with the edit trackpoint tool.

Then you just click on the points and hit delete. After that, you use the select tool, right click on the track and hit export to GPX.

Just reupload the GPX file to Strava, and you’re done. Tada!

All done. Turns out I did less than 50 km. How soft is that?!

On trolling

Full disclosure: I am probably a troll, and I like to think I troll hard. I can’t be sure though because sometimes I think the only person I am trolling is myself, in which case it’s kind of like the tree that falls in the forest with no one around to hear it.

Anyway, there was an interesting episode of Insight on SBS not too long ago about trolling. In that episode there was a bit of a conflation between trolling and cyber-bullying (albeit anonymous cyber-bullying), which is not in my mind quite right. Now, maybe that’s the connotation the word has picked up in the common parlance, but that was never what trolling was about for me. And let me say just quickly, I think Weev is a bit of an idiot for saying some of the things he did, but there’s some gold hidden in the dross. Just read transcript or watch the video, and make up your own mind.

Living under a bridge isn’t so bad. You’ve got water, a slope, and plenty of wind. Good fung shui probably. Trolls aren’t picky.

So let’s begin from the beginning. Or at least let us begin with Tolkien. Aside from the indignity of having to suffer defeat at the hands of Bilbo Baggins and his crafty hobbity ways, the trolls were portrayed as big mutton loving creatures, scary no doubt, but having their power to terrify constrained by solar petrification. So the trolls lived in a cave to hide from the sun, but got tricked by the tricksy hobbit into arguing until sunrise, whereupon they turned into stone. Fast-forward to the present, and well we don’t have as many caves around nowadays, so us trolls have taken to the dark underside of bridges, and moreover, having learnt the lesson enshrined in the book of Tolkien, mostly we work alone.

The Writing is On the I-Beam: Even if your belief system supports the idea of life after death, it makes sense to make the most of the one you have now.

As a lonely troll there’s only so much to do, especially during the day when you can’t venture out into the sunlight. It’s amazing how the smallest things take on massive significance when all you’ve got is yourself and your bridge. There’s certainly plenty of time to muse on the scant reading materials you have available.

There’s also plenty of time for other observations. For instance, a coke bottle in the stormwater becomes a metaphor for the existential struggle. If you can be bothered, watch to the end: There is a final escape, but whether it’s to Nirvana or not I don’t know. I don’t presume to understand the motivations of coke bottles.

 

Since trolls generally like the dark, it takes a particular kind of troll to enjoy the spotlight. Those things are bright, and pretty hot after all. I prefer a bit of subtlety to my trolling, where people are fairly certain that I am taking the piss, but aren’t 100% sure. Ambiguity resolvable only by context. That’s the way I troll.

ACT Elections 2012

Today is election day in Canberra. Polling opened today at 8am, and since the early bird catches the worm, and also gets the freshest baguettes, I was at the local polling place nice and early. Interface-wise, they have a really nice electronic voting system. They were numpad only, with the numbers removed, the arrows in place and select on the zero button. You use left and right to move between parties, up and down to move between candidates and select/insert to choose the candidates in order of preference. After choosing at least 7 candidates, you can press another button to finish up, whereupon your list of chosen candidates is shown back to you in order of preference, and you can confirm or start again. Each voter is given a barcode which they use to log on to the machine and at the end to confirm their vote. The barcodes are collected in a traditional ballot box at the exit. Really intuitive, and so much more precise and accurate than a touch-screen interface!

Aside from the major parties: Labor, the Liberals and the Greens, there are also a number of smaller parties that were on the ballot. At Molonglo at least, there was Bullet Train for Canberra, the Democratic Liberal Party, the Australian Motorist Party, and a couple of Independents. Interestingly, the Pirate Party Australia as an unregistered party have run candidates in the three electorates, these being: Stuart Biggs (Molonglo), Mark Gibbons (Brindabella) and Darren Churchill (Ginninderra). They are listed in the last box, the ungrouped candidates and don’t have IND (for independent) next to their names.

The election uses the Hare-Clark system to turn the sum of all single transferable votes into proportional representation. Since the electorates each have multiple candidates (7 for Molonglo, 5 for each of the other two), your preferences do matter. Moreover, with the system the ACT is using, it is very difficult to waste your vote. Have more of a read about it on the ACT Election 2012 wiki page, but basically, vote for whatever issues you believe in regardless of whether you think that they or that party will “win” the election, also use all of your preferences, as it allows you to make the most of your vote. Chances are we will end up with a minority Labor government again anyway, and this is not necessarily a bad thing. In my view a functioning democracy is about having a variety of competing opinions being debated in open fora, having a minority government will lead to a more nuanced approach in the legislature. This can only be a good thing.

Coverage of the election is available on ABC1 in the ACT and ABC News 24 from 6:30pm, on 666 ABC Canberra from 6pm, and on twitter at #ACTVotes

On touch typing

I strongly approve of touch typing. Moreover, the higher the speed and accuracy the better. Now I personally average out at 70-75 wpm with 98-99% accuracy. Not quite high enough to be a court transcriber, but high enough to do a lot of data entry jobs very well. Why is touch typing so important you might ask? Well it’s all about the ability to convert thought into written word. If you have barriers to conversion in terms of needing to focus on what your fingers are doing, or in terms of it taking too long for your fingers to type things, then I would suspect that it would be easier to lose focus. Additionally, once you’ve decided what you want to write, then typing it out becomes the only bottle-neck, and although bottle-necks are great for beer and cider bottles, they’re not so good for efficiency.

How do you improve typing speed? Well I guess it’s probably a matter of practice. For me it happened naturally, as I’ve been playing with computers since the Microsoft DOS days on my parents’ 286 with Word Perfect and Lotus 123. Back then everything was command line interface (CLI) only, so the only way you could get your computer to do things was to type out commands. Games in those days or maybe a little later on were particularly finicky. Since some of the times game writers would push the boundaries of the hardware by doing fancy things with graphics or sound, getting a new game running then could be a bit of an adventure. You’d need to type out commands to configure your soundcard, run the game with the correct memory settings, configure your graphics mode. A lot of the times being a kid I would have no idea, but I’d just go from the most basic option to the most advanced until things stopped working, and then bring it back a bit. Anyway, because I’d be playing games more than once, I got great at typing particular things. In DOS, this was commands like: cd, dir, del, copy, move, edit autoexec.bat, edit config.sys, format a:, etc.

The most important thing when learning touch typing is to look at the screen. Of course you can still see a little of your hands in your peripheral vision, but your focus should be on the blinking text cursor and the text that you are typing. If you’re not already a touch typist, the way to do it is to gradually reduce the amount of time spent looking at what your hands are doing. If you’re really good at typing the letter ‘I’ for instance, then don’t look down for that one, heck, even if you’re just really good at hitting space-bar,  then try to look up when you hit it. Gradually, as you get used to looking at the screen and not your hands, your brain will figure out where all the letters are and typing will become automatic. Once that happens, then you can focus your attention on other things. Since you are focusing on the screen, you can see the red and green squiggly lines as they appear and “correct as you type”, eventually you get sick of pressing backspace so much and your accuracy improves. And once you’re at that level, it’s just a matter of practise until typing happens more or less at the speed of thought, and you can concentrate on the most important thing: the words you are typing and the message that they are conveying.

To be honest if you’re in any computer based role today, you probably get plenty of practise typing. Whether you can convert that practise into acquisition of the useful skill of touch typing is a matter of focus, willingness to try new things, and persistence. Like learning anything new it will probably involve some kind of initial dip in productivity, but once your productivity starts climbing again, you get past the dip, and keep improving until you plateau out again.

Oh, by the way, if you are working in a customer facing role where the customer has to stand there and wait for you to type things into a computer system, please learn to touch type. It will make things so much easier for all involved.

(Law and Economics) and IP

I like the Law and Economics movement. It makes sense to me. From what I understand, it’s about both taking an economic view of legal systems and using economic incentives to influence the law. This is fantastic because it’s very difficult to argue on the merits of laws and legal systems divorced from their economic contexts and without a view to their economic effects. The IP arena is particularly interesting for law and economics because fundamentally intellectual property for me is or should be about giving people a time limited monopoly in exchange for their creative efforts. But as economists know, monopolies are not generally particularly economically efficient.

In an environment of perfect competition, such as you might see at a fruit and vegetable market, sellers are quite limited in terms of the prices they can set. If there is a single vendor selling apples for $2 a kilo, then that is the price for apples. If people have perfect access to information – which in at the markets isn’t very hard, although it does involve a lot of walking – then if you set your price at even $2.50 a kilo then you will not get many customers; they’ll all be going to the $2 guy. If you have a monopoly, then you can basically set whatever price you want. Granted, you’ve still got a demand curve and people will buy less units if you charge more, but profit maximisation can mean that monopolies need to charge a lot (after all they owe a duty to their shareholders) leading to a lot of latent demand. Hence, anti-trust laws. Rather telling from a legal perspective is that modern patent law in the commonwealth started from a piece of legislation called the statue of monopolies.

IP is an interesting beast from an economic standpoint. Some argue that if it were not for the financial incentives created by the IP system then creativity would stagnate and the rate of innovation would decrease. Others argue that people create anyway for a whole host of other reasons and really, giving people a monopoly for the length of their life plus 70 years or giving inventors 20 year terms for what are in essence trivial technological developments ties up the creative commons. There is a lot of work in the field and it tends to be described as (anti-)competition law and IP law, but most IP reform reports and even sufficiently important high level judicial decisions will at least mention this trade-off.

Anyway, for obvious reasons I’m firmly in the latter camp and probably quite anti IP. There’s a whole host of reasons, but fundamentally, you just need to look at what has happened when people are free from the constraints of traditional IP laws in this connected digital age. If you look at the Free Software movement, if you look at GNU/Linux, if you look at what is being used in the server environment, if you look at Creative Commons, if you’ve seen a million parodies of Call Me Maybe and seen all the action with Gangnam Style, you know the power of open. Yes if you’re a company it’s nice to have a monopoly because you can make mega-bucks, but as Cory Doctorow and a lot of other really smart people have said previously (and I’m paraphrasing here): it is obscurity not piracy that is the enemy of creators. Really, if you are doing cool things then people will be willing to give you money for it even if they don’t have to, or be willing to pay extra where they could have gotten access to things for less (see for instance the Humble Bundles). The reality is nowadays information is free and what you really need is goodwill so that people will be happy to give you money. If you’re relying on being the incumbent rather than on continuous innovation, you’re probably doing it wrong.

High profile litigation to enforce IP rights is I think a particularly bad strategy to pursue because even if you win the battle, once that goodwill is gone, it is very very hard to get it back. See for instance, Apple v Samsung. And when you have some very high level people, such as Judge Posner of Law and Economics fame saying things like ‘My general sense, however, bolstered by an extensive academic literature, is that patent protection is on the whole excessive and that major reforms are necessary’ it probably tells you something. In fact, given that judges tend to be very careful what it is that they say because they know it can have major ramifications, it probably speaks volumes. At the very least, it confirms my view of the matter enough for me to resign from the patent examination branch of IP Australia or if you prefer, Australian Patent Office.

Land of the free

I like free. And for me, freedom trumps free beer almost always. Where you can have both options, then that’s ideal because money is needed to buy non-free beer, and not everyone has discretionary spending money. So freedom + beer > freedom > beer > nothing. Well, actually, that’s not strictly true. Whether free beer is indeed better than nothing depends. After all, there is no such thing as a free lunch, and if you’re having a liquid lunch, then you’d be having beer wouldn’t you. See the problem? Like any other complete meal provided to you without prima facie monetary exchange, if your free beer comes with strings attached, say for instance an obligation to pay for a beer at a later date, or the requirement (perhaps even mere expectation is enough) that in return for your supposedly free beer you divulge personal information about yourself, then that beer suddenly becomes less free. Money is good that way, if you have it sometimes you can get freedom to go with your beer. Anyway, I like free, but I’m very careful of which free is meant, because sometimes the least free things I’ve seen have been free.

On citations and links

During my studies at university, someone really smart told me that they went straight to the footnotes, endnotes and/or the bibliography first whenever they read an article. I don’t think I was sophisticated enough at the time to realise exactly how smart they were. I have since come to realise that the sources chosen, and the order that they are presented define the article. I think this is especially true of journal articles in law. You can tell, if you are familiar with the literature and without having to read any of the body, exactly what it is that the author has to say. The citations reveal all. So while I haven’t written anything substantial yet, I do have a page of links that will be updated as I go along. Probably, if you have a rough idea of the content that is linked to, you can read my mind.