Oh, The Woes

Morning weigh-in: 186.5#

 

I've been looking for better cycling training software for a while now, but I've been finding that most of what's out there is either a bit "meh," or unavailable on Linux, or both (usually both), and the web-based stuff seems just as lame -- I've tried a few of the free-on-a-trial-basis ones, and none have impressed me enough to want to upgrade to the paid version.

 

All I really want is one more feature than what's already present in Garmin Connect, PyTrainer or SportsTracker: I want to be able to see a breakdown of my heart rate data by heart rate zone, basically how many minutes in each zone, on a lap by lap basis. I was fooling with a Perl script I found online that converts Garmin data to Excel file format, trying to get it to work -- of course it didn't at first, it was poorly written -- and while I was on my new voyage of discovery I realized that a rewrite of this script would be the best way to extract the data I wanted.

 

It took me about two days, mostly because I didn't really have a big enough block of time to just sit down and do it, but I finally had something that seemed to work well with my sample data, and gave me the results I expected. Then yesterday I tried it on my actual training data, and got incomprehensibly wrong results. Oh well, back to the drawing board tonight, good thing today's a rest day.

 

Meantime, my new computer upgrade did wonders for TopoFusion, which as a Windows program needs to run in an emulator (and I guess the new emulator works a lot better), but then I did something and -- TopoFusion is all out of whack, and now maps and GPS tracks don't line up. I tried removing and re-installing wine (the emulator), and upgraded to the latest version of TopoFusion, but got very little relief. This is all happening now that I've committed to help Bob and Doug with mapping duties for an upcoming race, and I'd planned to use TopoFusion to do that work.

 

There's still always GRASS, or maybe QGIS.