Archive for March, 2008

oh! the places you’ll API…

Monday, March 31st, 2008

Expanding the where we were project beyond the prepackaged cruft provided by Yahoo Pipes. We’re full on in the API now. phpFlickr has been very helpful, as has the documentation and tutorials on using Google Maps by Mike Williams.

wherewewere (custom roll’d. seems a bit slower than the Pipes version. oh well, this is the first iteration and is likely not optimized)

Next plans are to add controls for isolating individual users and date ranges as well as working on generating vectors between each marker.

Where We Were…

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

A spatial/visual exploration.

My students in the Web Media class at Moore College of Art and Design are conducting an experiment in spatial/visual relationships.

We will explore the social/spacial aspects of the modern web, using geotagging to keep a visual log of our travels over the next few weeks. We’re using Flickr’s group and mapping features to aggregate the photographs. The photographs are available at the Web Media group on that site, under the tag “wherewewere”.

The final visualization has yet to be determined, however I’m interested in displaying our overlapping paths, and hope to be able to filter by time and by subsets of users. Ultimately, we’re going to investigate how our small social microcosm interacts spatially over the next few weeks. We may be right next to each other and never know it otherwise…

Here’s a visualization using Yahoo Pipes:

Golden Cheetah releases a new version!

Tuesday, March 11th, 2008

Finally, the new work is public. Download available at http://www.goldencheetah.org/download.html.

The biggest change is that the application now includes BikeScore. A metric developed by Dr. Phil Skiba based on TRIMPS and Andy Coggan’s TSS. These metrics aim to provide a way to quantify training load. It’s useful to help getting an appropriate amount of work done while avoiding overtraining .

We already have the next version of Golden Cheetah’s features in the hopper. I’m personally interested in adding long-term analysis of training data so we can track fitness trends over time. I’d also like to overhaul the interface.

For now, I hope that people will find the new version useful.