On Bicycles, and.... what else is there?

After years on Thinkpads running Linux, I decided to take the plunge on an Apple Mac Air. Macs have always had a premium price for the hardware, and I never considered the cost justified, since you're buying a lot of software with that money and I have all the software I need with Linux. But the deal with the Macs is they simply work, and the Air is a beautifully designed machine. After searching for a quick data plotting application, I was frustrated to find I still couldn't find anything which beat the old tried-and-true: xgraph , written at Berkeley in the 1980's It produces nice plots, data sets clearly differentiated in nice colors against a neutral grey background, with a super-simple data format trivially processed with scripting. The code's beauty is its simplicity and it's excellent defaults: no widgets or pull-down menus to deal with. At work I can tell people think I'm a bit strange for using such ancient code, but I get the last laugh when I to...

After adventures in Perl, then Java, then Ruby, I've been immersed in JavaScript, the language of web UI's. Writing command line apps is straightforward. For example if the user wants to analyze a specific ride, include the ride ID as a command line argument. Done. Now get on to the juicy data analysis. But with a user interface, things are much more complex. A bunch of my Strava app ideas begin the same: user specifies a ride, app maps the ride for user reference, various analyses are done and/or actions are taken. In the Strava API some methods require an authorization key from logging in, while others do not. Among those that do is the method which returns a reduced set of coordinates for a route to allow mapping without transferring the full set of data for the ride. This is important for maps, because it substantially reduces the bandwidth requirement, not only loading the data from Strava, but then subsequently uploading it to Google for map generation. And obv...