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

I've been doing a lot of calculations about marathon pacing and times and I wanted to document my favorite method for doing that. It's the venerable unix code "units", which is provided with Mac OS/X. There's various GUIs provided for this code, or for other unit converters, but it's the command-line version which is the most powerful. I suspect most users of units fail to appreciate it's power. For example, they might want to convert km to miles (or back). For that, I type: > units Currency exchange rates from 2012-06-06 2546 units, 85 prefixes, 66 nonlinear units You have: km You want: miles * 0.62137119 / 1.609344 I see that 1 km is 0.62 miles, with a reciprical conversion of 1.61 km per mile. Or you can just convert a unit to a basis unit, as follows: You have: km You want: Definition: kilo m = 1000 m You have: miles You want: Definition: mile = 5280 ft = 1609.344 m The internal unit for distance is meters, so the code provides t...

Okay, I couldn't resist on this one.... after clicking a link to a photo-intensive page, my laptop with its measly (????) 1.5 GB RAM came to a grinding, swap-induced crawl. First, I killed the tab for that page. Okay: time to start killing the few aps which were running.... leaving only firefox, with a few innocuous tabs still open, including my training diary which I wanted to finish updating. Then I dropped firefox. Okay, so I screwed up that screen grab big-time. But if you could actually read it, you'd see 940 MB freed up by the death of the bloated firefox beast. Wow. Okay, vent done. Back to cycling....

Powertap's gone ANT+ Sport. So when I sent Saris my previous head unit for replacement when it magically stopped functioning, they send me one with ANT+ Sport enabled firmware. All good: the firmware is still compatible with old hubs. But when I cranked up my venerable GoldenCheetah ptdl and ptunpk command line utilities to download and decode the data, they spit it back out. Saris had changed the "raw" file format. I reported this to the GoldenCheetah user's list . Curiously, my report was the same day Ned Harding reported the same problem (this time in the context of a Windows version of the code. Windows is a virus my system doesn't have: I run Ubuntu 8.10. One month until 9.04 ! Hold you're breath. There's always issues with "upgrades".). The same day, Ned was able to reverse engineer the new binary format, and posted a patch. Wow. I consider myself a coding hack, but when guys who really know what they're doing show their ...