Archive for the ‘Bike routes’ Category
November 11, 2007
I’ve been unhappy with the dojo based elevation charts I’ve created from my hikes and bike rides, so last night I decided to create a Flex version of the elevation chart for the October 14th ride on Kennedy Shannon Roads Trail. The Flex chart was surprisingly easy to create. What I want to create is a Flex application that plays back the bike routes that I take. I’ve been thinking about this for a while and when I learned that motionbased.com is also doing something similar, I decided to spend sometime developing this player. The Flex code for this is here (see map.mxml). I now need to add a Google map to the page and move a marker on the map as the user moves the slider on the elevation chart.
When I was writing this app, I was looking for an ActionScript sleep function so that I could animate the slider; I realized that Flex has a much richer framework for animation using Effects.
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November 5, 2007
This morning after adjusting our clocks and watches the night before, we went for a 33 miles bike ride along the magnificent Pebble Beach coast line. The bike ride was comfortable and challenging in parts. What struck me about the ride was how courteous the cars and other bike riders are along this route. A pleasant contrast to the inconsiderate drivers that we encountered last weekend along Stevens Creek Reservoir. 
The weather was absolutely perfect. No fog, sunny and warm. There are a couple of relatively steep hills. Here is the Google Map for this ride. The ride took over two and a half hours with average speed of 14 miles per hour.
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October 28, 2007
This trail starts in Los Gatos, takes you thru Saratoga, Stevens Creek Reservoir, Cupertino, where you finally start your return to Los Gatos. The ride is 29 miles and takes about 2 hours and 45 minutes with average speed of 10.7 miles per hour. 
There are three big climbs of almost 600 feet each. Here is the Google map of this ride.Here is the route of the trail using my Flex Route Player.
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October 24, 2007
This week a new extension to the Los Gatos Creek Trail was inaugurated. Now you can bike from Los Gatos to San Jose with minimal time on the road. The new trail has an entrance on Lonus St. and on Auzerais Ave. At some point in future the Los Gatos Trail is supposed to be connected to the Guadalupe River trail. Here is the Google Map trail for Los Gatos to San Jose. The ride to San Jose is easier than the ride back (here is the elevation chart of the ride to San Jose vs. the ride back).
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October 21, 2007
Today we took another bike ride along the Kennedy/Shannon/Hicks roads trail. 
The bike ride was 28 miles and it lasted almost 3 hours. The Hicks Road ride is really steep no matter the direction. I added the minimum/maximum elevation markers to the map. The lowest elevation is about 66 meters and the highest is 433 meters a difference of over 1200 feet. Here is the elevation chart.
I found out last week (thank you Bennett) that the way I generate the Google maps does not work on Windows IE. I need to debug this problem. It does work, however, on Firefox and Safari.
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October 14, 2007
This is an easier Kennedy bike trail than the one I took last week. But it still has a couple of steeeeep hills and a number of panoramic views that take your breath away. The hardest hill 
is on the way back on Kennedy just after Shannon. Here is the elevation chart (the elevation chart needs to be improved). Here is the Ruby code for the map and the elevation. The data from my Garmin GPS device is in GPX 1.0. The times are in UTC and the elevations in meters. The display of distance and elevations is in feet and miles. But when you import the data the distances are in meters.
I created the elevation chart in dojo JavaScript library hoping that it would work on iPhone, but unfortunately it doesn’t. Its time to forget about client-side charting and go back to generating chart images on the server.
Posted in Bike routes, GPS, iPhone | 3 Comments »
September 29, 2007
The Kennedy Bike Trial on a cruising bike can be kind of tough. It is very steep at points, but overall it is a great way to spend 3 hours. Here is the elevation chart for this ride.
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September 25, 2007
I need to add a feature to my GPS to Google map program so that it would display the performance graph, e.g., distance traveled, elevation gain, … but for now it will have to be manual.
Posted in Bike routes, GPS | 2 Comments »
September 14, 2007
I’ve overlaid two bike routes from Los Gatos to San Jose. I noticed that the maps look fine in Firefox but on iPhone you cannot really zoom in as easily as you can in the desktop browser. This is one reason why Google is a special application on the iPhone and not just a web page in the browser. iPhone finger interface works a lot better on the Google iPhone app than it does on the Google browser map. Unfortunately you cannot enter a URL in the Google Maps application, you need to search for an address. It is not clear if it is possible for users to display their mash ups in Google iPhone Maps application or not. Does any one know?
Posted in Bike routes, GPS, iPhone, Maps | 1 Comment »
