So for the last few months, I have been really dodgy on my running. I haven’t kept any schedule that remotely resembles regularity. My running partner moved away to California for a new job and I’ve been struggling keeping myself motivated and accountable. I also have a terrible habit of pacing too fast, feeling like crap, then pausing the GPS unit while I catch my breath. I really want to break this habit.

Today is a new day. From here on out, I will start posting my pace charts. Since I am currently using Sport Tracks for my training log, I can generate the pace chart as a PNG directly. From there, I use F-Spot to tag the image and then upload it to my NextGen gallery. Every week, I will post the week’s worth of images and summarize how the training towards a sub-2 hour half-marathon.

I should note that I got this idea from Thomas Bubendorfer, who’s excellent blog I have become an avid reader. He also posts his heart-rate graphs, but I only have the Garmin 205, so no heart-rate.

So to kick things off, here is this week’s training. I had the Qualifier this week and I’m going to a funeral here in about an hour. So training early in the week didn’t happen, and I won’t be able to train again until I get back on Sunday evening (probably just go to the gym instead). I decided the quickest way to force my body and lungs to get accustomed to the pace I want to run is to just do it and progressively extend the distance. For the first week or 2 my intervals will be a single 1 mile sprint. I can’t do a long run this weekend, but I was start again at something less than 8 (probably 6 next week).

Without further ado, here is this week’s training:

I should also note that it does not appear that the NextGen gallery supports adding the detected tags to the official WordPress taxonomy. For the time being, the image tags will not appear in the tag cloud, so I won’t duplicate the tag by creating one now.

Also, you might notice a few significant drops in the paces. The bad habit I mentioned that I want to break. Basically, I stopped the watch to catch my breath, then started it back up. This habit can make a 30 minute run stretch on for upwards of an extra 15 minutes and it really bugs me that I do it. By posting these pace charts, I’m hoping to train harder and stop pausing the watch (unless I have to, i.e. for traffic or water).

Hi, my name is s1n and I am obsessed with GPS devices. In the back of my mind, something tells me I shouldn’t, but it’s so damn alluring to know where I am, where I am going, how fast I’m getting there, and what else is there where I am headed.

For the record, I own 3 GPS devices. That may not seem like an addiction, but how many GPS devices does one person really need?? I have 2 GPS watches, a Garmin 205 and a Timex BodyLink. My car also has a built-in GPS navigation unit, which I presume is also a Garmin. I have actually stopped using the Timex watch in favor of the shiny new Garmin.

So far, the 205 is a vastly superior GPS watch over the Timex BodyLink. It keeps a better connection, there’s no annoying GPS pod, the interface is simple (4 boxes of fully configurable data), and the watch is generally a more powerful tool. I can race myself with it, setup time or distance intervals, I can have it keep the backlight on for longer (or always on). Lastly, you can also connect the 205 to your computer and download the data without needing another data recording pod. That last bonus is a huge deal breaker for me. I want to be able to use my watch and my NAS as my training log.

I have become obsessed with collecting the data from the unit. I can hook the device up to my computer using a program called gpsbabel. In my testing though, I’ve found the results of GPSBabel to be less accurate than the Windows application SportTracks. For now, I am importing the tracks via SportTracks and exporting the data to the network. At some point in the future, I would like to rely solely on gpsbabel and pyTrainer (I have some scripts that allow me to use my media keyboard to simply matters). I have become involved in the pyTrainer project lately and it seems like the role I will best serve as is the English documenter and the HIG compliance specialist.

Note, for those who want to hook their Garmin up to a Linux box, I would recommend using the track filter option if you have multiple tracks on your device.

I have found that for some reason, the GPX format has become a standard XML format for GPS data even though it has serious deficiencies. It cannot represent anything outside of bland coordinates and timestamps. There’s nothing in the spec that should prevent extensions from being adopted that add things such as heart rate readings, wind, lap data, calories, etc. Fortunately, Garmin has started an extensive developer site that should spur development of better future tools.

I must resist the urge to desire the brand new Garmin 405.

So my Christmas vacation has been a hit or miss. I have spent the entire time on pins and needles because I am (still) technically on call. That means, even though the company is shut down for the holidays, I may have to go in to work. I am working on a project that is delivering and they refuse to slip the delivery, so I have to go in a fight any fires that come up during the holidays. It could be worse though; I could be one of the people who is working every day but Christmas and New Years.

The thing that’s frustrating for me is I was desperately needing a solid vacation. I get 160 hours of paid-time-off a year and I only used about 16 of them for pleasure. The rest of the time was spent studying for school. Graduate school has basically become a second job since it is so demanding of my time. I had over 60 hours of time off in November before I used about 50 of them to study for my Machine Learning class.

I did end up with some decent swag for Christmas though. Here’s a brief list of things I was gifted:

• Garmin Forerunner 205
• The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass
• Contra 4
• DS Charger Grip
• Misc. DS accessories, including a bendable stylus
• Marathon by Jeff Galloway
• Galloway’s 5K/10K Running by Jeff Galloway
• Nine Inch Nails – Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D
• Nine Inch Nails – Year Zero (returned, will by the Still CD)
• Nike sweat wicking layer shirt
• $100 Visa Gift card (will get a new harddrive)
• $40 CircuitCity gift card
• Hockey wall calendar

All in all, it was a pretty sweet Christmas. I can’t complain about any of the gifts really. I’ve been working on getting this Garmin working with my Linux box and all is going well so far. I’ll make a separate dedicated post about it later because it seems the internet is devoid about information on how to do this.

About a year and a half ago, I purchased a cheap $15 multi-flash card reader from Newegg. I have had this stupid device plugged into my motherboard and wasting power ever since. I was never successful in plugging in my flash cards and having them detected.

Until now.

I posted about upgrading my machine recently, which included a kernel update to 2.6.21-gentoo. I figured it was high time to get this device working, so I spent a few hours and figured out my problem. I have a Neodio Technologies 7-in-1 reader as detected by lsusb:

citadel s1n # lsusb
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0aec:3260 Neodio Technologies Corp. 7-in-1 Card Reader
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 03f0:8804 Hewlett-Packard
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0bda:8187 Realtek Semiconductor Corp.
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

The problem I was having was the device nodes were never being created, with the exception of /dev/sda. Well I learned that USB flash card readers do not automatically report when a card has been inserted. The solution to this is to make sure that your kernel has the following option set:

CONFIG_SCSI_MULTI_LUN=y
CONFIG_SCSI_SCAN_ASYNC=y

The async scan option is a nice feature that can significantly improve your bootup time if you have several UMS devices or SCSI devices connected. This will make sure that all LUNs are scanned as the other devices may not be detected. In my case, the /dev/sda was actually just the CF card reader slot.

After rebooting, I found each card slot was detected and now associated to individual devices:

usb-storage: device scan complete
scsi 8:0:0:0: Direct-Access GENERIC USB Storage-SMC I19B PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
scsi 8:0:0:1: Direct-Access GENERIC USB Storage-CFC I19B PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
scsi 8:0:0:2: Direct-Access GENERIC USB Storage-SDC I19B PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
scsi 8:0:0:3: Direct-Access GENERIC USB Storage-MSC I19B PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
sd 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi removable disk sda
sd 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
sd 8:0:0:1: Attached scsi removable disk sdb
sd 8:0:0:1: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
sd 8:0:0:2: Attached scsi removable disk sdc
sd 8:0:0:2: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
sd 8:0:0:3: Attached scsi removable disk sdd
sd 8:0:0:3: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0

When I logged into Gnome, I found this lovely gnome-vfs icon indicating the flash drive from my camera that I plugged in. The mount options show up as follows:

/dev/sdc1 on /media/disk type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,shortname=winnt,uid=1000)

Now that everything is merry in the hellkeep kingdom once more, I can move on to organizing my photos once more.

So news has it that NetFlix is distributing movies via their new Watch It Now service. In light of this, I think I should go ahead and air my predictions.

It’s been rumored that NetFlix will eventually launch their own set-top box. This would be rather clunky as the last thing I need is a TiVO, a content-provider (Comcast or AT&T) set-top DVR, as well as a NetFlix box (assuming I don’t also want an AppleTV). It would also be extremely expensive for NetFlix to invest in their own hardware development that would most likely lag behind the competition. It would make much more sense to NetFlix if they banded with an already prominent STB provider and offered their service through it.

Content-providers would be in direct competition with their In-Demand services and are not likely to ditch them in favor of NetFlix. The only way the content-providers would be willing to co-operate is if they were desperate to cut corners. Apple is not likely to partner unless they control the environment to the fullest extent as Apple believes in this dogma that all electronics should be treated as appliances. That leaves TiVO. What a combination. TiVO lacks on-demand content and would probably be elated to off-load the content distribution to another provider. This is something that could be added relatively easy to their series 3 boxes.

So Scobble, I am afraid you are wrong, NetFlix is only beginning to fight. Only time will tell if this prediction comes true.

I was reading on the net the other day that someone spent about a week and managed to crack the AACS encryption scheme used by HD DVD and Bluray discs.

After reading through the entire forum, I think the only person that can claim this works is the person who wrote the code. It seems that Doom9 has a bunch of lawyers as members because everyone came out of the woodwork to offer legal advice concerning the author’s identity. After sifting through the code (in java no less), I have come to the conclusion that this is not a crack, not a hack, circumvents nothing, and the industry needs to only worry about correcting the hardware.

Basically, the download the poster provided uses a config file that needs the decrypted title keys in order to work; they are nulled out by default. To obtain said keys, you will need to do a memory dump on the HD DVD player (in this case, the XBox360 add-on). The rest of the code just performs vanilla decryption of a AACS stream, in this case the movie content.

Not all that impressive as I’m sure the hardware players will be fixed to prevent this from happening, but the key thing is this starts the cat-and-mouse game between the millions of home users and the retarded industry experts. This battle was never won on technical merits by the industry so they will likely try to win via legal means, again.

The guy said there will be some sort of announcement or release on 01/02/07, so keep your eyes peeled.

Well, I had worked out a sweet post about my Christmas loot, but epiphany crashed when I tried to look up a link on timex.com. So instead, I’ll make it much shorter as I don’t have the patience to retype the whole thing now.

The in-laws gave me a Timex Bodylink watch. This thing makes training more enjoyable. Now I can run anywhere and let my watch do the coaching automatically for me. In fact, when I took it out for a test spin today, I just started running and didn’t really concern myself with where I was going or how far I’d gone. I didn’t even make a point to remember street names because I figured at the 2 mile mark, after my AIs, I’d just run in the opposite direction for a while and it’d all work out. This is without a doubt one of the coolest gifts I’ve ever been given. It is a little strange reading the time from the top of my wrist now; I’ve been using an OVA watch for about a year and I became accustomed to reading it from the side of my wrist.

I also made away with seasons 2 and 3 of Monk and volume 1 of Futurama. I was also given some Nike running pants which turned out to basically be tights. I’ll be taking those back for something with a little more room. I was given both CastleVania games on the PS2 and FF3 on the DS. I got some Eddie Bauer clothes and a Life In Hell book from sunshine as well.

All in all, I made out pretty well. I think I also gave sunshine one of the better gifts I’ve given as well: a Brighton wallet. It was a total surprise. In fact, she said that she would not have suggested it and was very happy because of the quality and the taste was an exact match for her personality. Score!