I just spoke with Jim from quarq (www.quarq.com) about how their Cinqo bike powermeter picks up and sends power signals to head units. This isn’t covered in their FAQ’s in depth, so I thought I’d post what I understood here:

• The Cinqo reads torque at 60HZ (60 samples a second)
• At each pedal revolution completion the torque values for the rotation are computed to come up with a power figure for the full rotation, using an averaging method rather than a “latest data” method.
• 4 times a second the data from the latest rotation is checked and if there’s a new value (i.e. you just finished a pedal stroke), transmitted via ANT+ to the head unit

You can use the above to go through some scenarios, but the take-home is that when you’re spinning at 90RPM, which is 90/60s = 1.5 rotations a second or a rotation every .67s, you’re generating a new value a little better than every second, and within a 1/4 second of that value being generated, it’s transmitted to the head unit. That means that at worst, the lag between the new value (which is generated every .67 seconds) and the transmission (every .25 seconds) would be limited mostly by the .25 seconds between sends.

The head unit, (mine a Garmin edge 500) on the other hand, is a different matter. Some say that the head unit takes the power measures and just shows, and records, the latest value, which is a bad idea – it should average multiple values in a second, if it receives them, at least for storage purposes, which is widely reported to be 1 measurement stored per second.

On a test ride last night, I saw changes in the head unit that correlate roughly with the above. Tonight I will try to spin up to 200RPM, but am guessing that I’m going to have a hard time reading the display at that RPM to determine if I’m getting faster updates.

There are rumors that head units like an upcoming one from cinqo will show multiple values per second, and that they will also allow for much better data resolution, which may be important for sprinters, or those interested in peak power in general.

How to make a batchfile wait or pause? I see many people propose a vbs or c++ program, but this is the easiest way to make a batchfile pause:

Use the TIMEOUT DOS command timeout to make the bacth file wait. For example “TIMEOUT /T 3600″ inserted into your batchfiles will pause for 3600 seconds, or 30 minutes. A user can override this, but if you use the /NOBREAK parameter it will ignore a keypress. If you want it to wait for a keypress indefinately, use the /T -1 setting (wait forever) without the /NOBREAK.

So, to make your batchfile wait for 10 minutes, and ignore keypresses, add in this line:

TIMEOUT /T 600 /NOBREAK

In Northern Climes

a man looks over barren wastelands

As forgotten

as you and I

In our times

life passed us by, silent

So amazing

its closeness

How ashamed

we should all be

Of what is

and what we don’t see

Funny thing that when we change an element in a system most people don’t think through the other changes necessary. Funnier that I am guilty of that!

Few days ago I received my Intel x25-M SSD 80GB hard drive from the hardware magicians at SoftMart! I then copied the Vista OS over from my old conventional drive with Acronis MigrateEasy – which worked just as the title suggested. MigrateEasy allowed me to connect my old drive via a USB controller, copy the disk image of the Vista OS to a hard drive on the desktop, then rewrite it back to the new solid state hard drive again with the SSD connected via USB. There were no hitches, and upon insertion in my Lenovo x60, Vista booted just fine.

However, there were some strange crashes and issues. So I started to look around for best practices, and found little. CAVEAT: I don’t *know* that this stuff is the right way to go – it’s just what I am doing now   But here’s what I am using as my working best practices, gleaned mostly from common sense and some web forums and reviews:

• Turn off defragmentation in Vista: the random access time on these drives is very fast, and I am under the impression that the Intel drive is allocating blocks of data into the areas it deems best for performance – no sense having an algorithim optimized for a conventional hard disk try to move things around.
• Turn off Active Protection from lenovo: After turning this feature, which stops the hard drive when it detects g-forces like being dropped, I noted much less machine freezing. I don’t think solid state memory is to shock-sensitive enough to warrant this
• Turn off the disk paging file if you have enough RAM: paging to an SSD is pretty fast, but some folks are opining that it keeps writing and writing and that SSD’s are more sensitive to multiple writes. I rarely run out of RAM, so am going to try this.
• Turn off superfetch: again, no need to cache the info on the drive when apps start very fast anyways.

If I see any adverse effects on my machine I will post back. Let me know if you’ve ot some additional ideas.

For those iPhone gripes, please go to pleasefixtheiphone.com.

The top gripe: cut n paste.

My gripe (and 23 other folks right after I posted it!): no search in the email app!

There should be a generalized gripe list for every product – like SFDC’s ideas app, only universal. Yeah – I know people have created these – but we really need a dictator to decree that there should only be one per product, and then things would get done around here!

The world of sport-focused wrist-top computers, also called watches, jumped ahead light years in the last few months. While I’ve been using a GPS-enabled heart rate monitor for some time now (The Garmin Forerunner 305), it’s huge, and not wearable on a daily basis (see pic @ right on a typical human wrist). The battery life is also not workable – you can’t expect it to stay on for more than 25-30 hours at best, even with the GPS off. But as a training device it’s excellent – tracking where you’ve gone, how fast, how high, and your heart rate along the way.

So Garmin innovates, and uses in the ForeRunner 405 an excellent GPS receiver in a more normal size watch, this time using the closest part of the batch bands as a way to hide the bulk of the watch. It’s still a little large, but a very workable daily war, and includes GPS tracking and heart rate tracking.  But alas, this thing isn’t the answer to all your prayers. First, it only shows one time zone, which is a drawback in my book. Second, it doesn’t have a barometric altimiter, meaning that you will have to burn major battery to get your altitude, and forget about any baro warnings that a pressure drop is taking place and a storm is coming!

Now Suunto, whose Core device excells in providing Altiture / Baromoter & Compass (ABC), and also sports a depth meter to 32 ft, has out a GPS watch called the X9i, which is not focused on the training world, but rather the navigation world. For instance, the x9i has no heart rate monitor!  As a matter of fact, Suunto offers *no* watch in all of its lineup that does GPS and a heart rate monitor at the same time as navigation features. You can get a training watch with a GPS pod, and that will help with training, but not with navigation, or get a navigation watch without the HRM!

Suunto’s new X10, which has better battery life than the X9i (lasting 6 hours of GPS monitoring and perhaps as much as a month of non-GPS use as a watch), seems to be the best compromise. In a few words it has: GPS, Altitude, Barometer, Temperature,Compass, and Dual time features.

But here’s the payoff: real integration – as a busy busy guy, I only want to go out, workout, and upload from one device, but I want that device to include the navigation features I need rather than having a performance monitor on one hand, and a navigation device on the other!  Now only if  these folks realize – it’s really not that much harder to cram a heart rate monitor into this watch – and it would be a *really* smart thing to do. And if they want a beta tester, I’m ready.

So Shame on Suunto and Garmin – why go 80% of the way, then stop, when it really wouldn’t cost much more, or take more battery life, to build the complete package!

There’s lots of buzz in the blogosphere about Enterprise Mashups and Mashups in general: Raf Cammarano, ReadWriteWeb, Forrester, etc. But they all have it wrong — well — kind of.

Mashups are simple, really – here are three points that explain the whole phenomena from start to finish:

1) In music mashups took off when the technology to mix together many songs became readily available. The songs have been available for a long time.

2) The Web takes a previously hidden “tier” of applications (the middle tier) and makes it available to everybody all the time!

3) Tools have now appeared to let ordinary people mash together websites using the accessible middle tier.

Enterprise mashups are even simpler: SOA means that most applications are also making their previously convoluted APIs easier to use, and tools are being built, like Serena’s Mashup Composer, to allow business users to “mash” these applications.

So that’s it: open APIs + mashing platforms = mashups.

Not so complex – huh?

MashupCamp6 is going on right now (March 17-20), and Serena is here presenting about Serena Business Mashups and Mashup technology, as well as the Mashup Exchange. You can find out more about MashupCamp here, which we sponsor as a sustaining member.  I will also be uploading photos to Flickr here.

As Dave Berlind said as he started, Mashups are Mainstream!

Another goodie for your ears. Check out #7 – Bury My head. Music is solace. Had a good bud over from DC last night. We ate Vietnamese, which deserves a post on its own, but that’s for later. For now, have to say rekindled good memories. RIP Ian, and love *will* tear us apart. Again.

If you are the intrepid type, looking for an opportunity to mix up old-school business development and OEM with the wild world of SaaS and online marketplaces, look no further – I’ve got a job with your name on it!  drop me a comment. The actual job description is here.

The MashupExchange goes live Feb 14th – tell a friend!