So unless you’ve been living in a cave you’ll be aware of how rad helmet cams are for the adventure sports inclined amongst us. I held off buying one for quite a long time because they have been FREAKING expensive. The other issue is that the ‘industry standard’ GoPro HD makes you look like a total mongtard when you are wearing it.

Figure 1: How to look like a gaper mong!

So I really like the look of the cameras from Contour. They have recently announced the Contour ROAM which is their new budget camera at $199. But, this post isn’t about that new camera. It’s nice and all with more waterproofing that the original ContourHD, but, it lacks the 720p 60fps mode which I think is critical to nice footage in fast moving environments.

Instead this post is about the CountourHD; because it’s basically been replaced by these newer models it’s available super cheap. It supports full HD 1080p as well as the important 720p at 60fps mode.

Figure 2: How to not look like a gaper mong!

It can be had at Backcountry at the moment for about US$140 (http://tinyurl.com/contour-backcountry). If you’ve been in the market I think this is the deal to snag! Shipping is a bit to New Zealand but it’s still waaay cheaper than buying locally. Particularly if you get a spare battery and a few other things in the same order and/or order with friends.

So one of the kayaking items on my bucket list was a trip to the Ottawa River. Just ticked that one off with a couple of runs over the last couple of days.

Didn’t take all that many photos but got a few decent ones of me running The Elevator Shaft chute at Garvin’s rapid on the Middle Channel. The flow yesterday was 13.0

Here is a MASSIVE panorama of the rapid. Thought I’d upload in all it’s glory for people who may want to examine it later to plan their lines. Clicky Clicky for the monster.

Elevator Shaft is hard River Right. It was a pretty simple drop but it’s got a heap of rocks in the bottom which kinda freaked me out at first. Someone on the trip who had run it a heap of times said you don’t hit em, just go for it. So I did.

And finally a view looking back up the river. With the Chute we ran on lookers left.

Denniston is a former coal mining area situated on an alpine plateau about 30km North of Westport on the West Coast of New Zealand (Wikipedia here). It was actually an active mining area right up until the 1960’s. In recent years it has fallen under the ambit of the Department of Conservation. Along with the Buller Cycling club they have been building out a bunch of Mountain Bike tracks around the area.

You can pull details on the cycling area from the DoC site and from the Buller Cycling club.
http://www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/places-to-visit/west-coast/buller-area/denniston/activities/mountain-bike-tracks/ 
http://www.cyclebuller.co.nz/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=19&Itemid=3 

Dave and I decided we’d try and visit the tracks as part of our summer South Island road trip. We drove in via Murchison as we did some paddling along the way. We had a couple of days in the Murchison region where the water levels were well up. Paddled a few runs that I’ve done before as well as a new run down the mangles that started with about a 2m waterfall- pulled quite a crowd when we ran that one for some reason… didn’t seem that difficult.

We drove into Westport the evening before we planned to ride and found ourselves a nice motel (Buller Bridge Motel) with free WiFi. Got up early and headed up the hill. This place really is quite the plateau. The hill rises steeply off the ocean almost to an altitude of about 650m at the carpark. The views were pretty good for us; on a really fine and still day I can imagine you’d be able to see all the way up to Karamea.

Once we got to the top we had a bit of a potter around looking at some of the old mining ruins. Denniston is famous for the Denniston Incline which is a frighteningly steep, two pitch, coal railway that literally goes straight up the side of the hill. Check out this video from the NZ Archives for an idea of what it was like.

Then we headed up the hill to the Museum Car park which is the designated starting place for the Mountain Biking trails. While getting organized we saw the Google Car driving around- yes, even in the middle of bloody nowhere there is Google!

We started out with the Ropers Hotel Circuit.
http://www.cyclebuller.co.nz/attachments/011_MTB%20-%20Denniston%20-%20Ropers%20Hotel%20Circuit.pdf 
Straight away the riding was quite different to anything we’d ridden before in New Zealand. Lots of slick rock and ledges. Was quite fast riding and reasonably hard on the suspension. A 6” trail bike is ideal- we had a Trance and a Mojo. The last part of this track before it hits the road is walking only- for ecological reasons rather than ride-ability. You definitely want to do this track in the predominant direction indicated on the map as it would be a pain to walk up that hill.

Next we rode out on one of the longer trails. This was nominally on 4WD track but I’d challenge most people to take their 4WD there and get it back in one piece. The track was Sullivans Circuit and it went off the other side of the Plateau back down towards Westport.
http://www.cyclebuller.co.nz/attachments/011_MTB%20-%20Denniston%20-%20Sullivans%20Circuit.pdf 

This track had plenty of challenging riding. Lots of large rocks and ledges. it was all too easy to go far faster than 0.1mm of lycra really should justify.

Finally we rode the Miners and Drill track circuits. Again, lots of hairy riding with a bunch of sketchy single track, some of which we both had to walk.

There was still plenty of sign of the old coal mining stuff and indeed the coal itself.

Despite only doing about 30km (in 3.15hr!) we were in need of a beer once we got back to the car.

Here’s the GPS dump

And the full TCX file of my Garmin 310XT is here:
http://connect.garmin.com/activity/21786909

Thought it would be interesting to do a blog post of my stats for 2009.

It was a pretty hellish year for travel. It’s the first full year that I’ve used TripIt which has proved to be a really useful tool. TripIt also provides travel stats.

Now not all of this was work travel (I had a couple of overseas holidays) but it was still a pretty full on year.

This is borne out in my exercise stats. Obviously my most exercised location was Wellington, but, I also did a whole heap in Issaquah, Washington and also in Bangalore, India.

I remained pretty steady over the course of the year in terms of the amount of exercise I did. It was still really hard to maintain anything approaching a good training program though.

Once again it was a shitty year for me skiing wise, though these stats do miss out a bit of skiing I had in January. I also did far less mountain biking than I would have liked to.

I did do over 300hr of exercise over the year and travelled 2700km. I also burned 65,000 calories.

Will be interesting to see what I can manage this year.

Got out for hills this morning on the road bike. Turned into a shorter ride, but, I pushed the 2nd interval really hard (100% MHR) and in doing so smashed about 7% off my PB up the short pinch climb I do.

The average power was 450 Watts over the 4min 31 seconds. Pity the hill wasn’t a touch longer as it meant my new PB 5 minute power ended up being only 431 Watts i.e. 30 seconds of my rest break at the top was included.. Goal for the next few weeks is to really work on lifting my power profile. I think I’ll probably look at doing Peak 1’w and 5’w on Happy Valley road as it certainly appears to help going up a hill. At the moment my 1’w isn’t even on the chart and I’d like to work on getting my entire profile into the Cat 4 region over the next few weeks in the lead up to the K1 race. Means I need to be targeting 350 Watts for 60 minutes which I think is going to be the hardest bit.

The other interesting thing is to see just how much temperature variation affects my (supposedly temperature compensating) barometric altimeter on the Polar s625x. All 5 of those intervals should be the same height, but, there is a definite trend downward over the set.

So it’s 1830hr in Durban South Africa and today was the last day for TechEd Africa for 2009. This was my first TechEd for this year and the second time I’ve spoken at TechEd South Africa.

Before I give you links to the demo code I’m going to bore you with some photos of my trip down the Zambezi last week. There’s actually quite a story behind it that you can read all about over at the Intergen Blog.

Thoughts I’d start a post of some of the grades of the various hills (Road Cycling) around Wellington.

I’ve pulled these off various rides around the place. Have noted where some are averages. All data recorded on a Polar s625x

Hill	Map	Distance	Height	Grade
Makara Saddle. Karori Side. Cnr Allington Road and Apex of Saddle Average of 3		1.05km	87m	8.5%
Makara Saddle. Makara Side Lamp-post in front of Church to Lamppost at top of Saddle Average of 2	Map	2.61km	186m	7.15%
Takarau Gorge Road Intersection to Top of J’ville Intersection Makara Rd and Takarau Rd to top of Johnsonville on Cortina Road	Map	11.07km	268m	2.2%
Aro Valley Up Raroa Road From Traffic island at bottom of hill to top of hill on Raroa Road	Map	1.96km	107m	5.7%

So all was quiet for me with a big travel load the last couple of weeks. Spent an amazing week in Redmond last week and kinda wish I had my bike with me- Seattle in Summer is rather alluring to be honest!

Got out for a MTB ride with my brother today. Not far, but, we got a couple of hours in. We did a lower loop of Makara Peak then up to the top, down Zacs and Varleys and home along the road.

The Yellow Mojo got really filthy. You can at least still tell it’s yellow.

Way cool. @RotoruaNZ Tweeted me the other day after I posted some photos of Mountain Biking up here.

Asked if they could use one of my photos on their Mountain Biking page. Check out Phil Ross on the dipper with the *loud* strobe action going on.

http://rotoruanz.com/ 

If you’re one of my overseas readers I can’t comment the City of Rotorua to you enough. I’ve dreamed of living there since I was at highschool and it’s still 100% on my 5 year roadmap. It’s close to the ski fields, has phenomenal mountain biking (the Redwoods), great kayaking (Kaituna and Wairoa) and great air links for frequent business travellers like me (Can go direct to AKL, WLG, CHC and ZQN).

The only query/quibble I have with the Destination Rotorua site is why on earth is it hosted on the other side of the world!?! See the trace-route below. Looks like it’s in Orlando!
Looks like their site uses PHP so they’ll probably be a good candidate for the Apache version of the Runtime Page Optimizer http://www.getrpo.com/Product/Apache. Running the RPO site tester it reckons it should knock a couple of seconds off the New Zealand load times.

C:\Users\Chris>tracert www.rotoruanz.com

Tracing route to rotoruanz.com [66.7.213.144]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    13 ms    <1 ms     1 ms  …
  2    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  …
  3     1 ms     2 ms     1 ms  wlgrtr1-65.intergen.org.nz [202.126.87.65]
  4     4 ms     1 ms     2 ms  ihwrtr1-129.intergen.net.nz [202.126.87.129]
  5     2 ms     5 ms     3 ms  32.114.216.13
  6   158 ms   150 ms   148 ms  165.87.71.190
  7   150 ms   148 ms   148 ms  12.127.33.6
  8   150 ms   152 ms   158 ms  cr2.sffca.ip.att.net [12.122.136.74]
  9   148 ms   148 ms   156 ms  ggr3.sffca.ip.att.net [12.122.136.17]
10   150 ms   149 ms   154 ms  att-gw.sanfran.level3.net [192.205.33.78]
11   157 ms   162 ms   161 ms  vlan89.csw3.sanjose1.level3.net [4.68.18.190]
12   176 ms   152 ms   160 ms  ae-83-83.ebr3.sanjose1.level3.net [4.69.134.233]

13   151 ms   155 ms   167 ms  ae-2.ebr3.losangeles1.level3.net [4.69.132.10]
14   148 ms   157 ms   148 ms  ae-63-63.csw1.losangeles1.level3.net [4.69.137.3
4]
15   160 ms   163 ms   161 ms  ae-62-62.ebr2.losangeles1.level3.net [4.69.137.1
7]
16   183 ms   181 ms   192 ms  ae-3.ebr3.dallas1.level3.net [4.69.132.78]
17   202 ms   181 ms   180 ms  ae-93-93.csw4.dallas1.level3.net [4.69.136.166]

18   190 ms   197 ms   181 ms  ae-91-91.ebr1.dallas1.level3.net [4.69.136.133]

19   215 ms   214 ms   224 ms  ae-1-14.bar2.orlando1.level3.net [4.69.137.153]

20   220 ms   218 ms   210 ms  ae-9-9.car2.orlando1.level3.net [4.69.133.69]
21   212 ms   210 ms   211 ms  hostdime.car2.orlando1.level3.net [4.79.118.38]

22   211 ms   211 ms   213 ms  dime151.dizinc.com [66.7.213.144]

Trace complete.

So I spent last week Mountain Biking in Rotorua and generally recovering from my 3 months of travel.

Got out with the Canon 5D MkII and some strobes for a bit of run in the Redwoods.

Photos were taken by a variety of Myself, Phil Ross, James Ogle and Sarah Bolland.

Phil Ross on ‘The Dipper’.
5D MkII, Sigma 14mm F2.8 EX DG + 580 EX II on ‘Ebay Triggers’

Chris Auld on ‘The Dipper’
5D MkII, Sigma 14mm F2.8 EX DG + 580 EX II on ‘Ebay Triggers’

Canon 20D and Canon EF 50mm F1.8 II

Chris Auld on the Dipper
Canon 5D Mk II w/ 70-200 F2.8 IS L 1 x 580 EX 1 x 580 EX II fired by ST-E2

David Addison
Canon 20D and Canon EF 50mm F1.8 II

Chris Auld and David Addison on The Dipper
Canon 5D Mk II w/ 70-200 F2.8 IS L 1 x 580 EX 1 x 580 EX II fired by ST-E2

Getting the strobes setup
Canon 20D and Canon EF 50mm F1.8 II

Canon 20D and Canon EF 50mm F1.8 II

Canon 20D and Canon EF 50mm F1.8 II

With all this travel I keep forgetting just how lovely Wellington can be on a great day.

Did a fantastic road ride today. Out to Johnsonville (past the murder scene at the Mobil), back into town via Ngaio, around the bays and the Miramar peninsula and the I cut home @ Kilbirnie as I was pretty stuffed by then. Rode a bunch of the peninsula with a guy from Mercer comparing notes on hotels to stay at that actually have proper spin bikes.

Did about 70km all up.

My peak 20min power was up to 300 Watts so I’m defn. seeing some improvement in my Functional Threshold Power (up from 280 Watts last time I did a proper test) . Even more pleasing was I maintained 290 Watts for 20min and 255 Watts for 60 min. Just have to get the body weight down and should be caning it.

Nikki Kelly Nikki is a paddling friend from way back and her son Sam is about the same age and Anna Kaituna Calder, the daughter of some other great paddling buddies.

Almost inspires me to jump back in a slalom boat…. if I had time :-)

I pine to go and live by the Kaituna river!

Nikki Kelly Shows Why She Is So Inspirational

So one cool thing I’ve noticed on my morning walks/runs is they’ve started putting biciyle compatible cattle stops on the Skyline walkway. These allow bikes to pass, but stop stock moving between paddocks. Thus far I’ve seen one on the actual Skyline track and one where the track drops down into Karori Cemetary via the new track that’s been built.

So I watched a few Snowsports videos while I was skiing in Banff last week. There is an increasing focus on avalanche education which is a good thing I think. I watched the Biography flick on Craig Kelly called Let it Rideand The Fine Line which is a sort of Hybrid action+education flick on Avalanches in the back country.

All go through the big three avy safety tools you should never be without:

1. Beacon/Transceiver. With fresh batteries and a user who knows how to use it. I’ve got one of the older model Barryvox beacons.
2. A probe- that’s long enough for the sort of locations you’re hitting. I have a 300cm G3 probe.
3. A shovel. I’m personally not a big fan of polycarbonate shovels, they may be lighter, but the wet snow here in NZ is just too likely to break them… You want a nice big alloy shovel for digging your friends out pronto like!

Something that a bunch of them missed was helmets. Back when I was a ‘grom’ skier Helmets were totally ‘uncool’… but that’s all changed, I wouldn’t be without mine. Several of the case studies in The Fine Line talked about severe head and facial injuries so a good Helmet is number 4 for me.

Check out this email that the guys from Shred Ready received about how one of their helmets helped in an avalanche situation.

http://shredready.com/team/2009/02/we-are-happy-our-friend-eric-zuaro.html

So I hope you’re all having a great holiday break. I’ve been paddling and kayaking in Rotorua which is always great fun. Photographing a friends wedding today.

Some paddling photos…. if you’re ever keen for a bit of kayaking let me know!

Chris running the Roller Coaster on the Wairoa River near Tauranga

A friend running the top Waterfall rapid on the Wairoa River

My friend running the bottom waterfall (Auto Huck styles) on the Wairoa

Running the Kaituna 7m waterfall in a double kayak for Dave’s stag-do… Chris in the back, Dave in the front about to get a Sinus rinsing.

Feel free to take a look at the comments to the last post as this is a followup. You may want to ignore the snipey content devoid comments from our friend in the NZOSS community.

Herewith a follow up post that hopefully addresses the substantive questions that were actually raised (thanks Stu)

Sorry for the delay. I've been busy trying to get a high quality specification progressed through the ISO standards process. Oh and I've also managed to get outside to do some skiing in the Montana backcountry.

The issue is that the GPL aims to enforce the distribution of any derived work under the GPL also.

I do not want to release my applications under the GPL and inparticular I do not want to release any Open Source code I write under the GPL as I do not believe in the 'Copyleft' philosophy to which it subscribes.

Now that's fine. As a general rule I avoid GPL code like the plague (we do use LGPL code in some of our products). In fact our contracts at Kognition included a clause requireing neither party to the agreement to provide GPL code to the other.

So the question then comes to can I implement ODF without having to derive my work from any GPL based code.
My feeling is that even looking at the code for say OpenOffice will get me into trouble.
Likewise decompiling the code will be problematic.

I am actually comfortable reverse engineering by observation for features like 'blink', I do not believe that is going to breach copyright in the work.

But the question is, will reverse engineering by observation be sufficient. And to be honest I just don't know the answer to that question. I don't really see myself spending that much time working with ODF as I tend to agree with The Burton Report as to its likely levels of adoption and indeed the likely market segments to adopt it- selling software to people who are philosophically opposed to paying for software is unlikely to be a sustainable business. That said I did find a very interesting bit of commentary on the web about just this problem quite recently.

http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/announcements/1.8/gnumeric-1.8.shtml

"The Gnumeric team does not envision using the OpenDocument Format as its native format.

The spreadsheet part of ODF, in its current form, is ill defined and has many, many problems. For example: (1) there is no meaningful discussion of what functions a spreadsheet should support and what they should do. Without that, there is little point in trying to move a spreadsheet from one program to another; (2) there is no provision for sharing formulas between cells; (3) there is no implementation -- writing an ODF exporter consists of reverse-engineering OpenOffice to see what parts of the standard it can handle. (Note: the preceding comments relate to the spreadsheet part of ODF only; we do not have an informed opinion on ODF for word processing documents, for example.)

We may revisit this decision in the future, should the situation improve. In the meantime, we will strive to maintain a reasonable importer and exporter."

Those guys look to have actually broached the problem and to be honest that kinda answers my question. If I can't realisitically use ODF without reverse-engineering OpenOffice then I'm pretty much stuffed in terms of writing a GPL free implementation.