MTBGuru blog

Time to get the blog out of hibernation! We’ve been silently making upgrades, adding new features to the site and testing them out, and there was not much time left to write about it here.

More about that below, but first a service announcement: I’ve created a new home for the more bike and riding oriented stuff I want to write about (and did so here in the past); it’s called Canyon Fever, go check it out.
This place (blog.mtbguru.com) will then be focused on MTBGuru.com support and announcements.

So here’s a quick recap on what’s new on the site, and I plan to elaborate on some of this in subsequent posts…

• Google Earth in the browser

Google recently released a browser plugin as well as an API that enables us to run Google Earth within the browser (only Firefox and IE on Windows are supported at this time).

• MTBGuru for Mobile

We’ve been getting quite excited about the possibilities the latest generation of mobile devices offer (iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia’s NSeries); this is a work in progress, more to follow!

• Integration of the Garmin’s Communicator browser plugin

This allows you to automatically download or upload data from your Garmin devices, rather than by transferring the .GPX files.

• Support for Garmin’s Training Center format

This format is required to upload course files to the Garmin Edge and Forerunner series, which become increasingly popular for biking and running activities; so we made a little exception on our .GPX/.KML centric policy.

When I first moved to the Bay Area from Europe and started riding the trails here, I didn’t believe it when people told me about park rangers setting up speed traps for bikers, writing tickets with huge fines for riding after dark etcetera. Needless to say, I’ve come a way from there.

The situation here is now such that mountain biking is used by some public agencies as a quick and effective way to raise funds or overcome budget shortcomings, by means of writing out ridiculous fines for such gross offenses as riding a trail half an hour after sunset or exceeding 15mph at the bottom of some fireroad descent (usually not on singletrack, where speeding actually could present a real hazard to other trail users).

These funds are subsequently used to acquire more land or build and maintain trails *closed* to mountain bikers, as for instance is the case here with the La Honda Creek Preserve.

This is where trail advocacy comes in - a concept which I couldn’t grasp and appreciate while living in my bike-crazy home country - and the great people that spend their precious spare time and efforts to ‘further our riding causes’, attending endless meetings in an environment often very hostile to them. But also small efforts and contributions can make a difference - I’d urge everyone to sign this petition, or attend the public hearing tonight in La Honda (even though it’s held at 4pm on a Tuesday) - more info in this thread on MTBR - bring a bike helmet!

To get you warmed up, check out this recent example that should get your blood to boil: FC from MTBR was on a short after-work ride, riding from his house to the park, only to be intercepted (at 7pm) and presented a +$300 ticket by a ranger who was driving a truck around in the park, burning fuel and spoiling the air with exhaust gases and spitting out CO2 for the sole purpose of catching offenders whose ‘crime’ it is riding a bike on a trail after dark. Two words come to mind: ‘absurd’ and ‘Kafka’…

News has leaked about an upgrade to the Garmin Etrex family coming later this fall, including a new ‘high sensitivity’ receiver - it’s unclear whether this will be a SiRFstar III chip or something else. Due to its compact size and mapping and navigation capabilities, the Etrex units have been quite popular for hiking and biking (easy to mount on a handlebar). Their crappy sensitivity though has always been problematic - it seems that this is about to change, and that would make them pretty great GPS units for mountain biking.

As pointed out in the GPS Tracklog blog, one of the things advertised in a (leaked) Canadian GPS catalog (see image below) is Galileo compatibility (by means of a chip module that can be added later), which shouldn’t get you too excited as the earliest Galileo is now projected to be functional is 2012…
(Galileo is the GPS project of the European Union)

Below: the new Vista ‘HCx’ (in Canadian dollars…)

MTBGuru wishes everyone a happy and safe new year - and may you all take on lots of exciting outdoor adventures, discover new trails and routes, and share your experiences.

We’ll soon get out of our holiday hibernation and get back to work to improve the site and implement new features (more about that soon).
And to ride, of course - for new year’s resolutions I was thinking of signing up for a 100 mile race (Park City, Leadville?) or doing a 24 hour event (team? or perhaps even solo?), though I may be getting carried away a bit.

cheers,
Dirk & Tom

Right after raving about our Google Earth feature, we discovered a bug in our ‘Google Earth Download’ feature… o, Murphy! Or is it the demo-effect?
Either way, we’re actively looking into the issue; the problem is that for some trips a crash will occur when you try to download the Google Earth file. Our apologies and we’ll try to resolve this asap…

Update (12.30pm): bug squashed and issue solved!

We’re experiencing intermittent outages this morning (morning in the Pacific US, evening in Greenwich/Europe) - we’re working on it and investigating the possible causes. Our apologies for any inconvenience!

Update: everything should be running fine now, we’re still investigating the causes of the problem. Note that absolutely no data has been lost, this was strictly a problem with the web server.

Update 2: the problem seems to have reoccured - we’ll keep you posted when we got everything sorted out! Sorry for the down time.

Update 3: the problem seems related to picture processing. We’ve suspended picture processing for the time being. Everything else should be working, but please be aware that you temporarily won’t see any new pictures that you upload - thanks for your patience and we’re trying to fix things as soon as possible.

Update 4: we should have stuck with our first thought - it is more than likely a problem with the web server and web host, an acute case of growing pains. We have found a patch for it and everything seems to be working again - picture processing is up and running again. We’ll continue to test and monitor things, please bear with us in case the problems would resurface.

We had a temporary glitch in our picture upload feature this afternoon - our apologies for the inconvenience!
Everything should be working well again now.
Note that when you upload pictures, you’ll see a line on the trip page saying ‘New pictures are currently being processed’ - this should normally only take a minute or two to complete (depending on the amount of pictures) - when you then reload the page you’ll see a thumnail gallery of your uploaded photos.

Google’s pushpins (the balloon icons) are nice and so but we got a bit tired of them. So they’ve been replaced with something better: the map is now featuring icons indicating the type of activity and a colored circle (green, blue or red) that tells you whether the trip is public, yours or pivate. Some examples:

a mountain bike trip created by you

a private (i.e. not readable by the public) run

Now when you’re not zoomed in very much and you’re in area that has a lot of trips, things are starting to look very busy and messy (this was of course also true with the old pushpins) - we’re aware that this is a problem and that this will get worse so we’re working on a method to groups trips together when they’re in close proximity at a given zoom level on the map.

You may also notice another tab on this blog: ‘Known issues’ - here we’d like to keep you up to date with some known bugs or issues we’re aware of and/or are currently working on.

We’ve started to demo the site to some more people and friends… though everything is not yet 100% working or looking as we’d like, we think we’re almost ready for v1.0!

We’re currently feverishly implementing various changes in both design and functionality, to get ready for launch. The database is all set and stable though, so the 80-something trips in it are still there to browse for you.