Stranded Strava ride#

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 13:50:29 +0000

This morning, due to some unlikely-ever-to-be diagnosed bug perhaps involving poor network connectivity in our office basement, the Android Strava app started denying all knowledge of my ride into work.

It turned out not to be quite as lost as I feared it would be, but the process of getting it uploaded was still kind of complicated. You will need root on your android, plus a real computer (or a Mac will do at a pinch, if that's all you have available) with the android stuff installed, sqlite3 and gpsbabel.

• copy the strava database onto the computer. Do this in two steps because adb pull doesn't have the permissions to read the directory where the database lives

  $ adb shell
  shell@android:/ $ su
  shell@android:/ # cp /data/data/com.strava/databases/strava /sdcard/tmp-strava
  shell@android:/data/data/com.strava/databases # exit
  shell@android:/ $ exit
  $ adb pull  /sdcard/tmp-strava
  4566 KB/s (1277952 bytes in 0.273s)
  

• use sqlite3 to get the data points out. This involved a bit of digging around

  sqlite> .tables
  CLUB_ACTIVITY           comments                related_activites
  activities              facebook_athletes       segment_leaderboards
  android_metadata        followers               segments
  athletes                followings              streams
  challenge_leaderboards  heartrates              waypoints
  challenge_participants  kudos                   zones
  challenges              notifications
  sqlite> .headers on
  sqlite> select max(timestamp) from waypoints;
  max(timestamp)
  1370851561000
  sqlite> select * from waypoints where timestamp=1370851561000;
  ride_id|pos|timestamp|latiude|longitude|altitude|h_accuracy|v_accuracy|command|speed|bearing|device_time|filtered|elapsed_time|distance
  c558df30-01ae-43ab-99c6-9b4649b8d596|1742|1370851561000|51.5209762891755|-0.0867852196097374|107.0|10.0|||3.56535005569458|13.0|1370851559177|0|1752811|10778.9532725066
  sqlite> .mode csv
  sqlite> .output /tmp/track.csv
  sqlite> select date(timestamp/1000.0,'unixepoch') as date,time(timestamp/1000.0,'unixepoch') as time,latiude as lat,longitude as lon,altitude as alt from waypoints where ride_id='c558df30-01ae-43ab-99c6-9b4649b8d596';
  sqlite3> ^D
  

  Yes, you read that right, there really is a column called latiude in that table. Note that the ride_id of my missing ride is not necessarily the same as your missing ride: in this case I looked at the timestamp of the most recent waypoint logged and it corresponded to the time I finished my ride, but you might have to dig further.

• now we have a CSV file, we need only turn it into a format that Strava will recognize, and upload it with the Strava upload button. According to the docs, this GPSBabel invocation should transform a list of waypoints in CSV form into a track in GPX form - according to empirical observation, it merely gives a list of waypoints in GPX format. But Strava seems to accept that as a valid upload anyway

  $ gpsbabel  -i unicsv -f /tmp/track.csv -o tcx -x transform,trk=wpt -t   -F /tmp/track.tcx
  

• And here it is - though, you might argue, hardly worth the effort of recovering it. Somewhere in the process it seems to have lost track of my local time conventions too, but UTC is the one true timezone, so no big deal.

NetworkManager No More#

Sat, 29 Jun 2013 22:43:08 +0000

Finally fed up with it randomly stalling and hanging for tens of seconds at a time, I decided yesterday to reinstall my laptop using ext4 instead of btrfs[*]. This time around I've done it all with Puppet, so I can tell you about my other recent change - connecting to protected WPA wireless networks without the "assistance" of NetworkManager.

It turns out to be amazingly simple if you're reasonably acquainted with editing text files: you need a stanza in /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf for each network you want to connect to (and optionally, each network you want to tell it about that it should not connect to)

network={
        ssid="My SSID"
	priority=20
        #psk="not a passphrase"
        psk=8649204ac9cecc467b6c7cb35806627736c3e28f8303d73f2e9afb0a1dff871c
        id_str "default"
}
network={
        ssid="My other SSID"
	priority=20
        #psk="not a passphrase"
        psk=33e4836e7a1325ee4abe6e7ba0f4f9f2f0927aac6d476b001a2469b67e5f2ad7
        id_str "default"
}
network={
        ssid="Some annoying captive portal"
	priority=0
        id_str "ignore"
}

and then you need to put stuff in /etc/network/interfaces to tell it to use wpa-roam

iface wlan0 inet manual
  wpa-driver wext
  wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

and then some more stuff to correspond to each id_str you've used in wpa_supplicant.conf

iface default inet dhcp
iface ignore inet manual

My setup is not exactly what you see in this commit because I'm not quite stupid enough to put real keys into Github - but it's otherwise pretty close. And for the rest of the repository, see here

[*] it remains to be seen if it makes any difference at all, but it was probably about due for a good decrufting anyway

Fully loaded leiningen#

Sat, 29 Jun 2013 23:04:59 +0000

Taking the time to figure out how to use ones tools is more often a good thing to do than it is a thing I actually do. In this case, the thing I have now figured out is how to get all of a multi-file Clojure project loaded into Clojure without visiting each file and doing C-c C-l on it

user> (require 'winnow.core)

That's right. require on a namespace will actually load the file that defines it - and the files defining the namespaces it depends on. ns or in-ns just create it in an empty state.