Garmin Forerunner 305

This year for Christmas I received a Garmin Forerunner 305 from my lovely wife. It's a GPS receiver with built-in heart-rate monitor - it does just about everything my existing Polar F11 does, but gives me the added bonus of GPS data as well as Open-Source accessibility. Both GPSBabel and garmintools support my device through a pretty standard usb interface which is fantastic! (as opposed to the Polar which uses an audio interface, and is currently Windows-only :-(

The open-sourceness accessibility is very important to me, and now being able to extract the raw data easily is a huge win that justifies the changeover price by itself. I've already scripted up a nice interface, and am exploring some pre-existing solutions too - stay tuned for a later blog post. While it's early days - I've only been on 2 runs so far - the heart-rate monitor seems less susceptible to spikes which is a bonus - I don't like looking at the watch and seeing that it thinks that I'm working at 190bpm when I _know_ I'm only at 140bpm.

Getting fit is really quite a bit easier when you have gadgets to distract you :-)

exercise | 29 Dec 2007 | #

16km Run Goal - Completed

Yesterday I broke through a distance barrier that's hung over my head for 3 weeks - running 16kms. The barrier wasn't physical so much as mental - getting my head in the right place to run that distance. Just like golf, running is only 25% physical - the rest is keeping up the concentration.

24 hours after the run and the body has held up remarkably well. I'll take a couple of days off now for Christmas, before starting towards the next challenge.

GPS points plotted thanks to Gmaps Pedometer.

exercise | 24 Dec 2007 | #

World Domination, part 317

Cool, I've just been publicly called a shadowy underworld evil genius.
Now I just need to work on getting that on a business card :-P

tech/linux-australia | 18 Dec 2007 | #

Dead Drinking Bird

Sadly, office cricket, or over-zealous cleaners have resulted in this mess after the weekend:

:-(

tech/gadgets | 17 Dec 2007 | #

The latest addition to my desk

Ever since the days of Bugs Bunny cartoons I've wanted one of these :-)

tech/gadgets | 14 Dec 2007 | #

Biometric Insecurity

A very nice succinct blog about why we should be cautious about biometric authentication schemes. It's a useful read.

I've been discussing this with Ken for the last couple of years - security systems are only as secure as the weakest link in the system. If your biometric reader (fingerprint, retinal scan, DNA fingerprint, whatever) just dumps raw data over some data bus, who says you can't do a man-in-the-middle data capture and replay attack? How about your storage of the data? How about the security of that database? And the operating system on which that database sits? How about protection from unauthorised modification? How about that data falling into the hands of unauthorised users? We've already seen databases with the records of millions of citizens "disappear". Given that our judiciary holds biometric data in very high esteem, who will guarantee its integrity?

I'm all for improving security, but the illusion of security only harms the innocent. It seems to me that many biometric system proposals are susceptible to the Bribing the Doorkeeper on the Great Wall of China-kind of attack.

tech/code | 05 Dec 2007 | #

LinuxSA December 2007 -Christmas Dinner Breakup

 Hi all,

 As is the tradition, for the December meeting of LinuxSA we go
 somewhere for dinner (no meeting topic, no speaker).  Please register
 (see below) so I can let the restaurant know how many are coming.

 Last year we had it down south (Blackwood), so this year we'll be
 pleasing the northerners.

 The important info:

 When:   7:00pm on Tuesday, 18th December, 2007

 Where:  Mawson Lakes Hotel
         http://www.mawsonlakeshotel.com.au/
         10 Main Street, Mawson Lakes

 Who:    Any Linux-minded people who want to eat with us!

 RSVP:   Monday, 17th December, 2007
         http://www.linuxsa.org.au/meetings/

 For more information:

   Email:        organisers@linuxsa.org.au
   Web Page:     http://www.linuxsa.org.au/
   Mailing List: linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au
   IRC:          #linuxsa on irc.freenode.net

tech/LinuxSA | 05 Dec 2007 | #