Training Log

I spent again a few needless moments in the morning trying to make the best out of my precarious programming skills and dabbled on an alternative to srdplot.

Not that I don’t like srdplot – it generates very pretty graphs that seem just to be made for public display. It’s just that it’s a C application, and it reads only .srd files. I added support for Windows .hrm files, but that still left me without the possibility of generating graphs for combined exercises.

So I went in and took the Perl approach. Dave was kind enough to add support for retrieval of data points from S710, and now I can generate both an XML file from the original source format (regardless of srd or hrm), and a graph straight from the data using GD::Graph, which is what I used to generate my weight chart.

The code went down dramatically in size and complexity. Right now, I am at 124 lines to generate the speed and the altitude graphs for distance. Time will be a trivial addition. There are still a few issues on the esthetic side, but still we’ll end up with something that replaces plot.c and makes it easier to extend – and we get merged files almost for free!