Render fast

I updated my Greasemonkey script that replaces the Bing Map with a Google Map in Garmin Connect. This version is made faster by completely disabling the Bing Map and it no longer fetches the map information twice. Additionally, I’ve fixed the lap display markers and improved the quality of the track line.

Install Garmin Connect Google Maps Greasemonkey Script v0.2.

I have also posted Garmin Connect Google Maps at userscripts.org.

Note: For some reason I had to uninstall the old script before installing the new one–Greasemonkey didn’t seem to recognize the upgrade.

Garmin Connect, a site I use to log my runs and bike rides, switched from Google Maps to Bing Maps back in November. Bing Maps’ coverage seems generally inferior to Google Maps and I think the maps just look better on Google. Also, Bing Maps seems to apply some overly-aggressive line smoothing, making tight corners look like wide curves.

I finally got around to writing a Greasemonkey script to restore the Google Map on the dashboard and activity pages.

Here’s the link to the script:

Install Garmin Connect Google Maps Greasemonkey script.

A run I did in Kathmandu displayed on Google Maps, top, and Bing Maps, bottom.

When I was developing the NWSClient I had to collect the locations of National Weather Service weather stations, radar sites, and weather forecast offices. Here is the list of weather stations in Google Earth kml format and GPX. A subset of this list, the weather forecast offices, is in GPX format and csv format.

Around 6am EDT today the current conditions XML feed stopped updating. I notified NWS and I received the following reply:

“There was a database cluster failure earlier this morning. System admins are working on the issue now. It should be available shortly.”

UPDATE: I’ve released versions 1.14 and 1.15 which fixes the problem with the decimal temperature not displaying properly.

Ugh. This has been a crazy week for my little Blackberry weather app. The National Weather Service has decided to change the formatting of their current conditions XML file. The original product description (pdf) displays the temperatures as integers, but as of this morning NWS has started pushing temperatures with an additional digit of precision. This causes the temperature in the application icon to overflow its maximum size of three digits. Some users will see “NWS” instead of the temperature and some will see “err.” To be fair, the schema for the current conditions feed  indicates temperature is a decimal type, but I naively treated all values as string data for the sake of simplicity.

I have a fix that will strip the extra digits off of the temperature for display in the application icon. I plan to release this as a new version tonight.

I’ve made a version of NWSClient for the Blackberry Storm. It is identical to version 1.0 except it has been built for OS v4.7 and the over-the-air install will not make the Storm run the application in “compatibility mode,” as it would the 1.0 version (this can be disabled in the preferences of the phone if you’ve already installed the previous 1.0 version).

Over-the-air install is here.