Kochka's notes

Random thoughts

Geo/Distance Search From Scratch Using Rails & MySQL

With an explosive growth of the internet, data need to be localized more than ever. Many DBMS already include some GIS features but support is often incomplete. InnoDB’s MySQL engine currently supports some spacial data types but not indexes on it. Building an efficient GIS system from scratch is quite easy, let’s see how to do it using Ruby on Rails & MySQL.

Manual Input of Health Values Into Garmin Connect

Garmin Connect is a pretty nice solution for Garmin device users to track down cycling or running workouts. It is well featured and still gets improved on a regular basis. However the health section of the site is quite totally locked down to Tanita BC-1000 scale (which allows for body measurments uploads to Garmin devices such as Edge or Forunners series).
For the users of other scales, only weight can be manually input, which is pretty silly. So the owners of the other hundred body monitor devices on the market are screwed. It’s certainly due to an agreement between Garmin and Tanita but it’s still lame.