This blog uses fitness data to benchmark Python analytics against the analytics from leading fitness websites. The fitness data is from a ride in the Great Dublin Cycle - a 100km cycling sportif that took place in Dublin last September. This fitness data was created, and stored in a Garmin activity computer file, by a Garmin bike computer. This data file contains sensor activity data such as time, distance, cadence, heart rate and altitude.

Cyclists are well known for our use of technology for performance enhancement. The modern road bike is made from materials that originated in the racing car and fighter jet industries. The clothing for cyclist are the most advanced on the planet and were developed from professional skiing apparel. Cyclist have used bike computers to measure their performance for decades. Before IoT (Internet of Things), Smart Phones, Apps, FitBits - cyclists have been logging personal activity data and analyzing their performance. Cyclists have always been at the cutting edge of collecting data for performance improvement - apparently the first device to measure a cycling metric (cadence) was in use in 1895.

My first ever blog on Docker was published by Docker Weekly

Since completing the DemonWare Docker Bootcamp, I have become a Docker user. I am now doing all my software development under Docker - see my Jupyter Pandas responsitory on GitHub. I have also released my Jupyter Docker Image on Docker Hub.

Today I registered my user name patclaffey on the Docker Hub web-site - I am now the proud owner of a personal patclaffey Docker Hub account. The first thing I did on Docker Hub was create a public repository for my Jupyter / Pandas image. I navigated to the Dashboard tab, pressed the Create Repository + button and followed its dialog:

I have created a new GitHub Docker Jupyter repository in my personal GitHub account. The repository contains the code to run the latest version of Jupyter (using version 4.0 documents) on Ubuntu 14.04 in a Docker Container. I have tested this Docker container on my PC (using Ubuntu 14.10) and also on the cloud (using an AWS EC2 instance with Red Hat Linux). I verified that I could work successfully with the Jupyter Notebook content over the cloud.

I attended the Docker Hackaton organized by Demonware on the 19th Sept 2015 in Dublin. The Hackaton was run as part of the Global Docker hacking weekend. Our hosts / guides for the day were Tom and Nic from DemonWare. The event took place in the WorkDay building in SmithField. Thanks to WorkDay for providing the venue and Softlayer for the food and beverages.

My original idea was to write my first blog about the experience of posting a GitHub hosted blog. Like the best laid plans of men and mice - that did not happen. In fact the first four blogs are about the set up and configuration of a blogging application on GitHub. Now at last here in the fifth blog, (yes, Blog Number 5) I can focus on the experience of actually posting a GitHub hosted blog. Whats cool is the simplicity of its blogging work-flow.

The Jekyll Now powered blogging site is customized by a configuration file. This blog describes the customizations made to the blogging site using this configuration file. In addition the contents of the About file needs to be updated for the user.

A GitHub web-site is like an empty container. A blogging application is needed to transform this empty container into a functional blogging web-site. A blogging application is software that manages the layout, formatting and style of the users blogs on the blogging web-site. In the case of GitHub this blogging software needs to be compatible with Jekyll. This blogs describes installing up this essential blogging software.

Installing Jekyll on Windows is a royal pain. GitHub claim in the article "Using Jekyll with Pages" that installing Jekyll is easy. However, I beg to differ, and in this blog I describe in detail the steps I took to get Jekyll up and running on Windows. I am a big fan of open source software and the volunteers who make possible great products like Jekyll. I generally shrug off these kind of installation issues and move on. However in the case of Jekyll I give a blow by blow account of this installation.

I want to create a personal web and blogging site. As a GitHub user the idea of a GitHub hosted web-site is attractive to me. GitHub provide one static personal web-site per user - and its free. Also you get a cool personalized web-site url - in my case the url is patclaffey.github.io