New trails, and new PyTopo 1.1 release (Shallow Thoughts)

New trails, and new PyTopo 1.1 release

A new trail opened up above Alum Rock park! Actually a whole new open space preserve, called Sierra Vista -- with an extensive set of trails that go all sorts of interesting places.

Dave and I visit Alum Rock frequently -- we were married there -- so having so much new trail mileage is exciting. We tried to explore it on foot, but quickly realized the mileage was more suited to mountain bikes. Even with bikes, we'll be exploring this area for a while (mostly due to not having biked in far too long, so it'll take us a while to work up to that much riding ... a combination of health problems and family issues have conspired to keep us off the bikes).

Of course, part of the fun of discovering a new trail system is poring over maps trying to figure out where the trails will take us, then taking GPS track logs to study later to see where we actually went.

And as usual when uploading GPS track logs and viewing them in pytopo, I found some things that weren't working quite the way I wanted, so the session ended up being less about studying maps and more about hacking Python.

In the end, I fixed quite a few little bugs, improved some features, and got saved sites with saved zoom levels working far better.

Now, PyTopo 1.0 happened quite a while ago -- but there were two of us hacking madly on it at the time, and pinning down the exact time when it should be called 1.0 wasn't easy. In fact, we never actually did it. I know that sounds silly -- of all releases to not get around to, finally reaching 1.0? Nevertheless, that's what happened.

I thought about cheating and calling this one 1.0, but we've had 1.0 beta RPMs floating around for so long (and for a much earlier release) that that didn't seem right.

So I've called the new release PyTopo 1.1. It seems to be working pretty solidly. It's certainly been very helpful to me in exploring the new trails. It's great for cross-checking with Google Earth: the OpenCycleMap database has much better trail data than Google does, and pytopo has easy track log loading and will work offline, while Google has the 3-D projection aerial imagery that shows where trails and roads were historically (which may or may not correspond to where they decide to put the new trails). It's great to have both.

Anyway, here's the new PyTopo.