Hi!

I have done my own version of the TDF 2006 stages, see

http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php/Cat/0/Number/476848/an/0/page/vc/

Within minutes this was spotted by lucifer666, mentioning that he already had published tracks back in may. I saw his post, but decided to upload my version nonetheless, because

• While I am amazed by the sheer quantity of information in his version, I like to keep things lean and mean.
  
• I like diversity.
  
• It is mine, mine, mine!!!
  

But lucifer666 noticed some differences between our tracks, and asked me to join this discussion. Maybe I simply start by explaining how I made my upload:

• The basic data was taken from the Tour web page of ARD ( http://tour.ard.de/ ), one of germanys main broadcasting companies. It's just a textual list of WGS84 coordinates, you can nearly wrap them into a <LineString> as is. I am not sure how they generated the data, or how accurate it is. It was possibly provided by MagicMaps ( http://www.magicmaps.de/animationen/radsport.html ).
  
• With some lines of Perl I converted these coordinates into KML files, calculating the distances between points using the module Geo::Distance.
  

That's essentialy it.

Concerning the differences between lucifer666's and my tracks: Sometimes my data seems to be better (for example in stage 6), and sometimes I think lucifer666 has it right (e.g. the finish of stage 1).

Oh, one more thing about lucifer666's placemarks: Most of the accented letters are broken in Google Earth. The KML file contains Latin 1 characters, but the XML declaration says UTF-8. Either actually use this encoding, or change the declaration to "ISO-8859-1".

Hi Joern,

Thanks for showing up here and thanks for your comment.

I know you published yours, yours, yours, and that is good like this,
when I published mine it was also because it's mine, mine, mine!

Regarding the encoding, thanks for the tip. I had no time to care about it until now and description is generated through a small script not taking care of encoding and not able to do any conversion.

My work is still under construction. You will notice some tracks have snooth tracks following exactly the roads (these are finished) and others are more like yours (under construction).

I plan to discard unnecessary information or put it in a separate placemark to make my version smaller.

My main idea is however to get the most accurate track information as possible as this will be the base for live tracking of the race.
I will grab real time progress information from the web (normally km from start) and find the corresponding location on the track to update a network link, say every 20-30 seconds.

So basically there are 2 tasks to be completed:

1) finish the tracks.
(Here your help is much apreciated by reporting errors in the tracks)

2) Find the best live ticker to grap position information.
( Give me a hint!)

for 2) we have to consider that I am not able to extract information from a Flash site, which most are. So if you have a way of extracting the content of a website in flash, tell me.

Saturday the prologue has taken place in Strasbourg.

Today we start the first stage over 185 km, mostly flat.

The network link has been updated to include the live tracking red bicycle. (No need to download the placemark from the first post again, You are getting the changes automatically!)

You should see the red bike sitting near the 5 km mark on the track.
It is showing a timestamp at 1:47:30, which is the time of the last test...

From 12:55 you should see the timestamp follow the actual time (in France)
and when actual position information is available from the letour.fr you will see it move.

I hope all you 20 000 folks having downloaded hte placemark can enjoy the race and that the server will manage the load.

Live TDF is not working for me:



If I try the link in Internet Explorer it gives me a 403 page with the text: "Keine Berechtigung.
Richte auch du Deine kostenlose Homepage beim kostenlosen Webspace bei Funpic.de ein."
Same happens if I click the link in your signature.

Thanks for doing this, Lucifer... I love to watch the progress live on Google Earth while I watch the Tour on tv.


Is there any way to change the default viewing angle on my computer for the live tracking? I like to be a little bit more zoomed out and from higher up.

Not sure if I can change it or if that is something hard coded in the live tracking.

Megan

Hi rilkeanhearts,

Thanks for Feedback.
The view is coded directly in the network link refreshed every 20 seconds.
So if you want to change the view, you need to be dam fast...

I was thinking in implementing diferent views to chose from but i do not have a solution yet.


Hi Hgalca,

Sorry to hear you had trouble, unfortunately the server (a free hosting offer) seems to be freesing for a few minutes here and there.
after a few minutes everything is back on normal.

Hello All,

Look at www.letour.fr. They have published a coverage of the TdF for GE on their site.
I was contacted by Google last week where they asked permission to use my work as a basis for the official coverage by the Tdf organisation comitee.
Wow, thats cool, beeing asked by the big ones.

So all of you working hard to publish realy good GE placemarks. WE have it in hands to make the world more GE aware!

We can expect to see some more details on start and arrival locations in the www.Letour.fr version.

There's a mistake in the route of the last part (from Valkenburg to the Finish) of today's stage (stage 3). For the correct route see http://develop.proflexes.nl/eccycling2006/images/eccycling2006_22122005154853.gif

Thanks Jan,

That is exactly the information needed to have the most accurate routing.

!!! Please more of such information !!!

Today I will however leave the route as is in order not to break the live tracking module.

The most difficult task for now is to get a track with the exact length as published by TdF. Only with this route I can compute a good live tracking.