Friday, August 28, 2009
IBR 2009
The 2009 edition of the Iron Butt Rally started earlier this week. For reasons not completely known yet, the IBA put a general lock-down on blog postings and SPOT tracks from the participants. This FJR Forum post has been the central location for up-to-date info. Warchild is the chief tech inspector for the IBR, and has been making regular updates to the post every hour or two since the rally began.
I've been contributing to the post by providing some on-line tools:
- http://tcfjr.goptin.com/ibr/index.xml - an RSS feed for the official IBR Daily Reports. I wrote a script that checks the IBR index page every 20 minutes, and rebuilds the RSS feed if a new entry has been posted.
- Leg 1 Bonus Locations - a Zip file containing CSV, XLS, and ODS versions of the 124 bonus locations for leg 1.
- Google Map of Leg 1 Bonuses - an interactive map showing each of the leg 1 bonus locations. Hover on a marker for the bonus name and point value; click on a marker for complete details, including the background information provided to the riders.
For the last two items, I grabbed the Leg 1 Bonus Locations PDF off the IBR web site, converted it to text, then wrote a Perl script to scrape out the necessary data, and format it (as CSV for the spreadsheets, and in Google's Map API format).
I hope people find these things useful.
Posted by bnc at August 28, 2009 12:00 PM