I've decided to try to ride a bike for exercise more in 2025. Run harder, but run less, with more active recovery and low-intensity outings on a bike. At least until June, when I need to start building the running and hiking endurance that I will need in September.

I got a new bike to make this more fun. It's a Rocky Mountain Solo C50 and I bought it from my favorite local bike shop, Drake Cycles, last Saturday. The first thing I did was pedal it from home up Spring Creek Trail to Pineridge Open Space and ride some laps around the pond. It sure beats riding my commuter bike on dirt and gravel. I haven't bought a new bike or any new bike components in 10 years. Electronic shifters feel like magic to me.

So far this week I've done two rides from the barn where we keep our horses while Bea has been doing her equestrian stuff. One at sunset and one at sunrise. I've been three miles east of the barn and seven miles north of the barn, following roads on the PLSS section grid.

In the neighborhood of the barn, the ground is completely free of snow and quite dry. Passing trucks raise medium density clouds of dust. There are scattered homes out here, and vehicles going to and fro periodically. There are large construction sites, too, which can mean a wave of large rigs pulling trailers.

I've got a lot to learn about this kind of riding. The right tire pressure for road and trail conditions, for example, and how to get in and out of the drops smoothly. How to descend and corner safely, and how to survive washboard surfaces. Dressing, too. I'm riding at a low intensity and don't generate as much heat as I do when I run.

One of my favorite things about riding further east is the panoramic views of the Front Range peaks. I can see Pikes Peak, Mount Evans, Longs Peak, and the Mummy Range, a span of 200 kilometers, from the top of every rise.

At last, I'm less than 1% injured and am getting back into regular and productive running. We've had a long stretch of mild and dry weather here, which makes it easy to just lace up and go. I ran four times last week, including a nice hilly run in Lory State Park, and will run three times this week. Thursday I did some harder running and a bunch of strides for the first time since June.

Some faint numbness lingers on my left quad, but my hip, butt, and leg are otherwise just fine. My doctor prescribed a course of prednisolone in early November to calm down my pinched nerve and that seemed to banish the last of my Achilles tendonitis as well. My right heel and calf haven't been pain-free in a long time. It's really nice to feel good.

This is why I've been hesitant to add type hints to Fiona, Rasterio, and Shapely. David Lord on missteps and misgivings:

I want a "start over" tool for type annotating a Python library. I started with Flask as untyped code, then added annotations until mypy stopped complaining. But this didn't mean the annotations were _correct_. Over time I've fixed various reported issues. I feel like if I could start from scratch again, I'd probably get closer to correct with the experience I've gained. But removing all existing annotations and ignores is too time consuming on its own. #python

I saw a physical therapist yesterday. I had a virtual visit with my physician today. I had a 2 mile hike in the sun around a local reservoir. Now I'm listening to the Glenn Branca Orchestra on The Frow Show and my take on my health is: let's go!

The expert consensus is that I did not injure my spine, but that muscles in the left side of my hip have clamped down on a nerve. I'm going to proceed as if that is true, foam rolling, walking, and running through the pain, and not worrying about my spine cracking in pieces. I do have a little bit of numbness in my upper left leg and so I will not directly dive into long technical downhill runs. I expect that I'll resolve that soon.

Even Rouault has proposed a new, modern, and more coherent command line interface (CLI) for the GDAL/OGR project. I think it's a good idea and a good time to do it. I've wanted a better one for about 15 years. Even credits Rasterio for inspiration, and that's gratifying to see. I started writing Rasterio 10 years ago in part because I wanted a better CLI for GDAL.

What I wanted in a GDAL CLI were the following features:

• A root command and a few subcommands, one namespace for everything.

• Uniform arguments and options with predictable ordering and naming.

• Good documentation of arguments and options.

• More subcommands with fewer options each. Making gdal_translate into 3-4 commands, for example.

• Input and output that favor stdin/stdout and JSON.

• Ease of installation. For example, with pip instead of an OS package manager.

I estimated in 2013-2014 that it was not feasible for me to achieve those goals within the GDAL project itself. GDAL and its community had no funding for this kind of work at the time. I found the GDAL project's tests somewhat inscrutable and frustrating. A hefty legacy of documentation and folk wisdom about the old ways would have to be updated. Mostly by me, certainly. And the GDAL user community largely did not care. Free software that was fast and effective (and, most of all, free!) was already more than most people had dreamed of. A GIS analyst had so many business and organizational problems to deal with already that the rough edges of gdalinfo and gdal_translate didn't even crack her top 20. Software polish wasn't a big concern in the second decade of FOSS4G. I think it's still a hard thing to sell. Individual consumers will pay money for slick, well-designed software that makes them feel good. Organizations value polish less. And neither GDAL nor Rasterio sell anything to individual consumers.

Overhauling gdal_translate, ogr2ogr, and friends within the GDAL project looked like a non-starter to me. Pushing a herd of boulders up a hill, by myself, for free, for a community that was largely content with working around and stepping over these boulders. I think I made the right choice for myself. I got to start from scratch, move fast, and use a modern CLI framework. I made a command line interface for Rasterio that, while not perfect, met most of my goals. And I didn't go broke or burn out while doing it.

Today, thanks to years of fundraising work by Howard Butler, Paul Ramsey, Kristian Evers, and Even, the GDAL project does have funding to overhaul its command line interface as an aspect of overall project health and maintenance. Multiple developers can be paid to work on it. They won't have to donate their time to it as I would have. Rasterio's command line interface can't be adopted by GDAL, or be forked to become GDAL's because it doesn't have all the features of existing GDAL programs (or even of gdal_translate and ogr2ogr for that matter), and my decision to have more subcommands with fewer options is kind of against the grain of GDAL. But the new GDAL CLI can adopt the demonstrably useful features and design of Rasterio's. JSON output, for example, is something that GDAL has already picked up from Rasterio.

Rasterio will certainly fade a little if the new GDAL CLI is designed and executed well. But that's in the nature of software and software communities. Rasterio has always depended on GDAL and benefited from being built on a technically solid and well loved foundation. And I didn't invent CLI subcommands and JSON output, not at all. It's not unfair. If you succeed in open source, if you move the needle, you will be emulated. In this case, I think we can call it progress. I'm content.

In the long run, I stand to get half of what I originally wanted from a GDAL CLI, the first three of the six features I listed above. And there's probably still room for a suite of Unix style programs with different opinions and design decisions, especially if it and GDAL agree on basic concepts, arguments, options, and flags.

I stopped using Twitter a while ago. Then it was rebranded as "X". I dithered about deleting my account. Would it be taken over by crypto scammers or an 18 year-old Russian army private or contractor? I've come to the conclusion that I don't care anymore. They can have it if they want. I've downloaded my archive and clicked "deactivate your account".

If you see a post from an @sgillies on X, it isn't me.

Saturday, I reported that I was laid up with a back injury. I'm feeling better today. The pain is manageable and I've been able to spend about half of my time awake upright, standing or sitting on my bed, with regular breaks to touch my toes and do the yoga half lift to stretch my back. I even managed to run a little bit yesterday while helping a guy who was the victim of a hit-and-run incident. Car on car, to be specific. No one was injured, as far as I could tell.

Ban cars. Ban injuries.

In a Mastodon thread about "GeoAI" today, I blurted out:

Uh huh. It's CyberGIS all over again.

We don't talk about CyberGIS anymore. I think it's going to be the same for "GeoAI".

I knew that a second Trump presidency was very possible, but I'm still surprised that most American voters chose this sociopath. It's super disturbing to see the veneer of decency entirely stripped away from this country. Apparently, this really is who we are.

If you're not already using pytest's tmp_path fixture, you really should. The fixture provides a temporary directory for testing use. A directory that you can't reference from other test runs or from other test functions in the same run, but that isn't immediately deleted when your tests finish. The directory is created in your account temporary location and is eventually cleaned up by your computer's operating system. Until then, you can open the directories and their files in other applications.

I've been making assertions on datasets in Rasterio's tests and also dragging them into QGIS for a closer look after the tests finish.