Nigel and his e-row replay (or Analysing the software III)

Nigel Farmer surprised us with his creation. A replay for the e-row races, an original idea. Now everybody is analysing theirselves but more...their close oppositors! Now I only read "Next time I will sprint more at 5000m and..." Sytse van Slooten and me bombarded Nigel with questions...(S=Sytse, N=Nigel,M=Marilyn)

M: Hi Nigel! Who are you?

N: "I am British. I live in Leeds in the north of England and work as a programmer ( 20 years ! )
I am 37 and  have no on-water rowing experience but was persuaded to train specifically for indoor rowing after coming 2nd in a gym competition. I had been doing general training to keep fit at the gym for 4 years but then started training for the 1998 BIRC which was my first big competition. I ended up being in the same heat as Steve Redgrave but not surprisingly finished 40 seconds behind him !"

M: What were you thinking about when you developed this software. For example, I was thinking that it could be a good idea for new spectators for the races. I was thinking in this form but "live". Would be it possible too?

N: "I had the idea in September 2001 having started to do some HTML/Javascript programming at work. I have thought of writing a replay system for years but realised that doing it with HTML would be far better as it would not require the download of any software and ultimately could run in any browser on any platform. My main concern was that the Javascript would not be fast enough do display the race but I put some tests together using random numbers rather than stroke data which proved it to work. 
The software was designed to be an add-on to E-ROW and could not really be used to display a live race. Apparently Concept2 already have this facility which is written in Java and at one stage I was told that all e-row internet races could be viewed live by spectators.
I have got a replay from Bill at Concept about the stroke data and they say that it is not created for E-row race. He was going to get one the programmers to check to make sure this is the case. It might be worth a request for this feature on the E-row forum".

S: I can see why you need the stroke data to generate the HTML, but I'm curious what you need the split data for? And can you also handle splits that are not 500 meters (that's the default I think?)

N: In theory the stroke data should be enough but I noticed that the values are not all that accurate. If you look at any stroke data ( especially with a few rowers ) you may notice that the times at the end are a few seconds off   the actual time. I spoke to C2 in the USA about this and they told me that the stroke data is not that accurate. This is not a problem for me as the error tend to be the same for all rowers stroke data in a race so the relative positions are correct. It only became a problem when I displayed the time in the top left hand side of the browser. The splits data is 100% accurate so I used this to correct the stroke data by applying a small change to each stroke. 
Any split should work as it just looks at the distance and corrects any strokes up to that point.