Wednesday, December 26, 2001

I've learned an amazing amount of cool stuff about Global Positioning Satellite technology. My quest for an online route planner that produces data that can be loaded into a gps has been completed. Brent Blair sent me over to easyGPS.com which makes an application available that houses all the basic functionality to track edit, create, modify and mangle anything you could wish for. There are several standards for this GPS data, of course there's plain old long. and lat. coordinates for a specific point on earth. There's a simple and widely implemented standard for communicating with GPS devices called NMEA. Developed by the National Marine Electronics Association (from which NMEA gets its name) originally for data communication between electronic marine instruments and navigation equipment. There are many applications available online that will let you set and retrieve waypoints from your GPS. That's all lightweight stuff. Travelling a route is no more than tracking from one coordinate to another and displaying it on screen. It's the actual route calculation that takes severe processing power. That's why it makes so much sense to build complex routes on a PC, or better yet, a dedicated server that can spit back a dataset that is appropriate for your needs at that moment. Interestingly enough no one seems to be offering this. easyGps comes close, because it can import driving directions from MapBlast. But this is a hack, albeit a good one: The trick is to save the html source of the MapBlast route information with 'turn maps' enabled. Each map is generated from the mapblast database, which is based on longitude and latitude coordinates, which are a part of the image URL. easyGPS just strips out the long and lat data in order, which is a route that can be uploaded to the gps unit. Clearly this is a severe disconnect, and an amazing opportunity at the same time. I really believe a web based service, accessible through xml-rpc would be the perfect bootstrap for a slew of new products and services. There's some good community resources as well, such as the WayPoint DataBase, which I will certaiinly contribute to. Hey, we could put those Map of the Star's Homes syndicates out of business! 10:34:35 PM    Discuss

Airlines take turn for the better. Workers being rehired, more seats being filled, fares inch higher. [USA Today : Front Page] 5:03:17 PM    Discuss

World: Death of Dutch Guilder to Go Unmourned. After spending 776 years together it should be hard to say goodbye. But the down-to-earth Dutch expect the death of the guilder to be quick and unmourned. 3:14:11 PM    Discuss

Airlines struggle as roads jam. Commuter airlines, which fly shorter routes than major airlines, feel pinch. [USA Today : Front Page] 2:58:14 PM    Discuss

India, Pakistan Prepare for War. India said its missiles were ``in position,'' air force jets flew near the Pakistan border every few minutes and frontier forces exchanged gunfire Wednesday as the two nuclear-armed nations prepared for a war both say they don't want. ~>Can't we all just get along?<~ 2:53:03 PM    Discuss

Now that I have a portable GPS unit, I'm coming up with all sorts of ideas on how to integrate 'waypoints' with relevant location data. It is inevitable that gps receiving technology will be built into common tools, like cell-phones and perhaps even clothing. So we might as well start thinking about applications now. I wrote about the nautalis system that alerts drivers in Holland to speed traps. That's a good start, but surely there's more. Here's a simple one, instead of lugging around expensive equipment like a "StreetPilot", a route planning service could easily take two set of coordinates for a start and end point, perhaps a variable or two about mode of transportation (walking, biking, automobile) and return a list of waypoints that a much cheaper devices can use to point the proper directions. The heavy processing can be done elsewhere! Actually, this would be perfect to use with XML-RPC. I'm amazed that there are many great route planners available online, but none seem to be able to spit back a list of waypoint cooordinate you can load into a simple GPS. Surely someone sees this hole in the market?! 2:41:05 PM    Discuss

Picture time! The night before Christmas, we looked a bit like the "three stooges" in front of the tree. Christina got a beautiful "new coat" and Patricia can't live through a new year without her "number 5". We gave our gardner Luc this "Indiana Jones hat", which he wore all evening :) Everyone had a great time, including our "newest member of the family". Mother nature almost did it perfectly this year, only one day late for a "white christmas", which is ok because I still get to make the perfect shot of the "front of the castle". For those of the Geek persuasion, my personal data-flow is at work on this posting, pics were downloaded from the cam, resized, renamed, upstreamed with appropriate 'shortcuts' all through scripts I wrote in Radio UserLand. Took me 3 minutes to complete everything. Amazing. 1:53:23 PM    Discuss

NYTimes: The deluge of junk e- mail threatens to undermine the utility of the Internet at precisely the time when anthrax fears and cost- cutting efforts have prompted more businesses to use it as a substitute for postal mail. Some mainstream marketers are already beginning to see the effects of resistance to junk e-mail. Only a year ago, advertisers were raving about the response rates to targeted e-mail, which could reach as high as 20 percent. But that number is falling fast. 1:03:46 PM    Discuss

Merry Christmas everyone! (We celebrate 2 days here in parts of Europe) Yesterday our ISP's dhcp servers were down, probably for the best, since I literally couldn't get online to do any 'work' or blogging. :) We had an awesome celebration this year! Our "butler Dennis" made sure we had maximum vibe starting with beakfast (as you can see from his outfit) Lots of folks stopped by the castle for drinks and snacks as well as gifts! Commerce fared well by the Curry's this year .... I got what I wanted: the "StreetPilot". My brain has been spinning with GPS2Blog ideas, no doubt more coming on that front later today. Also, lots of pictures I want to share! 12:02:21 PM    Discuss

© Copyright 2003 Adam Curry.