tech – Page 6 – woowoowoo

a tale of GPS woe…

I’m a little bit obsessed by maps… and gadgets. Oh, alright, computers too! So, naturally, a GPS was one of those things I just had to have. I was lucky enough to have a Garmin eTrex Venture for a six month loan. Nice little unit – some limitations, but as a first taste it was perfect… I was hooked. When the time came to give back the loan unit, I knew I wouldn’t survive without one for long, so I started researching my purchase.

etrex-legend Didn’t take me long to decide on the Garmin eTrex Legend Cx. For a start, I liked the original Garmin, and they were the only company offering Mac support (albeit, at some date in the future). I knew I wouldn’t be satisfied without colour, maps, USB and expandable memory, so the choice was easy.

It is gorgeous. It does everything I could have asked for – and more, but it hasn’t been without it’s problems. It has taken two trips back to the distributor – one for replacement – and a lot of careful testing, but I think I’ve found the problem and just want other Mac/Garmin users to beware.

I have Virtual PC, which allowed me to use Garmin MapSource without a problem, but I also have a number of Mac tools I’ve used with other devices quite happily – my favourite is Load My Tracks. Simple, and it mostly does what I need. My mistake was to use a mac tool while Virtual PC had control of the USB port. I am sure this it the issue, though I’m not about to sacrifice another GPS to test it. Virtual PC ‘captures’ the USB port for its own use, but the Mac still knows it’s there and it seems apps can use it. Result is mixed messages to the GPS, possibly writing data to places it shouldn’t or maybe missing an end of file marker… who knows, but the result seems to be a major software glitch.

Aside from the fact that it happens, which is a bit of a concern, it highlights a major failing with the Garmin that I can’t do a hard reset. Garmin support did at one stage talk me through a couple of ‘reset’ procedures, but they seem to be at a higher level than I needed. Having to send the unit back to base just to have it reset is a bit of a worry.

Anyway, more recently, I’ve kept my MapSource use to a PC and never used LoadMyTracks when Virtual PC was loaded, and things seem to be sweet. I recommend other mac users do the same.

OpenOffice vs. Redmond on the buses

Interesting bit of dialogue here. A blog notes bus ads from Sun pushing OpenOffice.org by taking aim at Microsoft… Amusing enough in it’s own right, but…

…a Microsoft employee fires off a retort in ~~her~~ his blog with some taunts of ~~her~~ his (? gender assumption cleared up, thank you Sandy) own. Trouble is, the retort fails to defend any of the claims in the Sun ads and fails to target the direct opposition in this case, Open Office. Perhaps this implies acceptance of the facts.

~~She~~ He even has a shot at Apple! … please! Lets hope she constructs better software than arguments. Though, history seems to suggest otherwise.

Case of the disappearing Pantone colours

We’ve (well, my work has) recently been issued a takedown notice by Pantone, insisting that we remove a page of hex codes labelled with numbers that correspond to the Pantone Matching System. The page was very well patronised, even though it wasn’t very accurate and did not claim any ‘official’ status. Not wanting a fuss, the page was taken down.

Not surprisingly, a lot of people are annoyed – it was no.1 in google for ‘pantone colour chart‘. In fact, I’m annoyed! I can appreciate Pantone’s right to prevent us using their name and they probably have the right to the way a range of colours are assigned to particular numbers, but no way have they got the right to stop me publishing my own colour chart or to publish that a particular colour is, in my opinion, similar to one of their numbered colours.

Anyway, I got curious, so I checked other listings in Google and found that many had also been instructed to remove their pages: 1 2 3 though other solutions survive: A B C D E F (many more) and no-one seems about to take down partial pages of pantone conversions such as are commonly used in Coporate Style Guidelines.

Anyway, the thing that really ticks me off is this wierd phone call we received in our office a couple of months ago – no doubt related to the takedown notice we later received.

Here’s an excellent newsforge article exploring the credibility of Pantone’s claims of copyright.

Over at wikimedia they are building a creative commons pantone approximation chart that has so far survived a take down notice.

More information at Wikipedia. Pantone’s Terms of Use

My sad RAW workflow

I’m beginning to really enjoy shooting RAW format with my digital SLR, so why am I sad? Read on gentle friend…

phew!

It took a bit of care and time, but upgrading to wordpress version 2 went quite smoothly. I’m hoping to start playing with new plugins and enjoy improved comment spam prevention.

Google keeps the good stuff coming!

I can’t believe how many new and interesting things are coming out of the Google labs these days. A long-time gmail user, in the past month I’ve started using four new google tools and, so far, I have to report that they are all ‘really cool!’.

Round-tripping geocodes from Flickr to Google Maps

I love Flickr. I love Google Maps. Like a lot of people, I’d like to combine my love for these two tools by accurately geocoding my photos and then being able to see where geocoded photos were actually taken. I was frustrated that all the tools to do this either required GPS equipped devices, or clunky and less than intuitive interfaces.

I also like bookmarklets. Little bits of JavaScript code that you can just click on to do things. So, I created these two bookmarklets that allow ’round-tripping’ of geocodes to and from Flickr and Google Maps. Hope you like them!

Mapping Australia – spoilt for choice?

Just a few months ago, Australians had no ‘new generation’ web street maps, now we’ve got three! By ‘new generation’, I mean smooth dragging, ajax/javascript driven, feature loaded maps – not the old point and click clunkers like whereis (though quite good in their own right, people want more these days).

Now that I have all these choices, I find myself skipping between them, with the natural comparisons that brings. So, at the risk of boring others, in the hope of kicking off some discussion, I thought I’d post my (very unscientific) ‘findings’, about the comparative features of each and how well they map my neighbourhood.

Undocumented Google map trick

An article on Ogle Earth alerts us to a neat trick to get a location from Google Maps to Google Earth. Simply add ‘&output=kml’ to the URL of the map you are viewing, (be sure to click the ‘Link to this page’ on the map first!). I created this simple javascript gMaps2kml bookmarklet, that seems to do the trick, so drag it to your bookmark bar and enjoy*.

Unfortunately, I have problems with getting this to work in Firefox (1.5) whether I use the bookmarklet or manually paste the parameter. It always generates the same kml file of a location in New York. Safari, Opera and Camino don’t have this problem! I’ll have to keep you posted of this one. A friend with a similar setup doesn’t have the same problem – might be a firefox extension issue.

* Note: that the resulting kml files are simply called ‘maps’ with no extension, so this may cause you grief, but it’s easily fixed by adding the extension.

Update: Barry Hunter over at nearby.org.uk, who originally documented the hack, has improved on my bookmarklet, by searching the DOM for the ‘link’, so you don’t have to click ‘Link to this Page’ anymore. He’s posted it in a comment below, but I’ll put it here as well. gMaps2kml2. Isn’t that neat?

Google gets organised…

Piece by clever piece, Google are putting together the bits I need to manage my life online. The latest addition is google calendar.

Nothing earth shattering here, just stuff that works the way you want it to. I exported my Oracle calendar appointments as an iCal file, it imported seamlessly into google and straight away alerted me about an appointment I should have been heading off to.

What else? Easy to add events – all the options you need. Great looking agenda tool. Lots of Ajax usability, drag and drop events – for a web app this is to calendars what gmail was for webmail – better than a desktop app! I see from the options screen that they are planning to provide SMS alerts, but it was disabled on my account at least.

With the usual Google API, it won’t be long before people with much more programming skill than I will be writing ‘synch’ tools for iSync and maybe even the corporate tools like Exchange and Oracle. I can’t wait!

Yahoo! Maps – a rival for Google?

Since Google released their maps/local product on the world, they have really ‘owned’ the space. The Ajax word has become common parlance, and we’ve all learned to expect a lot more from our browsers.

Microsoft brought out their Live Local product in an attempt to rival Google. It is good – slicker than google, but somehow misses on so many levels – I haven’t seen the stats, but I suspect it’s bombing badly – Google still get all the press.

I was prepared for another disappointment from Yahoo! Maps

opening pandora’s box

Do you like music? Then you will love Pandora.

Visit the Pandora website – type something in: an artist name or song title and this site uses the collected wisdom of the Music Genome Project to serve up a stream of music related to your selection by an array of musical attributes – “genes”. The genes might be melody, rhythm, harmony, arrangment, you don’t have to worry about that. All that is important is that it quite unerringly serves up the ‘right’ music.

Your selection automatically creates a ‘station’ that you can edit, send to a friend – whatever. Here are a couple I’ve already tried: Hallelujah , Manu Chao and Nick Cave.

A great way to find new music that you’ve probably never heard before, but will almost certainly like!