jorge's jome

I think they're just waiting for me to die so they can fight over the big pieces.

Posted by at 9:15 AM | Permalink

The guys at Google have added another feature to Google Maps, one that I personally have been wanting for a while and that I think most people will find very useful: saved locations. Any time you enter a location when doing a search, it will save it to this list. You can then add a label to each saved location. This paves the way for faster mapping and routing, since you can then use their AJAX search box and match on the label you created.

Posted by at 4:28 AM | Permalink

I wanted to plug Etsy, since I am doing a little bit of work for them these days. The technical lead there is a friend of mine, Haim. Etsy is a pretty cool site with some amazing flash work. It's basically eBay for arts & crafts products. You can purchase hand-made products or commission items to be made per your request. Wired has a short review on the site. Twit.tv did an interview recently with two of the founders.

Posted by at 8:33 AM | Permalink

So, I bought a Garmin GPS 18 since I didn't need a UI or anything for my maps project, and it works via USB port so I don't have to worry about batteries. After discovering that it isn't so easy to read a USB port with the available .NET stuff, I searched the Garmin site for some tools to help. Sure enough, they have a neat utility program that creates a virtual serial port that spits out NMEA-0183 compliant data, and thankfully the .NET framework guys saw fit to finally make reading from a serial port about as simple as possible. So I go to the NMEA 0183 site and it turns out they want $270 for a copy of the standard. They're out of their fucking mind. Thankfully, a quick search on Wikipedia led me to this page, which subsequently led me here, where some kind person has published the data format. So I rewrote my parser and now am happily using my new GPS 18 for sending my coordinates to my server. Of course, this wasn't without a couple glitches along the way. The NMEA is, well, a marine electronics association. Obvously, these guys aren't interested in altitude much. So, unfortunately, that means that the data stream I am getting doesn't contain any information for this. On the plus side, however, I do get my speed pre-calculated for me, only problem is that the unit is knots, but the conversion to mph is simple enough. I've added some stats to the map page now, so you can see my current coordinates and velocity. Just don't take any screenshots and send them to the CHP...mmmkay?

Posted by at 12:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Finished up my live map. Of course, it only updates if I've got my GPS location upload program running on my laptop and my EV-DO card hooked up. To make it at least somewhat interesting, I load up the last 20 points so you have something to look at. It works pretty well. If you are really interested in seeing it in action, let me know and I'll set up a time to show it off. I think it's pretty slick. After I got it working tonight I drove around town for a bit. My friend Ian was kind enough to take some screenshots of the app in action, I've posted a few of them below.

Posted by at 2:31 AM | Permalink

My good friend, Ian, recently had a recruiter contact him regarding an opening. I won't spoil the details, Ian sums it up pretty well here.

I don't know what some of those guys are thinking. I guess they're blinded by the prospect of easy money. We work in an industry where hard work and paying attention to detail is our hallmark. This recruiter guy does neither. But they all want to stick their hand in the pot and get their huge commission.

Good job, Ian. All I have to say is...pwned.

Posted by at 7:08 PM | Permalink