GPS Number Formatting

Oh, you tricksy Europeans. I forgot to take into consideration that you might use something besides my localized US English numeric representation for latitude and longitude. GPSMonitor is expecting something like this, which is the default location if you have no GPS hooked up:

latitude = 40.522
longitude = -111.958

And some of the GPS systems out there have been trying to feed this format to my poor mapping page:

latitude = 6750,167
longitude =5261,067

It looks like I need to update things so my US-based web page is only fed numbers that use periods for their decimal point. Google's maps don't know what to do with commas. Sorry about all those maps where it looks like you're a couple thousand miles north of the North Pole. Yes, it actually showed me one like that. Not wrapping around to the south, but north of the pole.

So, does anyone know off hand what the units are on those numbers? If I had to guess, I'd assume it was something like 6750 minutes, or 67 degrees and 50 minutes, or 67 and a half degrees, but those would all be guesses. Time to break out the web search engine...

GPSMonitor responses

I've received a request to increase the range of COM ports that GPSMonitor scans, so the next update will include scanning up to COM15. Yeah, someone has their GPS at a double digit com port. While I'm at it, I may also allow it to be set to something besides the default 4800 baud. If you have a request, drop me an email.

Based on my web logs, a bunch of you are testing out the application with no GPS attached. When you do that, you will get no graphs, but the map will work. The map shows you a default location a couple miles from my house, in the middle of a busy intersection. Of course when you show the map with a GPS attached, it's likely to never request the same exact map, so I'll get a huge pile of virtual single page hits, so I will have a hard time summing up the traffic. Any ideas on how to do that with Google Analytics, to ignore form-based parameters sent to a web page when counting page hits? I may have to just rely on the hit and visitor summaries.

GPSMonitor Release

Well, I decided to go ahead and wrap up the initial release of GPSMonitor, my windows-based GPS data monitoring and translation tool that makes NMEA string data easily readable. Go ahead and give it a try!

More Web Page Preparations

I've put a bit more work into the site, getting it ready for upcoming software releases. The map for GPSMonitor now has controls on it, and it allows for the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. I've filled out a lot more on the GPSMonitor page, getting rid of the filler paragraph. I still need to get a screenshot or two so I can put them on the page.

I'm going to set up GPSMonitor with a PAD file and all that good stuff, so download sites will be able to easily keep up to date if I release an upgrade. I've been holding off until I can get both GPSMonitor and my PingGraph rewrite ready, to do it in one shot. That may take a while, so I'm considering putting GPSMonitor out really soon, then the updated PingGraph when it's done.

Home Page Redesign

The site redesign is going well, but is a bit slow due to Real Life continuing with its demands. I'm putting in the functionality I want on the site , then I will worry about making it look nicer by adjusting colors, logos, fonts, and all that fun stuff before declaring it live. I'm experimenting with doing the whole site as php files so I can include interesting things like RSS feeds and google maps inline.

During all this, I'm getting a major overhaul of PingGraph done which will organize the interface a lot better, and have much nicer timestamps on the graphs. I'm going to use a layout that I built into my GPS Monitor app. Speaking of which, the monitor works well, but is missing a feature or two that I really want to add, but one feature in particular needs the site to be running first. Those chickens and eggs are at it again, and I need to figure out the right order to get things done.

First post!

I need some content to test the RSS feed, so here it is.