More Tracking

I continue to tweak the map resulting from the tracking info (see my updated video). I implemented a suggestion in this thread to grab the "address" corresponding to the longitude/latitude of a sample. That now shows up as the location when mousing over a marker. The mouseover kicks off an AJAX fetch of the geolocation info from Google Maps, which processes the JSON data and fills the popup. Clicking the marker brings updates the popup to show 3 nearby items and clicking it again brings up the original data.

A major change is I'm now using the Google Maps direction service and renderer to do the actual distance calculations between two markers and to draw the line connecting them. This ends up being a lot more accurate than my original straight line calculation and, of course, the line actually follows the road traveled. The more accurate distance calculation means a better speed estimate for that interval as well.

Right now, the code is a disaster, but I plan on putting it on my website after I clean it up.

Google Latitude Tracking Live

Today, I've fully deployed our tracking scheme using Google Latitude. My wife and kids have started their road trip and I'm tracking their progress. Here's how things look so far.

Using the Latitude data, I can determine their position in the past 2 minutes (it appears to update only every 2 minutes). Using two points and their timestamps, I can estimate the approximate speed they were driving between the two points. As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm storing the locations in a MySQL table and through AJAX, I'm able to update a map with their path and show information bubbles over each point with some information, which is what you see in the video linked above. You can see an occasional large gap between points as they move in & out of 3G coverage, but it's not too bad since we don't use AT&T. HA!

Jobless Still...But "Work" Continues

The deal with the early stage startup (which recently closed a Series A round from 2 firms) fell through. It left a bad taste in my mouth. They dragged the whole process out over a week only to email me this: "Thanks for taking the time to speak to us. Unfortunately, your background is not a good fit for the current position we have open." It's odd they came to this conclusion after I nailed the technical screenings with their engineers, and they thought I was good enough to talk with the VP of Engineering and the CTO. They even asked for my references, but in the ensuing 5 days, they never called a single one. I also had an inside person there who said everyone was impressed by me and it was pretty much a done deal. However, their Director of ASICs admitted to having difficulty with the compensation package given where I was at. After doing a little research on my own, it looked like I would be offered a 25% cut. So, to save face and not be called cheap, they chose to say my background was not a good fit rather than saying they wasted everyone's time because they can't afford me. What a joke.

Instead of long hours at the early stage startup with a menial salary, I've accepted a consulting gig at a large, public company. I won't have to cut back on my gadget spending and I'll only work 40 hour weeks, leaving plenty of time for my own projects.

On that note, my Google Latitude project is progressing nicely. Still, not yet at the point to post screencaps, etc. Another project I started yesterday was creating an xPL bridge in Python. I had already created a rudimentary way to link xPL networks across the Internet using EventGhost and the Network Sender & Receiver plugins. I'm still using EG at our other house, but I don't really need to use EG on my HA server, so I stripped out the Network Sender & Receiver plugins and made them into standalone Python scripts. I've also gone one step further and made the receiver script capable of re-sending the bridged xPL messages as if they were sent by the original source. Now, I can fully view the remote xPL network and configure the remote apps as if they were local. There's still a lot of tweaking and clean up to do, and I am pondering building a C# xPL bridge just to make things less of a hack. The thing is, I still use EG on the remote network and the thin client it runs on is rather limited, so I don't really want to add another app on that machine.

New Toy - GPS Receiver for 700WX

I picked up an IBlue 737 GPS receiver from buy gps now. The receiver is very compact, about the size of a pager and it is very sensitive - it doesn't need to be left on the dash - it works very well in a cup holder or the door handle. It communicates to the 700WX via bluetooth and we use it with Google Maps Mobile and our unlimited data plan. It doesn't have all the extras of a dedicated GPS (like text-to-speech, etc.) - it just tracks your location. However, any place we can Google, we can get turn by turn directions to it from where we are at the moment. Also, since it's so small, there's no large device to tote around or leave in your car baking in 120 degree temps, hoping nobody steals it.