Visualizing Track Logs with Google Maps

Sunday, January 15th, 2006

The track logs from my GPS unit look like this:

Format: DDD  M/D/Y H:M:S  -4.00 hrs  Datum[108]: WGS 84
ID	Date Time	Latitude	Longitude	Altitude
L	ACTIVE LOG
T	01/13/2006 14:15:56	40.63935	-74.02917	22.2
T	01/13/2006 14:18:57	40.64027	-74.03097	17.9
T	01/13/2006 14:20:36	40.64095	-74.03195	27.1
T	01/13/2006 14:22:53	40.64061	-74.03347	26.6
T	01/13/2006 14:26:08	40.64065	-74.03324	26.1
...

It occurred to me that someone must have integrated this with Google Maps and I was right. GPSVisualizer can convert these into a Google Map like this one:

Map created by GPSVisualizer.com


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A Foggy Day in Bay Ridge with a GPS

Sunday, January 15th, 2006

Bay Ridge Route

Friday I finished my scheduled work for the day a little early so I decided to head down to Owls Head Park in Bay Ridge. The rocks along the bicycle path that starts from there are often a good place to look for Purple Sandpipers, one of my target birds for the year.
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History of the BASIC family of languages

Saturday, January 14th, 2006

This is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a a long time (or at least since Scott Adams’ Devil blog yesterday morning.).

Five miles uphill in the snow both ways

Friday, January 13th, 2006

My main Mac just warned me that it was running low on space on the startup disk and I should clear some. It seems I have only 239 megabytes left. My first computer’s hard drive had less than 20% of that amount of space completely empty. The first computers I worked with (Apple II’s I think, but maybe Commodore 64s) had no hard drives. I’m not sure how much space there was on a floppy back then, but it was probably about 360K or so. In fact, I remember at least one computer I worked with didn’t even have a floppy drive. You stored programs on audio cassette tapes that recorded the modem tones! You young whippersnappers don’t know how good you have it. :-)

Atom Podcasts

Thursday, January 12th, 2006

John LeMasney asked a good question during my RSS and Atom presentation last night to the Princeton Linux Users Group that I didn’t know how to answer. Do Podcast clients, especially iTunes, support Atom Podcasts yet? I know Atom has the necessary elements but do the clients recognize them?
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Copy protection steals Speilberg’s BAFTA

Wednesday, January 11th, 2006

The Guardian explains how copy protecttion is now even befuddling and bedeviling wealthy movie producers. When are people going to realize this stuff is more trouble than it’s worth? It’s not like I can’t go out onto the streets of New York City right now and find a pirated copy of Munich. Copy protection only hurts the honest, who in this case include people who might have otherwise voted for a Munich for a BAFTA award.