Where's Tim
There are 53 entries for the tag
Where's Tim
Yahoo Live launched last night. It is basically a social network of webcams. They talk more about it on their blog. Once I saw it on digg this morning, I configured my "live" in about 20 seconds. It automatically pickup my webcam and started broadcasting. My page is here, I doubt I'll keep it up, but it's fun to play with and it fits perfectly with my exhibitionism :) They allow you embed your webcam, so I'm going to try that here: Technorati tags: Yahoo Live, Where's Tim...
I finally fixed the Get History issue that hasn't been working on Where's Tim for a while now. Apparently, the Google Maps API doesn't like it when you call removeOverlay with an uninitialized parameter. http://timhibbard.com/where... Technorati tags: Where's Tim, Google Maps API, removeOverlay...
Kyle Archer is headed to New Jersey today to swoon our future clients at the COST Expo 2007 tradeshow. He took our Where's Tim phone, so you can view his current GPS location on Google Maps in real time (updates automatically every 15 seconds). You can view his location here. Or download the Where's Tim task tray alerter. It's ClickOnce, so it's double cool. Bring home the bacon, Kyle! Technorati tags: Kyle Archer, EnGraph, New Jersey, Where's Tim, GPS, Google Maps, COST Expo...
I just made it to Philly (despite running late this morning and checking in 32 minutes before my flight) and met up with Kyle. He has been on a EnGraph crusade as of late, visiting six clients in the last two weeks. He writes more about it on his blog. We are visiting a client in Salem, NJ this week, adding new GPS units to their system and troubleshooting some existing units. Matt Strausz is joining us on Tuesday to help with the installation. It should be a good week. I'm looking forward to some...
The Google Maps API blog talks about adding driving directions to their API. This is something that I am excited about adding to Where's Tim. I've had directions to me on my real time GPS site for a while (see the post here), but I've always just shelled out a url to maps.google.com. Now I can retain the users of that feature on my site and not have to send them away (hoping that they will come back). This is also big for the mashup "industry" as well. Visually understanding where an object resides...
I've thought about posting this for a while now and responses to my architecture post by Dave and Dru have got me thinking about it again. I avoid open source frameworks or libraries in our production desktop applications. I don't have a problem with third party when it comes to web applications or internal apps. I use AjaxPro and skmRSS on Where's Tim and my home site. I use Indy.Sockets all the time in our internal apps. Where's Tim is just for fun though and if it goes down, it's not that big...
As a display of how non-creative I am, I redesigned timhibbard.com this weekend. The new master page concept with ASP .NET 2.0 is really cool. Using a master page, I linked the Where's Tim API to show data from Where's Tim on the top of each page. Using AjaxPro and a little JavaScript, it updates every 15 seconds. Other than that, it's pretty boring :) Technorati tags: ASP .NET, C#, timhibbard.com, Where's Tim, Web design, AjaxPro...
The guys over at NavXS have just released a new Windows Mobile client for their social geocoding network. Feel free to add me as a friend after you download the software. My user ID is tim@timhibbard.com and it is directly tied to data from Where's Tim. Technorati tags: NavXS, Social Geocoding, Where's Tim...
Cursor on Target (CoT) is an effort by military and governmental branches, FFRDCs (federally funded research and development corporations) and private companies to standardize an electronic portable data format to define location based data. I am the biggest geo-geek that I know, so obviously I was very interested when they contacted me about implementing their format into Where's Tim. These guys have done a great job of making a simple schema (12 required fields) that is easy to implement. I blogged...
I've been working on implementing CoT XML standard for describing location based data. Here is the C# code for an .aspx page that will render XML More infomation about CoT can be found here: using System;using System.Data;using System.Configuration;using System.Collections;using System.Web;using System.Web.Security;using System.Web.UI;using System.Web.UI.WebControls;u... System.Web.UI.WebControls.W... System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;... System.Xml;public partial class cot : System.Web.UI.Page{...
Where's Tim hasn't been getting much attention the last couple of months. A little bit here and there, but nothing like the Digg days of last summer. I've got several requests for information the last week or so though. Joab Jackson (who did a National Geographic story last October) is working on an article. Ronan Fitzgerald (who did an article in The Guardian) has been emailing me about the Social Geocoding studs NavXS. Davey Winder is also working on a mashup article. I'll post the links to these...
The last year in the Pendleton & Sutton building has been good for EnGraph. It is our first office and I remember when we just moved in. However, we've added new members to the company (and are still looking for more), and an office in Kansas City just makes sense because all the developers but me live in the KC area. We just signed for a place on Strang Line Rd that used to be occupied by Kyle's brothers company, ASB. We move in on Monday and I'll be driving there everyday (which will make Where's...
The Google Maps API blog talks about adding support for GeoRSS enabled feeds on Google Maps. That means you can take the Where's Tim Messaging Feed and view the last 50 message people sent me on Google Maps You can also take my location feed and view it on Google Maps. Since my location feed contains Yahoo Maps, clicking on the GIcon will show a Yahoo Map on the Google Map! Technorati tags: GeoRSS, Where's Tim, Google Maps, Yahoo Maps...
Ken Hoetmer - who has his own Where's Tim - has started a new company called Spatial North. He talks more about it on his blog. Good luck Ken! Technorati tags: Ken Hoetmer, Spatial North, Where's Tim...
Yesterday, Jonathan Umscheid started full time with EnGraph. He's been working on a contract basis for us for a bit now and it's great to have him on board full time! Jonathan and David are doing some really cool things with our AutoCAD project and they really need to start blogging about it! We are still looking to fill a position for a .NET developer that will help Kyle and I on our transportation and GPS software (you might even get your own Where's Tim). Technorati tags: Jonathan Umscheid, David...
Carl is driving to Colorado and wants people to watch his progress with GPS and send him text messages. Click here to see him on a Google Map and click the icon on the map once you get there to send him a text message. Technorati tags: Where's Tim, GPS, Google Maps...
Somebody from Sprint must have read my blog post about not being able to receive text messages from Where's Tim. Either that or somebody decided that we were not sending spam through our servers. Either way, I am now getting text messages people send me on Where's Tim. I also publish these messages in a GeoRSS enabled RSS feed. Since the feed does have GeoRSS, you can even view the last 100 messages on Where's Tim. Technorati tags: Where's Tim, GeoRSS, Sprint...
Iain Martin (a student on the post graduate diploma in journalism at Cardiff University) wrote an article about the mainstreaming of geography and geotagging journalism. He talked briefly about Where's Tim and included some of my quotes on how GIS will impact various industries. He even mentioned Social Geocoding. Well, it was in a quote from me, but he still published it! He also spoke of Jerome Dobson and his concerns of loss of privacy. It's funny how we always get mentioned together in articles....
A couple weeks ago, I blogged about Sprint blocking my SMTP server from sending text messages to my cell phone from Where's Tim. After I changed the code to send messages people send me through a different mail server, it worked fine for a week or two. I noticed last week that they were not coming through again and sure enough, they blocked me again. I apologize to anybody that has sent me a text message on Where's Tim and I haven't replied. I still kind of get the messages via the RSS feed, but...
A couple French websites talked about Where's Tim today. After translating them to English, I was a bit surprised to read the negative/paranoid connotation of the comments. Maybe the intent was lost in translation, but one guy mentioned radio controlled missiles and burglary. Translations here, here and here to see comments. I have not been to France or hung out with anyone that has spent an extended time in France. That being said, I wonder if something about the French culture or government spawns...
Google Maps works by asynchronously downloading tiles of map/satellite data as you navigate around the map. Lately, I've noticed that it has been rendering the wrong tiles in Where's Tim occasionally. I've only noticed this in FireFox though. Anybody else seeing this? Technorati tags: Google Maps, Where's Tim...
I'm working on an article for a special personal tracking issue of a magazine. It's due next Monday and I would like some other people to look it over before I submit it. If you have some spare time this Thanksgiving weekend, send me an email and I'll send you a copy to proofread. Warning, it's mostly about Where's Tim and Social Geocoding, so if you're tired of reading about that on this blog, you're probably not going to want to read this :) Technorati tags: Writing, Where's Tim, Social Geocoding...
You're going to be hearing a lot more about the Social Geocoding service, NavXS. It's MySpace meets Where's Tim. These guys do it right. They have a Windows Mobile client, a Java client, Google Maps interface and a rock solid permissions model. They also have a blog here. Technorati tags: NavXS, Social Geocoding, GPS, location sharing, Where's Tim...
Matt Dunbar & Co. did a fantastic job putting together GIS day at Kansas University. My favorite part of the day was judging the student competition. Seven students gave ten minute presentations on unique uses of GIS. They showed everything from a geographic boundary of where grits are consumed (apparently South Carolina is the capital of all that is grits) to a traffic analysis of SW Douglas Country in Kansas. The winner was Lincoln Lewis. He showed how to make GIS data pretty using a suite...
Rachael King from Business Week writes about Where's Tim: Meet Tim Hibbard. It's 11:45 p.m. on a Wednesday night and Hibbard is currently near the intersection of Jacob and Ranch Streets in Lawrence, Kan. It's a cool 50 degrees outside. He's not moving around now, but he's traveled a total of 28.42 miles today. And no, I'm not stalking him. Very cool. She also talked with John Musser of ProgrammableWeb (THE place for web API's). He talks about the article on his blog. Technorati tags: Where's Tim,...
I'm driving to Jonesboro, AR today to install ParaPlan for our newest client, EAAAA. I'll be driving through Clinton, MO. You might remember that we stopped there on our SC Code Camp trip. It's also Jeff Julian's hometown. Watch me here. Technorati tags: Where's Tim, EnGraph, South Carolina CodeCamp, Jonesboro, Clinton, Jeff Julian...
Manish Lachwani from 411Sync sent me an email this morning about his new service that allows you to send a text message to 411Sync with a couple of lyrics from a song and they will send you a text back with the artist and title of the song. For example, send a text message to 415-676-8397 with "getlyric stranger flowers yet" and it will return 8:16 AM by 311. "getlyric should have done something but i've done it enough" to get Blue and Yellow by The Used. I can see being useful when listening to...
In CNN's article about .NET 3.0 RTM, they quote Ben Noonan from Burton Snowboards: Now that our pages are enabled with Atlas, we've seen nearly double the traffic. That is a misleading statement. By nature, adding AJAX elements to your site is going to increase traffic. Every page that loads asynchronously (where the initial page load is just the structure and then the data loads in front of your eyes) is charging many more hits to the server. For example, on Where's Tim, I initially load the map...
Tim from GPS Review revisits the idea of submitting a GPS tracklog to your insurance company to prove you are a good driver in exchange for better rates. This particular program is in the UK called "Pay as you Drive". David Starr talked about a similar program in Canada a couple months ago. I still think this is a good idea. In order for GPS to be profitable in the consumer market, the end person being tracked must be in full control. In both of these cases, participation is voluntary and the consumer...
Kansas University (right here in Lawrence, KS) puts on a Geographic Information Systems day every year. A couple months ago, Matt Dunbar contacted me and asked if I would speak about personal tracking. My talk is titled "Big Brother is on MySpace. How GPS will change our everyday lives (in a good way)" After some shameless promotion of Where's Tim and EnGraph, I plan to talk about how real time GPS can add a new dimension to social networking sites like MySpace. I also plan to talk about enhancing...
Kyle and I are sitting in the Philadelphia airport hoping that our flight doesn't get delayed again. So far, it's only been delayed an hour, but they are delaying and canceling flights left and right. I met a guy named Curt Walz who works for Sygma, a fast food distributor. He was telling me how they use RFID to tell the warehouse workers which items to pick for the order they are completing. The RFID reader actually mounts on the workers forearm and alerts them when they need to pick an item. I...
Joab Jackson published an article in National Geographic that give a very basic introduction of GeoRSS and a couple examples of it's use. One of the examples was Where's Tim!! GeoRSS is a way to add geographic information to an RSS feed. Most generically, it is used to add a latitude / longitude point to an item. To add GeoRSS to your existing feed, add the namespace to your rss element like this: rss version="2.0" xmlns:georss="http://www.ge... xmlns:gml="http://www.openg...
David, Steve and everybody else involved did a great job in putting this event together and keeping the chaos at an organized level!! My talk on AJAXPro went really well. 25 or so people showed up and everybody seemed to understand the power of AJAXPro and several of them told me afterwards that they had projects that could use this technology right now. I've talked before about why AJAXPro is better than XMLHttpRequest. It also had advantages over ATLAS (Microsoft's AJAX library) in that AJAXPro...
Kyle and I are at the airport getting ready to head to Salem. Tulsa TechFest 2006 was awesome. Lots of attendees and great sessions. They did a great job keeping everything organized. And to Chris Williams, my laptop acted up when I plugged into their projector too, so it had nothing to do with your projector, my laptop is just possesed. More details about TechFest later, I met some very interesting people. I've never actually gotten a GPS reading at takeoff or landing, but I'll keep trying. Technorati...
Some guy added Where's Tim to his del.icio.us bookmarks and tagged it ASSASSINATE.
Geo-Names has released a utility that will scan an RSS feed for geographical content and spit out a GeoRSS feed. So you can grab the RSS feed for this blog and convert it to GeoRSS. Since Where's Tim understands GeoRSS, you can view the geographical data of my feed in relation to my current location here. You can also use the same utility to spit out KML and view the data in Google Earth...
GeoRSS is an extension of RSS that allows for geographic information to be associated with a blog post, an event, a gps location, a photograph or any other information where geographic information would help better describe the item. Several websites are recognizing the value of GeoRSS and are adding these extensions to their feeds. Most recently, Wordpress is using GeoRSS to add maps to their posts. One of the things that Jeff and I talked about on our roadtrip is adding GeoRSS tags to ESS. ESS,...
As I talked about earlier, we've add geocoded pictures from flickr to Where's Tim. With a flickr=true query string, you can see pictures taken in the area of my real time location. We've added a little UI under the map that will allow images to be turned on or off and also the ability to only map pictures that match a tag. Tag support is also supported by query string (flickrtags=), and the following url will map flickr pictures taken close to my location with the tag ppc6700: http://www.timhibbard.com/w...
We released a new version of Where's Tim this morning that supports GeoRSS feeds. Use a georss query string with the url of the feed as the query string value like this: http://timhibbard.com/where... or you can create an xml file that contains information about GeoRSS feeds that looks like this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <GeoRSSFeeds> <feed url="http://timhibbard...
I added the Where's Tim API + Google Maps demo code to the article about showing the code from my AJAX.net talk. http://geekswithblogs.net/t
Steve Walker was at my AJAX.NET talk at Wichita Code Camp. This is what he said: ...One thing that I thought was interesting about the presentation was Tim showing us how his company uses Google Maps and GPS to track items around the world in real time. In a VERY small amount of code, we were able to see where Tim was at and where he had been on his drive over this morning... Thanks Steve. People are starting to use the Where's Tim API for interesting things. One guy mashed up Where's Tim data with...
This article is from a talk I did for the Kansas City .net user group. It will show you how to use the AJAX.net library written by Michael Schwarz. Initial Setup: 1) Download dll from http://ajaxpro.info 2) Open Visual Studio and create a new web application 3) Add a reference to the AJAX.net dll 4) Modify your web.config to include: <system.web> <httpHandlers> <add verb="POST,GET" path="ajax/*.ashx" type="Ajax.PageHandler... Ajax"/> </httpHandlers>...
Lawrence, KS got new Google satellite images the other day. Check out pictures of the EnGraph office.I haven't fully migrated Where's Tim over to the v2 of the maps API. Once I do, you will be able to see the new images on Where's Tim as well.[Google Maps] [Lawrence, KS] [Where's Tim]...
We just received a purchase order for a web based real time GPS system using Google Maps. It's exciting for me to see all the work we've put into Where's Tim starting to materialize into $$$. We have a couple other companies that are interested too, so hopefully we'll have a bunch of Where's Tim popping up on the internet :) Check back this weekend for a url. [EnGraph] [Where's Tim] [GPS] [AVL] [Google Maps]...
I found another podcast that talked about Where's Tim. Apparently, I'm a "nerd with no life"!! It's by WeBeGeeky.com (which is down right now) and the mp3 is here (9 min, Where's Tim mentioned about 1:45 in). [GPS] [Where's Tim] [EnGraph]...
Well, like I said yesterday, I was pretty nervous for my interview with Good Morning Kansas on ABC 49 in Topeka. Kyle was nice enough to go along and we got there around 5:45 AM. Heidi greeted us at the door and said that she had been watching on Where's Tim and already knew I was here!! We went over some basic stuff about the site and she explained that I would be going into the studio around 6:00 and get familiar with the set and the anchors. We went in the studio and she introduced me to Blake...
Much thanks to the BBC for throwing Where's Tim a plug!!Apparently, Where's Tim is a marvellous, entertaining and pointless application :)
Emily Chang lists Where's Tim on her eHub list of cool web 2.0 applications. She sent me a text message on Where's Tim to tell me we had been listed :) Of course, if you subscribed to the Who linked to Where's Tim RSS feed you would have already known that
I talked earlier about integrating WeatherBug data into Where's Tim. Chris Sloop has been a lot of help and was even nice enough to include Where's Tim on the WeatherBug's API example page. He requested that I share some code, so here it is:Basically, to consume WeatherBug's API, I:1) Make a call to the Where's Tim webservice2) Parse the zipcode out of the .Place property of the GPSData structure3) Pass the zipcode into a function that builds the REST url4) Load the url into a System.Data.DataSet...
In the PodcastStudio.net session the other night, I told Jeff and John that I have never had problems with Google Maps, or any Google API. Well, I think I might have found something. I was redesigning the layout for Where's Tim, because, well, I'm an awful UI designer. And I was putting everything into a 2x4 table and I set the left column width at 25% and the right column width at 74%. The upper right hand cell contains the div tag that eventually becomes the Google Map and I set the width of that...
I had a great time talking with Jeff and John the other night. As I listened to the podcast, I noticed a few things that I should clarify. Lat/Long = Latitude & Longitude, and x and y way of locating a geographic point on a map. For example, the Lat/Long of Allen Fieldhouse in Lawrence, KS is -95.25438, 38.954069. We used the AJAX.net library by Michael Schwarz. It is very easy to use and had wanted to talk more about it, but we ran out of time. All you do is modify your web.config, register your...
Last week, Scoble asked if we would port Where's Tim over to Windows Local Live. This morning, Chandu Thota (MapPoint all-star) sent me an email letting me know to contact him if I need any help working with WLL. Hey Chandu, I also have a ClickOnce version of Where's Tim in the works using MapPoint that I will probably need some help/guidance on too.I'm excited to work with their new API...I need to work on sending vehicle manifests and receiving messages from vehicles for Sean before I go on vacation...
New! Check out the new ClickOnce Where's Tim Tasktray alerter! http://timhibbard.com/where... When I tell people that I keep a GPS enabled Nextel phone in my car and anybody, at anytime can see my current position, they always ask, “Well, aren’t you worried about that?” I always say, “No, one day everybody will use their current location to assist them in their everyday lives.” While most people aren’t as comfortable with this level of transparency, I believe the social and business benefits of...