Tim Hibbard

Lunch with Clint

I am having lunch today with Clint Batman from ThinkGeo, another GPS company out of Lawrence. They have some additional hardware that might be useful for us and maybe we do some things on Where's Tim that he might find beneficial to his products. Plus the sweet salsa at La Familia can't be beat!

posted @ Wednesday, June 21, 2006 7:29 AM | Feedback (1) | Filed Under [ EnGraph .NET GPS Mapping Where's Tim ]

Tour of GWB Headquarter

Jeff and John were nice enough to give me a tour of the GeeksWithBlogs headquarters yesterday in Lee's Summit. They also treated me to my favorite food, Culvers!! They went over Team Foundation Server and I am really excited to start using that. We need to finish the last step of our certification before we get to start playing with it.

Jeff also tagged my top:


and pimped my saturn:


Thanks guys!

posted @ Wednesday, June 21, 2006 7:09 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ .NET TFS ]

Checking out Team Foundation Server

posted @ Tuesday, June 20, 2006 6:53 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ EnGraph .NET Mapping Where's Tim TFS ]

Class to consume hostip.info API

In my last post, I talked about wanting to add GeoRSS tags to the RSS feed of the text messages people send me on Where's Tim. The first thing I need is to find out the users location based on their IP. So I wrote a class that communicates with the hostip.info API to generate a object that contains location data based on that ip.

The article with the code is here: http://geekswithblogs.net/thibbard/articles/consume_hostip_api.aspx

posted @ Friday, June 16, 2006 11:28 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ .NET GPS Mapping Where's Tim ]

Using GeoRSS - Geocoding RSS Feeds

Like Lance talked about yesterday, I added GeoRSS tags to my Where's Tim Location feed.

Essentially, all I needed to do was reference the GeoRSS namespaces:
xmlns:georss="http://www.georss.org/georss"
xmlns:gml="http://www.opengis.net/gml"
and add the georss:point tag

By adding that one little tag, I was then able to drop that RSS feed on top of mapufacture and get this. And Lance was able to mashup the RSS feed using RSSBus with a Yahoo local search and find the closest pizza place to me, and also input the data into RSSBus and get a Google Earth KML file back. It's so easy.

I also spoke wtih Rod Edwards yesterday about getting involved with the group that creates the standards for Geodata tags in RSS feeds and websites. I'm looking forward to learning a lot from those guys.

Next project will be adding GeoRSS tags to the Text Messaging feed so you can see on a Google Map where people send me messages from.

posted @ Friday, June 16, 2006 10:15 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ .NET GPS Mapping Where's Tim ]

Follow up on LTA June

Last night, I attended the Lawrence Technology Association mixer at Netopia here in Lawrence. Ends up that Netopia does a lot more than the broadband services that I blogged about yesterday. I ended up chatting with Sam Snyder and Jesse Stanely, two QA guys and they gave me a couple of live demos of their products. One was Timbukto, a remote desktop application that works on Mac and PC. The other one was an end to end solution for tech support. It's called eCare and it rocks! A client submits a ticket and once the support staff gets it, they can remote into the clients computer or give the client viewing privileges over the support staff's computer. This would be ideal for Kyle. I need to set up a meeting with these guys so that Kyle can see this product.

Sam and Jesse need to start a blog so they can show the world all the cool stuff they are working on!

posted @ Friday, June 16, 2006 8:15 AM | Feedback (0) |

Updated demo code

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/thibbard/articles/79447.aspx

posted @ Friday, June 16, 2006 7:23 AM | Feedback (0) |

Lawrence Technology Association June Mixer

I'm off to the LTA meeting at Netopia (a local broadband and wireless provider). Hopefully it will be as interesting as the May Mixer!

posted @ Thursday, June 15, 2006 1:50 PM | Feedback (0) |

It's almost ready

We are working on something pretty cool...stay tuned.

posted @ Wednesday, June 14, 2006 1:23 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ EnGraph GPS Mapping Where's Tim ]

Using AJAX.net on non-SmartPhone

The Java based Opera Mini browser is compatable with the new AJAX.net library!! I have officially switched to using Opera as my main mobile browser. I can't wait to write a Where's Tim mobile version with automatic updates!

posted @ Wednesday, June 14, 2006 7:07 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ Mobile ]

AJAX.net on Windows Mobile

Michael Schwarz has released a new version of AJAX.net that works with Windows Mobile 5 and PPC 2003 devices. I don't have a device right now to test, but if you want to see if your device is compatible with AJAX.net, browse to http://www.ajaxpro.info on your mobile device. If you get this screen, it works.



Very cool!

posted @ Tuesday, June 13, 2006 8:07 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ .NET ]

My KML doesn't work in Google Maps

Yesterday, Google announced KML support in Google Maps. KML is a markup language like XML that defines data to be shown on a map. I use KML on Where's Tim to show my current location inside of Google Earth, so I was very excited...until I tried it.

My KML file is an .aspx page that returns a content type of "application/vnd.google-earth.kml+xml", so when you click on it...it opens in Google Earth. So I put the address of my .aspx in the query string as instructed by Google and I got a "could not be displayed because it contains errors". So I thought, ok...maybe it has to have a .kml extension, so I downloaded the file and ftp'd it to here. And when I put that url in the query string, I got a File not found error. So I tried a file that Frank Taylor made a while back...and it worked.

Maybe Mike still has the ear of a mapping guy over at Google...If so, ask him what do I need to do to make my KML work with Google Maps?

UPDATE: My export history to KML page works inside Google Maps. Maybe it just doesn't work with a single point. Or maybe I am defining my single point wrong.

posted @ Tuesday, June 13, 2006 6:48 AM | Feedback (6) | Filed Under [ EnGraph Mapping Where's Tim ]

Live blogging Where 2.0

Mike Pegg is "live blogging" his experiences at the Where 2.0 conference. He posted a bit ago about getting ready to talk at Google Geo Developer Day

His location is also available on Where's Tim. It's pretty cool to see the little icon right at the Googleplex!

posted @ Monday, June 12, 2006 9:57 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ GPS Mapping Where's Tim ]

Watch Mike Pegg in San Francisco on Where's Tim

Mike Pegg is driving around San Francisco getting ready for the Where 2.0 conference. He has one of the EnGraph Nextel's and you can watch him on Where's Tim!!

We also created a Google Homepage widget that shows his location. Click here to add it to your google homepage.

posted @ Saturday, June 10, 2006 12:17 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ Where's Tim ]

Article about using Google Maps .getBounds() function

Too many Google Maps mashups force the user to enter a zip code, or select a state before displaying the data to the user. This interrupts the user experience and takes away the "browsing" capabilities that Google Maps offers.

This article shows how load data from XML using the Google Maps AJAX helper when the user moves the map and display only the points that are in the viewing range of the user.

http://geekswithblogs.net/thibbard/articles/googlemapsgetbounds.aspx

posted @ Friday, June 09, 2006 11:54 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ Mapping ]

Hippies invade Lawrence

Has anybody seen the episode of South Park where Cartman tries to stop the hippies from having a music festival? It's kind of like that in Lawrence right now due to the Wakarusa music festival starting today. Except there isn't a fat kid hosing down hippies with a fire extinguisher. I've seen more grass skirts and dreadlocks since...well, last years festival :)

posted @ Thursday, June 08, 2006 11:11 AM | Feedback (0) |

2 years at GeeksWithBlogs

2 years ago I meet Jeff Julian at DevEssentials in Kansas City and he set me up with this blog. My first post here. Thanks to all the GWB members for making this a great community!!

posted @ Thursday, June 08, 2006 9:49 AM | Feedback (1) |

Digg vs WebHost4Life

Digg wins. I need to implement the caching stuff I learned from Raymond Lewallen last weekend into Where's Tim

Thanks Frank :)

posted @ Thursday, June 08, 2006 6:54 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ Where's Tim ]

Google Maps Mania goes real time with Where's Tim

Mike Pegg is heading out to San Jose for the Where 2.0 conference next week. He sent me an email this morning telling me he was going to give a talk on Where's Tim! Very exciting!! We got to talking and I suggested that he take our spare Nextel and show his current location on Where's Tim. He agreed, so I headed to the UPS store to overnight it to him. I went ahead and left the phone on, hoping that we might catch the phone in transit. So for the next week or so, you can watch Mike Pegg on Where's Tim.

Frank Taylor talks about it

It's also on Digg (which scares me a bit :) last time Digg brought my servers to it knees)

posted @ Wednesday, June 07, 2006 4:58 PM | Feedback (1) | Filed Under [ Where's Tim ]

Google Maps Mania + Where's Tim

Not everything is ready to go yet...but keep your eye out for Mike Pegg of Google Maps Mania on Where's Tim

http://www.timhibbard.com/wherestim/?xml=http://timhibbard.com/wherestim/gpsdata_mikepegg.xml

posted @ Wednesday, June 07, 2006 1:41 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ Where's Tim ]

EnGraph in Orlando

Kyle and Mark are heading down to Orlando tomorrow to be vendors at the CTAA trade show. This is a great opportunity for us to showcase our transportation and GPS software. Kyle talks about it on his blog.

[EnGraph] [CTAA]

posted @ Monday, June 05, 2006 9:17 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ EnGraph ]

Nice feedback

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...

posted @ Sunday, June 04, 2006 6:53 PM | Feedback (2) | Filed Under [ Where's Tim ]

My problem with Continuous Integration

Raymond Lewallen gave a great presentation at the Wichita Code Camp yesterday on Continuous Integration (zip file) and I know that I could integrate it into our existing source control and automated updating system and that it would save some time now and a lot of time in the future, but I have one problem.

I need another license for Vault to pull the files from source control. Which isn't that big of a deal, but I've been pushing EnGraph to look into Team Foundation Server. So they are not going to be thrilled if we waste $200 on a license and migrate to TFS in the next three months. TFS might be overkill for us, I just haven't spent enough time researching it. I need to spend a couple hours with Jeff and John and see which direction we should move.

posted @ Sunday, June 04, 2006 7:12 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ EnGraph ]

Real time GPS on a private flight

Google Maps Mania reports that Captain Dan created a real time flight tracking system in his plane and will be taking off tomorrow (Sunday) morning at 10:00 EST...Watch him here.

Hey Dan, can I put your data into Where's Tim?

posted @ Saturday, June 03, 2006 10:05 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ GPS ]

Down in Wichita

I'm down here in Wichita for the WichitaDevelopers.net Code Camp. I left Lawrence around 5:45 AM and got here just in time. Raymond Lewallen started out with a talk about smarter ASP session and cache use. I can't wait to incorporate that into Where's Tim. Next I talked about using the AJAX.net library. It was the same talk I gave at the Kansas City .net user group last week and I think I did better. Even though Jeff wasn't there to explain some of the "under the hood" stuff, I was able to give a good enough overview that everybody was able to grasp. I used the same code that I posted earlier.

After lunch, Raymond is going to talk about continuous integration, which I don't know anything about. And then I have a choice between a SharePoint talk and a Windows Communication Foundation talk. I'll probably go to the WCF talk, so I can see what the migration path is from .NET remoting.

The last talk is on developing secure web based applications. I don't have any immediate need to keep anything secure, but I know Matt has been bugging me to accept credit cards on his Smart Start of Kansas site, so I'll keep my ears open.

posted @ Saturday, June 03, 2006 9:12 AM | Feedback (0) |

Speaking at WichitaDevelopers Code Camp

I posted a comment on Raymond Lewallen's blog saying that I was looking forward to his talks at the WichitaDevelopers .net Code Camp this weekend...long story short, I'm giving a talk on AJAX.net, come check it out if you are in the area. I'm going to have lots of practice for Chris's SC Code Camp.

posted @ Thursday, June 01, 2006 11:07 AM | Feedback (0) |