Tim Hibbard

Software Architect for EnGraph software


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August 2006 Entries

YouTube geocoded RSS feeds




The video sharing site, YouTube, has some GeoInfo baked into their RSS feeds. It's not GeoRSS, but it's enough that you can pull data out it and lay it over Where's Tim (Zoom out)

This GeoRSS stuff is really cool, but I need to take a break from it. I'm falling behind on much more important things.

posted @ Tuesday, August 29, 2006 9:35 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ Where's Tim ]


Adam gets inspired


Adam Kimber sent me an email yesterday saying that he was inspired by Where's Tim and created his own real time GPS tracking website called Where's Adam. Very cool!! I can't wait to see what else he adds to it.

posted @ Monday, August 28, 2006 11:52 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ GPS Where's Tim ]


Flickr adds geocoding feature




Today, Flickr released geocoding for photos on a Yahoo map. Hopefully, they will add GeoRSS tags to their RSS feeds so I can easily overlay pictures on Where's Tim (like I talked about earlier).

As a side note. Jeff Croft and Matt Croydon have already geocoded their pictures, so Lawrence has way more geocoded pictures than any other city around. It shows that this little town has geek power :)

Via TechCrunch

posted @ Monday, August 28, 2006 11:36 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ GPS Mapping Where's Tim ]


GeoRSS on Where's Tim


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/wherestim/?georss=http://timhibbard.com/wherestim/rss_messaging.aspx

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.com/wherestim/rss_messaging.aspx" />
  <feed url="http://platial.com/rss/tag/lawrence" />
</GeoRSSFeeds>


and then this url - http://timhibbard.com/wherestim/?georss=http://timhibbard.com/wherestim/georss.xml
will overlay Where's Tim with the location of the people that send me text messages and places tagged "lawrence" on platial.com. It's not quite perfect yet. I need to add a place where people can directly add GeoRSS feeds and color code the icons for each feed.

The next step is to create an interface that will take a flickr RSS feed and spit out GeoRSS.

posted @ Monday, August 28, 2006 9:22 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ EnGraph GPS Mapping Where's Tim ]


Kyle no longer has the oldest computer at EnGraph


Kyle's new laptop

Look at how happy Kyle looks :)

This means that David's laptop (January 06) is the oldest workstation at EnGraph. It's great to work for a company that understands how to properly equip their employees.

posted @ Wednesday, August 23, 2006 9:27 AM | Feedback (1) | Filed Under [ EnGraph ]


Come watch Dru


A fellow Lawrence developer, Dru Sellers, is going to be talking about software patterns tonight at the Kansas City .NET meeting. Dru came to the office yesterday and gave me a dry run of his presentation. It was very informative. Check it out tonight at 6:00 PM at 8700 State Line.

posted @ Tuesday, August 22, 2006 8:41 AM | Feedback (1) | Filed Under [ .NET ]


Where's Jeff and John and Joseph and Tim?




Jeff, John, Joseph and I are all driving down to Chris William's Code Camp in South Carolina next month. Jeff and I were talking about the trip this morning. We are leaving Thursday (Sept 14) afternoon, which I'm glad because nothing is better than Nashville, TN at midnight :)

We are trying to think of some ways to make the trip interesting for the GWB faithful. One idea was to take pictures and post them to flickr and create a feed that Where's Tim can understand so you can see our pictures along the way. I sure Lance has some cool ideas that will use the cool features in RSSBus. Anybody else have any ideas?

posted @ Monday, August 21, 2006 8:31 AM | Feedback (1) | Filed Under [ .NET Where's Tim ]


My first EnGraph dollar


My first EnGraph dollar

EnGraph was nice enough to get me a framed dollar bill for my first sale of Where's Tim!! Thanks guys!

posted @ Monday, August 21, 2006 7:33 AM | Feedback (7) | Filed Under [ EnGraph .NET GPS Where's Tim ]


Sprint SMS gets upgrade




Sprint SMS sucked this past weekend, but as PCSIntel reports, there is a good reason. Sprint has been working on a new system that will allow you to view sent and received SMS as well as compose messages directly from your My PCS web page. It would be really cool if they syndicated my messages in RSS so I could plug them into my Google Desktop and search against them.

posted @ Monday, August 21, 2006 7:02 AM | Feedback (1) | Filed Under [ Mobile ]


GPS saves lost hikers




GPSReview reports on lost hikers in North Carolina that were found using the GPS chip in their cell phone after calling 911. The officers were able to put the hiker's location into their handheld GPS unit and find the hikers quickly.

posted @ Monday, August 21, 2006 6:55 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ GPS ]


Using Response.Redirect with KML (Google Earth)


DG left a comment on this post asking how to use Response.Redirect with a KML file.

It's simple. Just add a MIME type on your web server for Google Earth like this:

application/earthviewer .kml

posted @ Monday, August 21, 2006 6:41 AM | Feedback (0) |


Signs I'm turning into a web developer


Those who read this blog know that over the last year, I've complained a lot about not being a true web developer and coming from the fat smart client world, some concepts I've ran into developing Where's Tim just don't make sense to me. I don't know if this is a sign that I'm starting to "think web" or not, but I was testing some new features in our GPS parsing engine and I typed in alert (javascript) instead of a messagebox.show. People that are learning a second language say that they know if they have successfully learned a language if they have a dream in that language. Maybe this is the same type of thing.

posted @ Friday, August 18, 2006 10:40 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ .NET Where's Tim ]


50 coolest websites




Congrats to Rich Brome for getting PhoneScoop on TIME's 50 coolest websites. MySpace, YouTube and Digg also made this list. But what about evite or flickr?

posted @ Wednesday, August 16, 2006 6:33 AM | Feedback (0) |


I can not find your lost or stolen phone with GPS


I get an email every couple of weeks from somebody that has found Where's Tim and wants me to help find their lost cell phone. I always reply nicely and tell them that it is not possible to track a random phone via GPS based on it's number or ESN.  First of all, if it was that easy to track something, I would be out of a job. Second of all, it goes against everything we believe in as far as allowing the trackee (is that a word) to be in full control of who watches them and when. Thirdly, it shows a mis-education of how GPS works. People have seen too many movies where the bad guy throws a magnetic tracking device on the back of the good guy's car and then track them down later. Those devices exist in concept, but they are bulky, expensive and you would not casually toss it at a passing car and expect the driver not to notice. Not to mention that even if you could get past the ethical dilemma of tracking somebody with out their permission, it's illegal and considered an invasion of privacy.

I'll talk more later about profitable, positive uses of real time GPS.

posted @ Sunday, August 13, 2006 11:41 AM | Feedback (24) | Filed Under [ GPS Where's Tim ]


Counting textbox length with Javascript


I get a lot of funny messages sent to me on Where's Tim. I keep them all and put them on this page. Sometimes, people have so much to say that their message exceeds the 160 character message limit for my phone. So I wrote a function that tells people how many characters until the end of the message.

The countChar function takes a textbox object and a div object. The div object will display how many characters are left.

function countChar(txtBox,messageDiv)
    {
        try
        {
            
            count = txtBox.value.length;
            if (count < 160)
            {
                charLeft = 160 - count;
                txt = charLeft + " characters left...keep typing!!";
                messageDiv.innerHTML="<font color=green>" + txt + "</font>";
            }
            else
            {
                messageDiv.innerHTML="<font color=red>Message is too long</font>";
            }
            }
            catch ( e )
            {
                
            }
    }


I can then call that function from the onkeyup event of my textbox like this:

<INPUT type="text" id="txtMessage" 
    onkeyup="countChar(txtMessage,messagesuccess);" 
    onkeydown="if(event.keyCode == 13){document.getElementById('btnSendTextMessage').click();}" >

posted @ Sunday, August 13, 2006 11:15 AM | Feedback (7) | Filed Under [ Where's Tim ]


New stuff from Holovaty




Adrian Holovaty is at it again. You probably know him from one of the first Google Maps mashup, ChicagoCrime.org. This time the former LJWorld developer has created a database of political ads. The database is seachable by year, state, even type of music. Once again, Adrian has taken information and organized it in a way that makes it easily consumable.

posted @ Friday, August 11, 2006 10:20 AM | Feedback (0) |


Fixed "Get directions"


The "get directions to Tim" on Where's Tim wasn't working quite right after I added the AJAXPro caching. That's fixed

Sami has been driving all over Finland recently. Right now he is on the border of Finland and Sweden. You can watch him here.

I've been able to do a lot of coding this last week. I added a bunch more functionality to our application updating framework that David will be using in his applications. Hey David, start blogging!!

posted @ Monday, August 07, 2006 8:17 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ Where's Tim ]


Article about GPS on Lawrence Journal World


The other day, I blogged about talking with Terry Rombeck from the Lawrence Journal World. He wrote a good article about using tracking teens and if GPS is an appropriate tool for that. The article is in today's paper and online here.

Digg it!

posted @ Tuesday, August 01, 2006 10:33 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ GPS ]