Windows Web Hosting, Web Technologies, etc
Archive for April, 2008
Tracking your location with a SmartPhone and GPS
Apr 14th
I recently blogged about my new productivity device (AKA my new toy), an AT&T Tilt. I’ve been using a Motorola Q for years and missed the capabilities of a PDA phone (like the Tilt) versus a a smart phone (like the Q). The Q had superior voice quality and a better overall phone experience but the Tilt has a vast number of features and functionality that make it much more than a cell phone.
Introducing TrackMe, GPS tracking software
One of these great features the Tilt has is built-in GPS receiver. When you bundle a GPS with a Windows powered device and add on top of that a 3G data network, the creative applications start to flow and one such application is called TrackMe. TrackMe records your GPS data every few seconds and stores it in a local SQL2005 compact edition database (I should note it’s written on the .NET 3.5 Framework). It then creates data files that are compatible with Google earth. You can take it a step further and embed GeoCodes (gps coordinates) into your photos taken with your camera and provide not only the path you took but show pictures along the way. But wait, it gets cooler.
You can also get a special tracking script that uses PHP and MySQL and load it on your website and let TrackMe feed your information back to your server in real-time.
Seeing the results of TrackMe
This weekend I was fortunate enough to be invited to the Telefonica Second Annual Fishing Tournament which was held as part of their Leadership Conference. The fishing tournament was made up of about 30 people spread across 5 charter boats all fishing for game fish. I decided that I didn’t that this would be the perfect oppurtunity to use TrackMe (in case our 3 hour cruise turned into a much longer trip ala Gilligan’s Island).
What was interesting on this trip was that immediately as the boat took off everyone fired up their GPS on the smartphone of choice and started tracking the co-ordinates of where the captain was taking us to! (it didn’t do much good though the only fish caught on this trip was the 1 little 8lb king-fish I got).
Anyway, you can see my TrackMe results here. You’ll want to select “none” under trip and click show and it will show all my data points out of Key Biscayne. You can also see Map view and satellite view (which is the more interesting of the two)
Here’s a few cool screen shots:
Our boat was actually in the third slip at the marina there.
Here’s the path we took coming out of marina
Here’s a bird’s eye view of the entire path we took. (I stopped taking measurements when the first fish started biting)
Finally, if you click on any of the point it will give information regarding speed, etc.
Unfortunately, I didn’t take any photos on this trip but there’s always the next blog post for that 
Oh one last post, Christopher Columbus might have been the first to discover the world wasn’t flat but now I too have taken a boat ride off the edge of the world (albeit the google earth world) :
Crime Stoppers meets Web 2.0 with Google Maps
Apr 7th
Google and MSN both have a streetview product on their maps now. They have these little cars with 360 degree panoramic cameras driving down various streets taking digital pictures and then you’re able to view these street level pictures online.
To see an example of this take a look here:
That’s the main entrance to the NAP of the Americas where much of our hosting infrastructure is housed. (I have some aerial pictures of this same facility in another blog posting). I know what you’re think, big deal now I can see the front of the building. Well if click down the street a bit you’ll see the painting crew in action:
Okay, that’s mildly entertaining. But you say, “Well Jess, what does this have to do with Crime Stoppers?”. You see, we’re catching people in action, in their normal every day activities..
Cat Burglar caught mid air on Google Maps
So over in San Francisco, Here’s a guy caught mid air in what appears to be a little Breaking and Entering action:
And if you live at the above address in San Francisco you’ll probably want to zoom in and see what our cat burglar looks like:
Drug Dealers caught on Google Maps
Ron Johnson actually sent me the above image as well as one where an obvious drug deal was caught on camera too. Unfortunately those images have been pulled since then. But here’s a couple blogs with images that show just why Google pulled those images:
- The drug deal from all angles: http://gawker.com/5004469/a-drug-deal-caught-from-every-angle
- The money exchange: http://www.i-am-bored.com/bored_link.cfm?link_id=28330
So there’s our google street view maps in action showing dubious activities. You’re also able to see pretty interesting things from the normal Google Maps sky view too.
Tomahawk Missiles Caught Mid Air
One of my favorite sites for this type of information is googlesightseeing.com. There’s everything from nuclear subs and purported cruise missiles to post Hurricane Katrina images of New Orleans. I’m told that the government has started shutting down some locations or limiting the detail at which they can be viewed but there’s still many sites on the Internet devoted to sharing interesting images that people have spotted on Google and Live/MSN Maps. Here’s a few links:
- Hurricane Katrina Damage: http://googlesightseeing.com/2007/04/05/new-orleans/
- Nuclear Submarines: http://www.ssi-developer.net/rant/?p=775
- Area 51: http://www.satellite-sightseer.com/id/1007
So there we have it, thanks to the Web 2.0 evolution we’re able to see everything from drug deals and B&E to locating WMD’s (well maybe not WMD’s, sorry George). But you get the idea.
Cool Applications – Quickie Post
Apr 7th
#1 – Aptana.com – Has two interesting products, Aptana Jaxer, is an opensource web server optimized for AJAX pages and applications. Aptana Studio is a free and opensource development environment for AJAX based applications. I love free afterall and these are both cool tools.
#2 – Xobni.com – I haven’t mentioned this earlier but I’ve been using it for about a month now. It indexes all your emails and contacts in outlook and provides very interesting information such as: the time of day you normally communicate with this person, all your email conversations, contacts you have in common based on emails and any files you’ve exchanged. Below is a quick snapshot and I have 4 invites available if anyone needs one.
#3 – vmcNetFlix – Cool Media Center add-in- From the xobni email you can see Dean sent me this. This application lets you stream your NetFlix ‘Instant’ movies to your Media Cetner player and even download the movies for playback later from a ‘delayed viewing’ gallery. This one is definitely a slam dunk for Cool Media Center apps and is getting loaded as soon as I get home.
#4 – Woopra – hosted analytics and chat application - What’s interesting here is: a) that they built a 100 server grid system using 3tera for this application. b) They have a huge amount of features such has live chat, realtime site visitor analytics and visitor tagging. This application is going to grow in popularity very quickly.
Extending NTFS Volumes Quickly.
Apr 4th
Have you ever sat in a presentation and saw a command execute that you never knew about and was just blown away? Yesterday was one of those days.
I was watching a demo of a new SAN solution and the presenter created a new volume on an NTFS drive but didn’t use the full drive size. During the demo he wanted to adjust the size of that drive to use all the free space on the drive. My thoughts, okay here comes a tutorial on RAID 0 … NOPE Instead he fired up a CLI tool I’ve only used once called DISKPART.
With diskpart, you’ll select the volume you’ll be working on and then execute the command: extend to extend the partition. Here’s the info on this command:
extend [size=n][noerr]
Use the extend command to cause the current in-focus volume to be extended into contiguous unallocated space. The unallocated space must follow (it must be of higher sector offset than) the in-focus partition. The intended use of this command is to grow an existing basic data partition into newly created space on an extended hardware Raid logical unit number (LUN).
If the partition had been previously formatted with the NTFS file system, the file system is automatically extended to occupy the larger partition, and data loss does not occur. If the partition had been previously formatted with any file system format other than NTFS, the command is unsuccessful and does not change the partition.
Diskpart blocks the extension of only the current system or boot partition.
Free Virus Cleaning Software from Dr. Web
Apr 3rd
How often have you had someone come up to you and say “Hey, you know computers. I think my PC is infected what do I do?”
Generally, their AV is out of date or non-existent. Today it was pointed out to me that Dr. Web has a free cleaner called “Dr. Web CureIt!“. The application runs on all versions of Windows without installation of a full anti-virus application. Just download and run it.
According to their website it cleans:
* Rootkits * Mass-mailing worms * E-mail viruses * Peer-to-peer viruses * Internet worms * File viruses * Trojans * Stealth viruses* Polymorphic viruses * Bodiless viruses * Macro viruses * MS Office viruses * Script viruses * Spyware * Spybots * Password stealers * Keyloggers* Paid Dialers * Adware * Riskware* Hacktools * Backdoors * Joke programs * Malicious scripts * Other malware*
So next time you’re confronted with that, just have them download (if they can) a copy of Dr. Web CureIt!. It won’t replace having a resident (and up to date) anti-virus application running but it should help get them (and you) out of the little jam.
