Monday, May 01, 2006

I've been loving my new phone.  In an effort to fully exploit and justify my unlimited data plan, I've been dreaming up applications for it.  My latest one is something I've always wanted to do.

I hooked up a bluetooth GPS and capture my position.  Every 10 seconds or so, I send the logged data to a server.  I then have a spiffy Rails app set up to display my current location on a Virtual Earth map.  The page uses AJAX to poll the server every 10 seconds or so to update my position on the map.

I've got lots of ideas for how to mine and visualize the data, as well as provide nifty tools for my friends and family to track my location, as well as hooking the data up to my Flickr uploader (rewritten now in just about 20 lines of Ruby code) to automatically geo-tag my photos when I upload them.  I've got lots of cool things I plan to do with it while we're on vacation this summer.

I'll have live demos for the public available soon.  Some of my friends have been playing with it already as I debug it. For everyone else, here's a shot:

If you're a friend of mine and want to play with the live version, lemme know and I'll shoot you the temporary link.  Most of the time, it's pretty boring because I'm at work, but hold on to you hat when I start going somewhere.

Tuesday, May 02, 2006 6:07:42 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
The Mark Miller Stalkers Club is very excited about this new breakthrough! Congrats! See you sooon!
Not B-Dub
Tuesday, May 02, 2006 8:43:31 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
It will also help the Feds track you down, next time you're inquiring about the sewer system at UT.
Tuesday, May 02, 2006 7:51:48 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Ever seen this? http://mologogo.com/ Along the same lines.. You should make a subdomain like wheres.marklio.com.

Glad to see you're into Rails.
Thursday, May 04, 2006 2:52:32 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Mark - what did you use for your map nav tools in the upper left? Are these built-in controls? I need to find some images like this so I don't have to recreate them. Slick stuff!
B-Dub
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