www.devco.net by r.i.pienaar

28Dec/062

GMaps PHP version 1.7

After my recent release of version 1.6 I realized you wouldn't always want to have a clickable point at every line point so version 1.7 introduces a fix for this.
First a sample:


You can see there are few points and the line just gets drawn through points that aren't clickable. This is a much more practical approach to it since with version 1.6 you'd have had 2000 clickable markers on that map, not good.
To activate this feature there is now a special type called none, if you specify this as the type for a point it won't get a marker, no comments, not clickable etc. You can also therefore not define your own types using the word none since they just won't work.
As a side note, the image you see above is from a map with very close to 2000 points on it, the map works on my iMac with 1GB RAM but I've seen it fail on other smaller machines, it seems the problem is related to the time the javascript takes to run so the browsers kill the javascript. This is the first time I came across limitation in this so all I can say is if you intend to make huge maps, test it on smaller machines as well.
This version also fixes a small error in the HTML that my code produce, this didn't break anything but it's best to stick to what GMap EZ expect.
Version 1.7 is available at http://www.devco.net/code/gmapsphp-current.tgz as always and the docs at http://www.devco.net/pubwiki/GMapsPHP have been updated.

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24Dec/060

Back from holiday

We are now back from holiday after driving 1065 miles (1713 kilo meter).
We decided to cut 2 days out of our plans for the trip due to the persistent fog. First few days we had great weather, when the fog first set in it was fine as well as we were at Fountains Abbey where it added great atmosphere to everything, then we visited Emma's sister so no big deal. Last 2 days where primarily days for seeing the beauty of the lake and peak districts and we had zero visibility, so we decided to cut the Dean Forest days out out of the trip.
I used my trusty old Magellan GPS 315 to record the trip, one day I didn't use it as we were mostly just driving around New Castle, also didn't record short trips to restaurants and the like, therefore it's total distance is a bit out, only 947 miles on the track.


Average Speed: 63 km/hour
Max Elevation: 450 meter / 1473 feet
The car behaved perfectly, no hitches or complaints at all and overall I had a great time on the holiday.
I made the track using my GPS track management application that I've blogged about before, I'll turn it into a interactive google map with links to places, pictures etc and link it here later.

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15Dec/062

Geek Packing List

Last night while packing for my holiday it struck me just how bad things are today with all the gadgets and stuff we carry around. I guess the list of things I packed says it all:


USB Cable for WM5 phone and photovault Laptop + Charger
Lensbaby DSLR Cleaning kit
USB card reader GPS data cable
Backup mobile phone on a different network 4 x AA batteries and charger
USB Speakers for watching divx 6 x Ilford HP5+ films
Spot Meter 2 x Ilford FP4+ films
Nikon FM3a Nikon FE
12 to 220 volt adapter for car D70 + Battery + Charger
Road Atlas TomTom Navigator with latest speed cams loaded
WM5 Phone + Charger Tourist books, reading books
D80 + Grip + 4 x AA Adapters + 18-200VR Flash Light
5 x Memory Cards Tri-Pod
Notebook + Pen Photovault


That's about it, all of this before even starting on clothing and other such things. Insane.
Anyway, so a bit about the holiday, we're just doing a bit of a road trip to test out my new car, I only have 6 days leave this year after changing jobs and loosing 16 days worth in the process so this is all we really have time for :(

The major stops are basically Cambridge (today), Bolsover for a castle there, York, New Castle, Lake District, Peak District and Royal forest of Dean, we'll be back around christmas day.

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6Dec/060

Further lighttpd details

I've previously written that I am trying out lighttpd for serving up my static files, I've now been running lighttpd and apache in parallel for a while and must say the results are very good in favour of lighttpd.
First a graphic to show the change:


This is a capture out of cacti showing the requests per second for some servers. Look at the yellow line, till about 12 it was running Apache 1.x, then I took that server out, around 12:30 I put in a lighttpd server on the same box and enabled stats from it around 13:00. This is on the same hardware, same files etc same IP address and you can clearly see in terms of requests per second lighttpd totally flies compared to Apache on the same box.
The Apache is a stock Debian Apache 1.3.33, I could probably have sped it up by some tuning, but installing lighttpd is much less work and much less painstaking monitoring, tuning, monitoring, tuning.

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