In conjunction with displaying speed and direction on Google maps I’ve added the ability to view altitude. The approach is a little different in that altitude is not displayed directly on the map, but underneath it. There are quite a few tweaks that I’m working on, but at least it’s in a demonstrable state.
When you [...]

I was trying to access some session info in my Rails application and all of a suddent started receiving HTTP 500 errors from the WEBrick server.  This resulted in completely blank pages throughout the entire application.  It didn’t matter whether or not I was accessing legitimate controllers and actions, EVERYTHING was broken.
I searched around for [...]

I’ve found an interesting operator that I’d like to share.  I’m pretty fascinated with it because in ColdFusion I fell in love with cfparam for assigning default values that could be overridden.  You can achieve the same in Ruby on Rails using the conditional assigment operator.  This comes in handy when setting session or even [...]

I recently posted about displaying speed on Google maps. I’ve been wanting to represent other information graphically so I decided to add direction. The icons now represent speed (within a range) as well as direction. Direction is currently sent in degrees from the GPS unit, so I’m translating this to one of eight segments (N, [...]

As I’ve been working on my Bluetooth GPS app for Windows Mobile I’ve been thinking how to display useful information on a map. The GPS receiver provides all sorts of data such as location, altitude, speed, direction and many other things. Instead of displaying this information in a simple text format I’d like to do [...]

I recently updated my Bluetooth GPS app for Windows Mobile to accommodate speed and direction.  I’m still working through a threading problem with sending data over HTTP.  This would enable more real-time communication between the device and server.  Think about driving in a car and having someone being able to see your location update automatically [...]

Just a quickie to warn you not to use display as a name for any of your Rails actions.  I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why I kept getting an exception in one of my controllers.  It turns out I had an action called display and spent about 30 minutes trying to [...]

Today I encountered an interesting problem and one that was a first for me.  I was testing my Rails app and started the WEBrick server.  I then received the following error message:
[2006-04-12 23:01:13] INFO  WEBrick 1.3.1
[2006-04-12 23:01:13] INFO  ruby 1.8.2 (2004-12-25) [i386-mswin32]
[2006-04-12 23:01:13] WARN  TCPServer Error: Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) [...]

I found this to be a pretty cool product that I’d like to purchase for the office. Maybe I can get Jamie to let me splurge for our bedroom….but the chances are slim. Blik has all sorts of wall decals with some really cool designs. One of my favorite has to be [...]

I was recently working with a ColdFusion application that needed to access a SOAP Web Service and decided to code something similar with Ruby on Rails. As usual, I was expecting the process to be a bit more cumbersome than CF. I say this largely because I haven’t dealt with any scripting languages that make [...]