chrisstreeter.com » gps

Singapore and Thailand 2008

streeter — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 18:25:57 +0000

Railay East sunrise.

I’ve finally gotten around to finishing tagging, titling and describing my trip to Singapore and Thailand that occurred in March (!!) of this year. I know that it is really late, but I guess it is better than never. I put all the pictures up on flickr for people to check out. Since I’ve got flickr integration now, you can see the pictures in my photo gallery on my site. I’ve changed the privacy settings for all the pictures that have people (I know) in them, so to see those you will need to be a contact of mine on flickr. However for all the other ones, you can check them out on my site.

Singapore Pictures (with a couple in Malaysia)
Thailand Pictures

I also have the trip up on my travel page, so you can get a general idea of where I went. You can check it out at here.

Cache Miss

streeter — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 08:30:33 +0000

I posted on the 5th about how the travel page now shows all my travels. Well, I also mentioned that the page loads really slow. I’m happy to say that I greatly improved the processing bottleneck that existed. I implemented caching which has sped things up considerably. Previously, the travel page took ~7 seconds. The average time from start to finish of script execution on the page was 7.223 seconds, which is crazy long. I even saw execution times over 10 seconds! After turning on caching, I’m now seeing times from .572 to .7 seconds. This is a 10x improvement, and I know I can do even better, especially since this was a quick first pass at improving the page rendering time. Hopefully visitors to the travel pages will no longer notice that it is my side being slow, rather it’ll be the javascript and google maps servers that are slowing down the page load.

Worldly Travels

streeter — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:43:25 +0000

I’ve had a bunch of ideas recently for my travel page that I’ve wanted to implement. However, in order to implement them, I’ve needed to rewrite the Javascript that powers the page. I chose to use the Prototype Javascript framework due to my familiarity with it and its browser compatibility. After some time spent rewriting the code, I was able to get the page back to the same feature set (for only like the 5th time).

The rewrite has allowed me to quickly and easily add two new features to the page. The first feature is the ability to view track segments. This means that I can have a track that is broken up into segments, and each segment can be shown individually. Currently, I don’t have any trips that have track segments, but I may start taking advantage of that in the future.

Second, when no trip is selected on the travel page, something interesting is displayed. Now, all trips are aggregated together and shown on the map. So so you can get an idea of all the places I’ve been at a glance. Note that right now the page load is really slow. I know this and I know why it is slow, and I’ve got plans to address it.

As a final note, I’ve tested the page on Safari 3.1.1, Firefox 3.x and IE 7. With other browsers, your mileage may vary. And seriously, stop using IE, please. It hurts the internet.

Singapore and Malaysia GPX Tracks

streeter — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 13:36:55 +0000

I just added my GPS log of what I’ve done so far on my trip to Singapore. I also took a quick trip up to Johor Bahru in Malaysia, just across the border of Singapore, for a bite to eat … Continue reading →

New Travel Page

streeter — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 02:01:34 +0000

I’ve been recently working on updating my travel page. Part of the reason is that with the old page, everything was done with javascript, and thus was not good for search engines. Plus, it made the page much slower, and harder to work with. As part of the front-end change, I rewrote the back-end. Now, the back-end should be much better than previously and quite a bit faster. The back-end previously was in python, which was running as a CGI script, which took forever. The new version, in PHP, is going to be much more optimized. In addition, rather than loading all the GPX files at once, I now only load one GPX file at a time, cutting down on load time. And finally, now I can link to individual trips.

Lots of New Stuff

streeter — Sun, 16 Oct 2005 21:00:00 +0000

First of the new things, Happy New Year! It doesn’t yet feel like a new year, but I’m sure it’ll kick in soon enough.

Secondly, I finally decided to go ahead and get some real hosting going on. I eventually decided upon BlueHost as they had a good deal with all I wanted out of hosting. I think it should work out better than my previous solution of my personal computer on a dynamic cable connection. Not too mention the fact that my personal computer, on a wireless connection, is a laptop. I’m quite optimistic that the new solution is going to work out fine. So far everything has been painless and I got everything transferred easily.

While working on the hosting transition, I decided to do some upgrading to my site. I updated the styles and worked on the backend a bit. But, what I’m most proud of is my travel section. I got a Garmin eTrex Vista C GPS for Christmas, and I’ve set up a nifty little page. Basically, wherever I go on travels, I’m going to keep track my trip as a route on the device. I can also add waypoints at points of interest. Then, I simply export all that data and upload it. Then the page draws all the trips and plots the waypoints on a Google Map. I think it should be pretty cool showing all the trips I end up taking with the GPS. Eventually, I’ll add more information on the page, but not for a little while as I’m pretty happy with what I’ve got done so far. I’ll just have to go on trips and collect waypoints now. I’ll let ya’ll know when I do post updates to my travels. I’m planning on heading to Southern California later this week, which should add a longer trip that my current trip to Roseville which I wanted for development.

Several New Things

streeter — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 07:53:22 +0000

First of the new things, Happy New Year! It doesn’t yet feel like a new year, but I’m sure it’ll kick in soon enough.