From In To Audi

What went wrong?!? Germpan car?

The State of GPS APIs in Java

They suck. I tried two separate APIs. The first, GPSylon is well-designed (it even comes with design docs) but refused to connect to my Garmin Etrex when in Garmin Protocol mode. Admittedly, it mentions this capability as being spotty and the project hasn't been updated since 2003. I searched around for another complete API and came across a newsgroup posting for the Chaeron API. It was built for multi-platform use, especially handhelds. The interface is kludgy but I had high hopes that it would perform with the Garmin Protocol. Unfortunately, after splicing the parts of the demo up into what I needed, all I could get out of it for downloading waypoints, tracks, and routes was "GPS Function Unavailable". So I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong or that functionality just hasn't made it into the API yet. NMEA0183 is a dime a dozen but it appears no java developers have figured out how to write a complete API for usage with the Garmin Protocol. What a loss. Of course I could start one and put countless hours into figuring it out, debugging, and getting it running but that wasn't the point of this project. I want a high level Garmin-compatible API without reinventing the wheel.

UPDATE: In Chaeron's defense, my Garmin firmware version (2.14) is out of date with that of the docs (2.40). The Garmin site list 2.14 as the latest release software for my etrex. Perhaps somebody with a newer etrex could give it a go.

UPDATE: Still no luck finding a Java API, there seem to be plenty of commercial C/C++ APIs and some free ones. Nothing new. So instead I'm parsing the .gpx files generated by EasyGPS.

Tuscan Sunburn

I'm so tired of going to the bookstore and wafting through the millions of .* Tuscan[y] .* books to find a *real* travel book. It's ridiculous. You've got your Under The Tuscan Sun, which I guess started all this. Then there's A Tuscan This and A Tuscan That, etc. The local Borders has 10 copies of them all. Real people don't want to go to Tuscany, they want to go to Bolivia or Mongolia or Japan. Maybe Antarctica. After a needle-in-the-haystack search, I landed the other Redmond O'Hanlon book I haven't read yet, Into the Heart Of Borneo. Perfect for a trip to the armpit of America. I read his other book, In Trouble Again a few months ago. Maybe they should divide the travel section into "Tourist" and "Traveller" sections so I can find these things easier.