I have made a new site that is more along the lines of a tech blog. It is a site that I can dump my thoughts and present information that I have collected that may be of some use to other people. If I have an issue I am trying to google, but can’t find the answer in a timely fashion, I will post the answer there as well.
For an update, I have posted a screenshot of the program I wrote (few hours of sitting down and punching the good ol’ keyboard). The program takes a Wifi Scan text document and converts it into a Google Earth KML file. If you click the image below, you can see the full screen shot of what my program looks like, the tree structure listed in google earth and the information that pops up when you click on said point.
By doing this little project, i’ve learned about writing XML documents and how easy it can be and how big of a pain it could be. Also this project stresses the way I used to code. For example, a 750 KB file with 6,000 data points works flawlessly. Toss in a 10 meg file with 54,000 data points and you will see real quick that handling data is alot different.
Things I’ve Learned:
Redim Preserve statement is a bad bad bad idea if called once per loop. It basically creates an array thats bigger (or smaller), copies the old array to the new array (2x memeory consumption), then destroys the old array.
Better to Add items all at once vs one at a time on List View Boxes (still learning to program this one).
Google Earth is picky when it comes to <document> and <Document> …
This program for the most part is complete, once I fine tune it and get everything running smoothly, I will see about the website side of this project.
Went and saw Unveil play at Dr. Feelgoodz on Friday. Here is a sample of what they play. Sorry for poor audio quality, my camera is not ment to be a video camera nor does it have a filter over the microphone to make the sound quality better.
I finally got my QStarz bluetooth GPS receiver in friday. Since I was heading to Birmingham saturday, I thought I would test this thing out. Combined with NetStumbler and a D-Link 7db antenna with a magnetic mount, I rode to Birmingham collecting wifi data with GPS coords. Then I started thinking about mapping wifi around the gadsden area. One good weekend of driving with this setup should take care of the downtown area and slowly work my way around the smaller areas. It is just an idea at the moment.
Below is what I picked up for just the gadsden area. The data was thrown into Google Earth, and needs to be cleaned up as there are probably 5-10 Access Point data per spot and it gets confusing.
A red X is a secure Access Point, a green check is an open wifi hot spot.
I went to video games live in Birmingham and it was pretty sweet hearing some old and new games played through an orchestra. It was the Alabama Symphony Orchestra playing, with the UAB Singers (I don’t remember the name) doing vocals. There was also an awsome pianist there as well. It may sound pretty wierd listening to video game music but once you hear them play it will change your perspective. We were not allowed to bring cameras however, everyone brought them anyways… except me . At one point in the show the crowd was clapping to the beat however, way out of sync and the conductor turned to the crowd and started conducting for the croud. It was awsome.
. At one point in the show the crowd was clapping to the beat however, way out of sync and the conductor turned to the crowd and started conducting for the croud. It was awsome.
