Hey Jan (or anyone else that might know), what is going on with gpsapp? For a while there development was speeding along, but there haven't been any new posts in a while. I was curious if you have been busy working on map data or if real life just got in the way for a bit. Anyway, I am looking forward to my first chance to use gpsapp on a longer trip for thanksgiving.

-Mike

I think Jan's on vacation for a week or so.

I have some updates overdue to him but I had a death in the family, and I'm going to London shortly.

I just used GPSApp on a long trip (8-10 hours each way, to Portland and back), and your message just reminded me to report on its usefulness.

MapsOnUs sucks.

MapsOnUs sucks big green donkey dick.

Fortunately, I knew this ahead of time and did not depend on their data. I supplanted it with printouts from MapQuest, which were excellent and provided me with the exact route data I needed.

The problem is that GPSApp is only useful to me if I can throw away the printouts and depend totally on it. Because of the fact that MapsOnUs sucks so bad, I cannot depend on its directions. Therefore, its use on this trip was merely a testing exercise.

Now, for most of the trip, which was the long haul on I-5, the map data was correct. I followed my little arrow along the line on I-5. But for the smaller highways between my house and I-5, MapsOnUs was totally wrong. MapQuest nailed it exactly, including a shortcut on a little-used road called "Woodruff Lane" which I've been using for years because it shaves at least 20 minutes off of the route. MapsOnUs had me going pretty far out of the way which would have added at least 30 minutes to the trip above and beyond the 20 minutes that the Woodruff shortcut saves me.

GPSapp itself worked quite well the whole time. However, it had a couple of problems:

- The known bug where it disappears from the Hijack menu happened a couple of times.

- The known bug where pressing the left button to zoom-out the map did not do so, instead it rewound the song with no way to stop it. This happened several times.

- It had a new bug where if you left it up and running for several hours, then for a moment the music from the player stuttered. After that, all front-panel input stopped working and I had to reboot the player by using the POWER button on the remote.

But when it worked, the basic functionality of the GPSapp software was great, it did exactly what I would want it to do. And all of the work for keeping my Rand McNally unit from going into full-reboot-mode was doing its job properly, each time I started the player the satellites came right up.

If we could clean up the aforementioned bugs, and if we could use MapQuest data instead of MapsOnUs, it would be the perfect application for me. The latter, unfortunately, is out of our control I fear.

Sorry to hear about the death in the family, Derrick.

The problem is that GPSApp is only useful to me if I can throw away the printouts and depend totally on it. Because of the fact that MapsOnUs sucks so bad, I cannot depend on its directions. Therefore, its use on this trip was merely a testing exercise.

That's the point of being able to use Census data, which shockingly seems to be more useful than MapsOnUs.

That's the point of being able to use Census data, which shockingly seems to be more useful than MapsOnUs.

Which is exactly why I was asking the original question I was wondering if Jan had made any progress with the tiger data. Anyway, thanks for the update and sorry to hear about your families loss.

-Mike

Last I knew Jan was playing with a python script to do routing based on his newfound knowledge of graph theory

I don't know where he's gotten with it.

I was just thinking that this might be very useful software for a ... I don't know ... traveling salesman?

Teehehehee. Good one, Bitt.

I jus installed gpsapp, and am replying to the only message I've found regarding a problem I'm having. GPSapp doesn't appear in the Hijack menu. I'm not seeing it as an intermittant problem though.

I loaded the Developer version of 2.00 beta13, followed by hijack, followed by preinit. I created /programs0 and loaded the gpsapp files there. I ran hack_init successfully. I created the /etc/preinit.d directory and copied M50gpsapp there. I had Hijack force the DC mode and re-booted.

I see that the player is started with -s, so the hack_init did it's job. But I don't get GPSapp in the hijack menu. Can someone point out anything I've missed?

Thanks,

Brian

Did you make M50gpsapp executeable? (chmod 755 M50gpsapp)

/Michael

Also, sometimes if you use WinZip to un-tar a file, it will automatically do a "Smart CR/LF conversion" which will ruin some types of Linux text files. I don't know if the preinit script is one of the ones that needs to be non-CRLF. But that's something else to watch out for... when you use WinZip to Untar, make SURE to turn off its "Smart CR/LF conversion" feature or you'll ruin a lot of empeg-related files when doing projects like this.

Thanks for the reply!

The preinit.d file (M50gpsapp) looks like this when I cat it on the player:
empeg:/etc/preinit.d# cat M50gpsapp
#!/bin/sh

[ -x /programs0/incar ] && /programs0/incar || exit
[ -x /programs0/gpsapp ] && /programs0/gpsapp

I gunzip'd and tar -xvf'd the file on a linux machine, so I believe the file should be OK. I also made it executable:
empeg:/etc/preinit.d# ls -la
total 3
drwxrwxr-x 2 0 0 1024 Jul 1 2001 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 0 0 1024 Jul 1 2001 ..
-rwxr-xr-x 1 0 0 110 Jul 1 2001 M50gpsapp

If you can think of something else I may have missed, I'd surely appreciate another suggestion!

thanks again,

Brian

Hey.. thanks for your reply.

I did make the M50gpsapp executable. Here's what a ls looks like on the player:
empeg:/etc/preinit.d# ls -la
total 3
drwxrwxr-x 2 0 0 1024 Jul 1 2001 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 0 0 1024 Jul 1 2001 ..
-rwxr-xr-x 1 0 0 110 Jul 1 2001 M50gpsapp

If you can think of anything else I may have missed, please let me know again!

Thanks,

Brian

Ok... trying to get a usable map.... does anyone else seem to have a problem with finding the 'raw
route description' link on the mapsonus page??

You have to turn it on under General Options, I think

I'm having the same problem, I'd set up the TTS clock last night, so I already had the preinit on my empeg... I noticed this error when starting in forced DC mode.

empeg-preinit starting...
/programs0/preinit.d doesn't exist
You might want to consider placing your startup scripts there
Using /etc/preinit.d as startup script directory

whats telling it to look at /programs0/preinit.d? /etc/preinit.d is there....

I double checked everthing... everything has the chmod 755 stuff set and is in the right place... any ideas?

I think bitt set preinit to look first at /programs0/preinit.d and /programs1/preinit.d if those are not found, it will default to /etc/preinit.d

my TTS clock still works... I'm assuming that preinit is still functioning properly... hmmm

so is that message normal?

I would say its a normal error message. I think i have the same message on my empeg, i've never bothered to format and mount the dev partition, but bitt would have the final say.

does anyone else seem to have a problem with finding the 'raw route description' link on the mapsonus page??

Derrick is correct, you must click on "General Options" then click on "Show Latitude & Longitude".

Yeah.... I finally got that.... I installed python and the windows extensions.... now it throws an error in line 4? something about modules? dunno... I have a feeling I'm doing something terribly wrong...

what's the complete error? i don't do python but i'll guess the pyhton you installed is somehow incomplete

C:\\maps>parse_mapsonus.py map.html > map
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\\maps\parse_mapsonus.py", line
4, in ?
from convert import *
ImportError: No module named convert


Guess I should've stuck that on the end of the last post eh?

parse_mapsonus.py map.html > map

Have you tried it without the > map?

It automatically names it the same as the HTML file.

yeah.... exact same error

I'm not a Python guy, but to me it looks like it's looking for a module named convert - could be that it's not a part of the standard installation, or that the catalog it's in is missing from some PATH variable...

See if you can find something named convert[something] in the subtree where Python was installed... If so, then it's most likely to be a PATH problem.

/Michael

Lopan: Note that there were two ".py" files, one of which was named "convert". Did you get both of them? I have to be in the same directory with those two ".py" files when I execute the script to have it work.

Doh!!! sorry guys...