Tim Boudreau's Blog

August 2007 Archives

The NetBeansMobile update

Meanwhile, the NetBeansMobile is inspiring commentary:

• Dion compares my little labor of love with Adobe's tour bus
• Roman points out that this is apples and oranges
• David points out that what we need is a NetBeans aircraft. He suggests an Airbus, but since Boeing is building on the NetBeans Platform, we know where our loyalties lie

I've set up a twitter account for updates from the road - their wap interface plays very nicely with my phone.

Rick Ross and his gang over at DZone have graciously offered to spring for pizza for JUGs I visit. Thanks Rick!

The NetBeansMobile - coming to a city near you?

I'll also have a video camera along, if I can cajole anyone into being interviewed - hopefully we'll end up with some content for netbeans.tv, which is looking quite slick. How did this weirdness come to be? Well, I never planned to live in California forever, and I'm originally from Western Massachusetts. So with a let-up in the travel schedule for work, now was the time. So I bought this giant 1984 GMC truck for $1000, and spent the last two weeks fixing it up (I will never sand and paint a big truck by hand again!). I told my colleagues about it, and David Botterill suggested that I should put NetBeans signs on it, load it up with a GPS. And the rest was history, or is becoming history...

Getting all of this stuff to work together has been interesting. I'm using my tired old PowerBook to run everything (having just sent off my MacBook for a new screen - don't swat flies on your keyboard with a baseball cap. Bad things can happen.). So what all it does is:

• A Garmin G18 gps (basically a wart with a USB cable - no built in UI, it just talks to the computer) is used to record tracking data
• gpsbabel talks to it and writes the data out to a GoogleMaps compatible .kml file.
• A little Logitech webcam takes pictures
• isightcapture is the command-line utility that takes the pictures
• The computer is online via the internet connection from my BlackBerry Pearl phone
. Actually this part is currently the weak link, as getting the laptop online again via bluetooth after it has disconnected once is still eluding me
• Every so many pictures, it will rsync the photos and kml file up to the server
• On the server, a one-page wicket app is running, which periodically notices if new files have appeared, and serves them in what will hopefully be a usable ui

Places I could use some help
If anybody out there has experience with gpsbabel, I'd love to find a way to get it to spit out a single kml file and exit - I've only gotten this working in tracking mode, where it polls once every second and generates files too big for GoogleMaps (but not for GoogleEarth). Any pointers appreciated.

There seem to be a number of hacks, commercial products, etc. out there for hooking up a BlackBerry to a mac. Bluetooth is preferable, as if it's via USB, well, that's probably more reliable, but then I can't use it as a phone :-(

I'll post more info and pics when the graphics are on it tomorrow. As I said, if I'm going to be passing near you, let me know - just post something right here. Maybe we can set up a NetBeans demo or you can do something fun on camera or we can just have lunch.

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