The site that did the tracking was http://www.flightstats.com and it did an amazing job with updating where we were in real-time. Now being me, I found a quick and easy way to grab the GPS coordinates from the site and import them into my database. It was a quick and dirty shell script that was all of 3 lines of code. So I won’t be sharing it, however I do think it is something that should be added to my overall GPS tracking suite.

I’m going to start looking into other GPS type location services, such as FourSquare, and FireEagle and try to build a framework around all of them that allows one to update all of them by updating one. So if anyone can think of any other apps or services out there that allow one to share their GPS location with friends or just track it, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

Also, one last thing I’d like to share. With the flight tracker I decided to have my script run every minute to pull the information. It’s pretty amazing how far planes get in a single minute. Here is a screenshot of when I started the script.

GPS Flight Points

The main part is the use of the Mologogo software. Which I used because I had a old boost mobile cell phone and this was the easiest and fastest way to get my location up on the web. It was also the cheapest at $1 dollar a day. After the iPhone came out I developed my own application to get my location and update the mologogo software that way. This was awesome because I could get rid of the boost mobile phone and I only had to carry a single phone then. However after almost every update to the iPhone software, I had to wait for a new jailbreak and then I had to change my code to work. This became a huge hassle and I had to deal with it after every update.

When the iPhone 2.0 software came out I assumed I wouldn’t have to do that anymore. Except for the fact that in order to actually use any application that you wrote, you needed to pay the developer fee. So instead I decided to get my location another way. On many of the twitter iPhone apps it would allow you to update your location and this would then update the GPS coordinates shown on your twitter.com page. This was an easy way to get the location of myself without the need of writing a new custom app. So I wrote some code that would look on my twitter page and find the location of me and check to see if it had updated since the last time it checked. This solution was great because it would only update as much as I wanted, and wouldn’t drain my battery since my phone would do none of the work. However, a few months after this went live twitter decided to change their design and at first the location info was no longer shown. So I had to come up with a new idea.

Now, so far I’ve had 3 different ways to update my location. The first being the boost mobile phone, that worked great except for the fact thatI would forget to charge the phone and it was an additional $30ish a month for me to tell people where I was at. If anything people should of paid me for that info. The second was developing an app that would work on the iPhone and update my location every now and then. What was great about that was, it did not cost anything additional because it was on my main phone, and I didn’t have to worry about the phone not being charged since I always charge my iPhone. Then the 3rd solution was to use a 3rd party site that happens to get my location from another 3rd party app and just parse the data that way. This failed because I had to rely on 2 3rd party companies and hope they don’t make any drastic changes.

Now out of all 3 of the ways I’ve updated my phone, I enjoyed the 2nd the most. Since it wasn’t hard to do, it was just either a pain to wait for the next jailbreak or to pay for the developer license. So with the new iPhone 3.0 update, they allowed you to do something quite magical. You can now get your GPS coordinates though Safari on the iPhone! This was perfect. So I made a page, that would do the geolocation call that Safari now supports. After some testing I was able to get the calls to update a URL by tricking the javascript code I used to into thinking it was going to call an image. I coded my first version of the software off of the code found at http://smithsrus.com/gps-geolocation-in-safari-on-iphone-os-3-0/ and the 2nd version I coded around the source code found on http://www.thecssninja.com/javascript/geolocation-iphone the 2nd version allowed me to
view exactly where I was on the map and looked awesome so I only needed to make some specfic changes so that it could post the data to my site.

I have included the files I use for the Mologogo portion of the site as well as the 2nd version code that I use to find my iPhone’s location. The main plus side on using the webbrowser to update my location is that it can work on multiple platforms without any changes. As long as the device and webbrowser support the new location feature you could use this on anything.

Now, since all of this has happened. I became an iPhone Developer, or at least I paid to be one. So I’ve been toying around with the idea of developing a new app that will use the push feature. I’m not quite sure if it can be done, but basically when ever someone visited my site it would send a push notification to my phone to get the latest GPS coordinates. Now, incase I get a huge amount of traffic I would limit it so that it would only do so every 10 minutes or so after the first push is sent out since it could get rather annoying.

The thing is, I’m not sure if one is able to get information from the phone like that. Perhaps it should be called “Pull” but if I can somehow tie in push alerts to activate a certain function on my phone then I don’t need to worry about opening another app to update my location ever again.

You can download the files in one nice package at http://haxbyjaku.com/gps_code.tar.gz

We are past the story time and so now I will describe how you can download and setup the software. There’s gonna be a few things that might be a bit complicated but it’s fairly easy to do if you’re able to read code.

Once you get the software downloaded you will need to modify a few things. In the molo_config.php file, you will want to update the nickname that it updates the location as, as well as the HTTP_HOST and google maps key labeled as GMAPS_KEY. And of course you’ll want to put in your own database settings. Now the cool thing about the mologogo code is that if the correct tables are not in the database it will create them for you, as long as you give the mysql user enough access to do so.

The 2nd file you’ll want to update is the update.html file. You will want to update USER_NAME and the SITE_URL_REFRESHES_EVERY_30_SECONDS parts of this file. Now I also suggest re-naming this file and the submit.php file something randomish but still easy for you to remember. The reason is that if anyone can figure out what the file names are they could post their own GPS data as yours. So while it’s not the worst thing in the world, it could confuse you if you start to see other peoples locations on your map.

If you have any questions or comments please let me know and I’ll do what I can to help.

With pastebin you are able to post to a sub-domain, as well as put a name along with the post and even set how long the data should stay up. So I’ve made it possible for you to edit those settings in the script so that if you want to post as “bob” and keep the data up there for a day you can do all of that.

The easiest way to install this would be the following 2 commands

sudo curl haxbyjaku.com/pastebin -o /usr/bin/pastebin
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/pastebin

I know that you won’t run sudo on commands that download code from my server, but you can trust it since you get to see everything.

After it is installed I suggest editing the file as well so that you can set your own settings such as username or pastebin URL. Once that is all set simple run a command like "echo test | pastebin" in your terminal and you’ll get the URL that pastebin posted it to. You can even do something like "echo /etc/passwd | pastebin" and it will work exactly as you expect it to.

I’ve pasted the code after the break as well.


#!/bin/bash
#Pastebin poster, created by Jaku

curl -i -d "code2=$CODE&paste=Send&expiry=$RETAIN&poster=$USER&format=$TEXT" $URL -s| grep -i Location:


So like I said, it’s not very complicated but it certainly does get the job done. Let me know if you have any comments or questions!

http://haxbyjaku.com/hax_GA1.pdf & http://haxbyjaku.com/hax_GA2.pdf

Changes in the past few months include:

Working nights now, 1am to 9am, instead of normal days.
Moved into a new apartment. Much nicer and better view.
Working on a few new projects, but this time with friends instead of alone.
Been driving a bit more.

Otherwise, I don’t have to much else to say. In about 2 weeks, there should be a post about one of the projects. Some of you know a bit of the details, but the one’s that don’t should enjoy it. I will also be doing a new presentation at the next 2600 meeting in June. You won’t want to miss this one.

I got a WoW trial yesterday from a friend at work, and so when I got home I figured I’d try it out. I played no more than 49 minutes when I got banned. I didn’t get banned for anything I did, I got banned for something an “associated” account did. However, my friend that gave me the trial, isn’t banned. So I don’t see how that would work. So I figured I would call to try and get this fixed, as I was actually having fun for those 49 minutes. I wait on hold for 50 minutes before I get connected with someone and talk to them for no more than a minute. All they can tell me is to email the email address I got in my Inbox about the ban, and they might be able to reverse it. Nothing can be done over the phone. Also he tells me that it can take up to 3 weeks for them to even reply. o_0

So, let’s see, I played for 49 minutes, was on hold for 50 minutes. I was on hold longer than I played. Thats neat. However it gets better. Since I am on a 10-day trial, I have 10 days to play, but wait, it takes 3 weeks to reply back. Thats 21 days, my trial will have been over for 11 days before I even get a reply. That is just awesome.

I can now see why they call it WoW….

Let me know if you find any errors or anything like that.

So yesterday the app was finished and working pretty much exactly how I wanted it. A few things were left out but overall it is working. Well, that is if it has the MAC address of the router that it found while searching. And right there is the flaw. Without a huge database of MAC addresses this app is pretty useless. I’ve been working on adding MAC addresses that I find to my database and geocoding them, but that won’t really be fun for people not in Chicago, and even then people in Chicago wouldn’t have fun with it either. So that is why I contacted WiGle.net, who actually was a bit of help but not as much of a help as they could have been.

Also I was just informed that the server that HaxbyJaku.com is currently on, might not be up much longer. So I am going to end this post now and backup all my stuff and then move it.

K thx. Bye.

Anyways, the app does look ups of the MAC addresses that are around it. Which is what I wanted to do. The next step after this is to make it not open Safari first, this would work already if the ? in the url didn’t get changed to the hex value. But whatever, I’ll try to find a way to call the Maps.app directly with the GPS coordinates. If I can’t figure that out, it’s not a big deal and I can let the community figure it out.

After I get the MAC lookup how I want, I’ll add the cell tower lookup. I’ll try to add that on the weekend or Monday. But don’t promise anything. Anyways, the app is at the state I wanted, the app looks like an official app or at least an unofficial 3rd party app, and I hope after I finish it that people will want to use it. No screen shots or anything tonight, as the only difference in the app is the code, nothing cosmetic has changed. Anyways, I need to sleep.